The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  But then the baby began to cry, loudly, and Denise cooed and tended to him. His face was red and sorrowful, wadded in anguish, the tiny fists beating the air, and something in his cry resounded in her. As if she had a taut wire running from her skull right down her spine, and he had plucked it. She stroked his face and talked low, whispering Look at you, look at you, look at you. Denise brought out her breast into the cold air for him to feed at. She did not notice the graduate student sitting quietly, fascinated, then gathering her drink and leaving. She did not see her husband, his cigarette extinguished, watching her. Or Dr. Manday, leaning against a tree in the darkness, doing the same. They were all gone, and Kathy was gone, and Eli, who had so suddenly flourished in her mind like a flower taken for dead, was gone. Her son was here. If you asked, she would tell you that this was the great change in her life. She would say she was a different person now, a mother. All old grief was in the past.

  Except—those evenings when she would sit in the darkness of their living room, in an old rocking chair, listening to her husband upstairs washing her son. Then she would think, There’s time. Time yet for another life, after this one. At forty, at fifty. Little torches flickering in his pupils. Then, ashamed, she would hide the image in that room where no one else would ever find it.

  Denise was whispering to her son: Look at you, you’re wonderful. It was as if she had a lapel-full of old medals, her old hopes for herself, tarnished things. It was as if she were unclasping them one by one from the past, wiping them clean, pinning them bloodlessly onto the future—onto him.

  The last twilight flickered and moved west, and, with the growing chill of the air, people moved inside to eat. Swift handed off his tongs to other husbands and men who stood in threes around the grill, drinking and shivering and laughing. Inside, they were balancing paper plates on their laps, eating the greasy shish kebabs with food other people had brought: three-bean salad, pasta, a Julia Child recipe for quiche. Swift told some of his stories about science in the Sputnik years, about his Communist parents and his own fear of being discovered, and people sat and listened because it seemed, in his words, so long ago they needn’t fear it anymore. There was so much new to fear. Adam was sitting with the baby, smoking another cigarette in the living room, listening to the long, dull travails of some bald astronomer. Denise was off with the women in the kitchen, mixing drinks. Lydia sat on the floor with a girl of five or six, explaining, with growing frustration, about sex. Time passed, falling like the darkness in veils around their feet. The bats left the barn and wandered drunkenly in search of insects. The coals in the grill died and turned to ash.

  Out near the orbit of Jupiter, the comet, which had been moving more and more slowly each hour, measured in yards now, now feet, inched to a cold point in space and held still for a moment. Every other object in the universe seemed to continue its task, spinning or dying or blasting fire into the void, but this lattice of ice held still. It had not been in this place since 12.2 years ago, and (though no one on Earth knew this) it was not an old comet; had only come around twenty times since it was first caught in orbit. To human eyes, it would seem to catch its breath. Distant rocks were falling toward the sun’s gravity well; far away, a bright blue star was being born within a cloud. The moment passed, the aphelion, and slowly the rock began to move back toward Saturn, gaining speed each instant, already growing warmer for the time, six years from now, when it would race through the inner solar system, a white tail burning behind it. It moved, the dead thing, coldly toward them.

  The wind changed in northern California, bringing warm air up to Sonoma, surrounding the farm, brushing the field’s long hair. The guests, done with eating and (the older ones) feeling slightly guilty about what they ate and how much, broke from their clusters and reassembled in groups of two or three, wandering into the gardens and the abandoned tennis court, walking quietly and softly and talking more honestly now under a bright moon which, with the hour and the warm air, had appeared. With it had come all of the stars.

  Dr. Manday sat on a low stone wall, searching for his cigar. A moment before it had been in his hand. A moment before he had been so happy, full of red wine, talking to the little girl and puffing at his cigar, and now they were all gone—his glass was missing, the girl was gone, his hand felt light and empty. Had he missed something? Had he jumped forward ten minutes and lost them all? He turned right and then left, peering in the dark bushes for where he might have dropped his smoke, but, strange for an astronomer, he could see nothing glowing down there. He could smell it—the earthy chocolate odor of it—but where could it be?

  It was resting a foot away on the wall where he had put it just the moment before. The end was burning away, turning the tobacco into collars of white ash; in a minute or two, it would burn enough to topple into the very bushes Manday was searching. That had not yet occurred.

  But the girl was back, and with her, the wine. Life was wonderful again.

  “Here you go. Is this okay?” she was asking, offering the full glass with both hands.

  He received it like a chalice, saying, “You are a joy. You are a terrible joy.” He must have asked her to refill it. As he watched, the liquid tilted inside and left dark elliptic rings that turned to droplets, running down in lines—a subtle and beautiful effect. “A joy.”

  Lydia stood with her hands behind her, turning back and forth, a slight tree in the wind. You would think that she’d be bored with such a man, of her father’s generation and a foreigner to boot, but she wasn’t. Perhaps he was, at least, familiar and, in an awful way, perhaps she’d also learned that Manday was harmless, had seen people treat him kindly, dotingly, more like a pet than a man. That must have satisfied her somehow, and she stood talking to him more at ease than at any other time this night:

  “My dad wants me to do a dance. I don’t want to do it.”

  His fingers searched the stone wall busily. “What dance is this?”

  “It’s something I’m doing in school for the Easter assembly, but it’s so stupid, and he’s always wanting me to do things at these parties.” She began to pick a white string falling from a rivet in her jeans.

  “Did you ever notice your father carries around a little book in his back pocket?”

  “Yeah,” Lydia said, and she almost told Manday about the time she’d found it, paged through and thought it awfully boring; but she knew such a confession never paid off with adults, even when they acted like your friends.

  “I was telling a girl about it this evening,” Manday told her, raising a finger in the moonlight. He was held by two lights, actually, by the moon and by a torch ten feet away scattering a yellow glow—it made him two-sided, shadowy, glowing diamond-blue on his fat left cheek, and saffron on his right. He leaned toward her, round and appealing on the wall, his gray-streaked mustache bristling with his words, and asked her if she’d ever looked into her father’s book.

  “No.”

  Manday peered off through the trees to be sure Swift was still distant—there he was, the old white man, bumbling his arrogant way into a circle of twenty-three-year-olds, trying to get them to sing with him. Denise was there in the group, Dr. Manday noticed, smiling with a baby in her arms. Manday watched Swift thundering around the group, and it seemed, in the torchlight, as if his beard were on fire; one could almost smell it.

  “It is an address book,” Manday said quietly, leaning with a grin toward Lydia. He had two shadowed crescents of skin under his eyes, and they grew darker as he leaned forward. “It has the alphabetical pages, but he doesn’t write addresses in it. It’s his little book for ideas. Your father is a brilliant man, of course. He writes down his ideas, like he might write about the moon tonight, up there, at three-quarters, and how it is moving by degrees. He would write that under M for Moon. Now see that star out there above the trees? The little green one?”

  Lydia looked up, seeing the still light, questioning her own intelligence. “Is it a star?” she asked nervously.

 
“No, you’re very smart,” Manday told her, touching her head. “No—it’s Venus. He writes about Venus under V. It’s a wonderful book. And as for all of us, all his friends at this party, when he has an idea about us, or wants to remember to call us… he puts us under P.” Manday sat up, hands folded, gold and blue. “For People.”

  But Lydia did not understand this was the end to his story; she knew all this about her father’s book, and she really did not think it was so odd. She did not go under P. She felt embarrassed for the dark old man, that he had failed at a story, and she tried to distract him: “What are your sons’ names?” She was fascinated by his children, whom she had never met.

  “P for all the people in his life. We get such a… a sliver of his mind.”

  “Your sons, Dr. Manday.”

  “Oh?” he asked, because he had started searching again for his cigar. If he’d told her, she could have pointed to where she’d seen him place it five minutes before, where it sat ashing toward the tipping point. Instead, he kept dizzily feeling around the stones, saying, “Oh? My sons? Sami and Ali. Sami is twenty, and Ali is just a little older than you. Maybe you’ll get married to him.”

  She laughed uncomfortably, looked off to where that graduate student with the cool braided hair was walking toward them, her skirt a white undulating triangle against the garden darkness. People were moving in and out of trees, in slow couples, ghostly in the jazz coming from the warm bright house.

  “He’s handsome. Now about this dance? Will you do the dance for me?”

  “No. It’s stupid.”

  “Well,” Manday said, sipping his wine and forgetting the topic entirely. “Well…” He had begun to think about his sons, Sami and Ali. He had not seen them in three years, and so he was not always thinking of them. He had lived without them for so long, only coming home after his job was secure here in the States and he had money, seeing Sami grown eight years in the meantime, from a little boy of six afraid of crabs of all kinds, spiders, anything with many legs, to a young man in a gold sarong, fourteen, stern and trying on a mustache, learning to build boats. The next time, a few years later, Sami had a house and a wife and was already a boat builder near the volcano, with a child of his own whom Manday had not yet seen. The scientist did not feel sad about missing Sami’s growth; he had seen some of his childhood, and shown him how to swim, where to find the Southern Cross in the sky and how it pointed to the Pole, and tricked the boy into speaking English until he grew old enough to revolt, terrified, running to mother and swearing in her language never to utter fire again. The truth was that, as a boy, Sami had been wonderful and full of unexpected whims, and that, as a man, he was dull and dark from the sun, with his shy plump wife, his concrete hut, with his refusal to raise his head to where Manday pointed out the prospects of the night sky. “Father,” he would say in a growl, leaning his long neck to look down on Manday, “I have to see my family now, come with me.” The truth was that, as a man, Manday did not like him.

  It was Ali who cracked a little vein in Manday’s heart, because Ali (nine when his father last saw him, seven before that) was going to be lovable. No doubt—he was quiet and curious about the world, and you knew, watching him, the round-faced boy with sticking-up hair, or talking to him, that he shared only a hundredth of the thoughts going through his head. You knew, when he looked at a stream, that he planned, in his little-boy mind, a dam across it, a wheel powered by it, a bank to divert its waters into his own hut. Manday recognized the widening eyes (which the boy had not yet learned to hide) and it destroyed him that he would not be there to save Ali. If he had been there, Ali might have been like him, off to college in the States, one of the very few to leave. But Ali was not going to leave; Manday’s wife was there to squeeze him till he stopped breathing those wishes. However, Manday was not always thinking of his sons.

  There—the cigar formed one new wreath of ash and toppled into the dark leaves.

  “You’re Lydia, right?” It was the student with the braids, the one with mystical ideas, who chewed pink gum and, somehow, knew Kathy Spivak. Manday was almost blinded by the whiteness of her dress, covered on top by a wool shawl but bright and full of wind below. She leaned down and kissed Lydia on the forehead, not noticing the girl struggling. “Your father sent me, it’s time for the dance recital,” she said.

  Manday knew this student; not as young as the others, and so full of experiences and real stories about the world besides the stars. She had written a book of poetry and had it published as a chapbook out in Berkeley; in fact, it sat beside his bed (it was called Cool Agony), bent where he had made it to page twenty. He also knew that she had been seeing Swift secretly for months now, perhaps longer; he had caught them in a coffee shop in Oakland, holding hands. Manday felt, at last, looking at her, how very drunk he was tonight.

  Lydia put her hands on her hips, trying to look strident: “The dance is stupid.” She simply could not let them know she cared.

  The student saw this, taking her arm. “Listen,” she said. “Listen, if you do this dance for your father, I’ll give you a little present later.” Lydia whispered something to her, and she nodded. Without a word to Manday, the girl was off through the trees, toward the patio. A decade from now, of this round man on the wall, she would remember only cake, blue cotton candy and a brown man at a lake.

  The student smiled at Manday. She was not beautiful, but she was confident and fairly young, sun lines curving from her eyes ahead of her years. She had a dusty kind of skin, and rather large nostrils, but she seemed so sure of her beauty that you became convinced of it. He wanted her to ask him what he was reading; Americans were always asking you that. He would have said, “I’m reading you, it’s you.”

  “You coming to see her, Dr. Manday?” she asked instead. Her focus went off behind him to some people who must have been walking by. The shawl fell and she readjusted it, straining her neck to see whoever it was.

  Manday felt, with each blink, that he was flipping through time, missing every other second so that he had to piece together what she was asking him, what she was doing with her neck. His arm stiffened on the wall and he stopped himself from tipping over. Then he felt suddenly warm and pleasant.

  “What is it about us fat, old men that you like?” he asked her.

  All the little actions of her body ceased.

  “Swift and me—is it our position on campus? Or is he actually sexy? Wouldn’t that be lovely, if beautiful girls started undressing for old astronomers….”

  “Dr. Manday,” she said, pale and still. “You’re a little drunk. I’m going to get someone to help you.” The student turned away from him, into the sulfur glow of the torch.

  “I’m reading you,” he said.

  She looked back, her face pulled tight. “What?”

  “It’s you, I’m reading you.” Half of him blue, half gold, like a foreign god. “I have two hearts, one in each breast,” he said, quoting her with his shaky hand outstretched, only half-realizing that what he was thinking had come out of his mouth, that he was telling her all this and it was permanent and real. Yet he went on: “I will kiss you better than him. The old goat. Come back here with me. I will kiss you better.”

  She was gone behind a tree.

  Manday sat on the wall for what seemed like a long time. He was realizing, so slowly, that he had actually told the student that he wanted to kiss her. He was still thinking he could change things, but the moment was long gone. The branch that she had thrust aside to leave had snapped back, tottered in the air, releasing leaves, and was already still again. He had stamped and sealed the moment, tossed it in the mailbox, and there was no scrambling at time’s metal door now, retrieving what had happened. Manday was drunk and a fool; that now was clear even to him.

  But there across the patio he could see the white abstract form of the student moving across the yard toward a group of people—God, it was going to be worse! There was Denise, in green with her baby in her arms, chattering to the crowd wh
ile her husband stood in silence, hiding a cigarette behind his back. The student was approaching; soon they would all lean in and listen, then turn and see him toppling from the wall. It was too much to bear; he had to leave. He tried; he couldn’t move a muscle; he lost his train of winey thought. All he could focus on was Denise’s husband, taking his turn to talk while his wife stood by smiling pleasantly but with a look of anguish in her eyes. Manday could guess what was happening there; he had felt that way before. Her husband was talking about her, giving the crowd his own amusing story of her life. A cocktail party version of that scientist’s hard life. Bowdlerized, that was the word, a bowdlerized version of a spouse’s life, told to tittering strangers, with all the terror taken out. The tense smile and the look on the young woman as if she might snatch the conversation from their very lips, take it back—Manday was sure of what was happening. His friends had done it to him many times.

  He managed to stand up, losing his wineglass in the shrubs at last, and made his way across a lawn to escape their sight. He was opposite the tennis court now and could see Swift, smoking a pipe, holding a small box before one of their colleagues, obviously in deep consultation. Above them all, to the east, Cassiopeia was spreading her tortured, glittering arms. Manday watched Swift and the scientist for a moment, seeing their nodding heads, and then turned behind a hedge to escape them, too. They had always treated him like an old man, all of them. Even when he was young, in his thirties, they had spoken easy English to him, petted his hand, kept difficult news from him as if he were a doddering grayheaded fool. The dark man, the Indian, handsome and vibrant in his way, but never to them. An old man. And here he was, actually grown old, and still the secrets were kept from him—why had Swift, his best friend, never turned to him with a box? He padded through the shadow of the hedge, came into an open field, and was alone again. Cypresses leaned back and forth, and the grass rippled colorlessly. The moon floated above him, a glowing jellyfish, a man-o’-war, and its long threads of light touched and stung him all along his face. His life was so unlike theirs.