The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (30 page)

So they had separated and, at last, divorced. Though the legal tangles were complex, and she was bitter and unyielding in taking her share, it upset Eli to realize that they really had so little to split up. A house, furniture, the silver, gardening tools, and books. No children, of course. And the things that mattered to him—his job, his private life inside his mind—she could not touch, and had never touched. He had always thought they were attached in some great, parasitic way that would allow no separation; but in the end he felt they were simply two great ships, lashed together to wait out the high waves of an ocean storm. It was simply a chore, and no terrible one, to cut the ropes at dawn.

He had his apartment in Hollywood, and Hector, the dog he’d bought five years before and which Kathy had never cared for, never even called by name. He was the interim chair of his department and things were looking good. And, after a few years of dating, he found a girlfriend, Penny, a thin and big-eyed Jewish girl from Baltimore who taught high school botany. A little cynical, but a bit younger and therefore impressionable, adoring even if she didn’t know it. When he was out of town, she took Hector on walks. They had begun to own things together: season tickets to the Dodgers, two paintings (one at his place, one at hers), a plate-filled picnic basket kept in the trunk of her car. The ship-lashing process had begun; marriage was obviously coming within the year. Soon they would own rings together, and furniture, and maybe even still a child. Did he dare to upset the world he’d made without Denise? Could this be, perhaps, the way things were supposed to turn out?

No, he decided, as Jorgeson chattered on about lenses and computers, as the stark sunlight came through the mist like a pail of water thrown into a basin. No—and yet this isn’t like any other kind of risk. Even if he called Denise, even if he wanted that, even if she forgave him—it was difficult to see what might come then. You chance everything, ruin everything once again, wreck it all and still you aren’t left with a fortune. Still you’re only left with love; another risk, just as great, just as awful. It couldn’t be done. At twenty, of course; what was there to lose at twenty? Thirty, perhaps. Not forty. Not fifty. And yet—he couldn’t simply do nothing. He could not stand on the edge of the dormant volcano, realizing his terrible mistake, and not move to correct it. Not with this feeling come alive inside him again, eating him. Eli stood breathing heavily and thought of what should be done. Not just to make the most people happy; that was impossible. He only wanted to be able to live with himself. And, gradually, as the light filled the valley on that morning back in 1986, he knew exactly what to do.

For young Josh, in San Francisco, it was beginning. His dad had left, said his quiet goodbyes, and any minute now, Henry’s shadow would appear on that curtain—the window curtain of the front door. It would fall across the pleats, a jagged profile. Then Josh would hear the scratch of the key, the unseen mechanism of the lock. And then of course the door would open, and then of course it would be Henry Wong himself—first with his blank face, the face of a man clearing his mind of the working day, looking around, and then, when he saw Josh there in the room with all his boxes piled around him like a pharaoh with his treasures, a second lock would turn in the doorway.

It was how Josh imagined it. He stared at the door, a man making a tough decision, but still very much a boy in his hopes, his expectations of how things might turn out. He had been raised to believe that great things would come to him, and he had never questioned it. They did, they always did. His father had driven off up the hill, and the sun was setting, and Josh was here, where he had waited so long to be: staring at this plain white paint, the stiff pleats of a small curtain, the first truly shut door of his life.

Only the young could understand. A room, a hall, a life forever spent in bathrooms yelling “just a minute, jeez!” and nighttimes endured, the first part, listening to the clink of ice in your parents’ drinks as they came upstairs, letting the dog into your room to wake you with a tongue smelling of leftovers, or the second part, pretending to sleep while your roommate turns the crackling pages of a book, or hums to his music, or masturbates with a mournful rustle of the sheets. A truly shut door. As a guitar, restrung to replace the taut and brittle old strings, relaxes into warmer music, so Josh could feel, sitting in the chair and staring at that shut door, the nerves of his spine falling into their new places. Any minute the door would open onto a new life.

He turned on music, rock music, the kind of stuff that Henry raised an eyebrow to but tolerated. He turned it up loud and beat his head to the rhythm, all the while watching the door, and he opened another beer. He needed loud music, and booze, because this was all too much for silence, and because he was really so teenagerly, still, feeling the raucousness beginning in his heart and not being careful with it, not holding his palm against his chest and feeling the frantic beat there, listening quietly, but wanting it to spill out everywhere, loud and boisterous. Henry could not understand it when young Josh woke up in the morning—there! right there, in their bed!—and started to bounce naked on the mattress. When he sat next to Henry in a movie theater, staring at him, whispering that he wanted to become so small that he could crawl into his ear and live there. When he turned on every radio in the house when “their song"—or so Josh called it, since it was playing when they met at a party—was on the air. Another raised eyebrow from quiet Henry Wong, another bemused kiss as he watched the scene. But surely it was what Henry loved about him. The boy’s belief that he, Josh Lanham, the alchemist, the genius, had invented love itself.

He did not believe his parents had ever felt this. How could it be true? He had seen all the photos—he had pored over albums and boxes with his mother just the year before she died, talking about all those characters from their past. He’d seen the picture of them both when they were first dating: a dinner party with the Spivaks, and all of them sitting around a card table in his mother’s old efficiency in Berkeley. His parents had to sit on the bed, and the Spivaks sat in folding chairs; and though they grinned with heady youth, and though a bottle of wine sat empty on the table, still their expressions looked so weary, and their clothes seemed as if they’d be coarse and uncomfortable in any era; and there was something yellowed and dusty about the photograph, as if the world had been covered in a cloud back then. Yet there they were, very much in love, and in the background, a door. The first truly shut door of his mother’s life. Josh did not believe it. You should be able to see love; like those Russian aura photos, it should spot and distort the negative and give the lover a dark glow. But he couldn’t see it there, in anyone.

Some people walked by on the street; Josh could hear their laughter over the music, and for a moment he wanted to be them. He wanted to be people passing on the street, looking up at a frothy Victorian house with one light on, music coming loudly through an open window and the shadow of a boy running around, arranging things, putting things away, singing along. He wanted to feel their jealousy. He wanted to be jealous of himself. He took another swig of beer.

They had never done this, his parents. They had never gone on a date to the Sutro Baths and walked along the ruins of that turn-of-the-century bathing parlor—a set of rocky foundations against the pounding ocean, wind-bashed junipers, a Roman setting—or visited the Musée Méchanique with Henry Wong and watched as he put a quarter in an antique fortune-telling machine—a typewriter moving to invisible hands—and would not let Josh read his printed destiny. All the old penny machines, the Plantation, the Opium Den, the Gold Rush, with wildly spinning dolls in age-tattered clothes, and how this man beside him—square-faced, a birthmark on his nose, lips always apart as if he were about to speak—stared at Josh in a manner so different from the college boys. Not mere desire, not loneliness. He grabbed Josh’s hand and took him outside into the sun again, onto the wide concrete patio crumbled by the earthquake. They stepped into a little building, the Camera Obscura, and it was so unreal, utterly dark except for the ocean pounding blue and white on a giant horizontal disk. Henry kept staring, and Josh, nervous for once, stupidly explained the lenses, boring them both (damn his mother for telling him!). His heart was a bagpipe, wheezing, and when Henry took his hand and kissed him, Josh thought it might be the last thing he would ever do—he might die, and this optical hut would be his tomb.

“As long as it holds with the laws of physics,” Josh’s mother once told him, paraphrasing the inventor of the electric motor, Michael Faraday, “nothing is too wonderful to be true.”

She had been speaking of scientific theories. It was years ago, during their time together in Italy, when they sat on a tiny balcony, two metal chairs crammed in there, eating salami whose skin he unwound in long, translucent strips. His mother, a little drunk, had joked about being asked to join the Academy, and how all scientists secretly hope for it, the way writers hope for the Nobel, silently, just a little. The National Academy of Sciences, she told him happily. Well nothing is too wonderful to be true. But Josh took its meaning for himself.
Something terrible has happened,
his father told him years later on the phone, but Josh had not been able to hear it over the stereo in his dorm room, and his father repeated:
I said something terrible.
After the call, after the shock and the burial where rich relatives appeared with excited faces and his father threw a melodramatic rose onto the coffin, Josh understood that his mother had been speaking of the future from that balcony, a future she would never see, of course, with him here in this room, waiting for his lover’s shadow to appear at the door. Knowing nothing at all of love, she had still meant this.

No one missed her like he did. His mind tricked him to forget she was gone, and this was easy to do, because she had already faded from his mind these last few years. The crises of college, the constant revelations—they had nothing to do with her; she dwindled to a voice over the phone, a cook at holidays. If you had asked him, a year ago, what his life was like, he would have described everything to you, each bright detail and fumbled affair, everything except her. She did not count; she was something other than life. That made her doubly lost. Missing her was not an obvious grief, like his father’s, but a curse. And when he thought of her, it wasn’t as she’d been before her death, as a fiftyish woman who dyed the gray out of her hair, but as she’d been years ago in Rome, when both their lives seemed about to change.

It was the one time he told her everything. Back when he was too young for love, thirteen, terrified to be without her on the streets but also overjoyed. He was thrilled to have stories to give her about the things she never saw: the boats, the men fighting in the streets, the girls on mopeds. He came back each day to tell her, there on the balcony, and he felt her warm gaze searching his face for some sign. Who knew what she saw there? He felt that gaze when he told her about the friends he’d made, the girl who sold him a paper flower, the science museum. The handsome Italian man who had placed his hand on a metal sphere, kissed a girl and made her hair stand on end. That had made his mother smile a little, chewing on her salami. But the gaze made him leave something out, something he wasn’t sure he could tell her. How they had all stood in a line in front of the static electricity machine, each waiting his or her turn; and the man leaned down to touch them, one by one. The man had kissed the women on the cheek, touched the men on the forehead, and when Josh finally stood there and had that grinning man look into his eyes so unwaveringly, press his warm hand to the boy’s face, he wasn’t sure if it was truly science that caused each hair on his body to stand on end.

Henry was late. Josh felt a little tipsy already. The beer with his dad, another at their brief dinner, now this one. He took another swig. The sun was setting, streetlamps were coming on, and as the curtains leaked their light into the room, Josh stood and waited for the next song to start. No, love was not what they’d shown him. Not the fine accumulation of affection. Not the sediment of the heart. It was something that put you in grave danger and, like Josh’s own as he sat once again to stare at the door, it lay spring-loaded in your chest.

“Dr. Spivak! Dr. Jorgeson!”

Eli had not even stepped from the humid, echoing chamber of the dome before Dr. Manday, in a linen suit, his broad form eclipsing half the visible sun, approached with arms wide open. A little boy ran after him with a parasol, struggling to keep his grandfather’s forehead in the shade. The man seemed so overjoyed, so immense with pride, that Eli could hardly believe this was a man of seventy. Yet, as the old professor grew closer and grasped Eli’s hand, and then Jorgeson’s, Eli quickly recognized the signs of age: twelve years before, Dr. Manday had seemed so healthy next to half-blind Swift, but here his body seemed muted, appearing to stumble against his grandson, and his white hair, which used to be so carefully combed and brilliantined, now lay spidery and thin. Still, he shook their hands vigorously, grinning. A parrot squawked from its cage, and feathers floated in the air.

“So glad you could come! So glad you could come!” the old man said.

Jorgeson spoke first: “I always said I’d come back. Didn’t I always say that? And of course, yes, well, after all… unlike the two of you … I don’t have my name on a comet.”

False modesty, Eli knew, because, out of all of them, he was the one who had achieved Denise’s old dream: He had his name on something. He was famous, with his “Jorgeson effect,” and could afford these awkward efforts at humility. Eli, hot in the direct sunlight now and feeling pain all down his back, leaned against the wall.

But Manday frowned. He lifted a finger. “This morning, we are here for Professor Swift.”

“Of course,” Jorgeson said, lowering his chin to his chest.

“It is a time for remembrance,” the old man said again. Yes.