The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  “I’ve had too much to drink!” she had said, holding that long look.

  He remembered leaning against the railing, amused at this rich girl. He had asked, “You think it’s a good idea to be drunk so early?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Good,” he had told her. “So do I.” And, with her yelling in protestation, he had taken the picture. This one in his hand. He remembered it perfectly.

  And yet, the actual image did not quite fit. Denise was young here, of course, but much younger than he’d made her in his mind’s eye, with such unlined skin and a long face, a clumsy expression before she learned how to control these things, the surprised face of a girl. But he was shocked to see it. She looked so plain. Eyebrows plucked severely, gray eyes slightly bulging in her profile, especially in this joyful shout, a flat forehead and a stiff hairdo crushed by her hat and loosening messily in the heat and sea air—the kind of girl you see and hope the best for, but don’t love. Why had he remembered her as something else, someone so carefree and beautiful? Gold swirls of hair and jewel eyes and a sharp, clever face gleaming under the powder? The dark and muddy print put her out of context, made her seem like a young woman dressed up for the prom—the prim blouse and skirt, the hat—when back then all this had seemed so natural. But he couldn’t blame it on the print. It was simpler than that. She was not pretty.

  He did not want there to be pictures of such things. They ruined the past, flattened it in all dimensions. Why couldn’t he have kept her beautiful? Because it wasn’t true. The picture showed it. And the sense that she’d been funny and mysterious and brilliant as all hell couldn’t be felt on that glossy square—now she was no one even to look at twice. Would there be photographs of them together in the hut as well? Of the perfect body he remembered, wet and stuck with sand? And of the night of the comet hunt when she touched his shoulder? And even of Denise at nearly fifty, staring out to sea with her hat in her hand, her explosion of hair? You were wrong, the pictures would admonish, there was nothing there to love.

  He began to hate the dead a little, too. A young, plain girl from San Francisco shouting on a boat. An older woman on a hilltop, letting her dyed-blond hair fly out in a nebula. Unfinished, unsaid. He was to blame, of course, but she was also. She had grown beautiful without him. She had been happy with her son. She had sat in a car, wordless, and not fought for them. And of course now, being dead, she had the last word, and it was nothing.

  “That was Dr. Lanham, right?” Lydia asked.

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “It’s hard to think of her so young.”

  “You know, actually, it’s hard to think of her so old.”

  Lydia paused. “That’s interesting,” she said.

  “Well.”

  “And that was you,” she said, showing him the next one, and it was.

  But different. Different from the last one. Yes, Eli gaunt and cleanshaven, with a crew cut, his eyes warped by thick glasses as he wrote with his red pen in a little book. A novel of some kind. He noticed a painful-looking pimple on the corner of his mouth—he’d forgotten that, but the sensation returned to him—and the absurdity of his clothes: woolen pants, a button-up shirt (sweated through) and a tie (folded in his pocket). Those old glasses, that shy grin. But what made him gasp here, even more than at the old photo of Denise, was not just the sense of himself—of all of them, his wife, these scientists here—so very young, so ignorant of what would come, but simply the way the photo had been taken. A shot of a young Jewish man caught in a private act: writing in a book. A quiet photo, composed in a way that made him seem much handsomer and smarter than he’d really been, a generous photo; and at the bottom edge, to the left, he could see the wind-lifted edge of a skirt. Her skirt— Denise’s—as she took the picture. Because for Eli it was really a picture of her, more so than the last one—of the skirt and angle and the light that implied her, and her busy mind, and how she looked upon this young man with a schoolgirl’s crush.

  He took it all back, his petty rant against the dead. He saw himself through Denise’s eyes and it was happening again—the moments when he couldn’t grasp it, how things had gone, when his mind suffered some eclipse of the spirit—he had to leave. Eli dropped the photos in Lydia’s hand and walked away. The other scientists were approaching, muttering and laughing, and he went in the other direction, to the edge of the wall. Always here, to the edge of this wall.

  “Are you okay, Dr. Spivak?” the young woman was asking. He said nothing. She would understand, when she was older, how you cannot look directly at the sun.

  I should have come here, he thought. An island thirteen days in the past, a place to tear the seams out of time and sew it back correctly. Ishould have come here that day. The day of her death. Rather than sit with Penny in the TV-flickering room, letting it all fall wordlessly into the past, he should have rushed out of the house, driven to the airport in a frenzy, flown across the Pacific to arrive here the next day, to step onto the hot sand of a place where she was not yet dead. Thirteen days until she died, thirteen days to prepare himself. To sip cocktails and think of her calling to her son or arguing with Adam or reading a book, ordinary and still alive. Days would pass. To swim and nap and have her still alive. And then the day would have come at last: Eli, standing in the shallow ocean water off the spit, staring east to where the future would arrive, when Denise would be torn from his life again. A few moments of still ocean. A gull crossing the sky. Then it would have come, in waves like light, to cover him.

  The line of ants was here before him, yards and yards of braid upon the wall. Eli put his finger down and let them crawl over it— an odd feeling, a trickle, like drops of blood. He thought of the photograph again, the ruffled edge of skirt. Of Adam’s mournful voice over the phone, giving a crazed and terrible description of her body on the hill: her pale neck blooming with a purple bruise, the stale blood, the wreath of broken glass. There it was, the awful image, the drop of poison convulsing in his throat. He leaned against the wall, covering his wet eyes with his thick fingers, and let his mind heave.

  Out there, past all the asteroids and planets, halfway to the nearest star, to a point in space where the sun was dimmed to just a subtle fleck of light, another mass of ice and rock was moving. Moments before, it had been still. The light from everywhere was equal, cold, and all around were gathered icebergs of similar giant size; there were more of these objects in this part of space than there were stars in the Milky Way. From their great frozen distance, they circled the sun in a halo; this was the Oort Cloud, that auditorium of ice, that house of comets. A star passed close by, disturbing them. Then another; and then a final star that tipped one comet off the shelf, sending it slowly toward the sun. It fell, turning slothfully through the darkness, growing ever warmer so that eventually, in a million years or so, the ices would begin to sublime from its surface, causing the wisps of a tail; and in a few million more, that tail would paint a broad white stripe across the earth’s sky. This has been happening for longer than we can imagine.

  Our comet lay once more in the open sky, blazing, a dozen or so astronomical units away from the sun, which it had once again looped during this apparition. The bright sun blocked it from view on the island, and tonight the rising full moon would outshine it as well, drawing all attention like a celebrity arriving at a party; but still the comet wobbled on its dust-strewn ellipse as if all the world were watching it. It was dark, most of its ices gone into space long ago; it was one of the darkest objects in the universe. Occasionally, gases jetted from its interior, but they did not change its orbit; that had already been done, years before, by Jupiter’s great presence. Warped and altered, unpredictable yet again, heading toward the outer solar system; a swarm of dust falling through cold space.

  And thousands of miles away, on an even more eccentric orbit, a similar object was approaching on its own loop, a comet whose last apparition was in 1974, discovered by two astronomers on a mountaintop in California. Two comets w
ith hyphenated names, two cousins floating through the ether. And not even the scientists below, at countless observatories across Australia and America and the world, pouring numbers into their equations like grains into sand-clocks, not even they could tell you where those objects were headed, where they would be in a year, or when the time might come, a lonely hour, when they’d be lost to greater gravities than ours.

  Kathy felt two shadows on her. They came from some men who stood outside the window; shadows, even in the gray light of the muddled evening, falling across her table like a scolding. She was wishing these two would pass; wishing the sun would come out full again, although the fog had clearly settled in for good; wishing the woman beside her, reading now, were someone she could trust enough to tell the truth to. But was there anyone for that, really? Anyone who could even audition for the role?

  She was in San Francisco to visit her college friend Rita, the one now reading, and she kept telling herself that she would call Adam. She would call him so they could talk or, rather, so Kathy could at last have a crack at that strange man. So blond and right, so all-American, as handsome as an extra in a football movie—which was not to say stunning, but acceptable anywhere, at any barbecue. But she was convinced he was crazier than anyone she knew. That old hobby of hers had returned, picking at minds—what Rita called her “cocktail vampirism"—and she could hardly resist. After all, she knew what Adam had done to Eli and Denise.

  Eli had told her, of course, in that terrible conversation before their divorce, but she herself had known about it, in her way, for years. Kathy guessed it in the moment that Eli, freshly paranoid from that breakfast with Adam in L.A., suddenly turned to her one night, magazine lowered in a glossy V, to ask if Denise had seen Carlos recently. A stern and careful look on his face. Kathy knew exactly what that meant; there was a thrill to it, knowing her husband was in terror of something, and that she herself was in terror. Something great and awful was rising in their lives. “Oh yes,” she lied to him. “Yes, they’ve become good friends, I think.” She heard herself say the lie, and that also delighted her—her lips were thinking faster than she could, acting without her. Her husband’s expression did not sink or weaken; it stiffened like meringue. That’s how she knew he had some idea, and that now, with what she’d said, it could not be disbelieved.

  So they were accomplices, she and Adam. Criminals together. And yet, in the end, she had not called him. There was still time, but Kathy knew, sitting there with her book and friend, that she was not going to call him. Could she really tell him what she’d done to aid him? There seemed to be no point now. After all, nobody had gotten what they wanted.

  “What are you reading?” Rita asked her, looking at her now. An old friend, kind and good with long hippyish blond hair gone gray behind her ears, skin lined from years in the sun, smart and unaware of how a fifty-year-old woman was supposed to look. The kind of friend who could sit with Kathy in a coffee shop and read a book. Long silences, polite pauses like this one, chances to return to the life she led inside her mind. A good woman; and while no great replacement for Denise, the same quality, the same kind of friend.

  Kathy smiled and put down her book. The cover was a cheap painting, B-movie style. “Not what you might expect,” she said.

  Rita leaned back, interested. “I don’t expect anything in particular, Kathy, not from you.”

  “It’s a book about scientists.”

  “Any good?”

  Kathy paused. She wondered how she looked to Rita, if she had aged so thoroughly, her hair short and gray, her clothing out of style by a decade now, her glasses by even more; if she had changed so much as to be a disappointment. Not the brainy, solitary girl in woolen slacks and a beret passing under the bell tower with a book in her hand. Not the quiet one in class who simply shook her head angrily until the professor called on her. Or could it be that she had aged but stayed exactly the same? Ridiculously, stubbornly the same like this longhaired woman before her? She surprised herself by finding this was what she wanted: nose in her books, to have sidestepped time. But now she had lost track of the conversation.

  “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  “Any good?” Rita asked again.

  Kathy tapped the cover. “Kind of the wrong question.”

  Rita sighed, clearly a little tired of Kathy’s old games, but still intrigued, still friends with her for just this reason. “Well, are you enjoying it?”

  Kathy looked at her and considered what to say. There was a story to tell, but Kathy wasn’t the kind of person who told stories or gave any background to her life. Her actions came with no context to explain them, but she had no need for explanation; she had no wish for other people to understand her, and the idea that understanding her might make them love her more—this was a strange idea, a strange motive, a bad one. Love didn’t come from understanding, did it? Love came from nothing. That was the whole point of love.

  But something made her smile through chapped lips. Perhaps the men stepping from the window, their shadows removing themselves from her body, taking with them the odd murmurs of their conversation. A clean canvas of light thrown on the table, ready for her to paint it.

  “It’s called The Search,” she said quietly, showing the cover to Rita, who leaned over to touch it with bitten nails. Two men in white lab coats, a red-haired buxom dame in a tight yellow dress and, of all things, pearls. “It’s from the thirties. About scientists.”

  “Sexy scientists.”

  “Eli’s owned it for years. Since we met. It’s one of his favorites and he always wanted me to read it when we were first married.” Her friend looked up and watched her. “I made him read Virginia Woolf, and I pretended I read this. I didn’t. I hate books that are ‘about’ things. Race. War. But I picked it up recently.”

  “You were missing him?”

  She was, but Kathy would never tell that to a soul. Longing was not a public act for her, and absence was simply that: an empty space, nothing to speak of. And, if she were to be honest, she was doing fine alone. Kathy was happy by herself. When she was a young woman, being alone had never been an option; but here, near the end of the century, it had been chosen for her and she discovered, like someone who has stepped into the wrong movie theater only to find herself transfixed, that she liked it. You did not really have to cook. You did not have to clean. You could read endlessly, stay up late reading and wake up Sunday morning with nothing ahead but a hundred cups of coffee and a million words in print. There was, of course, the debris of loneliness spread everywhere. But it was bearable. She did not long for a man in her life, after all; she only missed her husband.

  Not that he had understood her. A number of women, somehow discovering Kathy’s divorce at a party or a meeting, held her hand and told her that they knew her sorrow: they, too, could never find another man to understand them. It seemed to Kathy such a bizarre comment. Understand you? How was that possible? Even if it were, even if you had found a man who understood your every whim and quirk and mood, could you really blame the poor fellow for moving on? Simply to stanch his boredom? But Kathy also knew that these were a different sort of woman from herself, the kind who, while much younger than she was, having come of age under Nixon or Johnson, still somehow kept refrigerated within their chests the frosty ideals of much earlier decades. Eisenhower. Truman. Kathy had trouble finding women like herself—thus her renewed friendship with this old college gal—or even people like herself. There was no longer, of course, the old argumentative Eli to provoke. That was gone. And another: Denise.

  That terrible call in the afternoon, some relative she didn’t know who drew a picture of a car crumpled against the rocks, the confetti of glass, a pale forehead stained with a tree of blood. Hang up with a rattle, and it’s too clear: Despite it all, there never was any friend who got so close.

  But she said nothing of this to Rita. She changed the subject to her book again, saying, “I picked it up because it’s a particular day today. There’s a comet t
hat returns every twelve years, and a meteor shower that happens tonight. I’m old and I’ve gotten sentimental.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She picked up the book and looked at it. “I don’t know how I got it. I know he loaned it to Denise for years.” Her old friend grimaced, because she knew all about Denise. Kathy had not confided; she had simply dropped information over time. “But somehow it ended up in our house again, and somehow it ended up with me. I don’t know why he didn’t take it.”

  “Probably because of her.”

  Kathy put the book down. A waitress refilled their coffees from a green-lipped decanter. She continued: “So I started reading it, and it isn’t terrible. It’s kind of interesting and antique. All about the glory and frustration of science. I’m sure it would be very comforting to a young astronomer, like those books they give adolescents about puberty, to reassure them. Everything that you’re going through is normal, that sort of thing. A quick read, amusing, a little drama. And then I came across a page. It happened yesterday.”

  Here Kathy took the book from the table and opened it near the middle. She pressed it flat with the palm of her hand and the old paperback spine gave a little crack, settling into place. The smell of the old binding came into the air between them. She presented it to Rita. There, at the top right-hand corner of the page, was a sentence written in red ink.

  “It’s Eli’s handwriting,” Kathy explained, still smiling. “Denise must have read it.”

  It curved around the text and down the edge of the paper in a question mark, in ink that spotted and bled into the cheap paper. Kathy was shocked to feel it coming over her again, the deep chill of reading this for the first time yesterday, what she took to be some secret code passed between her husband and his now-dead lover. That bad, boyish cursive she recognized so well: