The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  Carlos in Africa, for years—the idea was still falling, as from a great distance, from Jorgeson’s chapped lips into Eli’s mind. Falling, turning, growing larger, forming a shadow on his eye as he looked up, unable to move, unready for the blow. Not in her bed—in Africa. And Adam, sitting in that L.A. restaurant, smiling as he licked the chocolate from his heart-shaped cookie. It seemed so improbable— conventional Adam, stuck in the concrete nouns of his novels, playacting for Eli’s benefit and building his little lie—how could it be true? Such a fragile lie, as well. One broken so easily, such as now, here, with this man. Carlos, the old lover whose face had burned in Eli’s mind so many sleepless mornings, driving him to destroy his affections—he had been in Africa all along. There was no man in a movie theater kissing sweet Denise. No letters hidden in coat pockets, no whispered calls. He saw Adam and that chocolate-smeared smile again. What a punch line to the whole affair. Africa. For years.

  And he understood, as Jorgeson rattled on about hexagonal mirror sections, that the lie was not so fragile after all. Adam had never depended on his own performance. He could never have hoped to be such an actor; in hindsight, even those sighs and expressions of fear that had seemed so convincing looked flimsy, amateurish. It occurred to Eli that the poor man must have been fighting down an urge to bare his teeth at Eli. Instead, those silly sighs. That chocolate smile. But of course what made the lie so strong was not its content, nor its likelihood, nor its presentation. It was Eli himself. He saw that. It was Eli’s own stubborn pride. The anger flashing in his skull, singeing every doubt. It amazed him most of all that Adam had known all about that and with a few easy sentences had twisted Eli’s heart, like the cartoon barrel of a gun, to shoot itself.

  Then there was Denise. The clouds were burning off, revealing the steep slope of the volcano and there, glittering beyond, the silver rind of the sea. There was Denise as he saw her just at this time of the morning, five years before with another mountain view—from Tranquillity, searching for a comet. There was Denise’s face as he told her it was all over, the look of something ruined by the rain, and her eyes in the car as she drove him down the mountain: two clenched fists. It had felt so gratifying to sit beside her and feel her hatred— it was the same brand he had felt. Eli had passed on that disease. He knew what it felt like to search for a word to save things; he knew what it felt like to know there was no word. All there in her eyes, locked tight, all there in her shaking hand on the gear shift. He knew she longed for him to take the hand in his. An inch away, an inch. And he would not do it. No, it occurred to him as he stood on the volcano looking back, you do not become a monster with a little lie, like Adam’s. You become a monster in the inch that might save someone, the inch you will not move.

  He tried to think of what to do. Five years had passed: five years of minimal contact, friendly conversations at conferences and dinner parties, each day numbed like a tooth and then extracted. He could have spent those days with Denise—but he couldn’t run to her and tell her that. It’s what he knew he was supposed to do at a moment like this, grab the oversize military phone and make them contact Dr. Lanham in Santa Cruz, put her on a plane to Hawaii, lift her in a helicopter to this high observatory where, an oxygen mask held to her face, she would step onto the lava rocks and make a simple sign of forgiveness. Offer her mask for him to breathe. A man and a woman, forty-six by then, ready to begin what should have started half a lifetime ago. He could have done it if he wanted; he could have shut Jorgeson up and run to the observatory office. Eli stood there watching the twin volcano, Mauna Loa, appear from the mists. This wasn’t quite what he wanted; things were more complex. Time was passing, flowing quietly, taking everything with it. So much had changed.

  Denise was still married; maybe it was best to say she had returned to marriage, had spent a lonely sabbatical on the Tiber watching the mechanical birds in the piazzas, and finally come back to Adam and Josh, unpacked her boxes in the basement, and begun at last the life she’d promised him. Why shouldn’t she? After all, Adam was the man who fought for her. It had always seemed so sad to Eli that she’d be left with Adam, that dull athlete, that meager partner for her life; but on the volcano Eli no longer saw it that way. You can either look around and long for the people who have left you, he thought, or you can forget them; you can turn to face the ones who stayed. There was something to be said for staying. And at middle age, why would Denise ever choose a different life? An old one that had always failed before? That would be the choice of a gambling woman, and Denise, for all he loved her, was never anything like that.

  He did still love her. It was horrible, it was the first thing he felt, the thought that he loved her. Not in the way he first had, not in the dumb excess of youth when he ignored his marriage, whispered so many promises in that hut out on the spit, when he ran to her doorway in the fog to try to wreck their lives for this small chance. When he stood with his finger on the doorbell, unable to make it ring. This time was different; this was a young man and an older one listening to the same piece of music. The first is astounded that such a thing exists, that no one has ever played it for him before; he wants to stand up and shout his passion to the orchestra. The second is just surprised to hear it again, one he had sadly forgotten, and he’s listening carefully now for that rapturous second movement, just where the violins descend. It made Eli want to lie down on the lava rocks and sleep away the past five years. He struggled for breath in this airless place and saw his past rewritten, saw a woman set right. And he felt that whatever might come, he at least still had this. A page of that music. Such a different sensation from when he was young—but the same love, the same.

  Yet his life had changed, also, and in ways that left him, oddly, no more free than Denise. All his choices had been based on the idea that he had to come up with something else to long for. Not that silly, obvious affair with a blond girl, but something real. A few months after the last comet search, he sat down with Kathy and told her everything that had happened, and she simply stared at him, face stained with red, and said “I know" with such finality and despair that he realized of course she’d known, of course she had. Kathy had simply expected his longing to be kept hidden, like a photographic plate, meant only for a special room of one’s mind. Now that he’d shown it to her, now that he’d turned the light at last onto his broken heart, it was ruined. They could no longer have this life.

  So they had separated and, at last, divorced. Though the legal tangles were complex, and she was bitter and unyielding in taking her share, it upset Eli to realize that they really had so little to split up. A house, furniture, the silver, gardening tools, and books. No children, of course. And the things that mattered to him—his job, his private life inside his mind—she could not touch, and had never touched. He had always thought they were attached in some great, parasitic way that would allow no separation; but in the end he felt they were simply two great ships, lashed together to wait out the high waves of an ocean storm. It was simply a chore, and no terrible one, to cut the ropes at dawn.

  He had his apartment in Hollywood, and Hector, the dog he’d bought five years before and which Kathy had never cared for, never even called by name. He was the interim chair of his department and things were looking good. And, after a few years of dating, he found a girlfriend, Penny, a thin and big-eyed Jewish girl from Baltimore who taught high school botany. A little cynical, but a bit younger and therefore impressionable, adoring even if she didn’t know it. When he was out of town, she took Hector on walks. They had begun to own things together: season tickets to the Dodgers, two paintings (one at his place, one at hers), a plate-filled picnic basket kept in the trunk of her car. The ship-lashing process had begun; marriage was obviously coming within the year. Soon they would own rings together, and furniture, and maybe even still a child. Did he dare to upset the world he’d made without Denise? Could this be, perhaps, the way things were supposed to turn out?

  No, he decided, as Jorgeson chattered on abo
ut lenses and computers, as the stark sunlight came through the mist like a pail of water thrown into a basin. No—and yet this isn’t like any other kind of risk. Even if he called Denise, even if he wanted that, even if she forgave him—it was difficult to see what might come then. You chance everything, ruin everything once again, wreck it all and still you aren’t left with a fortune. Still you’re only left with love; another risk, just as great, just as awful. It couldn’t be done. At twenty, of course; what was there to lose at twenty? Thirty, perhaps. Not forty. Not fifty. And yet—he couldn’t simply do nothing. He could not stand on the edge of the dormant volcano, realizing his terrible mistake, and not move to correct it. Not with this feeling come alive inside him again, eating him. Eli stood breathing heavily and thought of what should be done. Not just to make the most people happy; that was impossible. He only wanted to be able to live with himself. And, gradually, as the light filled the valley on that morning back in 1986, he knew exactly what to do.

  For young Josh, in San Francisco, it was beginning. His dad had left, said his quiet goodbyes, and any minute now, Henry’s shadow would appear on that curtain—the window curtain of the front door. It would fall across the pleats, a jagged profile. Then Josh would hear the scratch of the key, the unseen mechanism of the lock. And then of course the door would open, and then of course it would be Henry Wong himself—first with his blank face, the face of a man clearing his mind of the working day, looking around, and then, when he saw Josh there in the room with all his boxes piled around him like a pharaoh with his treasures, a second lock would turn in the doorway.

  It was how Josh imagined it. He stared at the door, a man making a tough decision, but still very much a boy in his hopes, his expectations of how things might turn out. He had been raised to believe that great things would come to him, and he had never questioned it. They did, they always did. His father had driven off up the hill, and the sun was setting, and Josh was here, where he had waited so long to be: staring at this plain white paint, the stiff pleats of a small curtain, the first truly shut door of his life.

  Only the young could understand. A room, a hall, a life forever spent in bathrooms yelling “just a minute, jeez!” and nighttimes endured, the first part, listening to the clink of ice in your parents’ drinks as they came upstairs, letting the dog into your room to wake you with a tongue smelling of leftovers, or the second part, pretending to sleep while your roommate turns the crackling pages of a book, or hums to his music, or masturbates with a mournful rustle of the sheets. A truly shut door. As a guitar, restrung to replace the taut and brittle old strings, relaxes into warmer music, so Josh could feel, sitting in the chair and staring at that shut door, the nerves of his spine falling into their new places. Any minute the door would open onto a new life.

  He turned on music, rock music, the kind of stuff that Henry raised an eyebrow to but tolerated. He turned it up loud and beat his head to the rhythm, all the while watching the door, and he opened another beer. He needed loud music, and booze, because this was all too much for silence, and because he was really so teenagerly, still, feeling the raucousness beginning in his heart and not being careful with it, not holding his palm against his chest and feeling the frantic beat there, listening quietly, but wanting it to spill out everywhere, loud and boisterous. Henry could not understand it when young Josh woke up in the morning—there! right there, in their bed!—and started to bounce naked on the mattress. When he sat next to Henry in a movie theater, staring at him, whispering that he wanted to become so small that he could crawl into his ear and live there. When he turned on every radio in the house when “their song"—or so Josh called it, since it was playing when they met at a party—was on the air. Another raised eyebrow from quiet Henry Wong, another bemused kiss as he watched the scene. But surely it was what Henry loved about him. The boy’s belief that he, Josh Lanham, the alchemist, the genius, had invented love itself.

  He did not believe his parents had ever felt this. How could it be true? He had seen all the photos—he had pored over albums and boxes with his mother just the year before she died, talking about all those characters from their past. He’d seen the picture of them both when they were first dating: a dinner party with the Spivaks, and all of them sitting around a card table in his mother’s old efficiency in Berkeley. His parents had to sit on the bed, and the Spivaks sat in folding chairs; and though they grinned with heady youth, and though a bottle of wine sat empty on the table, still their expressions looked so weary, and their clothes seemed as if they’d be coarse and uncomfortable in any era; and there was something yellowed and dusty about the photograph, as if the world had been covered in a cloud back then. Yet there they were, very much in love, and in the background, a door. The first truly shut door of his mother’s life. Josh did not believe it. You should be able to see love; like those Russian aura photos, it should spot and distort the negative and give the lover a dark glow. But he couldn’t see it there, in anyone.

  Some people walked by on the street; Josh could hear their laughter over the music, and for a moment he wanted to be them. He wanted to be people passing on the street, looking up at a frothy Victorian house with one light on, music coming loudly through an open window and the shadow of a boy running around, arranging things, putting things away, singing along. He wanted to feel their jealousy. He wanted to be jealous of himself. He took another swig of beer.

  They had never done this, his parents. They had never gone on a date to the Sutro Baths and walked along the ruins of that turn-of-the-century bathing parlor—a set of rocky foundations against the pounding ocean, wind-bashed junipers, a Roman setting—or visited the Musée Méchanique with Henry Wong and watched as he put a quarter in an antique fortune-telling machine—a typewriter moving to invisible hands—and would not let Josh read his printed destiny. All the old penny machines, the Plantation, the Opium Den, the Gold Rush, with wildly spinning dolls in age-tattered clothes, and how this man beside him—square-faced, a birthmark on his nose, lips always apart as if he were about to speak—stared at Josh in a manner so different from the college boys. Not mere desire, not loneliness. He grabbed Josh’s hand and took him outside into the sun again, onto the wide concrete patio crumbled by the earthquake. They stepped into a little building, the Camera Obscura, and it was so unreal, utterly dark except for the ocean pounding blue and white on a giant horizontal disk. Henry kept staring, and Josh, nervous for once, stupidly explained the lenses, boring them both (damn his mother for telling him!). His heart was a bagpipe, wheezing, and when Henry took his hand and kissed him, Josh thought it might be the last thing he would ever do—he might die, and this optical hut would be his tomb.

  “As long as it holds with the laws of physics,” Josh’s mother once told him, paraphrasing the inventor of the electric motor, Michael Faraday, “nothing is too wonderful to be true.”

  She had been speaking of scientific theories. It was years ago, during their time together in Italy, when they sat on a tiny balcony, two metal chairs crammed in there, eating salami whose skin he unwound in long, translucent strips. His mother, a little drunk, had joked about being asked to join the Academy, and how all scientists secretly hope for it, the way writers hope for the Nobel, silently, just a little. The National Academy of Sciences, she told him happily. Well nothing is too wonderful to be true. But Josh took its meaning for himself. Something terrible has happened, his father told him years later on the phone, but Josh had not been able to hear it over the stereo in his dorm room, and his father repeated: I said something terrible. After the call, after the shock and the burial where rich relatives appeared with excited faces and his father threw a melodramatic rose onto the coffin, Josh understood that his mother had been speaking of the future from that balcony, a future she would never see, of course, with him here in this room, waiting for his lover’s shadow to appear at the door. Knowing nothing at all of love, she had still meant this.

  No one missed her like he did. His mind tricked him to forget sh
e was gone, and this was easy to do, because she had already faded from his mind these last few years. The crises of college, the constant revelations—they had nothing to do with her; she dwindled to a voice over the phone, a cook at holidays. If you had asked him, a year ago, what his life was like, he would have described everything to you, each bright detail and fumbled affair, everything except her. She did not count; she was something other than life. That made her doubly lost. Missing her was not an obvious grief, like his father’s, but a curse. And when he thought of her, it wasn’t as she’d been before her death, as a fiftyish woman who dyed the gray out of her hair, but as she’d been years ago in Rome, when both their lives seemed about to change.

  It was the one time he told her everything. Back when he was too young for love, thirteen, terrified to be without her on the streets but also overjoyed. He was thrilled to have stories to give her about the things she never saw: the boats, the men fighting in the streets, the girls on mopeds. He came back each day to tell her, there on the balcony, and he felt her warm gaze searching his face for some sign. Who knew what she saw there? He felt that gaze when he told her about the friends he’d made, the girl who sold him a paper flower, the science museum. The handsome Italian man who had placed his hand on a metal sphere, kissed a girl and made her hair stand on end. That had made his mother smile a little, chewing on her salami. But the gaze made him leave something out, something he wasn’t sure he could tell her. How they had all stood in a line in front of the static electricity machine, each waiting his or her turn; and the man leaned down to touch them, one by one. The man had kissed the women on the cheek, touched the men on the forehead, and when Josh finally stood there and had that grinning man look into his eyes so unwaveringly, press his warm hand to the boy’s face, he wasn’t sure if it was truly science that caused each hair on his body to stand on end.