The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 2

  How had they done it, with all those stars in the way? Had he compromised his astronomical first love for this second one? Or had Kathy paid somehow in the end, slept alone while he was at the telescopes? Denise would have to start over, learn from them, forget what Carlos had taught her. Her mother had paid, after all, a great deal for her to forget.

  “What are you reading?” she asked Eli, who had dipped his nose back into his book. The cover had a painting of a sad man in a white coat, and a busty woman in a yellow sweater haughtily turning away. “Is that a romance7.”

  He looked up, distracted, then turned the book over to look at its cover. “What? No. Oh, I see. No, it’s The Search. You’ve never read it? It’s about chemists.”

  “Like the hot number on the cover?”

  He smiled, but seemed annoyed. “No, she’s not a chemist.”

  “I bet she isn’t.”

  Eli opened the book again and looked very much at ease, as if this page were the pleasant view from a window. “It’s sort of a love story,” he said vaguely, then looked at her sharply. “And you can’t borrow it, because I’m making Kathy read it. The minds of scientists. It’s required reading in our marriage.”

  That look—her girlish crush rose up again inside her, made her blush. Denise asked, “What does she make you read?”

  He squinted in distaste. “Virginia Woolf,” he said, turning back to his book and walking away down the deck, leaving Denise alone under the canopy. Love stories about scientists—only Eli could find a book like that. A man in a lab coat, a dame in a sweater; a simple version of a complex story. Here she was, for instance, the dame in the lab coat, standing in the hot still air, the sun white as a salt lick, left with only her mother’s command to forget, like a naval order in a sealed envelope, to be opened once at sea. She would forget; she counted on it. But please, she thought, not yet.

  Denise had hardly noticed Carlos the first time she met him. It was at a grad student party, and her mind was on her mathematics. When the host, Jorgeson, introduced her to the tall, handsome man, she dismissed him: affable and rectangular, balding with a military cut, always in a tie and always grinning. To her, Carlos seemed thoroughly fifties, thoroughly married and dull. And being married was the final strike against him. Carlos was taken, and practical Denise simply wiped him from her mind.

  Later, however, in the lab, studying data with Eli, Jorgeson and others, someone mentioned Carlos and his wife, the shrill pointless woman, their loveless life together. Her labmates painted steady, devout Carlos as sympathetic, disintegrating, desperate and pleading, available for some woman to save. They hadn’t meant to do this, to hook Denise. But that information was a thistle snagging her thoughts: not important, not part of some greater idea, but lasting because suddenly this dull man became a problem some woman could solve. Later, when she ran into Carlos in the market on Telegraph Avenue, she seemed to be meeting a different person. I know your secret, she thought to herself as he talked about weather and student protest; you’re trapped and lonely.

  This time, she noticed his small clear eyes, the clean-shaven underbite, the oddly miniature ears sticking out from his buzzed black hair. Normally, she would disregard a man so clean and regular, but now she knew the truth. She imagined this was an act—the polite, kind man, the good husband. She imagined he was tormented by this life, this conventionality, which in the mid-sixties already looked flimsy. On the spot she gave him an entire hidden life; like a caricaturist on a boardwalk, she dashed off a sketch for Carlos to hold in front of himself. They arranged to meet next afternoon to exchange some books they’d talked about. He had taken her number on the inside of a gum wrapper.

  “If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?” Carlos asked as she was turning away with a polite smile.

  “What?”

  “The way I look,” he said, standing tall and looking himself up and down. “What would you do to make me better-looking? I wanted to ask a woman.”

  There were a thousand things she would have changed before, at those parties—the hair he was losing, the stiff posture, his thin lips, and she wouldn’t have minded telling him—but suddenly she saw nothing that she would alter. Make him better-looking? He had already changed, during their petty conversation, from a man of separate qualities to judge and dismiss, a stranger understood in pieces, into Carlos. A whole man, this grinning Carlos, too familiar to take apart now. Here was Carlos, all of one piece. Here he was.

  “I’d make your eyes more blue,” she said.

  “More blue,” he repeated, looking at her, then spreading his arms to show her his body in that dark suit. “But the rest is okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  His fingers landed on her shoulder, then flew off again as he backed away, saying, “More blue, that’s good. Thank you. See you tomorrow.” He waved, carrying his bag of oranges, and walked into the crowd. She remained, unsure as to what had just happened.

  Carlos would do this—seem so normal, hopeless, bland to the point where he bored Denise and she resolved to end things—and then, at the last moment, he would say something that made her realize he was smarter than she was. She was young; she could not resist it. That face she had never noticed before became beautiful— the eyes, nose and mouth, all his features stayed with her, coins held in her hand. She felt powerful, could feel his beauty clinking in her fist as she thought about him, even before he took her to bed, while they were having their sly and innuendo-filled afternoons of coffee and matinees. In time she seduced him away from his wife, from his frozen longing, and that gave her an even greater power. She would see that same smile each time he bent his head to enter her apartment, that wave and grin, that scar on his chest, and it would be beautiful every time. Love was so new to her that seeing him asleep or talking on the phone amazed her, never bored her. What else could fascinate but never change? The sky?

  But very soon, it did change. She grew too attached, or her virgin charms wore off, and he began to make excuses and then made her believe that ending things was her idea. She realized very quickly that any other girl her age would have known better. How stupid, how obvious.

  “What are you telling people?” Carlos had asked her after it was all over. They were sipping lemonade in a coffee shop in the city, in North Beach, where no one they knew would find them. At that moment she felt the whole weight of their six months together; but of course, later, in her memory, all that would remain would be that meeting in the market, one perfect afternoon on the cliffs with wine—and this, the end.

  “I’m telling them you went insane,” she said.

  He squinted, sipped his drink. “Well, Denise …”

  “I’m saying it’s a problem you’re having,” she said, knowing just as she spoke each word that it sounded desperate and would never win him back. “You’re in therapy, you’re on some kind of new medication for it.”

  He listened without saying a word, smiled, squinted and told her he had to go. It was wonderful seeing her again, and he wanted her to think of him as a friend.

  No one ever understood, though, that it had never really been about him. She’d loved Carlos, but always knew she would have loved any man who bothered to seduce her. Why had it come so late? Had she never been worth it before? Denise felt angry and terrified, jealous of other people’s lives—their youths spent making love in old cars and graveyards, passing notes and receiving scented letters, working up the nerve to touch a shivering body, to whisper lies to get what you wanted. What could her youth have been? Dances, coy looks, unwanted advances? Instead of stars? No wonder she clung so tenaciously to the memory of Carlos, hoping for a word from him, hoping he would still come back. She was confused and full of hate; somehow she felt it was her last chance; she saw people around her, and thought the life you got by twenty-five was what you would be stuck with.

  So, paid to forget, she spent her time hoarding her memories. Here, on the boat, she had even found a way to hear about him. One of Carlos�
��s friends was on board, the ugly grad student who had introduced her at the party, and she felt her gut tightening. She needed to talk to him, learn about her old lover. She knew it was ridiculous, and she tried to think about her thesis, gently leading her mind away from Carlos the way you might coax a jumper down from a high building. But her mind wasn’t interested. It forced her to watch this ugly student, the glow of Carlos he had about him, and she planned her approach. God, she would never forget; mother had wasted her money.

  “Don’t let Kathy fool you,” Eli said to her. It surprised Denise; he had been walking along the deck, writing quietly in the margin of his novel, and now here he was, staring at her, his glasses gleaming in the hot sun. He had sweated through his white shirt at the breastbone, and a translucent diamond formed there, showing the hair on his chest.

  “What?”

  “This guy she wants you to meet. Don’t go for it.” They did this often, Eli and Kathy: seemed to work against each other when, in the end, Denise believed, they were really two arms of the same creature, pushing her toward a single future they had both planned for her. Perhaps this was marriage? Eli peered down at her, but she could not see his eyes in the glare of his lenses. “A writer or something,” he said. “But sort of… I don’t know…. Not like us.”

  What did they want her to be? Alone? Was that it—they were happiest when she was utterly alone?

  “Not like us?” she asked. “Are we somehow special?”

  He brushed the crumbs of her words aside. “Oh, he’s just conventional. He’s nice, he’s nice. But he voted for Nixon. He memorizes jokes. That kind of thing.”

  “See,” she said, struggling to raise herself and feeling dizzy in the crowd of murmuring people, in the pounding waves and salt air. “See, now I’m intrigued.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, folding his arms and looking old again, grown-up and convincingly wise. “I wash my hands of this whole thing.”

  “Do you think Kathy is okay?” she asked him.

  Eli squinted to understand her. “What, do you… oh, oh you mean over there?” He turned his head to see the dark form of his wife at the other end of the boat, tying a scarf around her head. Sun caught half her back in a bright curve. “Kathy?” he said. “She’s fine. Look, that girl loves her.” Indeed, Denise could see a little girl, their professor’s daughter, Lydia, tugging at the woman’s skirt until Kathy looked down and started talking.

  “She’s so great,” Denise said simply. The canopy flapped above them.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Yeah.”

  “Once again it’s all BADgrads and her.” This was a nickname the students had—Berkeley Astronomy Department graduate students— as if they were a gang, ready to rumble.

  “There’s Jorgeson’s girlfriend….” He pointed her out, still looking away at the frothing wake of their boat. He was talking about a thin, timid Chinese girl who had come with the ugly student.

  Denise leaned over to whisper happily: “Mail-order.”

  “Who told you that?”

  She smiled. “Kathy.”

  Eli laughed and shook his head in that fatherly way, saying, “Don’t listen to everything she tells you.” Then he looked at her, smiling, his small eyes inscrutably examining her face while he kept the smile intact. She immediately recognized a mind in action, and it made her tense her shoulders, focus her mind on the details of his body. The half laugh he gave now, the hands brought together in his lap. What was he thinking? Sometimes she saw people as intellectual problems; if she paid attention, she might solve them. In a lower voice, Eli asked her, “So what does she tell you?”

  Denise said nothing. Clearly, Eli believed his wife had whispered some secret to Denise at one of those barbecues, or out shopping, but what could he mean? Kathy told Denise nothing, nothing at all, and it surprised her to think that Eli knew his wife so poorly. Kathy never fidgeted with secrets; if she had them, she kept them sealed tight, waterproof. She was the kind of woman, Denise found, whose lock could not be picked—you might catch her gazing wistfully out to sea and, believing she was pondering some old love or regret, you’d carefully ask what was on her mind. “Thinking about a book,” she might say, smiling a little, or “I think I’ll roast a chicken tonight.” There was no confession brooding there. Didn’t Eli know this? Or was there something wrong with their marriage? Denise was so young, so caught up in her own mission to forget, that she had never considered that her friends might not be happy. It was an awful thought. She laughed with confusion.

  “I’ve had too much to drink!” Denise said, fanning herself with her hat.

  Eli smiled, giving up. “You think it’s a good idea to be drunk so early?” he asked.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Good,” he told her. “So do I.”

  He quickly pulled the camera out of his bag and took a picture of her sweating there, fanning herself. She squealed. Then someone shouted “Land ho!” and all faces on the boat turned to see the island. Denise could hear tiny Lydia calling out, “I don’t see it!” and everybody shushing her, but Denise could see it: a dark, green animal shape on the horizon. Why was she here?

  The boat turned, and the sun crept through a rip in the canopy and lit her upturned hand so that the light, the foreign light in this place, was a warm lemon in her palm. She knew her sadness was a foolish one, but it was real, and despite her mother’s wishes, she could not forget. She had to feel that again, to feel alive before her youth was over; if not Carlos, then some other man. She remembered herself in love, and that memory glowed with a blue flame behind her thoughts. But now she was unhappy—now, on the boat, with Eli, with the island appearing before them, and the light sitting in her hand. Just as Eli touched his face—this was the worst here, for some reason—this, now. She turned her bright palm. It passed, the light, onto the water.

  And everyone was shouting as they saw the island. They had no wish to know the future.

  If you flew from Singapore to the main island, Raya, and from Raya by propeller plane so that you approached the island of Bukit from above, you would say it looked like a rabbit: the mountainous haunch of the volcano, the tea-plantation uplands where the sultan had his palace, the paler forelimbs reaching down to the shore, terraced with rice paddies; then the flat plane of the head and, of course, beachy spit of ears drawn back in fear. It would seem almost ridiculous to you; it would define the island in your eyes, the shape like a rabbit, the shivering blink there in the jungle, the nearby archipelago of wolves. The native people had never considered their island in this way. They had never seen their island from the sky. They had never seen a rabbit.

  Their lives were very different from the Americans’. How could an island girl, equally brokenhearted as Denise, passing the woman as she left the boat, how could she understand her? They each stared at the other—the girl in a red sarong and headscarf, the tall beige-colored woman in khaki and pale blue—and could not comprehend that other life.

  The only one among the Americans who knew this place was Dr. Manday, who had left to go to school in California twenty years before and had never returned. He stood next to Professor Swift, wiping the sweat from his broad mustache, chattering to the bearded man about his island, the sultan, the customs. He told him that the old sultans had never accepted the Gregorian calendar—the decision by Pope Gregory in 1584 to recalibrate the calendars by ten days— so that the island was always ten days behind the rest of the world. Actually, he told them, the error had grown to thirteen days. All the students were listening as Manday spread his hands across his chest, across the dark sweat heart there. “It’s thirteen days ago here. Not March twentieth: March seventh. A little joke, yes?”

  But it was more than that for all of them. It allowed them, as they trudged across the hot beach, men in sarongs carrying their bags, it allowed them to feel less of a shock—this was old soil, in the past. Everything strange or uncomfortable was due to that, to Manday’s little joke about time, and they could feel, odd
ly, at ease believing (knowing it was ridiculous) that the modern world would arrive in thirteen days and change things, that they weren’t trapped here, that life wasn’t really like this.

  “Look,” Eli whispered to Kathy and Denise as they walked toward the shade of a tree. He pointed to a man sitting beside a brightly painted fishing boat, smoking a cigarette and looking at them. “Manday said some of the men tell time with cigarettes.”

  “Like a sundial?” Kathy asked.

  “Like I’d say to you, ‘I’ll be back in two cigarettes,’ and you’d smoke them, ten minutes would pass and I’d be back. Like that.”

  Denise shaded her face with a hand, beginning to be hung over now, feeling her mind becoming iridescent and confused. “Oh my God.”

  Denise, Eli, Kathy, Jorgeson—all of them might have gone a little mad if they hadn’t been given Manday’s little joke. They were allowed to feel like aliens, like different creatures, like visitors from the future.

  It was a familiar feeling, scientifically. They could look into the heavens like any human and see a swarm of lights receding from the earth, but their minds would spoil the wonder with mathematics. They knew, for instance, how distant each point was—in blackest space, and in time. The light from the closest stars had originated only years before, but images of the most distant objects arrived millions of years old. Yet each star sat equally on the dark palm of night. Orion’s belt had three stars of equal brilliance; yet Swift could point there for his daughter and tell the girl (baffling her) that the rightmost light showed that star two thousand years ago, but the center showed light thousands of years older—a visual paradox, a time machine. What could the daughter say to that? What do I care, what does it matter, I can cover them both with my thumb….

  They could feel proud, the students and the professors stepping across the fiery sand. They could feel in command of light and time above them, of the rabbit-shaped green clump of land before them, of each staring woman passing with fruit in a basket upon her head. Yet at home they were lost. They could travel thousands of miles and be in command, but at home, where they should have seen the world so clearly, they were blind—one eye to the lens each midnight—and already part of the past. It was 1965 in Berkeley; they were each twenty-five or twenty-six, yet they were born too soon to be young anymore. They remembered the end of the war, the atom bomb, the music of victory and Daddy coming home; they had parents born in the teens, the twenties; they remembered beatniks; they could conjure up an image of an old TV, a gray blob in a radio cabinet; they had worn hats on the street as young men, coats and ties in college (Denise had worn white gloves each day). Just a week before, in Berkeley, they had sipped tea in the lounge at Campbell Hall at 3:30—they did this, every day, tea at Campbell. They were young, in their prime, yet they had been born too soon.