The truly young had just arrived at Berkeley—first as naive undergraduates, still in their bouffants and skirts for the first few months, then falling into dingy shirts and jeans when the work began; there they were, thousands of them, swelling the lists. Loud and joyous, they were already outnumbering and outshouting the older students like Denise, Eli, and Jorgeson. These new students knew the death count in Vietnam, knew what it meant to have the Black Muslim headquarters in San Francisco burned, knew every detail of the Reeb beating in Alabama. They began their marching, their sign-painting and anger, their senseless carefree parties, too, out in the sunshine. But it should not have been the eighteen-year-olds’ time. It belonged to the scientists—the BADgrads—this time had been promised to them, promised by their parents and teachers, as their time to shine and take over the reins of America. It was their moment, now, as older plants folded and left a thinner shadow, to rise and flourish above. Their eyes were on their comets and fireballs, though—they read poetry aloud in bed and didn’t hear—they didn’t notice their moment being stolen. America was being shaken by their students while they slept. By the time this comet came around again and shed its meteor shower, they would realize their time had never come at all.
So they seemed a little innocent, a little more kind, walking toward the jungle and their huts, pointing at the man smoking a cigarette beside his brightly painted catamaran, at the pounded tin dome of the mosque, at the girls hiding their faces under their hands, dropping nuts for a frenzied monkey on the ground. The wind caught the palms and turned them, wheels in the sky, and a veil of dust rose between them and their boat. A cloud hovered magic carpet-like over the stunted volcano—on its hillside, you could see gleams of white from houses, bones buried in the lush green jungle. The women approached, smiling, their sarongs red and gold, their fingernails long and pointed, and they began to dance, smiling, jerking their arms, tossing rice in welcome. Each of the Americans shivered; thought, I’ve lost my way; then turned and caught someone else’s eye. Look at us, they all thought in relief, we’re wonderful, look at us. And they saw Dr. Manday halfway down the beach, holding a woman with a thin light-blue cloth over her head, a stout woman who touched his mouth, his cheeks, whispering. Manday laughed and whispered back, pointing up to the sky.
They all saw her head turn, owl-like, as she gazed at the bright sheet of sky, her mouth slack and expectant, her long black hair brushing his cheek. Through the cloth, you could see two golden combs in her hair, glinting. Manday was telling her about the comet. She was looking for it near the sun. They all saw that she did not understand, and they all saw him insisting. He took her arm, talking in her language but not in words she could understand—perihelion, aphelion, coma—and she kept her face to the sky, nodding and seeing nothing and looking afraid. She was his wife, they would all later learn, whom he had not seen in eight years, wearing gold combs in her hair for him.
Oh look at us, they thought, standing on that bird-haunted beach before the dancing women, look how wonderful we are.
Eli was quiet in his chair that night. A few meteors had already streamed across the sky, the earth passing through that cometary dust, and people had called out “Time!” to mark those few teeth pulled from the night’s dark mouth. Too early for the real shower— only midnight—but Eli was still searching the sky; every moment, his eye would flicker on its own. He had learned, over the years, to ignore the imaginary flashes in his brain and pick out the real ones.
They had found their huts and unpacked in the humid afternoon air. They had eaten lunch under a palm-leaf roof on the beach itself, and Swift had told long astronomical stories and jokes as Kathy and Eli held hands and tried to spoon the thin soup into their mouths. Denise had been quiet, staring at her food, sad or hung over or both. Later, they all returned to their huts and slept deeply in preparation for a night of watching the sky, each turning in the hot air, feeling a fever coming on. Around them, the jungle had rustled and made noises they had never heard before. Then it was dinner, and up the long stairs from the beach to the sultan’s broad overlook, where the chairs had been arranged. They took their stations. Eli and Denise, the best eyes, were put facing south, and Kathy was put facing north with some other wives. The Spivaks had kissed and parted. A few of the children, including Swift’s daughter Lydia, fell asleep out on the open stone, and others played catch with a baseball, which went over the edge of the wall and had to be retrieved from the beach far below. It was midnight. Darkness lapped against the overlook wall, the night’s tide coming in.
Eli could smell the sea coming over the white walls, the slight leafy death of it, something like flowers from the jungle below, and something sour as well. Above them all, a bowl of sky with nothing in the way but the low wall and a small gold dome that hid the staircase. They had traveled far for this diamond-clear view. Dr. Manday had taken out a notepad on which to record the meteors, and he walked among them all with an old man in gold brocade— the sultan himself, who murmured and scratched his slippers against the rock, talking about the repairs he would make to the overlook’s wall, which had been damaged during the war. There was no wind. People were whispering. Denise had chattered for a while, but seemed to be asleep beside Eli now, her headache beginning to fade. Eli listened for his wife’s voice across the parapet. There was no sound but the whispering, the sea, the flutter of bats’ wings. He stared at the sky, then over to the wall, where he saw that a gecko had crawled onto the whitewashed surface. Eli could hear it faintly croaking, a quasar in the night; he stared and wondered if they were all wrong about him.
He was lucky to be brilliant—his father had been so brilliant, a lawyer in Seattle, and everyone had watched Eli to see how this egg would hatch. Would he be ordinary and forgettable and safe in blue-collar Washington? Afterward, as an older boy, he had found a copy of Action Comics and felt just like that, like a death-kissed superhero with the parents peering over the crib to see if he might be human or extraordinary, if they should bother sewing capes. But he passed this test—his mother came home one day when he was three to see the letters ELI written in crayon on the wall. Had they really held a party for that? As if it were a true passage into genius, like the sailors passing the equator and pouring milk joyfully over one another. He had sweated after that, to live up to their prophecy.
But they were wrong. He had so easily conquered the scientific math, of course, shone so brightly as a student that even Swift remembered his name soon after Eli became a BADgrad—and wasn’t he one of the two fellows picked for this trip? Hadn’t he, finally, been tapped? But Denise, silently, was more brilliant. No one could see it but him. She had taken her preliminaries a semester early, and now was ready for her qualifying. Was anybody watching? Didn’t they see her there, with no praise, no support or notice, calmly jerking her slide rule through its motions until she had the answer before the rest of them? She didn’t raise her hand or speak, but she was first. Didn’t they see her?
Eli, on the other hand, was fading. He felt it fading, his brilliance, at twenty-five, like an aging actress feeling her once beautiful face. And somehow, in Eli’s mind, as he stared at the pale wall and tried to see the tiny lizard crouching there, croaking, the equation was simple and true: If Denise was brilliant, then he was not, and they were wrong. QED.
He turned toward his station again, and there above him was the constellation he had described to Kathy the other night: Centaurus. High in the southern sky, hidden from their usual vantage in California, it spread out hugely above him, the body of the creature drawn from the star Menkent and east toward the Southern Cross, where the imagined human head looked down. But there was nothing there, no meteors anymore—an empty vessel held before them all, or a magician’s hat which might (a childhood hope if anything) produce a rabbit all in fiery shards tonight. This he could see with his eyes. It was so clear here, and it was still so new to him that he could make out for the first time the stars of the Southern Hemisphere: the Southern Cross, Menkent, th
at open star cluster NGC 3532 just to the east of where the meteors would fall—wasn’t it amazing! All his life some curtain had been held up at the horizon, and here it lifted, as in a carnival tent, to reveal this museum of oddities—southern stars unknown to the ancients, named after objects in the sixteenth-century world: clocks, telescopes, air pumps.
But you could not describe these things to Kathy. You could try; you could name the stars and draw their lines on scraps of paper; show where, deep in the constellation, a spiral galaxy brooded. But in her folded arms, her tired stare, you would know it didn’t leap and form in her head; that even if she tried to pluck an image from his scribblings, hanging like a grape among the vines of math, it would not keep. Her mind was a poor place for his kind of wonder; after a while, the joy of it grew bad, turned to nothing. He had wanted, when he married Kathy, to take her up and show her what obsessed him as a boy, the hours he had stolen to bike in darkness to an observatory, the passion for it in college (all gone, of course, or changed). His mind was overfilling, like a library crammed with volumes to the ceiling, stacks on the tables, pages dusty on the floor; he had wanted to attach her to his library and fill that, too, with charts and names and nebulae. It was a foolish way to treat people, Eli knew, standing staring naked-eyed at the constellations (nothing yet in Centaurus, no sparks from its hoofs), and he felt very sorry.
Still, he wanted her closer. He had met Kathy at Harvard, through a friend who was a mathematician, at a party full of chemists. She had been a chemist then, bright and self-sufficient and promising, wearing a white dress with daisies and a frayed strap, sipping a rum drink through a straw, her hair in a shining ponytail. (He would always think of her that way, with her face stretched from the straw to the elastic in her hair, as she glanced up at him and raised her eyebrows.) He had stood near her, and, as he remembered it, she moved over on her chair so he could sit beside her. They dated in what seemed, now, like such an old-fashioned adventure: huddling in drive-ins on too-cold evenings, eating at odd foreign restaurants and laughing when misordered food arrived. And at first they didn’t go very far—it seemed impossible, just two years ago!—and she giggled and said they were all-American Jews now, and she should get a circle pin like a WASP and dye her hair. Kathy was dating two other men as well (a premed and, of all things, a math professor), but she ended things with them. She changed her major, without a word to him, to English. A friend lent them a house in Provincetown that winter, in their senior year, and, to his surprise, Kathy let him take off her clothes. They had sex there on the couch, breathing clouds of cold air. Eli fell hopelessly for her. She became his wife.
But she was never his; she was always a little apart, a little unhappy. She treated chemistry like a childish fad of hers, a rag doll she was embarrassed to hear about, and tossed the topic into a corner. She cooked and cleaned for him. She somehow knew her role as an academic’s wife and charmed his professors, his colleagues, and took poor waxy Denise under her arm. Kathy was clever, sometimes too bright for the men at the table, but she also didn’t mind their talking shop. She only minded that in Eli; the stars were not part of the deal; she wasn’t a woman in mythology, Kathy told him, marrying the sky. And there were times he heard her in the shower, weeping. It seemed so calculated, to time your sadness for the shower, to hide tears in water and camouflage red eyes with the steam and heat. He would have held her. He looked at her after a shower, smiling, beautiful, a towel wrapped around her, searching in the medicine cabinet—where was that piece caught inside her, cutting her, where was it?
But he dared not ask, nor mention any of his guesses about her mind. He knew, from experience, that he’d be wrong. He would just guess his own worries. He thought, for instance, that she cried about wanting a child; but his rational mind knew that this was off, somehow. Eli was the one who wanted a child. Kathy was the one who changed the subject, at dinner, or in bed, or looking at a baby in a carriage.
Whenever he saw her staring at the wall in bed at night, not at her book but at the wall, he patted her arm and said, “What’s the matter? It’s all right, things are great,” and then began to list off everything wonderful in their life. She looked peaceful, listening. It was wonderful! The house here in the city, their friends, the food and fun they had despite their poverty, the freedom of this time in history, his own career. He held her, loving her—it was wonderful.
“I’ll give you a hint,” she said one night as he held her and she felt stiff in his arms. It was in their small bedroom, almost a closet, high above the street near the campus. There was a picture of baby Eli and his brothers hung on the wall, yellow and old. The curtain was a green bedsheet, and they lay in a bed too big for the room. There was a tone in Kathy’s voice that he sometimes hated. He couldn’t imitate it, or tell you what it was until he heard it, but there it was. It usually came when she didn’t want to have sex. This time, however, she said, “When I look sad, don’t tell me things are great, that I shouldn’t be sad.”
“But.” He tried not to feel angry. He was so patient, so good, didn’t she see it?
She thrust out her lower lip, as if pitying him; he hated that, too. She wore her hair in a flip that stroked the pillow, and her glasses magnified her eyes and made her face seem pinched just above her nose. “Don’t even worry about why I’m sad, or what I tell you. Just say, ‘That must be hard.’”
“Kathy, you’ll know it’s a line. I want to help you….”
“Trust me. Just say, ‘That must be hard,’ like that.” She leaned back on the pillow, her face so pale. Outside, sirens blasted through the dirty streets. They were both silent. “You can say it now,” she whispered with a little smile. “I’m feeling sorry for myself.”
“That must be hard,” he told her, baffled, almost horrified that she would give him a trick to work on her.
But for some reason it appeased her. Something in her unhooked and relaxed. “It is,” she told him, resting her book on her chest and closing her eyes.
He’d held her moist hand and wondered why she loved him.
Eli was a few distant yards from her now, gazing at Centaurus above the Southern Cross. Something moved in the blackness—a bat—there were bats crossing the sky and he couldn’t see them, just the way they blocked some stars in a jagged pattern. Instinctively he leaned his head down, and then saw others doing it as well. Denise awoke and let out a little scream of terror. Where was Swift? Farther toward the golden dome, his daughter asleep at his feet, a pale bundle. Eli set his eye to the sky again, and Centaurus leaped toward him like a tiger. In its teeth was everything the men and wives could not see, not if they had the keenest eyes—that irregular galaxy spotting the centaur’s hide, the globular cluster—and there were objects too faint even for normal telescopes, objects Eli knew were there from his late nights up in the mountains of San Jose, above the clouds: two spiral galaxies turning in the centaur, bright and spending gamma rays like drunken sailors. It was true, what he told Kathy, all of it—that life was wonderful, every precious particle of it.
He would buy her a present. He had already written a note in the margins of his novel, hoping that she would come across it late one night while he was at the telescope. He imagined her in bed, yawning, dutifully reading along until she noticed the tiny message beside the words. Then she might understand what he somehow could not tell her. But more. He would bring something tomorrow while she slept off this night—not a photograph of a fireball, nothing as selfish as that—one of those golden combs. Like the combs in Mrs. Manday’s hair. He would try to talk to the island woman where she sat with a look of girlish concern beside her husband. Kathy was beautiful— the pink-tinted smile, her lost sleepy look in the morning when she was weak and funny, her sharp stare across a room of people which meant she was bored and missed him, the times when he could read her mind, those few times—she was beautiful. If only she asked him questions about the sky, told him her secrets. He strained to see her in her chair but she was turned away. He would tel
l her. He would bring her combs. That was why she loved him.
“Do me a favor,” Denise said, appearing close with her hair falling between them, smelling too rich and flowery. She had clearly slept off the bourbon; she looked determined as she often did under the stars. Off at the far end of the overlook, one of the students was signaling and approaching. Eli looked at Denise, and saw a piece of sunburned skin on her nose, curling from her like smoke. He recognized, too, some new tension in her face, some new tone in her voice.
“Do me a favor when Jorgeson comes over here.” She was talking about the graduate student, a gangly Midwesterner with horn-rimmed glasses, the one with the mail-order bride. “Find out about Carlos.”
Eli sat struck for a moment by this shift, almost angry. He watched Jorgeson waving his arms. Eli had been relaxed and fine a moment before, and now here was Denise, reminding him of her ridiculous love affair, her fling with that crew-cutted Chicano rich boy, that married Republican cad. Eli looked at his poor friend and thought Don’t be so sad, and not from sympathy, not because he knew what it might be like to have moods like this one, dropping like spiders inside her. It was a command, a wish made because he couldn’t deal with sad women, especially one who wasn’t his wife. He almost couldn’t stand their sudden, crystal grief. Professor Swift had predicted that the comet, tonight, would bring with it a meteor shower. So why not make such wishes? Thousands of stars were already poised, ready to fall.
The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 3