The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  It had all ended, though, when her friends moved on to postgraduate work elsewhere, when she met and married Adam and they were left (as the young never expect to be) alone with each other, two WASPs in a yellow house near Santa Cruz. March became a wasteland—nothing but drear, pastelly Easter with her mother in that ridiculous hat.

  The problem was, of course, that Denise couldn’t throw a seder herself. (Did you “throw" one?) They were both gentile, and she could come up with no justifiable reason for having one at their house, so she gave it up. It was like when she was a child and stared at the tall glass cabinet in the living room, the upper level of which was filled with porcelain birds. She had to wait for some adult to open it; otherwise, she could only stare. But Denise missed the seders too much—the politics, the fervor, the insipid wine—and her new plan this year was to get invited even if she had to crash the congregation of B’nai Israel. Mentally, she had a list of Jewish colleagues and graduate students who were possibilities. She was feeling them out, one by one. The young student of Swift’s before her now— Denise wasn’t sure.

  This obsession was, perhaps, a detail. One of many in a life which had not turned out the way she had expected. Denise always thought that life would build upon itself, that people would multiply, events would crowd for time, that life at thirty would seem like twice of twenty. She thought it might overgrow itself like a garden. But it wasn’t turning out this way. Your twenties choked with flowering vines; your thirties thinned to only what you tended. People disappeared, and events, and opportunity.

  Her career, for instance, was not what everyone had expected. She had published with Swift upon graduation, but she had also published on her own, laboring alone with the equipment, writing alone, putting no one’s name on the papers except her own. She did this pragmatically, because an older female astronomer had advised her once never to publish with a man; everyone would assume he had done all the work. Her solo publishing lent her distinction; it also raised eyebrows on search committees. Her graduating colleagues (Eli, Jorgeson, the rest) were being given postdoctoral positions across the country, and some even had faculty positions, but Denise was left in interviews calmly trying to explain that it truly had been her work alone. She was offered nothing. The best in her class, the field wide open with Sputnik money, dozens of interviews, and she was offered nothing. So she married Adam and, eventually, took a government position in Santa Cruz. It was a humbling choice. Few people did research there, or even published; it was nothing like the brilliant industry of grad school, but felt instead like a kind of occupational heat death. Only hard work could bring you out, and she worked hard. Denise was also the only woman there, and her supervisor often showed her lab to visiting scientists as a curiosity: We are proud to have one of the few female astronomers with us, Dr. Lanham. Denise, are you free for a moment? Denise complained about this habit to Adam, calling it “feeding time.” It reminded her of how the male BADgrads had all visited her office when she’d first arrived at Berkeley, a “field trip" to see the female student. She had assumed it would all change once she published. Nothing changed.

  But she was in a wonderful mood tonight, Dr. Denise Lanham with a baby on her lap. This woman amused her, she amused herself, and there was her husband clambering ridiculously through the grass. She had a child, a glass of wine, a breeze. It was all right. Life was wonderful, every particle of it.

  “And what does your husband do?” the young student wanted to know, which was a surprise because she had talked only about herself for twenty minutes now, as if it were a strict exercise in sticking to a topic.

  Denise adjusted her son in her lap. “He’s a writer,” she said. She looked up to the sky, dimming now, the purple shredded clouds moving in the wind, wool caught on a barbed-wire fence. Her first thought was: We won’t see the meteors tonight. Her second: It’s getting too cold for Josh.

  “What kind of writer?”

  “He writes fiction. Novels.”

  The woman brought out a stick of gum and began to chew it, her expression deepening, and Denise thought to herself, They’re so serious, this generation, they say they’re so fun and free, hut look how dark and serious they are. The woman asked, “What kind of fiction? Science fiction?”

  People always asked that question at astronomical parties; it was all anybody ever read. “No,” Denise said, adjusting her son and watching her husband appear from the weeds in a scattering of seeds. “No, like novels that take place a long time ago.” She was groping here, always finding it difficult to describe these things her husband made. “Historical novels, I guess.”

  The student nodded, the pink gum appearing in her mouth every few seconds, a bright spot in the darkness. “Have I seen them?” she asked.

  “No, they’re not published,” Denise said.

  She hated saying that. The face on the student now, the puzzled face of science staring at art—she hated it. They were so literal: A scientist without papers is a charlatan, and a writer without books is a fake. Always this puzzled face—as if Adam were one of those madmen scribbling letters to astronomy departments (Denise had read dozens), claiming to have found a message hidden in a nebula. It was an act of faith to call him a writer, the kind of faith a wife should have, must have. And yet, Denise’s anger came because, partly, she didn’t quite have it. She had read his failed novels and hadn’t understood or liked them; they seemed static and a little dull. I’m wrong, though, of course, she thought to herself. Surely she had made the right choice. Surely he, too, was a genius.

  Adam was moving from group to group like a bee pollinating a field of clover, picking up a drink along the way (a martini, which seemed very unlike him). As he reached a group, he would lean his head forward and nuzzle it between two people so he could address someone, and then, fairly quickly, he would take off for the next. Sweat was showing just under his hairline, glimmering in the torchlight. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. Denise knew what he was doing—he was bumming cigarettes. He had supposedly quit, but the calendar was a checkerboard of quitting and resuming the habit. Denise smiled because it was all right with her; she had never tried to have any control over him; and anyway, he was younger than she was by two years and deserved more time to make mistakes, time to wean himself of the habits of his youth. She had to give him things like that. But still it made her husband seem, sweating in that light, a little dwarfish and pathetic, dipping into crowds begging for a cigarette, pointlessly stooping so his wife wouldn’t notice—a boy cheating badly at cards.

  Denise got back to the point: “So, are you looking forward to next week?”

  “What’s next week?” the woman asked.

  “You know,” Denise said, stroking her son’s head and thinking it was odd how he could suspend a bubble on his lip for ten minutes, in defiance of known physics. “You know, the holidays.” She was fishing for Passover now, hoping she wouldn’t get Easter.

  But the student, straightening the part in her hair with two fingers, laughed and brushed the entire topic aside. “Oh that, oh no—oh, I don’t do Western congregational religions anymore. I’m into meditation.” She said this almost as a challenge.

  “TM?” Denise asked wearily, but the conversation was on automatic now as the student went on happily about the wonders of a trance state, and alpha waves and all the pseudoscience Denise was used to hearing from young people these days. Here was something Denise did not understand, not at all, this need for religion. She felt pure, this way, needing nothing but light through a lens to explain her world. She understood this was snobbery; she could not resist it. In any case, the girl, Jewish or not, was not inviting Denise to any seder.

  Adam had found a cigarette and seemed happy. That was good. He was talking to a spouse with old-fashioned peroxide hair (like something from a billboard), smoking, looking handsome, and the woman was laughing. Good. Denise would grant him all kind of pardons tonight if he’d look happy for her.

  “And in London,” the student w
as saying now, taking the gum from her mouth, “I hear there’s an amazing swami. Kathy was talking about him at the conference, if you can believe it.”

  “Kathy who?”

  “Spivak, Eli’s wife.”

  Denise tensed. How strange: Here was this young woman with pink gum in her mouth, talking nonsense, and then out of nowhere here was Eli. How unexpected. Who knew conversations could be as haunted as old houses?

  She had not seen or talked to Eli in years. That summer after the comet’s return, a cold green summer faintly echoing with that cry they’d heard, the boy’s cry from the overlook, Eli had abruptly transferred his studies to a lab in England, and within a month was on a plane with Kathy through the fog of San Francisco. Denise remembered their breakfast in the airport lounge, stiff scrambled eggs and coffee sipped loudly through the silence. Eli would not look at her, and Kathy kept an inscrutable smile on her face, somehow thrilled by all the mess and frenzy of this unexpected change, this flight from San Francisco. But it was a good-natured leaving. Kathy had waved to her from the tarmac, brown suede gloves in her hand, that green-apple-colored kerchief wrapped so tightly around her head, and Eli had not looked back but moved resolutely through the rain, hat-first. It was these two, of course, who had invited Denise to all the seders. And here she had forgotten it.

  Denise remembered Kathy’s smile, her wave in the mist of the airport. Had Kathy known? Surely not; she would have said something. She would have found a way out of having that awkward breakfast. What had he told her? What excuse could he possibly have provided for doing the unthinkable—switching not just advisers or courses of study but programs, slowing his Ph.D. process by two years—and all to move to England, across the world? Denise could imagine no scene in their bright dining room that might end with Kathy patting his hand and agreeing. She could only see a wife bewildered by her husband’s insanity. Because of course he couldn’t tell her the real reason for his flight: his sudden and strained love affair with Denise.

  It had surprised them both, standing there on the overlook six years before, looking down at that broken body. Broken, twisted, with his legs curled in one direction and his head facing the wrong way, flattened and bloody on a rock. Arms out, hands in loose fists among the seaweed. People were running around and screaming below, but they kept at a distance because a snake was in the rocks, apparently, stiffly terrified beside the body. Denise could not see the snake, only the body lit by torches and the women’s faces streaked with tears as they were held back. Her hand crept along the wall until it touched another’s—Eli’s. He grabbed her hand and held it tight, and she looked up into his eyes. In each pupil, a little torch flickered. She read there: Iunderstand, Denise, I’m the only one who understands.

  Kathy left on a boat the next day, waving to them in the hot, pale air, and when the boat was far enough away, Eli told Denise to meet him down the beach in a few hours. He walked away; she was confused. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand being alone there in the hot sun. Her studies could not console her, nor her books; and even the image of her old lover Carlos’s lips, which she used to love so dearly, meant nothing now. It’s not enough, it’s not enough. So she did as Eli said. That afternoon, while the other astronomers slept, she made her way down the jungle path to the beach, where she found him waiting in the shade of a frangipani, nervous, as serious as death. They made love in an old stone hut on a spit, sun flowing through the keyhole in a chesspiece of light, only because it seemed the most natural thing to do. Life was in crisis, somehow; this was the shelter. She simply did as Eli said. They kept their eyes closed when they were together— kissing, lying beside each other—which made the time so different from their afternoons arguing at the college, standing in the shining hallways with cups of coffee, staring at each other, shouting. Eyes closed; this was a secret they kept even from themselves. In the hut, on the plane. And when Denise arrived back home, when her mother greeted her at the terminal with a bouquet of white roses, she was able to tell the woman that it had worked. The trick, the deal: Denise had forgotten all about Carlos, her old lover. Her mother was so pleased.

  Denise very quickly brought it to an end. Not consciously, not intentionally; but somehow she found ways in their long hours together in class, under the telescope, to avoid moments alone with him. They had not spoken, on the island, like lovers—they’d made no admissions, no promises or confessions to each other; it was simply that they understood, they were the only ones who understood. And now Denise acted almost practically, living around the secret, the way a family in a war-torn land might live around a hole in the floor. Of course she could see the pain in Eli’s face, but it began to anger her, how obvious he was. She would come to dinner at the Spivaks, and every time Kathy left the room he would turn quickly to face her, staring, those eyes wide and full of meaning—but meaning what? That they had shared a little portion of death, of love? What was there to discuss?

  One night, months after the boy’s death, he finally caught her alone. She heard a knock on the door and it was Eli in a trench coat, hair glistening with fog, whispering that he’d come over to talk. He had driven across Berkeley, late at night, to talk with her. He cleared his throat and she knew he had been practicing this in the car, that he had left Kathy alone with some excuse and practiced a speech in the car all this way. Denise had practiced nothing; she had stuffed the whole event—the broken body, the frangipani, the chesspiece of light—behind her sweaters in the closet. If she let him speak now, so prepared, he might convince her. So she interrupted him with a hand in the air.

  “We don’t need to have this conversation,” she said.

  “Listen, I want to say I’m sorry. I was so confused….”

  She held the door halfway closed, talking in the narrow space. “I’m not, don’t worry.”

  Eli shuddered, cold, “Denise, you were in shock. I don’t know…. I know I shouldn’t have done that. But I wanted to tell you….”

  So this was the beginning of his speech. Apology, and then some rare admission. “We don’t need to have this conversation,” she repeated, feeling she had struck upon a phrase that might save her. Then she added: “I can’t afford it.”

  He got almost angry, whispering, “Listen to me, listen to me….”

  She shook her head without looking at him. “I’m the expert on this one. I’m the expert on married men. Go home, please,” she said. “Please.” Eli didn’t move, but stood there silently, as if he knew this was his great chance, that this was the only time they would speak of this while they were young, and so he stood there. She understood, as he must have, that it was just a crisis on an island, that they would not fall in love, that they would be fine; still some perfect combination of words might alter them both, open them to a terrible adventure. She could see his mind already searching for those words, tossing its net, catching them one by one. She could not let it happen; she could not bear it. So she talked through the moment. She killed it: “We don’t need to have this conversation. I’m fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Then Denise closed the door on him, turned off the light, walked to her kitchen to sit down at the table and put her hand over her mouth. She heard a car start up and drive away. Two torches flickering in his pupils. She sat there for a long time, hot and stiff in that placid light, before the sobs broke through her fingers.

  The image that came to Denise’s mind, however, six years later at Swift’s party, was not Eli filled with longing in her doorway, or his checkered hat in the airport fog, or even some moment of him sunburnt and smiling on the island, lying on the beach with sand stuck to his naked body as he held her hand. He did not come to her that way. The moment the student mentioned his name, the man she saw was Eli as he had been when she first met him. It was after the male grad students had visited her on that awful “field trip" of theirs, after they had stood gazing awkwardly at her, shaking her hand, and left in a group full of nervous laughter. It was after they were gone, when she stood
up to close the door, worried and upset, that Eli suddenly appeared in the hallway. “Are you Denise?” he asked, grinning. “The comet girl?” He gave her a few quick words of advice about Swift, then invited her to dinner with his new wife, who sat waiting out in the car. Slouched against the door frame, hands moving as his ideas flew everywhere, face goateed, hair long and curly and voice full of passion. A young Eli, anxious, exciting—a person who no longer, of course, existed.

  Eli in the hallway. Eli standing on this slate patio, young and curly-haired, breathing chill air. How strange. She thought of him as a dead person.

  “How are they?”

  The student pulled herself into a batik bundle on the chair. “I didn’t see Eli, but Kathy was fine. She’s working for a publishing house over there, pretty cool stuff. It was a book conference I’m talking about here. I went with a guy I was dating,” she said, giving a cryptic smile.

  “Kathy’s in British publishing now?” Denise pictured old Kathy in her pinched ponytail, laughing in the kitchen over frying potatoes. She tried to place a new life on the woman, like a paper dress folded over a doll—the professional sweater, the manuscript, the blue pen— but it kept refusing to fit.

  “Oh yeah,” the student was saying, looking around toward Swift, who turned his sweet-smelling kabobs with a flourish. “She’s doing great. Good overseas job, no kids.”

  “A real woman of the seventies.”

  The student laughed. “I don’t know about that.…” she said, grinning, and Denise got the impression that women like Kathy were too old to represent this decade.

  “And what about Eli?” Denise asked, although she had to turn away because her son was fidgeting, awake and anxious. She had a sense that he was hungry.

  The woman looked confused. “Job at Tech. You know they’re moving back here, don’t you?”