The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

of paper; show where, deep in the constellation, a spiral galaxy brooded. But in her folded arms, her tired stare, you would know it didn’t leap and form in her head; that even if she tried to pluck an image from his scribblings, hanging like a grape among the vines of math, it would not keep. Her mind was a poor place for his kind of wonder; after a while, the joy of it grew bad, turned to nothing. He had wanted, when he married Kathy, to take her up and show her what obsessed him as a boy, the hours he had stolen to bike in darkness to an observatory, the passion for it in college (all gone, of course, or changed). His mind was overfilling, like a library crammed with volumes to the ceiling, stacks on the tables, pages dusty on the floor; he had wanted to attach her to his library and fill that, too, with charts and names and nebulae. It was a foolish way to treat people, Eli knew, standing staring naked-eyed at the constellations (nothing yet in Centaurus, no sparks from its hoofs), and he felt very sorry.
    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