Jorgeson, bald now and sunburned, asked, “Now why did they put her name first? Periodic comet Lanham-Spivak. Why not Spivak-Lanham?”
“Alphabetical,” Eli explained, remembering the night of its discovery.
Swift put his finger on the side of his nose. “You’ve been hoodwinked, son. You should put it in order of contribution.”
Eli sighed. “Dr. Lanham gave the greatest contribution.”
Someone made a dirty remark and Eli blushed, turning away, letting them have the rest of their conversation without him. It confused him, sometimes, to realize his old colleagues had got through the sixties unscathed, unenlightened, and were turning into the same leering, jokey professors they’d loathed back when they were BAD-grads. But scientists were somehow impermeable to society. Fashion could not affect them, nor etiquette, nor politics nor the passage of time. It was wonderful, and kept them separate, honest; it was hideous, as well. Eli looked toward the jungle, but Kathy hadn’t returned. He noticed a figure above them all, on the overlook, but the relentless sun blinded his view. He sought the shadows and held on to a tree.
His collaboration with Denise had begun a year after his return to California. They saw each other very rarely, and usually in the company of her son and husband, that dull and likable football player to whom Eli had introduced her—introduced before he’d left for England, as a way to keep her happy. But hadn’t she realized it? That he’d never meant for her to marry him? Usually Adam was around, so their conversations were placid, with child stories, minutia of the suburban life, Adam’s store of WASPy jokes. But once, Denise had come down for business alone. Eli and Denise had sipped port together and finally talked about their favorite subject: the sky. How it always kept its word. There was something desperate in her that night which Eli had been yearning to see, hoping was not dead inside her, and he’d grabbed the chance. He talked about comet-hunting. He convinced her that it might bring the bloom back to her romance with the stars.
So it started. Every other Saturday, they drove from their respective cities to a midpoint near Tranquillity, a nothing town surrounded by pistachio and almond fields. The drive took each of them about three and a half hours, and they met in a diner and ate pancakes and drank coffee. Then he got into her car and they drove with their equipment partway up Ciervo Mountain. On a rocky overlook, she laid out the woolen blankets and arranged the folding chairs while he set up the sixteen-inch telescope and camera. Each imagined wild animals hooting and rustling, but they were never disturbed, not even by humans. Although they were here in an amateur capacity, they kept strict laboratory roles: Denise adjusted the telescope every six minutes to search the sky vertically, and Eli loaded the film, timed the aperture, and carefully preserved the images, which he developed the next day. He mailed the photographs to Denise and she studied them on her own that week. If they caught a comet on any night, therefore, they wouldn’t know it for days. Here, under the stars, they were merely gathering data, so they could relax; the young professor could bring out his college bongos and play to the sound of the trees, and his friend could stand, listening, gazing up at that old familiar view.
It was far from Tranquillity, though, deep into their sixth month of searching, that Denise made the discovery that would lend them small immortality. They had decided to search the photographs using stereo imagery, an uncommon procedure at the time. Eli stacked the hundreds of images in order, mailed them to Denise, and she, sitting in her bathrobe while she heard her husband typing in the other room, would fit two photos into her stereomicroscope and peer within. It was something like the turn-of-the-century stereopticons— two sepia photos (usually of a dour mandarin in front of the Yangtze River) were placed side by side with a barrier between them, and the viewer looked through a glass that sent only one image to each eye. The optical effect, because of slight differences in the angle of the photographs, was three-dimensional, and the sepia mandarin appeared to float angrily in front of his muddy river. For the comet search, Denise would put a photographed square of sky on one side and another photo taken six minutes later on the other. When she looked through the eyepiece, anything exactly the same in both photos would stay flat, but any object that had moved in those six minutes would appear, like the mandarin, to float mysteriously above the other stars. This is exactly what Denise Lanham saw that afternoon in May.
“Adam! Call Eli!”
Eli flew to Berkeley to see what she thought she’d found. There, in the eyepiece, in a close shot of Scorpius near dawn, hovered a smudge of light—which was just how a still-distant comet would look. Eli brought out his edition of the Uranometria to confirm it was not a known star or a Messier object. There was nothing known in Scorpius. Denise searched her shelves for the IAU Circular for March, as well as the Minor Planet Circular, and she and Eli, dizzy from a lack of sleep and pale with hunger, put their shaking fingers to the long ephemerides for bright comets present in the skies, moving down the columns in search of one in Scorpius, nervous as snakebite victims searching for an antidote. But there was, again, nothing. They had discovered a new object in the sky. Yet the scientific method could not end there, so they spent another anxious and slightly drunken night out on the rocky overlook, focusing, this time, entirely on that square of Scorpius before dawn, when comets glow coldly near the sun.
“I want this comet,” she told him forcefully as he loaded the film. She lay on the blanket with a bottle of wine.
“I know,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I mean I really do. Remember when we were grad students? And we all secretly wanted the Nobel Prize?”
He thought about it for a moment. She seemed so sure, so like she used to be in school. She frightened him again, the same way. “No, I never wanted that. Astronomers don’t win Nobels….”
“But you did want it, you did,” she said, sitting up and resting her hands on her knees. The only light was a red flashlight, which lay on the Messier catalog. “I know, you thought you had a chance. We all did. We thought it was just a matter of being smart and being lucky, that we were all young Hubbies and Halleys, but you learn it’s not true. You don’t just get smarter and smarter until finally you’re a genius. Being a genius is something else entirely.”
“I never thought I was a genius,” he said, having at last a chance to tell her how he’d always felt about himself, but knowing she wouldn’t hear it that way. She would just hear modesty.
“I thought I was,” she admitted, smiling, touching her thick wool sweater. “But I’m not. It’s all right, it’s fine, I found out early on when I couldn’t land a job and everyone else could. I’m a woman, I know, but a genius woman would have gotten a faculty position. I worked for the government, and the government lets you know you’re no genius. So I gave up on that, but I wanted something else.”
“I hope it wasn’t money.”
“I wanted an effect. An effect or an object. I wanted people to talk about calculating the ‘Lanham effect’ on a white dwarf, or the complex rotation of a ‘Lanham object.’Maybe a ‘Lanham force,’ or a ‘Lanham diagram’ or—hell—even a ‘Lanham tube.’Something named after me. And the funny thing is, even with Dr. Swift around all the time, I never thought I’d get a comet.”
He paused, then asked, “Is that why you agreed to this?”
“Of course that’s why. You can’t just do all this science and die.”
Then she stood up to readjust the telescope, and he recognized the stern, impressive tone in her voice. He had heard it before, standing in the San Francisco fog outside the doorway to her apartment. It had been just this way, just this tone, with different words: “We don’t need to have this conversation.” Such focus, direction, control. He had always seen her as so fragile, but it wasn’t true. She always got exactly what she wanted. And, of all things, instead of heartbreak, this new vision of her thrilled him. Denise would find this comet for him; she would save his career, and would not even expect to be thanked. There was no one like her.
Eli was careful but trembling in the Berkeley darkroom the next morning as he looked over the photographs they had taken, breathless in the red light as he saw the faint fuzzy spot appearing in the emulsion, this time teardropped with a tail. Then it was hurriedly lent to Denise in the next room. She panted, placing it in her stereo-microscope, turning the dials and he waited, pacing, holding his hands before him. After a minute or so, she stood up, and he could see she was weeping. She looked at him, then yelled for a telegram to be sent: new comet in scorpius magnitude 8 stop 8 hours ut stop discoverers lanham comma spivak comma professionals in amateur capacity stop right ascension….
And here she was.
Stepping from the shadows of the jungle, in the sunglasses and the white straw hat that students now associated with her, bending a banana leaf out of her way, Denise appeared. She nodded and waved to people, so unlike the timid girl Eli had known in Campbell Hall, yet somehow still consciously awkward. She had done well, produced important papers despite her constraining governmental position. Her success showed in the scientists’ response: They were nudging each other, ridiculing or admiring her, and she walked right through the group of them, using her gesturing hand like a machete to cut past the conversations they threatened to start. About her comet, her papers, her ideas. She spoke briefly with Swift and promised to come back. She made her way through the sunlight to Eli. Blue beads around her neck. Here she was.
Denise touched his arm and whispered, “Just give me a quick kiss, because your wife is on the overlook.”
Automatically, he obeyed, feeling angry once more at the commands she’d always given to people, especially him, but his anger faded as he kissed each cheek. He let himself look up to the great white concrete parapet above them. It was Kathy up there, leaning over the edge, coiled within herself like a heavy knot, and she held something in her hand—a berry, a butterfly, a stone?
“I just saw her in the jungle,” Denise said.
“She headed out to meet you. You’re her best friend these days, you know.”
Denise laughed, and whispered, “I want to talk about her. But people are listening, so we’ll use a code name for her. We’ll call her Bob.” Then she began to talk in her loud, natural voice: “Bob doesn’t seem very happy….”
He was staring at this woman in her late thirties, that stiff trapezoidal nose high in the jungle air, its bump darkened with a broken capillary; he was listening to her talk in code about his wife; he was watching the circular gestures she made to append her words; and all he could think of was how it had begun again. She might change everything about herself over the years—the makeup overdone with blue around her eyes, her thick hair bleached, some lilac scent spreading as she waved her arms—but still the actual rare presence of her warmed him entirely. He carried on this coded conversation with her, but he felt that they were discussing something else—not their collaboration, because that no longer existed as others believed. In this last year, their record of the sky had turned back into romance, into that old affair as easy as a familiar room, so easy it hardly seemed illicit. They both leaned against a palm tree as they talked, and she lowered her hand slightly, rubbing against his. They were lovers now. A blanket on a hillside, a clear veil of stars—something else besides the comet had been recovered.
Kathy glanced down from the overlook. She could not see the beach—she faced the jungle and watched Lydia making her way down the cut path from the huts, headed toward a clearing where the Mandays had their home. Kathy took great pleasure in this, although she knew it was childish, watching a girl like a boat you’d set free down a creek. It was good, though, to see someone else who couldn’t stand the crowd out on the beach. Women so rarely chose to be alone.
Kathy’s greeting of Denise had been brief—they saw each other so often, of course. Denise had not brought her son, after all, and Adam lay feverish and miserable in the hut. No, it was probably best that no one visit him. Kathy could recognize some terrible happiness in Denise’s voice, and she wanted to tell her, It’s all right, you can be glad you’re on your own today, but they didn’t talk like that anymore. Denise was Eli’s friend now. Afterward, Kathy had made her way up the long cut stairs to the overlook, curious to see the old place, since she’d be leaving so soon, before the count of meteors. She entered the spiral stairs, and emerged from the golden dome as if from the lip of a honey jar, realizing that she’d never seen this view in daytime. There was the place she’d sat twelve years before. And there was the wall where the boy had fallen. Would he have been nineteen now, twenty? She walked over to the edge and down below she saw Eli, standing alone and looking out to sea. It pleased her that he stood apart from the scientists, that he hadn’t seized her absence as a time to plunge back into the world that upset him. The bundle of hatless men in the sun. The water glinting like a chandelier.
Then, to the east, she noticed Lydia making her way down the jungle path. She had thought about Lydia so often, remembering the few times she’d talked with her as a young girl. That subtle strangeness she’d found. Kathy no longer pulled at people’s oddities during dinner parties; it had grown exhausting for her, and men and women seemed less open these days, palming their true eccentricities and offering feigned ones: yoga and mysticism and sex. They were all adults now, and closeness was something too difficult to bear. With friends, with strangers. The people around her had made life choices they took to be permanent; now, whether confident in or afraid of their choices, they no longer allowed any examination; she could learn no more about them than about characters after a book had ended. She rarely went to parties anymore, afraid to come across another sad, perfected person. But Lydia was young, and Kathy thought there still might be something free in this girl, unaltered, something to be learned. Also, Kathy had brought a gift with her to the island, especially for Lydia. She watched the girl’s movements through the trees, wondering if she had the nerve to shout, call the girl up to the overlook, hand over what had been waiting twelve years in her pocket.
She had it by chance. Back in 1965, on the boat over from the mainland, Eli had slipped her a heavy camera and she’d taken it without questioning. She knew it was Denise’s, but Denise was drunk at the time and didn’t need it. Kathy had headed out to the bow to look at the island that was appearing on the horizon, holding the camera before her. She remembered someone shouting Land ho! and the little girl beside her saying that she couldn’t see it, and that’s when Kathy turned and took a picture—an angry child, her face red and squinting in the salt air, her hands thrown down to keep her dress from flying in the wind. Later, when others were sleeping in their huts, Kathy had wandered along the jungle paths until she found Professor Swift with Lydia again, the man washing his face in a tub and Lydia stark naked in the orchids, staring. Another picture. And on and on as the evening progressed, as they gathered in their stations on the overlook, all photos of Lydia, until Professor Swift told her to stop using the flash; it would ruin their eyes. Kathy gave the camera to him then and got it back the next morning, but in the flurry after the accident, those bleary-eyed days on the plane and alone in California, she apparently removed the roll of film and then forgot all about it. Denise got her camera back, but Eli’s sudden decision to move to England made it hard to keep track of the small objects. Most random junk went into a box, in storage, and the roll of film went in there as well. She did not think of it again. Not until a few years after their return, when going through the box to find a book, did she recover the film. Kathy pulled it out, the rattling jar of plastic, knew instantly what it was, and stopped herself from developing it. She knew what was on it—prying shots of Lydia as a girl—and Kathy decided it wasn’t for her to see first. The pictures had a painful innocence to them now that she didn’t dare expose; they were a record of Lydia just before the accident. To see them, then hand them over—it would be an ambush, a trick. No, she would keep it for the reunion, for Lydia to see alone.
That’s what Kathy held in her hand
, which Eli had thought was a stone.
Kathy watched as the girl passed through a clearing, nodding her head at two women who sat smoking cigarettes. Lydia was moving toward the island’s interior, skirting the summer palace on whose overlook Kathy stood. She seemed to be making her way to the beach, brushing her hair back vainly and ripping the leaves out of the way. Angry youth, or impatient youth. Then she disappeared behind a curve in the path, and Kathy replaced her form with the memory of her that day on the beach. Taking that face from the age of five to here, seventeen, was like watching the expansion of a crumpled tissue dropped in water—the unkinking of the hair, bringing it to this shine, the outward floating of her features, the long kite-shapes of her eyes, the rosy pimpled chin, Swift’s upturned nose amid the faint pollen-scattering of freckles. It fascinated Kathy to consider what awful things the girl had got through to reach this age, and what she still might face.
She had thought of Denise this way, once, when they were young. The rich, heartless scientist too long ignored. But Denise was no longer that for her. The leave-taking long ago at the airport had been tense, interesting to Kathy, almost as if Denise could not bear to part with her and yet could not wait to drive home to her flat and begin new projects alone. And then no letters in England. No letters at all. Eli had not seemed surprised, but despite her eagerness for friendships to change, for people to change, it had broken Kathy’s heart. After a year, she had to give her friend over for good as one of those characters in an Elizabethan play who enters brilliantly in the second act banquet scene, has all the best lines, then never returns again. Kathy missed her, though; she and Eli talked about her. They said they missed her confusion, how she seemed perpetually unhappy but, oddly, good-humored. How she worried endlessly yet took for granted that she would succeed. How she nervously rubbed her face so that her makeup disintegrated over the course of a dinner party (Eli’s anecdote); how she beat the table when she argued and made the glasses ring (Kathy’s). In England, Denise seemed very far away, and Kathy assumed she’d lost her.
The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 13