The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (22 page)

She used her first quarter to call her mother. When her home phone rang ten times, she hung up and tried the office instead. Her mother had returned to her old career as a scientific artist on the staff of a magazine. Because of her Ph.D. in botany, she specialized in leaves and cells, but often took on the tougher jobs: microscopic creatures, viral interactions, cutaways of the human heart. “The trick,” her mother told her, as she had when Lydia was a little girl, “is knowing what details to leave out.” She had repeated this advice because Lydia now worked at the same magazine; she was calling her own office number.

“It’s Lydia, is my mom there?”

“I don’t know.” It was Lucas, the young gay man who worked as their receptionist. Lydia wasted a lot of time talking to him, especially about her love life, but he didn’t quite feel like a friend. Good advice, clever stories; but nothing deeper ever evolved. Perhaps he wasn’t very smart. It killed her to reject someone for that old reason. Lucas told her, “She was here, about half an hour ago, I’ll see.”

“Hurry, I’m in a phone booth.”

It wasn’t quite a phone booth; more a clear plastic alcove off the street. She leaned against the plastic as she waited and listened to the rain on the street, constant and soft, hushing the city like a baby. The young man who’d turned to look at her was nowhere to be seen; he had not returned to talk, to ask her name. Of course not, of course not. She noticed a cheap trinket shop across from her, and a series of plastic pictures displayed outside the window, beaded with water. They were tacky portraits of Jesus touching his heart, but she discovered that when you turned your head, the face changed to Mary’s. Jesus, Mary, then back again. She remembered pictures that did something like this from Cracker Jack boxes. While she waited for her mother to answer, hoping her quarter wouldn’t run out, Lydia swayed her head from side to side and watched the portraits change. Jesus, Mary, Jesus, Mary. Surely this meant something dear to someone.

“They say she’s here, but no one can seem to find her.”

“Fuck.”

“Can she call you?”

“I’m fucking locked out of my place, Lucas. I’m in slippers here out on the street, and I’ve got—oh, Jesus, forty-five cents or something.”

“Why don’t you come here? I’ll loan you money.”

“It’s raining. That’s like an hour’s walk in the rain. I’m in fucking slippers.”

“Call back in half an hour. I think she’ll be here.”

“If she’s not, that’s my last quarter.”

“It’s an interesting situation. What do you do in New York all day if you’ve got no money?”

“Play chess in Washington Square.”

“Call in half an hour or so. If she shows up, I’ll make her stay.”

“Thanks, Lucas.”

She hung up and headed toward her friend’s house once again. What a strangely ordinary conversation, she thought. A young woman in a panic, trying to reach her mother at the office. The kind of call that must happen every day, to all kinds of people. How strange—as if it were her real mother. As if that woman had been there all the time these last ten years, criticizing how she dressed and acted, worrying over her bad choices, weeping when she moved to college. A mother to call in a crisis. A dull, average mother instead of this old botanist with a gardening hat and a medical history— this relic from her distant youth transported, nearly whole, into the present. Time was not meant to work like this. We are not meant to skip.

Lydia turned the corner of Charles Street. By now, her dyed-red hair was wet through and through. She squeezed it and it dripped down her back. There was something thoroughly satisfying about being completely soaked; there was no further harm the day could do. At the doorway to her friend’s building, she pulled out the key—if it was the one, it should open the outside door as well. She thought of the warm room upstairs, the cat meowing, the half-eaten breakfast on Kelly’s kitchen table, the couch with its afghan thrown over it. She tried the key. It fit neatly but refused to turn. Another few minutes of wriggling and coaxing and Lydia gave up, leaning against the door. Not this lock, not Kelly’s lock after all.

She lit her third cigarette. What
does
one do in New York with no money, no hat, no shoes?

Gravity is a disease,
the woman thought to herself. She sat on a bench in a Roman square where market stalls were arranged in rows, their plastic canopies flapping in the early evening wind. Her son was beside her, chattering on about the marketplace and the dinner they hoped to buy there. Salami, he insisted, salami and mozzarella and big crusty bread. This was a woman whom Lydia had mostly forgotten, remembering her only as an intermittent character from her past made up of three pictures—an add-a-bead necklace, an anatomy book with transparencies of the body and a friendly black cat. That was all that remained. The woman, in expensive slacks and a short haircut that looked nothing like her old self, nodded to her thirteen-year-old son as he rubbed his crew cut and shouted his hunger. Girls drove by on Vespas, men whistled, pigeons left in a flock from beside her, circled and landed again where they had begun. The woman watched their flight and this made her think of gravity. It was Denise, far from her home, having lost the love of two men in a short span of years.

Gravity is a disease,
she considered again. She was to give a lecture to a freshman class here in Rome, and so she was taking mental notes on one of her own lectures. Something that would translate well. Denise had chosen this one about gravity. The idea infuriated her young astronomers, and it was a silly argument, but she enjoyed playing with them, testing what they assumed to be true. “We take it as a primal force,” she would tell them, “but maybe we’re just studying an aberration.” A disease. You catch it from everything around you—things pull at you and stretch you out, tugging at the path you planned until you bend back like a willow branch to where you began. Everything is grabbing at everything; even beams of light, infected by the planets and the stars, loop crazily in space like those doves, until we cannot quite know what we see, whether gravity’s virus has contaminated even the spread of stars above us. No, it has, she considered; we know it has. The moon pulls at the ocean and the tides go in and out. The earth pulls at the moon and traps it like a pale maiden in a high tower. Even a comet cannot shoot with shivering light through a galaxy—the planets spread infection and the comet is drawn in, stricken, spiraling or ellipsing around a center in a skewed, pointless orbit until some other greater planet crooks its finger and the comet comes running. Everything is pulling at everything; no one gets through untouched. “And we can do nothing about it,” Denise would remark to her classes with open palms. “We observe the victims. We take notes on the plague.”

An unusual thought to come to her on this sabbatical in Rome, but it pleased her like any idea before sleep. “And if it is a plague,” the lecture continued in her mind, “what would be the cure?”

A yellow wind-up bird went clattering above them, its plastic wings flapping frantically as it gained height, then began to glide and drop, moving more like a bat than a sparrow with its dipping, random shuffle through the air before it hit the stone of the square and, after a few hopeless bursts of its wings, skidded to a stop. Two boys in jackets came running, one with a shining key in his hand, the secret to the bird’s movement. They took the object gently in their hands and began to wind again.

“They’re going to close soon,” her son said forcefully. He was talking about the market stalls, which she was afraid of approaching.

She sighed dramatically, wanting to amuse him. “We’d better get this over with.”

“I’ll do it, you know. I’ll totally do it.”

Denise shook her head, saying, “But, you know, I’m the mother. I’m supposed to be in charge and buy dinner, but… God, those ladies are so intimidating….”

“I’ll do it,” Josh repeated, touching his chest. He was serious. “I took Spanish. That’s like Italian.”

“Go do it, then,” she said, trying not to laugh at his intensity. She brought her purse onto her lap. “Just point and give them the money. Here. Here, give them a really big bill, and that way you always have given them enough. So, salami…”

He rolled his eyes. “Mom, I know. Salami, mozzarella and bread.”

“Grazie.”

Her son, Josh, running toward the stalls, some of which were already closing, her wonderful son. There was an arrogance about him that should have irritated her, but she felt overjoyed; perhaps she recognized it in herself. And not just herself at that age, at nervous, fantastic thirteen, but still in herself. She loved it, for instance, when he said what he just had—"I know"—because she knew it as a ploy. He would stand holding a lemonade at a party, grinning, crew cut stippled with sun, hand-on-stocky-hip like an espresso pot, and when you told him, “Apparently there’s a total eclipse tomorrow over Europe,” he’d keep his steady grin, letting his drink melt, and say “Oh, I know.” His mother loved it when he said it, and not because she liked him to be arrogant, but because it was so obvious that he
didn’t know.
It made her want to laugh, and she egged him on with sly trick comments like “You know, they found out two male movie stars are actually women" or “Turns out Nancy Reagan once voted Communist,” and there Josh would go in his almost-bored voice: “Oh, I know.” It was a terrible habit, but it pleased her to no end.

The bird went through the air again, this time less successfully. It barely cleared the head of an old woman in black, who stood up and shouted at the boys for a long time. They seemed to take her very seriously. Josh stood under a canopy talking to another woman in black, and he pointed and gestured and bent over to hear her words. He was buying dinner, happily taking on a language he didn’t know. His bravery always astounded Denise; neither she nor her husband was brave in any way. In fact, she knew very few people who were brave. Kathy, perhaps. And, in his way, also Eli.

She lost Eli nearly five years ago. It happened a few months after the most recent trip to the island, after half a dozen or so midnight visits to that hillside near Tranquillity, wrapped together in a quilt to search for comets in the early morning sky. Denise had no glimmer of doubt, either on the island or during those nights. In fact, she felt that those evenings on the island, with Kathy gone and Adam sick and fevered in his hut, had changed their affair. It had gone from something quick and simple, a pleasant nostalgia and weakness, into an affection that threatened their other lives. And Eli, Eli had been the one begging her to stay. She remembered lying on the old reed mat, Eli whispering in her ear about the great mistakes they had made in their lives. “There isn’t enough time to keep going like this,” he told her softly. “We’re too old now.” His face was desperate and loving in the dim light of that stone hut, the same expression he had worn years before in the doorway of her flat, hoping to change her mind, as if this conversation took up exactly where that one left off. As if no one had hurt anyone or loved anybody else. And time had softened him, his mind as well as his body, taken away the rough anger of his idealism and the tension in his muscles. She rubbed the furry roundness of his belly. “I’m going to leave Kathy,” he whispered, staring at her in the darkness.

“No you’re not.”

“And you’re going to leave Adam.”

This time she didn’t say anything, and they did not speak of it again. He smiled and lay down beside her, because there seemed to be an implicit understanding that he was right, it was true, this was what they were both going to do. Not as if Eli were telling her his decision, but as if he had caught some cloudy glimpse of the future in the bat-grimed darkness of the ceiling: he would leave Kathy; she would leave Adam. She felt him take her hand, and she stared out the window. Had he seen her flinch?

This was too much for her. The hot room, this old friend, the returning comet—everything in the past had got tangled up somehow. She had a bout of anger at herself; she had not thought it through this far, and yet Eli’s hope was surely the obvious future. Surely this was what she had wanted, yes? Why she started all this on that chill evening when she touched his shoulder? Denise had noticed the uncertainty in his eyes that night, felt hope staggering noisily in his chest, yet she had made it happen. A kiss on a comet night, and a hastily whispered promise to be kind. Had she meant it? Wait, wait, she kept thinking as the waves shifted on the sand outside the hut, I haven’t thought this through. When she started this, a year before, it was for different reasons: a loneliness that both of them could recognize, a memory of what it felt like to be young. That old crush, that old affair—he was an accomplice, a coconspirator in the plot to kidnap time. They would trap it and raise it as their own. They would make a little life inside of life. But this, Eli’s clear and awful vision of the future—how could he expect it, for someone to throw off her old life for something just as difficult, as unsure? She squeezed his hand and smiled through her doubt.

Their next two comet hunts were beautiful: cold; the gegenschein, that disapproving eye, glimmering overhead; the two of them wrapped in her family quilt as they waited to adjust the telescope, whispering in the wilderness for no reason except the excitement of having to whisper. This still excited her, and having Eli to talk to, his wandering mind flashing with ideas. Eli seemed to have become more amorous, which annoyed her, since she hadn’t begun all this just for sex, just for clouds of breath on a chill mountain; he also became rougher, biting her, and she wondered if he were trying to get her caught, leaving red marks that she would later have to explain to Adam as “fleas in that old blanket.” Denise thought it was funny that they even searched for comets anymore on those evenings. The hunts were just an excuse to be together, discuss science and their lives, and they could easily have lied and met in a bed-and-breakfast on the coast, sitting in a hot tub and watching the surf pummel the shore. She told this to Eli as they were packing the equipment at dawn, and he shrugged.

“It would feel different,” he said, folding the telescope into its case. “Ordinary.”