The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  “Listen!” he insisted.”Listen to that!”

  She still looked out the window. “It’s Manday’s parrot.”

  Adam pounded the sheets like a child. He asked, “What’s it saying? What do you think it’s saying?”

  They listened to the noise together and Denise leaned against the wall, considering. The broken capillary on her nose looked blue in the cool, dark room, almost a bruise where she had fallen.

  “Hopeless,” she said at last, turning to look at him. So serious, so sure.

  “Really?” he asked, shifting in the bed and feeling the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think so, I think it’s a little more like ‘help it.’”

  “What would that mean? No, it’s ‘hopeless.’

  Adam said, “It’s been driving me crazy. It’s all I think about.” Then, wanting to smooth the serious look from her face, he said, “Does this mean I’m in love?”

  “Oh yes,” he heard her sigh, coming toward him at last, smiling. “I always knew I’d lose you to a cockatoo.” As his wife approached, she blocked the light a little more, so that he could make out less and less of her face in the shadow she created. He closed his eyes and felt her weight near him on the bed. He could hear her undoing the little knot he’d made in the netting, and the swish as the fabric fell behind her. Then a pause as she wiped back his hair. He tried to guess how cool her wrist would feel on his forehead when it came, to gauge his own temperature, and when it touched him, he was surprised to feel each bone and tendon of hers moving, like block and tackle under the skin, as she adjusted her hand. He opened his eyes, and there she was, his wife, shining with perspiration and the faint early glow of sunburn, wearing on her forehead her mother’s crease of worry.

  “I’m fine,” he said, to make the crease go away. It irritated him when he saw Denise disappear inside herself, replaced by some ancestral woman who was efficient with sickness and death and impatient with sorrow. He could not fit this person into his wife, and at times he wondered whether perhaps everyone suffered a variable personality and inside any head lived a thousand starving understudies, waiting for the lead to break her leg.

  “I’ll tell you when you’re fine,” his wife said, breathing deep and looking at him, tapping her fingers on his arm. He saw the muscles moving in her wrist again as she did this. He felt he could see through her. “I talked to Josh long-distance.”

  “What did he say?”

  She waited a moment to tell him, hands together on her lap. “He said you’d promised to bring back a butterfly with big turquoise dots on the wings.”

  Adam smiled. “He remembered that? I’ll find one.”

  “Alive?”

  “Whichever way they’ll let it out. I’ll sew it into the hem of my coat if I have to. Anything else?” But he knew she wasn’t going to tell him anything else; she was jealous enough that Josh had thought first of his father, of some private wish which only Daddy, always magical Daddy, could perform. There was always some whispering when she left the room, some planning of the wonderful thing the two boys held in secret from her. Adam knew she heard them; he saw her face turning in the hall, lit blue by a Batman night-light.

  Denise had her own secrets, is how he felt, though she would never call them “secrets,” exactly; she kept them hidden to spare others. Her work, of course, which she dismissed modestly when people asked her, even though this silence made her even more mysterious in the candlelight of dinner, leaning over to scrape peas onto her fork. At first he thought she didn’t know it, how people talked to him during drinks and said how wonderful, how smart and fascinating his wife was, and it made him proud that she cared so little about the effect she had on others; now, though, he suspected that Denise cultivated this religion. He knew this much of her secret life—that she longed to share it. But Adam knew he would not do.

  Her father’s death was treated the same way, and this time it was Denise and her mother together guarding the secret. The man had been dying for years, from smoking illnesses and cancers, though it was clear in Denise’s last call to him that morning that this heart attack was different. There was an operation that would save him, but his heart was too weak for it, and what would it mean to “save" him, her father asked? He was a man who could admit no change in his routines; who, when he visited Adam and Denise down in Santa Cruz, insisted on parking in the same place each time, even if it meant sitting in the bay window, waiting for the space to open. He would die with no change also. Denise called her mother at the hospital that night as her father lay sleeping, and ten minutes after she’d hung up, the phone rang again and Adam watched his wife huddled in the chair they never sat in, weeping, the phone cord trickling from her hand onto the floor. She said nothing for the entire call, not “hello,” not “I’m sorry, Mother,” but absorbed it all into herself. Adam could only stand and watch and try to decipher the moment. He had thought of Walter, her father, the stooped, skinny man with the hook nose and bulging eyes you see in WPA photos of workers (only, he was a rich man), with a mustache to hide his dwindled upper lip, and a small diamond in his lapel from some obscure association. His kind wife, his big house, his parking space. A good life forbidden to change—was that so terrible?

  Denise and her mother wouldn’t allow Josh to go to the funeral, so Adam didn’t go either, but took his son up to the San Francisco Zoo, where they stood in the cold sea air, watching an elephant chained to a cement wall, as they swatted the seagulls away from their vinegar-soaked french fries. It wasn’t that Grandpa Walter’s death was a secret from children; it was a secret from the whole world. It was a club with two members in beautiful black dresses. This club, at their annual graveside meetings, would argue furiously over dull dead Walter, but it was only theirs to argue. Adam was not to say a word.

  So why shouldn’t Josh and his father smuggle butterflies in secret? They were really, of course, only smuggling them past Denise’s own customs. More and more, Adam was hoarding the beautiful parts of his life away from her, bringing the treasures instead to his son. Was this a marital crime?

  “Kathy’s only staying today, did you know that?” she asked suddenly, standing up. He watched her eyes discover a banana leaf on the floor, and then, after she considered for a moment whether to pick it up or not, he saw her lean down and grab an edge. “Not even tonight.”

  “Maybe there’s trouble in paradise.”

  She stood holding the leaf. “What?”

  Adam laughed, trying to hold a conversation while he felt so ill. He was afraid he wasn’t making sense or that, as always, he wasn’t clever enough for her. He said, “The perfect Spivaks. Maybe she’s off to have an affair.”

  She frowned. “You never liked her.”

  He was shocked, and tried to respond. “I knew her first, remember? I like her. I just don’t understand her.”

  Denise dropped the leaf out the window and came to sit down on the bed again, saying, “Nobody does.”

  “You should, she’s your best friend.”

  But this comment obviously upset her. “Why is everyone saying that?” she said, fussing with the mosquito netting. “She’s not, I barely know her. Why do you say that?”

  Adam tried to sit up. He reached for a glass of water, studying his wife. Yes, as always, she had some other secret, and he longed to know it. “What’s going on?”

  She seemed tired of this subject. He saw her eyes flicker to a journal on the table, a physics journal. She relented, explaining: “It’s just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it’s like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they’re really close, closer than they are. And the other one doesn’t feel that way.”

  “And Kathy thinks you’re close.”

  She looked pained, as if he were forcing her to say things she didn’t quite believe. In truth, he was weak, ill. He could barely sip the water. He was thinking of her words, how, in relationships, someone is a little more in love.

 
Denise’s face was plain and thoughtful, obviously focused on an image of Kathy, perhaps of herself with Kathy at some moment in the past. She said, “She doesn’t get very close to people, so with me she thinks it’s special. But I’m used to being close, so it’s not special anymore. Not that I don’t love her. It’s just something I realized one day.”

  “I think that’s terrible. That’s really sad.”

  The words came out before he knew it. Adam never said these kinds of things to her. His role was to amuse her, relieve her. He was afraid she would turn away now, kiss his forehead and leave him for hours again. Instead, her face almost brightened as she sat beside him, saying, “You can use it in your writing. It’ll make you famous.”

  It always surprised and pleased him to hear her say this, to realize that she believed it. Her faith made her so pretty across the room. The thought had not even been on his mind, and he saw again that she believed, after all this time, the lie he’d given her: He was a genius writer. This was an old, old lie; he’d stung her with it in their first year together, in the false bohemia he’d shown her, in the romantic persona he’d created years before to attract girls. That’s how he thought of it, as a sting, like the hymenoptera wasp painlessly keeping its victim still, stinging again and again if necessary, keeping it quiet for days while it readied its batch of hungry children. Denise knew nothing about writing, although he told her everything about his days, the torture of a bad line, the exhilaration when something finally came, something good, and then the quick return to gloom in front of the typewriter. These habits must have sounded just like work to her, as any purposeful struggle is, and she took it on easy faith. She listened with unskeptical eyes, two white buds, eager, happy to support him. But underneath, Adam wasn’t happy. He knew it was a lie. He knew that writing, for him, was work in the way that the seduction of pretty women might be work; a struggle, of course, but purely selfish in the end. Purely to feed a compulsion. Only a bit more than bad habit.

  Although her own work, despite all his prodding, remained a mystery, he understood the way she thought about her work. It was to feed her curiosity, the kind of curiosity that made her stop while Josh tossed his yo-yo badly toward the ground, stand in distant fascination as she watched the plastic object spin on its string, wobbling in an ugly way, until her son managed somehow to jerk it back and it came, a reluctant pet, halfway to his hand before dying in the air. “Do it again,” she’d say, whispering to Adam something about the wobble—it had been the wobble she’d been watching this whole time! Then in she’d go, working out the calculations, showing that the wobble of a dish thrown in the air is exactly blah-blah-blah of its rotation (how had a yo-yo become a dish?). Her body shone like silver plate as she announced this to their blank faces. Her compulsion was her curiosity and this was a kind of love, he’d always thought. His desire didn’t feel that way; he never shone like silver plate. He worked for approval, and fame, and because of some old fantasy about himself he’d invented in high school to impress the girls. He knew this truth about himself.

  Adam’s mind was already up for lease. Denise could not see it, but his precious writing notebook (one in a numbered series of blue composition books) was lying outside on the ground near Manday’s house where he had flung it, under the parrot’s window, lifting page by page in the hot wind as if the invisible jungle were thumbing through for a last look before devouring it. That part of his life was lost, and she could not feel it, still numb from his stinger’s decade-old poison.

  His father had been a failure, too. He had been a radio crooner in the fifties, the “Sinatra of New England,” and it had been wonderful to turn on the big wooden box and hear his father’s voice emerging, although it was always a little hard to believe, his father being such a prankster. He sang on the local Liberty Soap Music Hour, and his signature song was “I’m Forever Chasing Rainbows.” That was when they lived in Connecticut, in the big house, near the swollen river that had almost drowned young Adam. One evening, while Adam was playing with his pet hamster, his mother leaned down, her starched skirt crackling, smelling of the mint she used to cover up the cigarettes, and whispered that they were moving. To Hollywood. He dropped the hamster and it ran away, lost for days behind the china cabinet. He had daydreamed about Hollywood at night in bed, the movie stars bringing him Jell-O in crystal cups, and here he had made it real. It scared him. The move was long and difficult on his parents, making the car ride silent as they crossed the hot states, but there was an unspoken hope for what was promised out there. Then the new house, the odd desert air. The huge pink refrigerator that made his mother laugh. The orange trees. Hearing his father coming home late at night, the murmurs of long talks and clinking ice in old-fashioneds. The movie when it came out—Hurrah for Harriet! with his father all black-and-white in a smoking jacket, spraying seltzer on a starlet—and the change to emptiness soon after. As if someone had come and taken all the furniture overnight. Within a year, his father was selling insurance door-to-door. That was 1955. They never spoke of his father’s past as “Sinatra,” and sometimes Adam thought it was one of his childish fantasies. A wooden radio, a bottle of white seltzer—dream objects. He learned then that failure was not a mallet; it was a trowel, smoothing and solidifying a life.

  “I was thinking about the boy,” Adam said, and from his wife’s face he knew he wasn’t making sense. “The boy who fell.” The image had come from a long chain of fevered thought. “Were you all together?”

  He saw her putting the thought in place: “Were we all…”

  “When it happened, were you all together?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “About Kathy, why she’s close to you. She was with you, right?”

  She didn’t answer; there was something more complicated about it than she could bother admitting, and she gave him her profile and faced the curtain with its bent square of light. The ceiling fan blew dust down on her through the shadows of the room. The wind blew open the curtain and the sun, a lion, reached its searching paw into the room.

  “Come over here,” he told her quietly, and she came, a little girl now, smiling and scuffling her old sandals on the worn floorboards, not knowing what to do with her hands and holding them close to her long skirt. Her eyes, those buds, had changed when he said this. She sat beside him on the bed, and with the tiniest gesture he had her lay her head on his sticky chest, on the hard bone between his muscles. He could feel her ear pressed between them, like a flower flattened in the pages of a book.

  “I’m sorry you’re so sick,” she said, lying half off the bed as the sun threw its desperate shapes at them, fighting against the curtain.

  “It’s kind of fun,” he said. He stared at the wall opposite the window, which was bare and hazy behind the netting.

  “I wish Josh were here.”

  “Me too,” he said and held his hand just above her hair, as if willing something to happen. His upraised arm made his chest muscles tense, and the back of her head raised with it. She stirred a little, noticing. He stroked her hair, stiff with spray. “I love you very much,” he told her. He felt her fingers jerking, the old funny signal that she was falling asleep. He leaned his back against the wall and looked at her: the shine of her cheek, the moth-powder color of her eye makeup and this unexpected expression of relief in his arms. So often, he was afraid he wasn’t enough for her, that she stayed with him out of duty. But that couldn’t be true—look at her, her face, how she believed in him—impossibly, stupidly, she did. He would fight for her; he would do anything to keep her, to make her happy. He would hurt people, lie, go to any lengths.

  But look at us, Adam thought sadly as he stroked her hair. Sitting in rooms, cracking our worries like nuts… and handing each other nothing but the shells.

  Some sights are only for the dark-adapted eye. An eye like Eli’s or Denise’s: shaded from the California sun, trained from years of stellar observation far from cities or suburbs, from radio towers or bright windows that m
ight contract your pupil and ruin your vision. An eye shaped from childhood, when you sat in the backyard making out the stars as they appeared. It is the best practice for a dark-adapted eye: You watch the night’s ether freezing above you, losing its blue, turning darker and more transparent until it reaches the exact shade of indigo at which the stars begin to show. First you will only spot one, usually Venus if it has risen, then begin to notice them one by one, floating up like bubbles from the bottom of a murky pond; only, you can never watch a star force its light through the atmosphere and appear—you can only see one that hasn’t been there before. They make you feel foolish; once they are all out, firm and bright as though they have always been there, you wonder if it was simply your idiocy, your own faulty eyes that hadn’t seen them. And in the end, of course, this is the truth of it.

  And once your pupils are dilated, wide nets to catch those moths of light, you will begin to notice more than planets, more than stars and galaxies. More than satellites making their steady way across the constellations. More than meteors or comets. In the evening, such as now on the island, you will start to see a strange phenomenon rising in the west. At first it seems imaginary, a haze against the sky, hard to make out with all the stellar objects clamoring for attention, but as the night progresses you will see it is a faint disk. It is called the gegenschein, the counterglow. It will reach its peak at midnight, sitting high in the sky at the point exactly opposite the sun—because, some believe, what you are seeing are particles blown off Earth’s atmosphere by the solar wind. The Sun is creating a stream of dust behind Earth. And some would say this stream we are staring into, this dusty gegenschein, is like nothing so much as a comet’s tail.

  The scientists on the island, gathering now atop the overlook, had all heard this theory. Eli, Denise, Swift, Manday, Jorgeson, the others—they had all read the crank reports about how comets were birthed in Jupiter, or how they were swarms of objects rather than dirty snowballs, or this one about Earth itself having a tail. Yet each had thought about it: Earth with a tail. Earth as a comet. Why not? It was just another object with a period around the Sun. The skeptical mind would say, “It has a much larger mass, an atmosphere,” but who could prove some comet didn’t have these as well? The idea struck, once again, at the heart of earthly arrogance. Here, if they waited until midnight, they could stare at Earth’s tail burning away from the Sun, just as if they stood Jules Verne-like on a rocketing comet with its mist of gases flowing into space, no different from any other object. But the idea was too sad. It is said that Ernest Rutherford, on learning how much space there was inside an atom, was afraid to step out of bed onto the floor for fear he would fall through. Science has that kind of terror to it, and it might feel the same staring at the comets from a mere cosmic accomplice. Without our special place in it, the universe would seem to turn away from us, a bored lover, showing only its cold back scarred with comets. And what a poor comet our own Earth would make: a hunk of nickel and iron, caught in its unadventurous orbit, never turning outside the most common plane of movement.