The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  Her disappearance was, however, the product of Kathy’s own device. She and Eli had introduced her to the man who would become her husband—Adam—but Kathy hadn’t realized that this would change anything. She had only meant to salve Denise’s loneliness, and grabbed the closest thing at hand—an odd, bookish young man from the edge of their circle, an acquaintance, really—but, in the same way a quick fix on a table leg can hold for generations, that conventional Adam, also never made to be permanent, stayed. What could you say when it was love? How could you tell her that you’d never really meant for her to marry him?

  Eight years passed. Christmas cards came, hilarious and weirdly upper-class things with a picture attached of a family Kathy could not imagine belonging to Denise. Was this the life she’d chosen? The smile seemed the same in each photo, and as the color processes improved over the years, her skin appeared to grow more natural and pink, her blouses more expensive. One year, the card came in the mail and Kathy laughed out loud to see that brain-heavy Denise had permed and frosted her hair into a kind of macaroon. She showed the photo to Eli, who simply repeated a dictum from his grandmother: You can’t judge anything you didn’t pay for. Oh what an awful world if that were true, she thought. And hadn’t they paid in some way for that macaroon? Wasn’t there an investment there— the Shabbat dinners, the sangria and fondue parties, the late nights, the neat package containing her future husband? Hadn’t they given her all this so that she’d yield something better than her mother’s life out in the foggy mansion, lunching at Neiman Marcus but buying, bien s※r, at Saks? Were these appalling cards to be the only dividend they’d ever see?

  When Denise did finally reenter their lives, it was as Eli’s friend alone. Kathy was not hurt this time; she understood that she was no longer crucial to her old friend’s life, and had not been for some time. A husband, a son—it changes you. Denise had hardened into the place where she had fallen at thirty, and Kathy assumed that, like so many people, she couldn’t bear the analysis. There were to be no more late-night talks on the carpet or sitting on the steps outside a party whispering and complaining. Eli was an easier friend, rarely petty or hurt by anything you said, content never to delve deeper than a discussion of ion clouds. Kathy understood that Denise was happy, and she gave her husband freely to those comet-hunting nights. But she ceased admiring the woman.

  Soon enough, she came to see a different side of Denise, the one her husband loved. It was at a party in L.A. years after their return, when Eli was beginning to have difficulties with his department and came home depressed, that Kathy and Denise were standing in the warm night air together. It was not an astronomical gathering, which made it all the nicer because it meant they could all admire the moon without any comment about how it ruined the stars. It was a neighbor’s backyard party, the weird seventies brand where all the men wore hemp bracelets and beads and all the women still came with their hair newly set. As the stars awoke, the two astronomers could point them out, delighting people as if they were all children, and had never noticed that Mars was red. Kathy remembered that the host came out with a pitcher of punch on a tray, full to the top with ice, and the hostess laughed and said, “Harry, you idiot! The ice’ll melt and it’ll spill all over everything!” Denise then flatly and innocently explained how it was a stupid thing to say, since ice, in contradiction to common sense, is more dense as a liquid: Worry not, Harry; the ice will melt harmlessly. The host and hostess stood stunned as oblivious Denise took a glass of offered punch, and Kathy saw that she was nothing like she’d thought she was. She had not become complacent or ordinary at all; these days, Denise merely said and did what she liked. And from Eli’s ecstatic face, Kathy saw he had always known this. Why had she never seen it? Was this the reason—had Kathy always held her back, tamped her friend down like brown sugar in a measuring cup, and so Denise had to be free of her? Was this why she had written no letters?

  Lydia had made it to the beach, was already past the spit. She had stripped to her bikini, clothes in a bundle under her arm, and walked awkwardly across the sand, picking up her legs like a sandpiper, rearranging her hair against a hopeless breeze. Scandalous white girl in a green bikini. Seventeen years old and finally away from the crowd, away from her bullying father, the anger of his old age, away from the worthless handful of jerks down the beach. They couldn’t see her—she was on the most desolate strip of beach, and only Kathy, leaning a little over the wall, could make out the girl stepping through the hot sand toward a clump of coconut trees. She could finally see what a girl might do if you just left her alone.

  It was hard to have no friends. Nearing forty, with everyone around you stuck in their personal tar pits, complaining about the loud music these days, the clothes, the morals, and the death of the English language on the lips of the young—did they really believe the seventies were the end of the world? Couldn’t they recognize all these phrases from their parents’ mouths? They were simply growing old. They had turned thirty-five and put a full stop on their lives. Where did this leave Kathy? Watching a girl who might grow up a little different.

  Then a dark form came from the jungle, walking at an angle to meet the girl. Kathy could see Lydia still walking, not noticing, just fussing with her hair and with the bundle of clothes, looking out to sea. But Kathy could make it out: a man walking swiftly toward her, an island man. Shirtless, long pants, his arms hanging as he made his way. And then Lydia saw him. She froze, dropped her bundle, standing hands-on-hips in false bravado. Perhaps the man said something as he approached, perhaps the girl yelled back; Kathy never knew. It was distant mime play for her, a dark form and a light one under the hot sun. The man drew next to Lydia. Kathy leaned over to see, inching for a view, terrified. Should she yell? They wouldn’t hear. Should she call a guard? It was too late. Yes, now he was soundlessly talking to her, his hand on the girl’s shoulder. Then she saw: It was Ali, Dr. Manday’s son. And also: Now Lydia’s hand was on the back of his head; now they were kissing.

  From there, Kathy let time move quickly. She leaned back from the wall as the distant figures kissed and groped like the teenagers they were, as he undid the bikini and the girl let it fall to the beach with the rest of her clothes. Kathy walked away from the view as the boy took the girl’s hand and led her down a spit to an old stone hut. She turned from the sight now. This was some other kind of youth, some foreign land, and she no longer knew how to read it. An innocent girl on a beach, a dark man. And to think she had almost screamed. Maybe she was old, too. She went through the gilt entrance to the stairs, making her way down through the shadowed spiral, then down the cut stone steps, her hand against the wall. The night ferry was many hours away, but she might still pack. Rest on her bed, read her book. There would be dinner, talking with Eli and Denise. God, there was so much time to kill before she could leave.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she handed the film canister to the sultan’s guard, telling him to give it to Dr. Swift’s daughter. They had some trouble working this out. Dr. Swift, his daughter, Dr. Swift. Then the guard grinned and took the roll and Kathy was in the cool of the forest again. And she could not know it, she would never know it, but this comet would come around again before Lydia saw those pictures.

  By four o’clock, you could see the comet in the sky. This day in March was the perfect time to view it; the comet had already passed out of the blinding halo of the sun, but still reflected the sun’s light, making it bright and clear. A greater comet had come the year before, Comet Kahoutek, and astronomers had grown excited, proclaiming it to be the comet of the century. It had sizzled, though, and hopes were high for Periodic Comet Swift. The same thing had happened: Comet Swift was faint, a scribble in the daytime sky, possibly with two tails this time, but nothing like it should have been. Few on the island were watching; they were all chatting or sleeping now, or awake in the hot darkness of their huts.

  One was watching: Dr. Swift, sneaking a bourbon at the abandoned bar. He was not supposed to
drink or smoke, but who was there to stop him now? Where was the lady in white robes who would tsk-tsk at his weaknesses, grab the bottle from him, stub out the strong cigars? Who would be enraged by anything he did to himself now? No one. There was just this broad, hot beach in its glittering Tiffany case. So he looked up at his comet and it brought his burning mind to a furious boil. A wait of twelve years, only his third viewing, and such a disappointment. Even now, near perihelion, it hadn’t ever blazed or smoked bright blue with ions. The professor had said nothing to anyone, but he had a private reason for his anger: He was ill. He considered the notion that this might be his last sight of his comet. At sixty-four, twelve years felt both too short and too long; that length of time, in the past, had seemed to move by so quickly, but now of course it seemed unreachable. His research was waning, he had fewer grad students and papers; life seemed to tire him. So this might be the last time, and the old man, dreaming of its fiery approach from Mars, had wanted housewives to gasp from their kitchen windows. He had wanted kings to shake in fear. He looked up from the fringed beach. A white scratch on the perfect sky.

  Several hours later, the comet was even more visible. Dr. Manday lay asleep, but his wife sat wakeful by the window of their hut. She noticed the scratch in the blue above; her husband had told her where it would be, what it would look like, and she wasn’t a fool. She’d seen it twice before herself; she remembered the day they’d found it, how Swift had burst in, yelling for the sultan; how they gathered in the little Japanese communication office to send that telegram. She remembered her drunken husband later that night, Dr. Swift in his open Hawaiian shirt, that giant awful man. She remembered with bitterness, too, the contents of their telegram: comet discovered in centaurus by swift stop. A stop where her husband’s name should have been. A stop instead of a manday. She turned away from Comet Swift; it was a stolen jewel, and she would not gaze on it in awe, or admire it or consider what its appearance might now foretell.

  The sun moved lower in the sky. Lydia sat at the bar, and this time the comet was plain to see above the water. She hardly noticed. It was her third gin and tonic, on top of a little pot Ali had given her, and she was glad to have planned it so well that none of the scientists would be around—they were all still having their stargazer naps, or reading their journals, or scribbling in their notebooks. It was just her and the bartender, a stout man who never asked her age and who happily put it all on her father’s bill. She stared out at the high tide, at the ocean-gutted rocks, the perfect curve of a palm bending like an open hand, the poisonous gemlike corpse of a jellyfish on the wet sand. She was so different from everybody else. She and Ali. She’d guessed it for a long time, but the conversation she’d overheard about the boy who fell from the overlook, this sick, secret anniversary—it had confirmed it; they were disposable. She, Ali, anyone who wasn’t one of the scientists, the squares. She thought of Dr. Lanham’s husband, Adam, and how she’d always liked him, ever since she’d met him in the barn; how he was sick today, but they didn’t care. The journals, the notebooks. Hadn’t she even seen Dr. Lanham walking on the beach with the Jewish guy? The bartender brought her another drink and she smiled. He smiled back. God, how was she going to hide the alcohol on her breath this time?

  She was right: The scientists were asleep or studying. Most were only a few years into their teaching positions, still assistant professors with loads of low-level classes to teach, desperate for a few hours to finish their research. They still had hopes of greatness, those of them who had landed at major institutions; and those who had fallen lower—they still labored as though they might break free. Denise, in her signature glasses, was working with Dr. Swift’s new calculator, an object as rare and valuable back then as a diamond. Eli edited a collaborative paper, nervously chewing the tip of his pen, Kathy asleep behind him. The others all busied themselves with figures of the sky before the sky itself appeared; they were young, as scientists go, their time eaten up by committees or, for those who had not made tenure, by a desperation too close to be ignored for sun or sand.

  And all around them, so easy to forget in its maroon and pea-green undulation, lay the forest. Millions of trembling leaves, each with an insect sticking to the pale undersurface, sailors on rafts riding out the wind. The wind changed its mind. The leaves, with their castaways, bucked wildly in the forest. On the overlook, the sultan’s old telescope creaked in its joints. The comet did not seem to move an inch.

  Deep in the cluster of huts, surrounded on two sides by banana groves, a man lay moaning in his bed; he had hardly seen more than the beach since his arrival. Some bad beef stew the night before, a sensitive stomach, and he’d been attacked by beads of sweat like an army of ants. He was recovering now, alone, staring around the walls of his hut. It was Denise’s husband, Adam, and he felt he just might lose his mind.

  It was the cry that did it. He was coming off his fever, lying in the sweaty darkness, the late afternoon sun parting the curtains of the single window, and every time he tried to rest his eyes at last, he was awakened by a piercing, mysterious cry. Adam was the kind of man who couldn’t ignore a sound like that, or any distraction—each night before they went to sleep, he carefully swept any dirt or crumbs out of the bed, and Denise always watched him, smiling, softly ridiculing his sensitivity by saying he was like a Poe character. He couldn’t sleep with the sound, therefore, this cry piercing his heated brain. At first, deep in his fever, he had worried that it was a child fallen outside his hut, wounded, crying for its mother, and that he was the only one who could hear it, but soon the regularity of the cry made this impossible. No, it was no child. The noise, then the silent shadowed room, then the noise again. What was it? He was driven mad trying to figure out the source until a lucky gust of wind blew open the window and he could see, plain and calm, a large parrot hanging in a cage across the way. It seemed to turn and sneer at him before the wind died, the curtain fell, and he heard once again that maddening cry. He knew what made the sound, but it had not calmed him. Now Adam had to figure out what the parrot was saying: “Help it"? “Hop it"? “Stop it"? What had they taught it to say? He could not sleep. Normally, sleepless, he would try to think about his novel, move the characters around like a boy playing with toy soldiers, but he’d given up on those thoughts half a year ago. Instead, he lay there for hours in his fevered dreams, waiting for Denise to arrive.

  Adam dreamed for a long time about the boy he had thought lay outside his window. This was not uncommon; he often found it hard to rid his mind of terrible images. He would walk down a street and see the sharp edge of a broken window, thinking, I’ll hurt myself on that, and even though he never did, he saved the mental picture of his bleeding hand for hours. So he dreamed about the boy lying wounded, bitten by a serpent, and then about his own son, whom he missed terribly. His son Josh, a proud and creative boy whose talents his mother could not see. To Denise, the blond kid seemed wonderful but not exceptionally bright, no good at math, at science, only happy playing soccer or drawing. Adam felt that only he saw the boy’s great confidence and charm, something Denise would never value. Then Adam dreamed of himself as a boy, as the sunlight suddenly entered his room like the angry husband of a lover. He remembered being in Connecticut at his grandparents’ house in winter, before his family had moved to Hollywood, where he would spend the majority of his life. He was in Milford, Connecticut, in the backyard of the house, and in this dream both the house and the yard took on plantation-sized proportions—a brick mansion with a widow’s walk, an impossibly unmowable lawn acres wide, striped and gilded with winter sun, yellow leaves floating in the crisp air. In reality, he knew it to be a suburban lot backing onto a stream. He made the stream into a brown flowing winter river, chinked with ice and black twigs, and in this memory he stood on a small cliff looking into a dark eddy in which twirled a soup can. Memory moved lightninglike to the next shocking moment, when he found himself in the icy stream, looking up toward the overhang where there was just blue sky. Adam was
taken downstream, suffering, frozen, calling, but nobody came and he was sure he was going to die until, just as suddenly, he found himself clutching the dead arm of a tree branch. He pulled himself out and staggered, almost blind with fright, into the mud room where he changed his clothes and appeared in time for dinner. This was just after the war, and his disbelieving family still kept their windows blacked against attack, so he walked into a warm box of a room, sat down and ate. No one ever noticed that his being alive was the most amazing aspect of the meal.

  The door opened and in came Denise, lifting him from his fever so that he tried to smile, feeling relieved. Bits of the dream still clung to the room, though, and for a few moments his wife seemed to wade through icy water, pushing cracked branches out of her way, moving forward to save him.

  “You’re back!” he said.

  “You look better,” she told him merrily, although she didn’t approach. She took off her ridiculous white hat and put it on a post, then removed her sunglasses. Tall, all in thin white fabric, a weightless being near his bed. She walked across the room to open the curtains. The sunlight she let in cast a wavering lemon parallelogram across the mosquito netting, and it moved in the wind like something afloat. The parrot began its cry, and Adam sat up, overjoyed that he could share it with her.