The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  “Dr. Spivak?”

  He turned, seeing a few yards away the form of a woman with her hair held back in barrettes. She waved, and for a breathless moment he saw Kathy.

  Eli knew in an instant that he was wrong. How could he have been so mistaken? A pregnant woman in her thirties—when had Kathy ever looked like this? Yet he’d felt the strangest pull of sorrow at that picture. His young wife the way she might have looked if things had gone differently. The woman approached, holding an envelope of some sort across her belly.

  “It’s me,” she said cautiously. “It’s Lydia. Dr. Swift’s daughter.”

  “Lydia, oh … of course I know who you are. My God.” He looked her over. He felt a little gulp of time’s fleet passage.

  Lydia was now beside him at the wall, and she had a look of concern. Lines around her eyes, he noticed, and something firm in her face. She had cocked her body, one hand on the wall, one hand on her hip, looking at him with worry before she smiled and said, “Sorry—you were thinking.”

  He looked back at the palms. Those garish red stems in all the green. Two scientists were coming along the path, gray-bearded and sweating as they talked, batting against the bird-of-paradise with their khakis. Eli turned his back to the view. “It’s all right.”

  “I don’t know if you remember me….” she began.

  He laughed. “I’m surprised you remember me!”

  “Well,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes, and it occurred to him that maybe, as a young girl, she’d had a crush on him. But when had they spent any time together?

  “You look wonderful,” he said, knowing this was dull; but she accepted it.

  She winced. “Well, I feel gross.”

  They talked for a little while, and mostly, because of the old assumption that the younger person has the more interesting life, Eli asked her questions, which she answered honestly. She told him she was moving from New York, would be living at Swift’s old farm while she had the child, maybe teaching art again when things settled down, and he got the impression that there was a sadness here—surely something to do with the baby’s father, whom she did not mention. But he also detected something women of his own generation did not show so readily: a determination, coupled with quick flashes of anger, that he recognized from her girlhood, from her teenage years. He remembered seeing her at the island bar, clearly underage, and drinking and smoking without a care. What an amazing girl—and here she was, a woman. If only Kathy were here, he thought; she would have loved this. Even if it meant being near her ex-husband, even if it meant another nauseating trip out to this island, she might have come if she’d known Lydia would be here, so complete, so undiminished by the years. This particular girl, this young stargazer, the only one his ex-wife ever cared about.

  Eventually, Lydia paused and changed the topic. Obviously, she felt close enough to him now—either through their years of association or simply their mutual estrangement from the crowd of bespectacled scientists—to ask him something that concerned her. It was, he saw, what she had been wanting to ask for some time: “Dr. Spivak. Do you remember the boy?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Do you remember the boy who fell?”

  Eli felt the relief of a switch in memory, back to something very old, something he well understood. He said, “I thought you were there. I remember you playing with a monkey or something….”

  “I was five; I don’t remember it. Isn’t that too bad?”

  He found himself laughing. “Not really.”

  Lydia frowned, moving and crossing her arms high on her chest, over her belly. The air was hot and yellow around her and she squinted even in the diffuse light. She said, “I just wanted to ask. My dad never talked about it. I don’t think he was upset, I think he was over it. Bored by the topic.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  She leaned back. “Did the boy trip? I don’t know why I’m so curious. It’s just so weird, don’t you think? A boy died. And then you all have these reunions.” When she first began, he thought there was something angry in her voice, something peevish, but it died away by the end of her sentence and he thought he must have imagined it. There was always something disagreeable about begging someone to provide your own memory.

  “I wasn’t really watching very closely. I was over there,” he said, pointing to the southern corner of the stone floor. He saw himself in a folding chair, looking up at the blackest sky he’d ever seen, the stars rising like ashes from a fire. “I’d been talking to Manday’s wife. She was a beautiful woman. Then there was a shout, I turned"—he did this, turning his stout body to face the yellowed break in the wall—"and it had all already happened. I remember your dad and the sultan standing there holding the telescope.” He gestured to where the telescope still stood, that old killer, now rusted firm and pointed permanently out to sea. “Everybody rushed to the wall. It was crazy, now that I think about it, everybody running. I stood here… no….”

  Eli moved along the wall, feeling its rough surface, until he found the place. Lydia followed, arms still crossed. Glancing below, he noticed that a group of palms had grown in the last twenty-five years, and that two huts sat in their shade where once the view was only of the beach. Why hadn’t he noticed this twelve years ago? “I stood here. We looked down and women were running everywhere. Some torches, I think. You couldn’t see anything.”

  “What did you do?”

  Eli had not noticed the change because, twelve years before, he’d been down on the beach, in the darkness, down on the strip of sand waiting for the bobbing movement of a flashlight.

  “What?” he asked, turning to meet her gaze.

  “Did you run downstairs? Did you find a doctor?”

  He shook his head, confused. It was so hot here, with the sun breaking through, and he wished he’d brought his hat. “We could see him down there, on the rocks; his neck was broken.”

  “You couldn’t see anything. You said it.”

  “We could see him.”

  “Did any of you try to help him?” she asked, her voice pitched higher, her face drawing closer to his. “Even try?”

  “Lydia, he was dead.”

  She stood there with her arms crossed, looking at the yellowed bit of wall, then at Eli. The auburn hair, round face and puffy lips that hadn’t seemed like they ever would be beautiful—and yet here they were, at thirty, lovely. He could see so many of her girlish gestures showing through this woman’s body, despite her grown-up anger; he could see the nervous fluttering of fingers, the fingers of a little girl revealed briefly like the red stems of the sealing-wax palms. He could see her father, as well, in her face, which hardened before him.

  She asked, “The next night, did you grieve? Or did you just count meteors?”

  He could only smile. There was nothing to say to this: the interrogation of a woman who merely wanted to remember an important moment, remember how her father stood next to the whispering sultan and silenced them all, told them all what to do. Send some away on boats; keep others—Eli, Denise, little Lydia—to lie out another two nights under the stars. The show must go on. Perhaps a bad choice, considering—a cold, scientific one—but so long ago. Eli understood her anger. He knew how, at a death, you want to hate the dead a little.

  “We went to the funeral. Your father paid for a grave marker; the son’s family couldn’t afford it,” he told her, and she softened immediately. “Bronze, down there on the beach. And at night we counted meteors.”

  “Where was I?” she asked.

  This was the real question. He saw it in her plain freckled face, in the hand she held now to her belly. Perhaps she wanted to clear things up, clean them, stack all the memories carefully in the cupboard because all that was over. The first half of her life. Now there was the lover whom Lydia carefully didn’t mention, the father who wasn’t around, and so this child, and her art and her teaching. It was the time for a long look at the past, as if it were a view you’ve come quite a distance to see, and then you
pivot on one foot, face the other way. He admired her for it. It was something he could never do.

  “You stayed on the island with us,” he told her.

  “What about that night?”

  Eli shifted his weight to save his back. He told her, “With my wife. She picked you up and held you.”

  Lydia smiled as if she almost remembered. She kept her hand on her belly—was she transmitting this to her child? Then, tilting her head, she asked a strange question, “Did you take pictures of us that night?”

  “What?” he said, shifting again. “No…. Pictures?”

  “Photographs.”

  He squinted and shook his head, seeking out the stability of the wall again. “No. I was here, looking down.” And then he realized he’d lied to her; those nights after the boy’s death, he hadn’t counted meteors. Eli, twenty-five, dazed by catastrophe, had been down in that stone hut with Denise, curing his troubles with his body.

  Hard to believe. His youth had been like that, so quick and hurtful and ecstatic. Eli looked back and wondered if he’d been in control at all, or if the words from his mouth, the movements of his arms and legs, had all happened too quickly, went on somehow without him. As though youth were a drug that wore off too slowly, left you in a parking lot some early morning wondering what happened. The young woman standing before him would never have guessed he’d felt that, too; that her generation did not invent it. He could not have explained to her how his life moved from standing on the beach and waving to the departing boat, the one taking his new wife away, to a silent moment in the leaves one afternoon when he was slipping off Denise’s bra. Time moved more quickly then—or no, that wasn’t it. Time was so slow, he remembered, it felt so warm and slow. Slow, lazy time. It was his body that was quick. Now, with this aching back and a nap that had to be taken each day at four, he could hold himself back so easily. But then, at twenty-five, he’d been a puppy pulling at a leash. Gnawing at a leash. Always breaking free.

  He almost wished he could tell her. What it felt like to have seen a boy’s head cracked like a melon on those rocks below—the sharp sting of poison. He thought of an island plant Manday had told him about, the devil’s nettle, whose pricking leaves brought on fever in men but whose antidote, luckily, could be found in the dark berries of the tattoo bush that always grew beside it. So it had been with him. A sting of terror, and then nearby an antidote: a hand reaching for his. He wished he could tell Lydia what he knew she could never believe—that it didn’t go away, ever, the gaudiness of youth. It just became smaller, a gilt room in your mind. But it did not ever go away.

  Lydia was holding something out to him. An envelope, the one he’d seen her resting against her belly. Apparently, her anger had quickly passed; she was onto something new.

  “I wanted you to see this. I thought you should see this,” she said, gripping the envelope stiffly against the wind. She didn’t open it, but let him read the shaky lettering: KATHY’S PHOTOS. “I found them in my dad’s stuff,” Lydia said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes,” he said, touching the envelope with one finger. “I think so, I think I remember she … Kathy, my wife … she took some pictures. She wanted you to have them. … You never got them?”

  “So she’s the one who took them?”

  “I don’t remember what they were. She never developed them. But she held on to them for some reason. Maybe privacy.” He looked up and saw Lydia’s eyes blinking in confusion. He said, “You didn’t know my wife, she was always hard to understand.”

  She sighed and handed them to him, saying, “My dad got them somehow. They’re old pictures, but he developed them and some came out. He never showed them to me—it’s strange. It’s strange, because mostly they’re pictures of me. But you’ll see.”

  He took the envelope and slid the flap open. The pictures came in a clump onto his hand, stuck together slightly from the heat, a gleaming stack of mirrors.

  “They’re out of order,” she said. He felt her leaning forward, watching his reaction.

  The first ones were of Lydia. Very young, a little girl, standing on the painted wooden deck of a boat, inside a coil of ropes. Her red hair was blown sideways, tangled, brimming with captured light, and as she held down the bottom of her dress with two stiff arms, she had the expression of a street kid, a tough girl squinting in the sunlight and unhappy to have her picture taken. Behind her, there was the pale sky fading at the horizon and the faint smudge of the island, this one, appearing in a whitish haze. The people around her, against the railing, were pointing, and their clothes and hairdos were the only markers of the sixties. Otherwise, with the time-fogged print, the starkness of her look, it could have been any time in the century. He looked up at the present Lydia and saw it—the same careful look as she watched him. Eli unstuck the photo and looked at the next.

  A few more of her on the boat, and some of her walking away. Then a new setting: Lydia in the sun-spotted jungle, standing in a tin pail with soap all over her naked body. A fat man (presumably her father) leaned out of the edge, but Lydia was focused directly on the camera. She had a vine of orchids in her hand, dry and brownish near the bottom; it seemed she had just grabbed them from the bush. A bee seemed to be exiting one of the flowers (or it could have been a drop of water, or an error in the old film), but the girl didn’t notice. She was smiling. It was a smile of astonishment, something like the previous frown: I don’t know why I’m here, but I’ll be fine. A few more of these pictures, with middle-aged Swift moving in and out of the frame. Eli wondered why Kathy had taken these, and when? Had he been sleeping in their hut? Had she crept away from her husband’s bed? And then, below, a darker set of photos entirely.

  That night, the meteor hunt. Lydia, her hair in pigtails, wrapped in a shawl and looking at a local woman who had a rhesus monkey on a leash. Kathy had caught the monkey with its mouth wide open as if it were singing. Everything was washed with cold light, people looked shocked, and the sky seemed utterly dark. Then one of Lydia smiling, with the wall and a red-haired boy in the background. Then Lydia asleep on her father’s lap, with the professor, as he held a piece of chocolate in his fingers like a pawn, looking enraged at the camera’s forbidden flash.

  And then Lydia screaming. A crowd behind her, turned all directions, slacks and sarongs and high-heeled shoes, with a few faces looking straight at the camera. Chairs were overturned, coffee mugs spilled, and Lydia’s face was ugly and red and mangled with fright. And then Lydia in Kathy’s arms. Eli looked carefully at this one— Kathy as a young woman, with shining black hair and a skinny face and arms. He had never realized there was something so stylish about her, and not just the sixties-ness of the moment, but the layers and patterns of her clothes that now looked effortlessly beautiful. Had he ever thought of her that way? She held Lydia gently to her and, with the little girl still screaming fitfully at the camera, reaching one paw toward the photographer, Kathy’s lips were pressed against her cheek.

  “Who took these?” he asked.

  “I…” she began. “I can’t tell for sure.”

  “Why would someone take these? With the boy dead?”

  But Lydia just crossed her arms and shook her head.

  He didn’t care. He was glad to have these pictures. Here was another one, closer now: Kathy’s eyes closed under her glasses, her neck stretched to reach the girl, and Eli could almost hear Lydia’s terrible cry, feel that struggling body through more than two decades of time. His wife, at twenty-four, kissing a child. Yes—it made no sense, after everything—but he felt the itch of love. He lifted the photograph to reveal the next.

  These were out of order; daylight filled this scene. He felt the muscles of his back tighten, the tug of a bellpull. It was Denise.

  He thought of the call. It came in the afternoon. It was a beautiful December day in 1988, and Eli had already moved to his new Hollywood apartment, sitting on the couch with Penny watching a baseball game on tape. She was a fan, and the incongruity of t
his fragile and pretty woman shouting at the screen comforted him, let him think there were more mysteries to her than he suspected, ones worth pursuing. Penny sighed in disappointment at the screen, and then the phone rang. Eli paused the tape on an image of some fans in the stadium, standing and yelling, and he picked up the phone. It was Adam. A low voice of endless words. Eli sat there and listened to the details. It was a long call, and all the while Eli just kept staring at the screen, at that blurry, frozen image of two women in the stands waving their banners: a tall blonde, overweight, delighted by something that had just happened, and a woman beside her, a redhead, flag held sideways, seemingly unsure of how to feel. Eyes turned down, a look of doubt, an image he would never forget. “Thank you for telling me,” he said at last, hung up the phone and stared at the frozen women while Penny asked him, over and over, what had happened. In a minute, the tape automatically unpaused and the raucous game began again; the woman landed on the ground, clapping, and the camera switched to focus on the sweating pitcher. Tied, bottom of the ninth, two bases loaded. They watched until their team lost, an outcome they had already known, and then Eli turned and said at last that his best friend was dead.

  And here she was. In his hand, in a photo from the past, one he’d taken of her, in fact. He remembered it. On the boat over to the island in 1965, a few sips from her flask of bourbon with the guards looking on, the shadows from the gulls passing over the canopy, over her face shining with sweat. Very young, both of them. Talking about Carlos, Kathy, his worries back then that seemed so innocent now— whether his wife was happy, or would have children with him. As if Denise had ever really cared. She was so focused on the stars, on her fame that wouldn’t ever come. She had taken off her hat and let her hair fall in sticky waves. He hadn’t loved her then—it was hard to look back and imagine himself so hollowed and yet happy—but Denise stared at him in that moment on the boat, fanning herself with the hat, and he’d tried not to smile at her harmless crush.