The Night of the Comet (11 page)

My friend Peter would’ve had a ready answer for that last question. “It’s all about the sex,” he liked to say. “Sex sex sex. Who gives it, who gets it, who doesn’t.”

I believed he was right, and sensing Gabriella so close to me now, her living, breathing body just on the other side of the wall, only reminded me of how woefully inexperienced I was. At fourteen years old, I still had never kissed a girl. I had never even held hands with one. And the things Peter talked about, rubbing the photos in his father’s
Playboy
magazines while he described what you could do with a woman like that,
mm-mm
, seemed so far off in the future as to sound like science fiction. It wasn’t that I was naïve; I understood how sex worked, at least as well as Peter did. But such a great gulf lay between my understanding and my experience that I wanted all those things a boy was supposed to want in only the most abstract sense. When I tried to think of Gabriella as one of those women in the magazines, I couldn’t. She was more than a collection of shiny body parts, and my attraction to her was something greater and more profound—more pure, I would’ve said—than Peter’s
mm-mm
.

Sex sex sex …

How that little word troubled me. It suggested a whole other world still shrouded in mystery. I caught glimpses of this alien world from time to time, in the glossy photos in Peter’s magazines, or in graffiti on bathroom walls, or in stray glances and odd chuckles that passed, like secret messages, between grown-ups. But these were only glimpses, and I knew there was more to it than that. Lately, I’d begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might’ve been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.

I remembered the first clear confirmation I had of its existence. It came from, of all people, my father. It had been on a night like this. I was nine or ten years old, sitting up in bed doing my homework, when he knocked on my door.

“Can I come in?”

Slipping into my room, my father asked what I was working on. He blinked distractedly, his hands on his hips. The white corner of an envelope stuck out of his left pocket.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

He carefully closed the door behind him. He pulled out my desk chair and sat near the foot of my bed. He began by questioning me about my classes, my friends. He talked about when he was my age and what fun that was: biking all over town with his buddies, annoying their teachers, teasing girls.

“Do you have fun like that?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

He slid the fingers of his hands together and squeezed them between his knees. He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a more serious tone.
Now we’re getting to it
, I thought.

“Your mother suggested I speak to you. I agreed that it would be a good idea. You’re getting older now, and typically it’s around this age—nine, ten years old—that a boy begins to develop a natural … 
curiosity
about girls. This corresponds to a growing awareness of the human body and a recognition of the differences between the sexes.”

He took a breather, cleared his throat again, and pushed his glasses up.

“You’ll get this information in school anyway, but you might as well hear it from me now. Get a jump on the other kids.”

He began speaking generally about the life cycle of plants and animals in nature. He described the reproductive system of plants; he spoke about pollen, and a flower’s stamen and pistil and ovule; and then he talked about fruits and their seeds and flesh, “like an apple, for instance.” He spoke so thoroughly and carefully that he might have been delivering a lecture. Soon I became bored and confused and a little sleepy.

At last he arrived at his main topic, which was human reproduction. “In other words, sex,” he said, and coughed.
Finally
, I thought, and perked up.

I already knew the basics by then. On the playground at school or squatting behind a neighbor’s garage, boys like Peter would share what they had found out about girls. Some spoke confidently, some sneakily, some with a show of toughness, spitting down into the dirt at their feet when they said what a woman was and what you were supposed to do with her. But I didn’t entirely trust their information to be accurate. Now at least I’d get my facts straight.

My father spoke about the parallels between the reproductive systems of plants and humans. Women were like flowers, he said, in that their bodies also contained eggs that needed to be fertilized in order to reproduce. He described the female reproductive organs: the uterus, the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the cervix, the vagina—

He broke off, flustered, and cleared his throat several times in a row.

“Maybe a visual illustration would help,” he said, recovering. He stood up, put his feet together, and spread his arms in a T.

“It’s like a little man. Imagine a little man standing inside a woman’s body. These are the ovaries,” he said, cupping his hands into fists. “My arms are the fallopian tubes. My chest can be the uterus.” He explained how egg cells formed in the ovaries and traveled down the fallopian tubes, where they were fertilized by the man’s sperm, thus creating life.

He sat back down. He sighed abruptly. When he spoke again, he spoke slowly, almost sadly, as if he regretted what he had to say.

“Now. This is the important part. On the night of their wedding, the husband and wife lie together in each other’s arms. And the man … carefully … impregnates the woman. This is natural. It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s a very … very … lovely event.”

He stopped and looked down solemnly at the floor. We were quiet for a moment. I held still. The air in the room was syrupy and warm. I felt myself sweating beneath my pajamas. Was he finished?

“Okay. I understand. Thank you,” I said.

“You may hear people talking bad about this,” my father cautioned. “Boys especially like to tell jokes and so forth. But I assure you there’s nothing wrong or ugly or dirty about sex. It’s perfectly natural. It’s a part of life. I do believe, however, as most people do, that it is something that should be reserved for marriage. Something that occurs only between a husband and wife.” He added, as if it were a point he’d almost forgotten, “Women are special. Always respect women. Women are like flowers.”

I nodded.

“Do you have any questions? Anything. You can ask me. I’m your father.”

“No. I think that’s all clear.”

“Good.”

He sat back in his chair, relieved that he’d said what he had to say. He patted his hands together a couple of times and looked around my room. He picked up a model airplane from my bookcase, glanced at it, and set it back down. He seemed reluctant to leave now.

I was relieved, too. I didn’t understand the actual how-to business of human reproduction any better now than when he first came into my room, but I was glad he’d stopped talking about it. Sex, in his telling, sounded like a kind of dark fairy tale, strange and a little spooky.

Eventually he got up to leave. He paused at my door. “I’m glad we had a chance to talk. If you have any more questions, I’m always here.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

That’s when I noticed the folded white envelope on the floor. It must’ve fallen out of his pocket when he stood to leave. I picked it up. On the back was written in neat, cursive pencil:

My father’s notes on the science of love. I tucked the envelope into my desk drawer, where it stayed. I never consulted it again. But after that night, I could barely look at a girl without picturing a tiny man resembling my father standing inside her belly with his feet together and his arms outstretched, saying solemnly,
“Women are special. Always respect women. Women are like flowers.”

At fourteen, I still believed that this was true. But I also had the nagging suspicion that the natural, lovely event to which my father referred was more powerful, more dangerous and wild than his science would admit.

CHRISTINE
was washing dishes in the kitchen when I wandered back downstairs.

“You’ve been quiet. Where’ve you been?”

“Upstairs. Reading.”

I dipped strawberries in melted chocolate from a pot on the stove while I peeked through the doorway at the adults in the next room. The hi-fi played jazz, and they were talking animatedly, laughing loudly now and then.

“Sounds like they’re enjoying themselves,” Christine said.

“Sure does.”

She was a chubby-faced black woman with rust-colored hair and oversized glasses. She wore a full-length white apron, like what a chef might wear. We’d never had a maid in our house before, and I watched her curiously as she ran water in the sink, adding dish soap and stirring it with her fingers to raise the suds.

“Your daddy’s got that column in the newspaper, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, ma’am. Groovy Science, that’s right.”

“I thought that was him. The scientist. Your momma said y’all are going to look at the comet tonight.”

“We’ve got the telescope set up in the backyard.”

“I heard about that comet. I haven’t seen it yet, though.”

“It’s going to be huge.”

“That’s what I heard. That comet scares me. You’re going to get sick, you keep eating all that chocolate.”

I got myself a Coke and leaned back against the counter, listening in on the conversation in the next room. My father had started in on his old story about how he ended up in Terrebonne. He told about the accident of the recruitment fair at the university field house, and then his secondhand car with his five new ties and his temporary teaching credential, and the black snake in the middle of the road outside of Napoleonville.…

“Oh no, here he goes again,” said my mother. “Mr. Marco Polo, to the rescue.”

… and then his early days as a teacher, and how half his students used to come to school by boat, clomping into his classroom in their fishing boots. And the deplorable conditions at the school back then, with the doors falling off their hinges and the windows broken and the rain leaking in through the ceiling and dripping onto his papers … “Dreadful. Just dreadful. Even worse than it is now, if you can believe that.” He was starting in on his usual complaint about the neglect of sciences in the Louisiana public schools when my mother cut him off.

“Okay, Alan, that’s enough! Nobody wants to hear all that,” she said, and laughed anxiously.

“No, no, I’m curious,” Frank said. Sitting up, he asked my father if he’d seen much improvement in the local schools, because to be honest, they’d had some concerns about that when they moved here.

Barbara Martello, joining in, said that if it was up to her, they’d have sent Gabriella to a private school. It was a question of “standards,” she insisted. Everyone knew that a private school had higher standards than a public school.

My mother agreed. She said something about my father’s work being “charity,” and if it were up to her, she’d do the same with her children.

Frank argued that the nearest private school was over forty miles away, and anyway, if public schools were good enough for him growing up—

“But things were different when we were kids,” Barbara said. “Schools were safer then.”

“Now they’re just big zoos!” said my mother.

“Oh, let’s just say it: my wife’s afraid of the blacks,” said Frank. “She thinks they’re all savages.”

“This has nothing whatsoever to do with race,” Barbara protested. “I’m talking about standards.”

I stole a peek at Christine to see if she was hearing any of this. She’d become very preoccupied with a spot on the edge of the sink, frowning as she scrubbed it with a washcloth.

“Ask him. Let’s ask him,” Frank said. “Hey, Junior!”

“Oh, no, don’t bother him.”

“Sure, why not? We’ve got an expert right here. I just saw him go into the kitchen. Junior!” Frank called again.

“Go see what they want,” Christine told me.

“Yes, sir?”

The adults looked up as I stepped into the room. They all held drinks or had drinks resting on the coffee table. Except for a small mess of chocolate and strawberry stems in front of my father, the fondue hadn’t been touched.

Barbara turned to my father. “I believe he looks just like you, Alan.”

“That’s why we call him Junior,” my father said, and snorted a laugh.

Frank Martello bounced nuts in his right hand, like they were hot, before popping them one by one into his mouth. “Your folks and I have been talking about the local schools. My wife’s worried about what kind of education Gabriella will get here. She’s afraid the high school isn’t safe. She thinks it’s a jungle of sin and vice—”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s not what she said,” my mother echoed.

“Poor standards. You said you thought the school had ‘poor standards,’ ” my father said, diplomatically.

“And I agreed,” my mother said, nodding.

“And so what we want to know is,” Frank said, going on, “from the student’s point of view, whether you think you’re getting a quality education.”

They watched me expectantly. I hesitated, not sure what they wanted to know. I tugged my shirt from my chest.

“What kind of quality?”

“Well, you know, the school, the facilities, the curriculum …”

“The teachers,” my father said.

“The teachers,” said Frank.

“They seem all right, I guess,” I said. “Not too bad.”

“Would you call it a rigorous education?” Frank asked.

“Well—” I said.

“What about the students?” asked Barbara, sitting up. “How are they? Your classmates?”

“She means the blacks,” said Frank.