The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  Frank settled back on the couch and stretched his arm along the top of the cushions. His shirt collar flared opened over the top of his safari jacket and his sleeves were rolled up, showing skin that was the same golden shade as his daughter’s. Barbara sat well forward with her hands clasped together on her knees, as if she was uncomfortable sitting on our dirty sofa and meant to signal that their visit here was only temporary, that any minute they might be called away to more important engagements. I spotted a brown cockroach crawling slowly along the top of the wall above their heads, and I prayed that no one else would see it.

  My mother began by apologizing for not inviting the Martellos over sooner; she followed up with some small talk about the weather, and then the Martellos’ new home, and the neighborhood. As though to draw out our families’ connections, she reminded everyone that Gabriella and I were in the same grade at school. She appeared to be taking her role of hostess very seriously; she sat carefully upright, smiling stagily and speaking in full, deliberate sentences, as if she were reenacting a scene that she’d been rehearsing in her mind for a long time.

  Frank, more at ease, turned to me and Megan, still standing there, and said loudly: “So! Tell us about yourself. What do kids your age do for fun in Terrebonne?”

  I looked to Megan. My sister, as starstruck as I was by our guests, spoke about activities that we rarely participated in but that sounded exciting. We went to football games, she said, or to parties with friends or boating on the lake. She claimed to especially like water-skiing, which surprised me because I didn’t know she’d ever done that.

  Barbara said that they’d never tried water-skiing, but they’d recently taken up snow skiing, out in Aspen, and she asked if we had ever tried that. “Oh, but you should,” she said when we shook our heads. “We just love it. It’s the best thing. Gabby can tell you all about it.”

  Gabriella, standing beside my sister, agreed that snow skiing was wonderful, she loved it, she couldn’t wait to go again.

  My mother, flinging herself back into the conversation, said that she had always wanted to try snow skiing herself, and that she kept asking Alan to take us, but we never managed to find the time. “He’s just so busy with his work,” she said, nervously smoothing the hem of her skirt. “Especially now, with the comet and all.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Frank said, and sat up as my father carried in drinks on a tray.

  “At your service.”

  My father served the drinks around, apologizing fussily. He’d had to substitute bourbon whiskey for rye whiskey in Frank’s Manhattan. He explained how there was an element of chemistry involved in bartending. You couldn’t just throw things together at random; different liquors reacted to one another in certain ways in certain combinations. You might be able to approximate the result with substitute liquors, but without the proper ingredients, you could never expect to produce the perfect cocktail.

  “We don’t need a lecture, Alan!” my mother said, and laughed tensely. “Just give us our drinks.”

  “I’ll be your guinea pig, Professor. Let’s see how you did.” Frank had thick sideburns that extended low alongside his ears, giving him a rugged, commanding appearance; he was the type of man you instinctively looked to for the final word on anything. We all watched him bring the glass to his lips, watched his throat move. My father waited for the verdict.

  “That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Man, that’s got a kick,” Frank said, and my father wagged his head in pleasure.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DRINKS delivered, we children were free to go. My sister brought Gabriella up to her room to listen to records. I slunk off to the kitchen, then went outside and checked on my telescope in the backyard, then wandered upstairs. Megan’s bedroom door was closed, but I could hear the two girls in there talking and listening to music. I dropped down on my bed and leaned against the wall. It didn’t seem fair that my sister should have stolen Gabriella away so quickly like that. They weren’t even in the same grade. What could they have possibly had in common?

  I picked up a book and tried to read. It was a science-fiction novel I’d been enjoying lately, a terrific, strange story about war and time travel and four-dimensional aliens, but I couldn’t lose myself in the words, not tonight with Gabriella right next door. I let the book fall on my chest. Gradually, as if by accident, I turned my head until my ear was pressed against the wall beside my bed. I heard Joan Baez singing and my sister speaking. I strained to make out what she was saying, but it was like trying to find shapes in clouds.

  My sister, I imagined, would’ve been trying to educate Gabriella about music, and Bob Dylan and the origins of the folk movement in Greenwich Village. I knew the talk; I’d heard it plenty of times myself. So much of the music they played on the radio was just awful, Megan would say. People here didn’t even know good music when they heard it; you couldn’t even find any good records here. All the decent music got left behind somewhere on the other side of Nashville. By the time it trickled down to us here in no-man’s-land, all that was left were the Osmonds, and the Carpenters, and Tony Orlando and Dawn, and all that other insufferable sugarcoated crap. If you really wanted to hear good music, she’d say, becoming insistent and superior as she did whenever she talked about it, if you really wanted to meet the cool people, you had to go to the source: New York City. That’s where she’d be right now if she had any choice in the matter. You could bet that as soon as she was old enough to travel on her own, she’d be out of here, away from these dismal swamps and the redneck boys with their Camaros, and the empty-headed girls who dated them and married them and wanted nothing more than to raise their own litters of more redneck boys and girls.…

  I gave up and pulled away from the wall and gazed out the window. From my bed I could see the thin crescent moon hanging low in the sky. It looked like a tilted bowl filled with a bright, silvery liquid, ready to overspill. The sight of it gave me a strange, aching emptiness. As though the moonlight had rendered the walls of our house transparent, I could picture Gabriella sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, not two feet away. She was listening politely to my sister, nodding her head in time to the music while turning over an album cover in her hands. Her luxurious hair fell around her shoulders. She was so close that I might have reached out and stroked her hair, taken hold of her hand.…

  I groaned, grabbed a pillow, squeezed it to my chest, and rolled back and forth on my bed while whispering her name: Gabriella. Gabriella. Gabriella.

  After a while I lay still. I turned my head on the mattress and let my eyes roam around my room. I’d tidied it up that afternoon on the off chance that she might want to visit me here. I wondered what Gabriella would think, seeing my room. I followed the slope of the low ceiling down to my desk. There were my schoolbooks, a wooden ruler, a metal compass. A studious boy, she might think. An intelligent boy. Opposite my bed was my bookcase, with my plastic model airplanes and old marble collection on top. The books were arranged on the shelves from the oldest at the bottom to the newest on top, like strata of the Earth: from Winnie the Pooh up through Treasure Island to Huckleberry Finn, to The Hobbit, to Lord of the Flies. A serious boy, she would think. A thoughtful boy.

  Hidden behind the bookcase—she wouldn’t have been able to see this—were old issues of my sister’s Seventeen magazine. I’d stolen stray copies over the years, desperate to understand more about the mysterious world of women: bra sizes, tampons, electric leg shavers. “Are You a Flirt?” the story headings read. “First Date Do’s and Don’ts”; “What Do Boys Want?”

  My friend Peter would’ve had a ready answer for that last question. “It’s all about the sex,” he liked to say. “Sex sex sex. Who gives it, who gets it, who doesn’t.”

  I believed he was right, and sensing Gabriella so close to me now, her living, breathing body just on the other side of the wall, only reminded me of how woefully inexperienced I was. At fourteen years old, I still had never kissed a girl. I had never even held hands wi
th one. And the things Peter talked about, rubbing the photos in his father’s Playboy magazines while he described what you could do with a woman like that, mm-mm, seemed so far off in the future as to sound like science fiction. It wasn’t that I was naïve; I understood how sex worked, at least as well as Peter did. But such a great gulf lay between my understanding and my experience that I wanted all those things a boy was supposed to want in only the most abstract sense. When I tried to think of Gabriella as one of those women in the magazines, I couldn’t. She was more than a collection of shiny body parts, and my attraction to her was something greater and more profound—more pure, I would’ve said—than Peter’s mm-mm.

  Sex sex sex …

  How that little word troubled me. It suggested a whole other world still shrouded in mystery. I caught glimpses of this alien world from time to time, in the glossy photos in Peter’s magazines, or in graffiti on bathroom walls, or in stray glances and odd chuckles that passed, like secret messages, between grown-ups. But these were only glimpses, and I knew there was more to it than that. Lately, I’d begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might’ve been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.

  I remembered the first clear confirmation I had of its existence. It came from, of all people, my father. It had been on a night like this. I was nine or ten years old, sitting up in bed doing my homework, when he knocked on my door.

  “Can I come in?”

  Slipping into my room, my father asked what I was working on. He blinked distractedly, his hands on his hips. The white corner of an envelope stuck out of his left pocket.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

  He carefully closed the door behind him. He pulled out my desk chair and sat near the foot of my bed. He began by questioning me about my classes, my friends. He talked about when he was my age and what fun that was: biking all over town with his buddies, annoying their teachers, teasing girls.

  “Do you have fun like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  He slid the fingers of his hands together and squeezed them between his knees. He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a more serious tone. Now we’re getting to it, I thought.

  “Your mother suggested I speak to you. I agreed that it would be a good idea. You’re getting older now, and typically it’s around this age—nine, ten years old—that a boy begins to develop a natural … curiosity about girls. This corresponds to a growing awareness of the human body and a recognition of the differences between the sexes.”

  He took a breather, cleared his throat again, and pushed his glasses up.

  “You’ll get this information in school anyway, but you might as well hear it from me now. Get a jump on the other kids.”

  He began speaking generally about the life cycle of plants and animals in nature. He described the reproductive system of plants; he spoke about pollen, and a flower’s stamen and pistil and ovule; and then he talked about fruits and their seeds and flesh, “like an apple, for instance.” He spoke so thoroughly and carefully that he might have been delivering a lecture. Soon I became bored and confused and a little sleepy.

  At last he arrived at his main topic, which was human reproduction. “In other words, sex,” he said, and coughed. Finally, I thought, and perked up.

  I already knew the basics by then. On the playground at school or squatting behind a neighbor’s garage, boys like Peter would share what they had found out about girls. Some spoke confidently, some sneakily, some with a show of toughness, spitting down into the dirt at their feet when they said what a woman was and what you were supposed to do with her. But I didn’t entirely trust their information to be accurate. Now at least I’d get my facts straight.

  My father spoke about the parallels between the reproductive systems of plants and humans. Women were like flowers, he said, in that their bodies also contained eggs that needed to be fertilized in order to reproduce. He described the female reproductive organs: the uterus, the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the cervix, the vagina—

  He broke off, flustered, and cleared his throat several times in a row.

  “Maybe a visual illustration would help,” he said, recovering. He stood up, put his feet together, and spread his arms in a T.

  “It’s like a little man. Imagine a little man standing inside a woman’s body. These are the ovaries,” he said, cupping his hands into fists. “My arms are the fallopian tubes. My chest can be the uterus.” He explained how egg cells formed in the ovaries and traveled down the fallopian tubes, where they were fertilized by the man’s sperm, thus creating life.

  He sat back down. He sighed abruptly. When he spoke again, he spoke slowly, almost sadly, as if he regretted what he had to say.

  “Now. This is the important part. On the night of their wedding, the husband and wife lie together in each other’s arms. And the man … carefully … impregnates the woman. This is natural. It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s a very … very … lovely event.”

  He stopped and looked down solemnly at the floor. We were quiet for a moment. I held still. The air in the room was syrupy and warm. I felt myself sweating beneath my pajamas. Was he finished?

  “Okay. I understand. Thank you,” I said.

  “You may hear people talking bad about this,” my father cautioned. “Boys especially like to tell jokes and so forth. But I assure you there’s nothing wrong or ugly or dirty about sex. It’s perfectly natural. It’s a part of life. I do believe, however, as most people do, that it is something that should be reserved for marriage. Something that occurs only between a husband and wife.” He added, as if it were a point he’d almost forgotten, “Women are special. Always respect women. Women are like flowers.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you have any questions? Anything. You can ask me. I’m your father.”

  “No. I think that’s all clear.”

  “Good.”

  He sat back in his chair, relieved that he’d said what he had to say. He patted his hands together a couple of times and looked around my room. He picked up a model airplane from my bookcase, glanced at it, and set it back down. He seemed reluctant to leave now.

  I was relieved, too. I didn’t understand the actual how-to business of human reproduction any better now than when he first came into my room, but I was glad he’d stopped talking about it. Sex, in his telling, sounded like a kind of dark fairy tale, strange and a little spooky.

  Eventually he got up to leave. He paused at my door. “I’m glad we had a chance to talk. If you have any more questions, I’m always here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  That’s when I noticed the folded white envelope on the floor. It must’ve fallen out of his pocket when he stood to leave. I picked it up. On the back was written in neat, cursive pencil:

  —teenager, curiosity, changes

  —nature’s life cycle

  —reproductive system of plants: pollen, stamen, pistil, ovule

  — “ “ “ humans // plants: uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, cervix, vagina

  —lovely event

  —respect for women

  My father’s notes on the science of love. I tucked the envelope into my desk drawer, where it stayed. I never consulted it again. But after that night, I could barely look at a girl without picturing a tiny man resembling my father standing inside her belly with his feet together and his arms outstretched, saying solemnly, “Women are special. Always respect women. Women are like flowers.”

  At fourteen, I still believed that this was true. But I also had the nagging suspicion that the natural, lovely event to which my father referred was more powerful, more dangerous and wild than his science would admit.

  CHAPTER THIRT
EEN

  CHRISTINE was washing dishes in the kitchen when I wandered back downstairs.

  “You’ve been quiet. Where’ve you been?”

  “Upstairs. Reading.”

  I dipped strawberries in melted chocolate from a pot on the stove while I peeked through the doorway at the adults in the next room. The hi-fi played jazz, and they were talking animatedly, laughing loudly now and then.

  “Sounds like they’re enjoying themselves,” Christine said.

  “Sure does.”

  She was a chubby-faced black woman with rust-colored hair and oversized glasses. She wore a full-length white apron, like what a chef might wear. We’d never had a maid in our house before, and I watched her curiously as she ran water in the sink, adding dish soap and stirring it with her fingers to raise the suds.

  “Your daddy’s got that column in the newspaper, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Groovy Science, that’s right.”

  “I thought that was him. The scientist. Your momma said y’all are going to look at the comet tonight.”

  “We’ve got the telescope set up in the backyard.”

  “I heard about that comet. I haven’t seen it yet, though.”

  “It’s going to be huge.”

  “That’s what I heard. That comet scares me. You’re going to get sick, you keep eating all that chocolate.”

  I got myself a Coke and leaned back against the counter, listening in on the conversation in the next room. My father had started in on his old story about how he ended up in Terrebonne. He told about the accident of the recruitment fair at the university field house, and then his secondhand car with his five new ties and his temporary teaching credential, and the black snake in the middle of the road outside of Napoleonville.…

  “Oh no, here he goes again,” said my mother. “Mr. Marco Polo, to the rescue.”

  … and then his early days as a teacher, and how half his students used to come to school by boat, clomping into his classroom in their fishing boots. And the deplorable conditions at the school back then, with the doors falling off their hinges and the windows broken and the rain leaking in through the ceiling and dripping onto his papers … “Dreadful. Just dreadful. Even worse than it is now, if you can believe that.” He was starting in on his usual complaint about the neglect of sciences in the Louisiana public schools when my mother cut him off.