The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  MY mother closed the front door behind her. She wore a scarf over her head and carried a shoe box full of paperwork. It was late in the evening. Megan was upstairs in her room, the kitchen was clean, the house quiet and cool. I sat with a magazine in the corner of the couch.

  “What took you so long?” my father said, looking up from his papers at the table.

  “We had to go into Thibodaux,” she answered.

  “You did? Who? What for?”

  “We had to see about the lights. The lights for the decorations.”

  “That took you all day?”

  “Guess who might come? The mayor.”

  She shoved my father’s papers aside and set her box on the table, talking all the while about their arrangements for the ball. Frank had spoken to the mayor—he knew him, naturally—and the mayor said he would talk to his wife. Now Barbara was worried that the party might get too big, but my mother figured the Martellos’ house could easily accommodate three hundred people. They could open up the yard, have tents and gas heaters out there in case it got cold.

  She took off her scarf and shook out her hair. “We should’ve done tickets and invitations, I know. I’m always thinking too small, that’s my problem.”

  Frank, she went on, was going to get a crew to lay a dance floor in front of the gazebo. He had sketched out some plans while they were chatting in the living room, zip zip zip, just like that.

  “Thank god for Frank,” my father said.

  “What?”

  “Frank Frank Frank. What would a party be without Frank?”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Your playboy across the water there.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be absurd. He’s been very helpful. In fact, you should be thanking him. We’re doing this for you, you know.”

  “I don’t need any favors.”

  I left my magazine and sat down beside my father at the table. “What about the dancing?”

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “Who’s going to dance?”

  “Everybody, I hope. It’s a ball. That’s what you do at balls. You dance. Which reminds me, we still have to find clothes for you and Megan.” She went to the kitchen to fix herself a drink, turning on lights in the house as she moved. I talked to her through the doorway.

  “What kind of dancing?”

  “Hm?”

  “What kind of dancing will there be?”

  “Any kind. Every kind. You do know how to dance, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “Where am I going to learn how to dance? School?”

  “Oh, but every young man should know how to dance. It’s a requirement. Women expect it. Society demands it. A man who can’t dance is like a … like a horse without a saddle. I’ll have to teach you.”

  “When?”

  She came back into the living room. “How about right now?”

  “The lights,” my father said, pointing. “You left the lights on.”

  “Oh, pooh.” She switched off the lights in the kitchen and came back. “Stand.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t dance sitting down. Get up. Help me move this.”

  My father stayed seated while we pulled the sofa back and cleared a space in the living room.

  “When I was your age everyone knew how to dance. We went to dances all the time. Every weekend. Gosh, it was fun. Boys lining up to get inside the gym …”

  “Your mother’s golden years,” my father said. “Hundreds of boyfriends, lining up for their turn.”

  “Thousands,” she said, snapping her chin at him. She positioned herself in the middle of the floor. “Come on. I’ll be the girl. You be the boy.”

  “Good plan.”

  “Wowser, you’re getting tall. Okay, first you should politely approach the girl and ask, ‘May I have this dance?’ ”

  “May I have this dance?”

  “Oh my god. Nobody does that,” said Megan, coming down the stairs.

  “Shh,” said my mother. “Why, of course you may. I’d be delighted. Now, left hand up … like that. Your right hand goes here on my back. Stand up straight.”

  “I am.”

  “Straighter. We’ll begin with something easy. A waltz.”

  “That’s useful,” Megan said. “Why not teach him to jitterbug, too?” She went to the kitchen for leftover pumpkin pie and ice cream.

  “Ignore the armchair critics,” my mother said. “We’ll start slow. One-two-three, one-two-three. Just like that. Follow my feet. Ready? Here we go.”

  I mouthed the numbers with her as we shuffled around on the stained rug. Gabriella, of course, would know how to dance. She studied ballet, after all. I imagined she danced like an expert—waltzes, jitterbugs, anything.

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. You’re getting it. One-two-three.”

  I concentrated on the steps until I was able to see them in terms of geometry, invisible squares and diagonals traced on the floor.

  “Oh my god, you dance like your father. Try not to look so grim. Smile! It’s supposed to be fun. Girls like boys who smile.” She stopped to take a swallow of her drink. “Okay, here we go again. Stand up straight. Relax. Don’t look down.”

  After a while I could do it without tripping up too badly, but it wasn’t what I would have called fun, exactly. While we practiced, my mother offered more advice about girls. Girls liked boys who took the lead, she said—men who showed confidence and acted like they knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t. It was best to be forthright, too; I should just come right out and say what I was thinking. Girls were gifted with many amazing powers, but telepathy wasn’t one of them. Also, I should look for opportunities to be polite, to offer small favors whenever I could. I could offer to get a girl a glass of punch, for instance, even if she said she didn’t want one. Girls loved to be waited on like that. I’d be surprised how much could be achieved with one well-timed glass of punch.

  “Oh, and by the way—don’t be put off by the competition,” she said.

  “What competition?”

  “Well, you know—pretty girls are always popular at dances. There’s no getting around that. That’s why you need to be especially polite and friendly. Polite and friendly beats out the competition every time.”

  “What competition?” I asked again.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  She taught me how to break in on a couple, and what to say to the girl while we were dancing. “Compliments. Nothing but compliments. Try it. Say ‘I like your dress.’ ”

  “I like your dress.”

  “I like your hair.”

  “I like your hair.”

  “I like your nose.”

  “I like your nose.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Just kidding on that one. You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself.”

  She pulled away, brushing stray hair from her mouth. “Not bad. You’re getting the hang of it. Now when you’re finished, you’re supposed to bow and say ‘Thank you for the lovely dance.’ ”

  “Thank you for the lovely dance,” I said, and she cracked up. “What?”

  “No, no, she’ll love it.”

  She told Megan to run upstairs and get some of her records, the fun ones, the ones you could dance to. Megan came down with a stack of 45s and they shuffled through them. “Try this,” our mother said, and they put a disc on the turntable. I recognized the song immediately; it’d been playing all fall on the radio. It began with a few pleasant notes in the upper registers of an electric piano, like something a girl would pluck out at a recital. She turned up the volume.

  “The speakers—” my father complained.

  “Forget everything I just taught you,” my mother said over the music, slipping off her shoes. “The only rule to dancing to music like this is that there are no rules. Anything goes. If it feels good, do i
t.”

  She grabbed my hands and twisted with me, humming and singing along to the record. “That’s it. You’ve got it.” She drew away, danced to the end of the sofa, did a kind of shimmy, turned, and came back. I watched, amazed. She didn’t look stupid, she didn’t look like someone’s mother trying to dance. She looked … she looked lovely.

  “Don’t just stand there, silly. Come on. Move! It’s fun.”

  I closed my eyes and made a few tentative steps. The song had a ridiculously simple arrangement, just a single piano, guitar, bass, and drums. It told about a party where everybody came together to have a good time. The Moon was bright; they danced, and people felt warm and alive. Then the whole thing repeated itself, and then again—there was almost nothing to it. But when the chorus broke in, the bounce in the rhythm and the invitation in the words was so irresistible that I felt myself lifted up on the swell of its refrain and soon I was dancing along with everyone in the moonlight. This, I understood in a flash, was why people liked to dance. It made you forget who you were and at the same time remember who you were always meant to be. You became more than yourself. You became, as the song put it, su-per-na-tu-ral. You flew.

  “Oh my god,” said Megan.

  When the record finished, my mother stepped back clapping. “Wowser. Honey, that was great. You’ll slay all the girls.”

  We played the record again, and then again, until Megan gave up sitting and joined us. Our father refused to stand, however, saying that he didn’t understand this kind of dancing.

  “Fuddy-duddy. Fuddy-duddy, you had your chance,” my mother said.

  So we danced without him. We stomped on the ruined rug, we turned circles between the sagging furniture and bumped against the old TV. This room, these things, didn’t normally inspire celebration, but tonight it might’ve been Christmas in our home, or New Year’s, or a holiday that none of us had known until now but were inventing at that very moment: the Holiday of Hope with the Dance of Possibility on the Eve of the Comet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  BY late November it had crossed the Earth’s orbit and was speeding toward Venus, traveling at 250,000 miles an hour. Its coma had already grown to more than 100,000 miles across, its tail 5 million miles long. We still couldn’t see it with our bare eyes, but with the telescope we could find it hanging just above the southwestern horizon, hovering near the archer’s hand in Sagittarius. In the lens it appeared as a flickering blue flame giving off a wispy trail of smoke. From night to night the tail moved and changed, fanning out, coming together, corkscrewing, breaking in half and then restoring itself. It looked, I thought, powerful and determined. Inexhaustible. Indomitable.

  My father kept up his nightly vigil in the backyard. From my window, I watched him shivering in his Sears McGregor raincoat. He’d zipped in the synthetic wool liner, but he didn’t think to put on a sweater, and late at night the air off the bayou could be chilly. His right eye glued to the lens of the telescope, he moved his lips as he muttered under his breath, as though he were whispering into the ear of a lover: Yes. Yes. There you are. I see you. Come on. Come on, you beautiful thing.…

  While downstairs, in her room below me, his wife, my mother, sat at her vanity, cleaning her face with cold cream and tissues. Her hair would’ve been tied back, her legs crossed under her nightgown, one slippered foot bobbing up and down. You’re not that old yet, I could imagine her telling herself. You’ve still got some looks. She smiled to remember the movie stars of her youth, glamorous women leaning their heads back, their pale throats curving forward as they closed their eyes to receive the lips of their leading men, and in an instant she became all those women, leaning her head back to kiss the man who was all those men.…

  While in her room next door to mine, my sister was biting her nails and studying the liner notes on a favorite album. I pictured her rocking back and forth on the rug below her black-light poster, LOVE shot through with bullet holes. She grabbed a fistful of her hair, frizzy and thick, and frowned at it. She thought of Joan Baez, how sleek and straight her hair was—like her face, her body, all sleek and long and dignified. She sighed, dropped her hair, and returned her thumb to her mouth. With her front teeth she chewed at a sliver of flesh at the corner of her cuticle until, giving a good yank, she ripped it free, drawing blood.…

  While I, her brother, backed away from my window to resume practicing dance steps. I didn’t have a record player so I had to imagine the music in my head. I bent my knees and dipped my shoulders to a rim shot, then sprang back up, strutted, and turned. I thought I had it for a minute, felt I must’ve been dancing, but then I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a gangly fourteen-year-old kid jerking around in his tiny room, and I lost whatever confidence I had. I looked like a damn idiot. She would take one look at me and laugh out loud.

  I stopped, caught my breath, and averted my eyes from the mirror. Then I started the record playing again in my head. I stood up straight, pulled my shoulders back, didn’t look down.

  Gabriella, I asked, do you know this song? May I have this dance?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “AN auspicious night,” my father called it.

  The sky was clear and speckled with stars. A full moon climbed up from the horizon. Mars was high, a faint red pinpoint hanging overhead. As we walked along a line of parked cars to the party, he pointed out constellations to me, tracing their outlines with his finger: Gemini, Orion, Aquarius.

  He reminded me that Luboš and his high-society pals were on the Queen Elizabeth right now, sailing out of New York Harbor for their comet cruise. Maybe they were looking at these very same stars, he said. We were luckier, though; we didn’t have to go out on a ship to see them: we got them for free. That was one advantage of living in a small town. “The greatest show on Earth, playing nightly. All you have to do is turn your eyes up.”

  He talked about organizing some kind of town-wide comet viewing here in Terrebonne. Astronomers were planning these events all over the country, and there was no reason why we couldn’t have one, too. “Wouldn’t that be fun? Get everybody to turn off their lights for a night and come out to watch the comet. Parents, kids, everybody out in the streets. Like the Fourth of July, only better.” He was trying to work out the best date for it now.

  I agreed that it did sound fun. I could picture it: kids on bikes, lawn chairs on the sidewalks, everyone gazing skyward with the silvery light of the comet falling on their faces.

  “Where is it now?”

  He stopped, took my finger, and pointed with it to a spot below Orion. “Crossing through the orbit of Venus. Right about … there.” He stood up straight and squinted sideways at the sky, trying to see it with his peripheral vision; he might’ve been listening for it. “It’s close, it’s awfully close. It’s sneaking up on us.”

  I listened, too. I didn’t hear any comet, but there was something, a suggestion of music in the air: notes from an electric piano, a guitar string being tuned, the thump thump of a bass drum.

  Ahead of us stood the Martellos’ house. It was set back across a deep lawn, lit with spotlights and decorated for Christmas. Behind the house we could see lanterns in the trees and the white peak of a canvas tent. As we continued walking, I had the feeling of approaching a circus at night, that same sense of expectancy. The air was brisk but not too cold, and as my father and I turned down the walkway to their house, around the lit fountain, and up a flight of low stone steps to their porch, the stiff cloth of our winter coats brushed back and forth on itself with a whispered yess, yess, yess, yess.

  Don’t gawk, my mother would’ve said, but when we stepped through the front door it was hard not to stare.

  The entrance hall opened up into an unexpectedly high ceiling lit by a crystal chandelier. A curved stairway led to a second floor balcony. On the walls on either side of the hall hung large, gold-framed portraits of the family: Mr. Martello standing beside a desk with one hand resting on a book, Mrs. Martello sitting regally in a high-backed chair, Gabr
iella as a girl holding a yellow bouquet of flowers and gazing off into the sunshine.

  Below her painting stood the real Gabriella in a purple velvet dress, her hair tied up with ribbons, welcoming guests.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Daigle. How are you? It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and the Daigles smiled and gushed in return. She was the perfect hostess: gracious, poised, friendly. Just seeing her made you glad you’d come. She passed the Daigles on to my sister, who sat at a white-draped table with a money box, dutifully ticking off names in a notebook.

  While my father spoke with the girls about party arrangements, I looked back and forth from Gabriella to her painting, marveling again at her and the extravagant wealth of her family. I might’ve been easily intimidated by it all, but before we moved on, Gabriella reached out and tugged my sleeve.

  “You’re looking sharp, Junior.”

  This wasn’t true. My suit was an old two-piece from my eighth grade graduation, the jacket ridiculously small, the pants high-waters. But when Gabriella said I looked good, I could almost believe it was true, and my hopes for the evening were given a boost. We promised we’d see each other later, and I walked away rehearsing tricky dance steps in my mind.

  We met Christine, our one-time maid, in the library. “They got me taking coats,” she said. We chatted as she hung ours up on a long rack. She asked my father about the latest comet news.

  “Soon. Real soon,” he promised. In a few more weeks she’d have to duck her head to miss it.

  “I’ll start saying my prayers.”

  He chuckled. “No need for that. No, no.”

  He paused to take in the room. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase covered most of one wall. There was a fireplace, leather chairs, a writing desk, antique maps in frames, a globe in a wooden stand: it was so handsome, so picture-perfect, it might’ve been a display room from D. H. Holmes—“Gentleman’s Study”—bought whole, taken apart, shipped here, and reassembled exactly as it appeared in the store.

  My father gave a low whistle. “Man-oh-man.” He reached out and touched the spines of a few books in the case and then retracted his hand, as though he’d caught himself doing something he shouldn’t have.