The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (4 page)

Still, he wanted her closer. He had met Kathy at Harvard, through a friend who was a mathematician, at a party full of chemists. She had been a chemist then, bright and self-sufficient and promising, wearing a white dress with daisies and a frayed strap, sipping a rum drink through a straw, her hair in a shining ponytail. (He would always think of her that way, with her face stretched from the straw to the elastic in her hair, as she glanced up at him and raised her eyebrows.) He had stood near her, and, as he remembered it, she moved over on her chair so he could sit beside her. They dated in what seemed, now, like such an old-fashioned adventure: huddling in drive-ins on too-cold evenings, eating at odd foreign restaurants and laughing when misordered food arrived. And at first they didn’t go very far—it seemed impossible, just two years ago!—and she giggled and said they were all-American Jews now, and she should get a circle pin like a WASP and dye her hair. Kathy was dating two other men as well (a premed and, of all things, a math professor), but she ended things with them. She changed her major, without a word to him, to English. A friend lent them a house in Provincetown that winter, in their senior year, and, to his surprise, Kathy let him take off her clothes. They had sex there on the couch, breathing clouds of cold air. Eli fell hopelessly for her. She became his wife.

But she was never his; she was always a little apart, a little unhappy. She treated chemistry like a childish fad of hers, a rag doll she was embarrassed to hear about, and tossed the topic into a corner. She cooked and cleaned for him. She somehow knew her role as an academic’s wife and charmed his professors, his colleagues, and took poor waxy Denise under her arm. Kathy was clever, sometimes too bright for the men at the table, but she also didn’t mind their talking shop. She only minded that in Eli; the stars were not part of the deal; she wasn’t a woman in mythology, Kathy told him, marrying the sky. And there were times he heard her in the shower, weeping. It seemed so calculated, to time your sadness for the shower, to hide tears in water and camouflage red eyes with the steam and heat. He would have held her. He looked at her after a shower, smiling, beautiful, a towel wrapped around her, searching in the medicine cabinet—where was that piece caught inside her, cutting her, where was it?

But he dared not ask, nor mention any of his guesses about her mind. He knew, from experience, that he’d be wrong. He would just guess his own worries. He thought, for instance, that she cried about wanting a child; but his rational mind knew that this was off, somehow. Eli was the one who wanted a child. Kathy was the one who changed the subject, at dinner, or in bed, or looking at a baby in a carriage.

Whenever he saw her staring at the wall in bed at night, not at her book but at the wall, he patted her arm and said, “What’s the matter? It’s all right, things are great,” and then began to list off everything wonderful in their life. She looked peaceful, listening. It
was
wonderful! The house here in the city, their friends, the food and fun they had despite their poverty, the freedom of this time in history, his own career. He held her, loving her—it was wonderful.

“I’ll give you a hint,” she said one night as he held her and she felt stiff in his arms. It was in their small bedroom, almost a closet, high above the street near the campus. There was a picture of baby Eli and his brothers hung on the wall, yellow and old. The curtain was a green bedsheet, and they lay in a bed too big for the room. There was a tone in Kathy’s voice that he sometimes hated. He couldn’t imitate it, or tell you what it was until he heard it, but there it was. It usually came when she didn’t want to have sex. This time, however, she said, “When I look sad, don’t tell me things are great, that I shouldn’t be sad.”

“But.” He tried not to feel angry. He was so patient, so good, didn’t she see it?

She thrust out her lower lip, as if pitying him; he hated that, too. She wore her hair in a flip that stroked the pillow, and her glasses magnified her eyes and made her face seem pinched just above her nose. “Don’t even worry about why I’m sad, or what I tell you. Just say, ‘That must be hard.’”

“Kathy, you’ll know it’s a line. I want to help you….”

“Trust me. Just say, ‘That must be hard,’ like that.” She leaned back on the pillow, her face so pale. Outside, sirens blasted through the dirty streets. They were both silent. “You can say it now,” she whispered with a little smile. “I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

“That must be hard,” he told her, baffled, almost horrified that she would give him a trick to work on her.

But for some reason it appeased her. Something in her unhooked and relaxed. “It is,” she told him, resting her book on her chest and closing her eyes.

He’d held her moist hand and wondered why she loved him.

Eli was a few distant yards from her now, gazing at Centaurus above the Southern Cross. Something moved in the blackness—a bat—there were bats crossing the sky and he couldn’t see them, just the way they blocked some stars in a jagged pattern. Instinctively he leaned his head down, and then saw others doing it as well. Denise awoke and let out a little scream of terror. Where was Swift? Farther toward the golden dome, his daughter asleep at his feet, a pale bundle. Eli set his eye to the sky again, and Centaurus leaped toward him like a tiger. In its teeth was everything the men and wives could not see, not if they had the keenest eyes—that irregular galaxy spotting the centaur’s hide, the globular cluster—and there were objects too faint even for normal telescopes, objects Eli knew were there from his late nights up in the mountains of San Jose, above the clouds: two spiral galaxies turning in the centaur, bright and spending gamma rays like drunken sailors. It was true, what he told Kathy, all of it—that life was wonderful, every precious particle of it.

He would buy her a present. He had already written a note in the margins of his novel, hoping that she would come across it late one night while he was at the telescope. He imagined her in bed, yawning, dutifully reading along until she noticed the tiny message beside the words. Then she might understand what he somehow could not tell her. But more. He would bring something tomorrow while she slept off this night—not a photograph of a fireball, nothing as selfish as that—one of those golden combs. Like the combs in Mrs. Manday’s hair. He would try to talk to the island woman where she sat with a look of girlish concern beside her husband. Kathy was beautiful— the pink-tinted smile, her lost sleepy look in the morning when she was weak and funny, her sharp stare across a room of people which meant she was bored and missed him, the times when he could read her mind, those few times—she was beautiful. If only she asked him questions about the sky, told him her secrets. He strained to see her in her chair but she was turned away. He would tell her. He would bring her combs. That was why she loved him.

“Do me a favor,” Denise said, appearing close with her hair falling between them, smelling too rich and flowery. She had clearly slept off the bourbon; she looked determined as she often did under the stars. Off at the far end of the overlook, one of the students was signaling and approaching. Eli looked at Denise, and saw a piece of sunburned skin on her nose, curling from her like smoke. He recognized, too, some new tension in her face, some new tone in her voice.

“Do me a favor when Jorgeson comes over here.” She was talking about the graduate student, a gangly Midwesterner with horn-rimmed glasses, the one with the mail-order bride. “Find out about Carlos.”

Eli sat struck for a moment by this shift, almost angry. He watched Jorgeson waving his arms. Eli had been relaxed and fine a moment before, and now here was Denise, reminding him of her ridiculous love affair, her fling with that crew-cutted Chicano rich boy, that married Republican cad. Eli looked at his poor friend and thought
Don’t be so sad,
and not from sympathy, not because he knew what it might be like to have moods like this one, dropping like spiders inside her. It was a command, a wish made because he couldn’t deal with sad women, especially one who wasn’t his wife. He almost couldn’t stand their sudden, crystal grief. Professor Swift had predicted that the comet, tonight, would bring with it a meteor shower. So why not make such wishes? Thousands of stars were already poised, ready to fall.

“What?” Eli asked, feigning ignorance. The Swede was listening to a colleague, stopped maybe fifteen yards away.

“He’s his friend. Find out.”

“Find out what?”

Denise didn’t answer, sniffing the vegetable air.

Eli remembered when she’d met this Carlos. A garden party at Jorgeson’s house, and Denise in a green frilly dress, talking to some handsome, military-stiff man, cocking her grinning head to one side in a girlish way that was utterly unlike her, some remnant of the upper-class coquetry she’d been taught in San Francisco. Eli could tell the man was a swindler. When he heard this Carlos had a wife, sitting inside the house, he assumed the meeting had been harmless. Carlos left, Denise came over and listened to one of Eli’s astronomy jokes, joined Kathy in a few drinks, and all was as it had been. It was months before Denise admitted she was seeing him—and then only through Kathy, who told the story plainly, as if it were a natural course of events and not a painful mistake. Brainy Denise had been seduced by married Carlos, had believed a promise from a man who could make no promises. And, Kathy told her husband, their blond friend was in love.

It had been infuriating to watch. Denise came to dinner far less often, rarely made it to the movie dates they all had together, and in general began to treat the Spivaks like a phase she had passed through, an old routine she wanted to forget. She was still friendly at school, but he could never catch her for coffee after class because of her complex schedule with Carlos, one that involved grabbing his lunch hours and breaks and free weekend moments, tiling her life with these shards of love.

When it had ended, a few weeks ago, Denise had returned. The prodigal friend. Kathy had listened to the whole tale, gone over the words Carlos had spoken, sat with Denise late at night in the living room with brandy and read these phrases like entrails, telling a fortune. As if this Carlos were a deity, hiding his heart in this tangle of cliches! Eli kept quiet; he knew the phrases, the phone calls and visits meant nothing. There was no code to break; there was no lock to pick; there was no anagram of love within this fool’s farewell.

He listened to her plea that night and stared at her sunburned scrap of skin. He seemed as if he wanted to reach out and take it from her, such was the look in his eyes. Perhaps he thought it was rare to own a piece of someone’s skin, taken from a memorable first day on this island, on this trip where she might have a chance to forget a bad romance and take the course he’d planned for her. Because he did have a course for her; he felt he made good choices for other people, but from experience he’d learned not to tell them. He had kept his silence, but here was at last a way to touch and change her.

“I need a favor, too,” he said.

She gritted her teeth, staring at him, then said, “Oh Eli, just do this for me.”

He was quiet and watched the boys throwing a ball, the background of stars behind them. Eli knew he couldn’t ever win by talking; she was too stubborn and selfish, and he had lost too many scientific battles with her to bother now with a real one. He couldn’t argue with her, but he could wait her out, let Denise fill the silence with arguments far better than he could come up with. He’d learned the trick of her. So he sat and let his pupils dilate in the darkness while he felt her beside him, looking, thinking too hard.

Denise folded her arms across her breasts. She asked softly, “What is it?”

“First, after this, let’s not talk about Carlos anymore.” Her face folded in subtle rage, but he knew she’d forgive him. He was always hard on her in a way no one else dared to be; that’s why she cared for him.

“Eli….”

“And also,” he said quickly, and she was quiet. He thought for a moment about how to put it, then he said, “I hoped you could … I want you to ask Kafhy something.”

She closed her eyes and the sunburnt skin fluttered on her nose as a cool wind came. The breeze lifted her hair slightly from her face. Eyes still closed, she said, “You don’t just want me to ask. You want me to report on what she says.”

He said nothing. There was a breeze that took the edge off the hot night, and you could hear the soft noise of people leaning in their plastic chairs, relaxing, taking it in.

Denise asked, “Is this a trade? That you’ll talk to Jorgeson if I talk to Kathy?”

Eli murmured something, nodding, and looked toward the tall Swede. Jorgeson was close now, looking ridiculous and shouting something. A few yards away. A choice had to be made.

“What am I asking her?”

He quietly told her to ask if his wife was pregnant.

She sat back and placed her fingers to her forehead, as if her headache were returning. He knew she was watching Jorgeson’s approach, timing her decision.

Eli wanted to be patient with her, but it was difficult—she seemed so much younger than he was, so frustratingly fragile for someone so brilliant. He looked at her face, how it cracked—shouldn’t she be hard as a diamond? Weren’t people either weak or strong, he wondered, not both at once, not unpredictably both? This was the flaw— he hated finding it—the flaw, as if she were a vase he was examining in a shop, cinnabar with two handles, discovering the flaw that would widen with time, crack and destroy the shape. He had found it now, a hint of it; you can’t return a friend at this point, but what do you do? You wait; you try to see if they will fix themselves before they grow too old to notice. Eli turned away as the Swede approached, as Denise considered the deal, and he let his doubts enter again.

He had his own flaw, of course. The great sign of this decline had come half a year before when, after collecting a preliminary set of data, Eli had let Swift sign him up to give a presentation at a professional meeting in Berkeley. A presentation—it was an honor. But he was not ready. Eli had taken the data so carefully over three nights at Palomar, but he found himself in Campbell Hall at four o’clock in the morning, unshowered and feeling crazy, unable to resolve his data into the answer that he knew was true. It was not even important; it was not even the purpose of his research, and yet it had to fit for him to move on. Eli stood up and walked down the polished halls, listening to his steps, peering into all the darkened offices until he came again to his own with its one fly-specked light. He was alone. What had happened to those years of surefooted reason? When he could bend gravities with a mechanical pencil? Now, when the other BADgrads slept, he scrabbled at the simplest set of data and could not get a hold. And it wasn’t even that he didn’t understand. No, he knew exactly where his paper should go. It simply would not go there. Standing outside his office, listening to the buzz of the hall’s fluorescent lights, Eli imagined the rows of scientists, coughing impatiently as he described his inability to bring this simple research to conclusion. “Thank you,” they would each say, “but not entirely persuasive.” Those would be the exact words.