The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  She sat indoors as she thought of this, eating a slice of pizza. Her luck had changed immediately after leaving her friend’s doorway; there, crunched in the space under the mailboxes and protected by the rain, was a baseball cap. Wearing a cap lessened the rain’s irritation by about half; the cold drops on her scalp had hurt and depressed her, but now she merely felt the chill moistness of her clothes. Things were looking up. At the next place, her friend Angela’s, her key didn’t work either, but now, with this cap, the day had lost its misery. She had some wild ideas about begging for money or jumping a turnstile, but it seemed too wet for people to stop for her on the sidewalk, and she actually got as far as the inside of a subway station, slippers in her hand, before deciding this was idiotic and she would surely get caught. So Lydia walked back to the surface, thinking of trying the key at her mother’s apartment, when she happened upon a party. A grand-opening party at a copy shop, with free copies and pizza. It was fairly empty except for an eager manager and a cheapskate art student hogging a machine to copy his portfolio. She sat down with her pizza and smiled at the manager, who seemed willing to let her wait out the rain.

  And the thought of Adam came to her. She recalled Adam’s voice in the darkness of the beach, six years before, and how it had startled her. “Can I have a toke?” she heard, and it jolted her out of her contemplation of the midnight ocean. Here was the man in a T-shirt and jeans, sitting beside her with a pleasant, distant expression. The sand must have silenced his approach. She passed him the joint, and only a little while into their conversation did she realize he was the same man she’d seen in the barn as a child, Dr. Lanham’s husband. Then she understood that he was sick, feverish in the cooler night air, floating in the same haze she was in. That made it easier to talk, and to sit saying nothing as the fireflies winked out one by one.

  “You’re a writer, Mr. Lanham?”

  “Adam,” he corrected her. “I’m a writer.”

  “I want to be a writer.”

  “No you don’t,” he said seriously. “And I’m not really a writer anyway. Mostly I’m a liar. I tell a lot of lies, Lydia.”

  “So do I.”

  It was hard to think of herself back then without laughing. She thought he was handsome—she thought every man was handsome when she was seventeen, and she flirted heavily with boys in school, with Ali on the island, thinking that if she could trick them into adoring her she would have won some prize. What was the prize? The memory of the adoration itself. She hoarded these memories, spending them on herself when she felt worthless and alone. But she didn’t usually sleep with these men and boys: It was enough to know they wanted to sleep with her. It was enough, in a crowded bus, fully clothed, to feel a college boy’s hand on her thigh, squeezing, his eyes blank with desire. She would catch the look and feel it inside her— the coin of his passion clanking on her heart’s metal floor.

  So it was enough that night with Dr. Lanham’s husband on the beach. To talk about her boyfriends and her dalliance with Ali that very afternoon. He seemed interested, amused, but she could tell he asked more questions than a married man should. About how she met these men, about the beach, about the little stone hut out on the spit. She wished she could show him, she said suggestively, puffing the last of the pot, but someone else was in the hut right now. She had just come from there. Two white people were having sex in there.

  “Who? Who is it?” he asked. Something had gone wrong with his smile.

  She told him she didn’t know. Two of the scientists, she assumed, a chubby white guy and a blonde. Some married couple trying to relight the spark, and at the word “spark" she flicked her lighter and smiled. “Time to go skinny-dipping!” she announced.

  It was enough to see his face melt like wax as she stripped off her bikini. Married men were so complicated, and she wasn’t even going to seduce him; she had just wanted to know that perhaps she could. The story about the people in the hut seemed to have changed him, and she was afraid he’d gone cold, but then suddenly he was lifting his shirt over his head. Off went the shoes, the pants, and he stood there looking a little dazed and sad, fat around his middle and his balls hanging low from the island heat. That moment was enough. After their swim, which was colder than she’d expected of the South China Sea, she put her clothes back on and said goodbye. Adam stood there, stoned, sick, confused, holding his shirt over his half-hard penis. “Yes, you should go,” he said seriously.

  “I’m supposed to be counting meteors,” young Lydia explained with a sly grin, pulling back her wet hair. She had enjoyed his desire when they were swimming, but now his numb look had dulled her pleasure. His body looked so old to her now, all hair and muscle that had turned to fat. She felt faintly disgusted.

  “You shouldn’t do this, Lydia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Adam stood shaking his head, looking down the beach to where a clump of coconut trees cut off the view. “You know. Neither should I… oh, Jesus….”

  “Don’t be so square, Adam,” she said, laughing, holding her sandals in one hand. She used her usual lines: “It’s just skinny-dipping. It’s just bodies.”

  “True,” he said. Adam was still half-naked, troubled, one hand to his head. Then he looked up at her with an expression of concern: “But not for you, I don’t think.”

  Lydia sighed and turned away, saying, “I’ve gotta go. Good night.”

  She was off into the deeper darkness of the path, her feet feeling the sharp end of twigs in the sand, when she heard him shout to her “I’m sorry!” and she was more perplexed than ever. He was sorry, when he should have been ashamed or angry. Why sorry? Lydia was unsure of what had happened, and of what she had won this time.

  In the copy shop she felt a wave of shame for her old self. She put down the pizza and let out an angry sigh, making the art student turn his head in concern. Lydia rarely did this—tortured herself with how she had acted in the past. There was no reliving and undoing the events, yet once in a while they still felt very real to her, very much in the present. She wanted to go back and speak to each different girl she’d been—the heartbroken twenty-year-old artist, the cocky adolescent slut, the lonely stupid child—and give them a good talking-to. Lydia did not feel as though they were part of her, but rather that these former selves were the team that had built her; and, like a monster ashamed of its creation, she wanted to confront her makers. She knew, though, that even if she could, she would not have had the nerve—they would have stood before her, shaking, merely children.

  Lydia used the manager’s phone to call her office once again. Lucas said that her mother still had not arrived. He suggested taking a cab, saying that he would pay for it, but Lydia found herself turning him down and hanging up the phone. The manager grinned at her under his mustache, starting a chat about the rain. He was still in mid-sentence when she left the store and headed up Seventh Avenue. She lit her fifth cigarette.

  Here is how it happened:

  Eli got a call one Saturday afternoon while Kathy was off at a violin lesson. This was a new fascination of hers, since she had learned the violin as a child but, through lack of money and her own adolescent stubbornness, had given it up too early. Her forties brought her a kind of mission: to eradicate regret. The violin lessons were part of this—as were plans for closer contact with her sisters, with other details of her past that she was saving from the trash and reestablishing in her life. Kathy had just left and would be gone for hours, so Eli sat peacefully alone in the house, aware that he would soon leave this place, noticing the canisters of flour and sugar that soon, if he so chose, would no longer be his. Or they might be his and Denise’s. He could rearrange it all. This was 1978, five years before.

  The call came.

  “Eli, it’s Adam. I’m actually in town and wondered if you wanted to get lunch.”

  “Well,” Eli said. “I’ve had lunch, and there’s some work I’ve been doing….” This reaction wasn’t unreasonable, since the Lanhams came down to L
.A. often enough, and so meeting up wasn’t essential. Eli thought he could shrug it off this time.

  But Adam would not let him go: “We need to have lunch. I need to talk to you.”

  They met at a Jewish deli that made heart-shaped cookies filled with chocolate. Adam was already there when Eli arrived, and he looked very much the part of a writer: polo shirt, rumpled tweed jacket, thick sunglasses and a dazed, uneasy look. He never looked like this; he usually dressed carefully, like a younger man, and while Eli had often thought he looked foolish, this disheveled look was worse. Adam seemed as though he had not slept for many nights. They shook hands, sat down, ordered coffee and a sandwich for Adam, and then the man said what he had come all this way to say.

  “Denise is having an affair.”

  Eli tried very hard not to change his face, and not to appear to be trying so hard. He breathed very deeply in order to appear serene, yet he had panicked at the last word. He could imagine Adam finding out about the affair—he could even imagine Adam’s fear and desperation—but the man was so passive and shy. Eli would have expected poison in his coffee before this kind of confrontation. So Eli sat perfectly still while he thought of what to do next.

  Adam took a weary sip of his coffee, staring and telling him, “I know, Eli. I know all about it.”

  All Eli could think of was to ask a question: “Did Denise say something?”

  “No,” Adam said, dismissing that as impossible. Yet it had occurred to Eli that Denise might treat her love affairs as methodically as her experiments. Adam shook his head. “No, of course not, but now it’s so obvious. I found letters.”

  “Letters?” Eli asked. This made no sense; there had been no letters. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s that old boyfriend. She’s been seeing Carlos.”

  Eli laughed. It came too loudly, out of relief, out of vanished fear, out of the giddy sensation of deep memory shooting suddenly to the surface of the brain. There was so much to worry about, so many sharp objects in that dark drawer in which Adam was rummaging, that it seemed ridiculous to have come up with Carlos. Eli laughed so loudly that Adam looked concerned, sad and almost angry. Eli swallowed the laugh and tried to calm himself. He had escaped disaster, and he had to hide it. He apologized, twice, patting Adam’s hand.

  He said, “Oh no—God—Adam, there’s no way! It’s … I can’t tell you … listen, I met the guy.” Eli still knew to form his words very carefully, acting the role of a friend giving abstract advice instead of a man with intimate knowledge. “I met him, and I remember, and there’s no way. Carlos? He was an idiot. She didn’t give a shit about him. And that was, what, fifteen years ago?”

  Adam would not accept this humorous attitude. Something in him seemed to bristle with anger. He said, “Thirteen. I asked her.”

  “You confronted her?”

  “Of course not,” he said, this time bitterly. “But you’re wrong, Eli. I know it sounds stupid. Like she wouldn’t be that stupid. But it’s more than letters.”

  Eli smiled, waved the idea away. “Your hunch.”

  “No, I saw them together.”

  It took a moment for Eli to realize what had been said. It was ludicrous—he had been with Denise two weekends before, on that hillside under a quilt, whispering together.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Adam told him a story about how he had followed her one night and seen them together going into a movie theater, laughing like adolescents. He had bought a ticket for himself and entered after the movie began, listening for her voice, finding the two of them near the side of the theater, huddled close together. He sat two rows behind and watched them kiss and pet—his wife, nearly forty, and this handsome, ludicrous man from her past—until, after half an hour, he could take no more and left. When she returned home, Denise claimed she had been at the office, looking over Eli’s photographs from their comet hunt. There was no doubt.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But I do. I was there. Eli, you’re my friend—what do I do now?”

  But Eli had nothing to say. It seemed as though someone had taken the sun’s lamp and flipped it over, shedding some harsh new light on the images that he thought he knew by heart: that night when the boy fell from the overlook, his time in England, the chill midnight of the comet hunt when she touched his shoulder, the humid evening on the island and all the other nights since then. He did not want to talk to Adam anymore, confront his guilt, comfort the man he’d wronged. He wanted to sit alone and rifle through her looks and phrases. He wanted to test each day scientifically, dip it into strong solutions that would reveal its composition, as if the days were beakered powders sitting by the dozens on a rack. He needed time to do this; he no longer wanted to be here. Somewhere far away a store alarm went off and rang dimly through his thoughts.

  Adam rambled on: “If it’s just sex, I don’t care. That’s all right with me. But I don’t want to lose her.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Eli said automatically.

  “I’ve … I’ve had my own, you know … it’s not like I’m perfect. …”

  Eli looked up, briefly distracted from his log of days. Adam’s own affairs! It had never occurred to him; nor to Denise, he supposed. But yes, Adam in a motel room with a student, a young poetess with suede boots and fluffy hair, Adam approaching her tentatively in the dark room, lit only by the louvered glare of streetlamps. Adam’s own desires, Adam’s own mistakes. He wished he had known this before.

  The image passed, though, and it was replaced with a similar scene of Denise and Carlos, and in Eli’s mind his rival stood unaged, still twenty-seven or so, grinning like a young married man. Denise and Carlos. It was absurd, but not impossible. She had been so silent on the island, making no promises. He began to feel for doubt in his chest, like a patient searching for a tumor, and there it was: the hidden sense that Denise wasn’t sure about him. A few weeks before, on a comet hunt, she had even told him how good she was at lying. “Oh, but I’m a very good liar,” she’d said. The ridiculous idea was growing, second by second, into a possibility. Denise and Carlos. Eli tried to phrase his questions well.

  “You really think she’s going to leave you for Carlos?”

  Adam stared intently, asking, “Do you think so? Do you think she’d leave me?”

  “Maybe I should talk with her.”

  But Adam would not let him. He insisted that this was his problem, his marriage; and he wanted, he supposed, simply to tell someone who would understand, who remembered Carlos and what he’d meant to her once. “She’s so logical,” Adam said, “but I think that makes people… I don’t know… so sentimental somehow. It’s weird, you know? But he was the one. He was the first. It made a great difference in her life, I guess.”

  Eli paid for lunch. He had the waitress bring them the famous cookies and for the first time Adam showed a little pleasure, closing his eyes and licking at the chocolate. It almost seemed to Eli that the funny man had forgotten—he could be so easily transported while Eli, his tongue numb, turned the conversation over and over in his head like a child’s puzzle, finding in its many sides new horrors.

  It began there. The snap of some tiny electric spark that started the whole heavy machinery moving counterclockwise in his chest. It would take days for Eli to understand what Denise’s rumpled husband had told him over lunch. Only a week later, he would have it confirmed—by an unwitting Kathy, of all people—that indeed Denise had run into Carlos three months ago, on the street, and had mentioned him happily a few times. After two weeks, doubts would solidify, silently, still without evidence, into unscientific certainty as he lay awake in anger, deciding whether to say something or to simply let her go. Then a month would pass, and by that time, with another comet hunt approaching on the weekend, Eli would be changed, chill and resolute. He would sit in his plastic chair at dawn and bury his lover in stones. We don’t need to have this conversation, he would repeat to himself that night, somehow satisfied. We don’t nee
d to have this conversation.

  Eli sat in the deli after Adam left. The distant store alarm rang rhythmically in his head, endlessly turning. His heart was slowing down, gently, pedaling to the stop where it rested for a moment. Then it began to spin in the other direction. The terror and freshness of that moment had a beauty to it. Not often in a life can one point to a scene and shiver, remembering all the ways things might have gone. Eli put the cookie in his pocket and stood up to leave. His mind could not shake the alarm, not for hours and hours, and he was still filled with doubt and worry over how his heart had turned. This was five years ago, though; by 1983, it was all over and done.

  Four and a half million miles away, the dark, icy shard of debris was falling slowly away from them all, on a curve toward a globular star cluster, but slowing every minute, shifting by degrees to imitate, though tilted far below them, the orbits of the planets. The planets were hundreds of millions of miles farther still, just discs of light, eggs hidden in the deep black field. No constellation was visible; the stars had been thrown into the junk drawer and pulled out again tangled, glittering, and nothing made a sound as the rock rotated opposite the sun. Dust came in a haze from its surface. It began a slow freefall again, but this side of its orbit became stretched out by Jupiter’s nearby mass, like the pulled string of a bass, so that its approach became erratic. This was not a unique moment. Millions of other stones and icy balls also were falling through space, also hissing near the sun, also becoming cold flares. This was happening everywhere.