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

the matter? It’s all right, things are great,” and then began to list off everything wonderful in their life. She looked peaceful, listening. It
was
wonderful! The house here in the city, their friends, the food and fun they had despite their poverty, the freedom of this time in history, his own career. He held her, loving her—it was wonderful.
    “I’ll give you a hint,” she said one night as he held her and she felt stiff in his arms. It was in their small bedroom, almost a closet, high above the street near the campus. There was a picture of baby Eli and his brothers hung on the wall, yellow and old. The curtain was a green bedsheet, and they lay in a bed too big for the room. There was a tone in Kathy’s voice that he sometimes hated. He couldn’t imitate it, or tell you what it was until he heard it, but there it was. It usually came when she didn’t want to have sex. This time, however, she said, “When I look sad, don’t tell me things are great, that I shouldn’t be sad.”
    “But.” He tried not to feel angry. He was so patient, so good, didn’t she see it?
    She thrust out her lower lip, as if pitying him; he hated that, too. She wore her hair in a flip that stroked the pillow, and her glasses magnified her eyes and made her face seem pinched just above her nose. “Don’t even worry about why I’m sad, or what I tell you. Just say, ‘That must be hard.’”
    “Kathy, you’ll know it’s a line. I want to help you….”
    “Trust me. Just say, ‘That must be hard,’ like that.” She leaned back on the pillow, her face so pale. Outside, sirens blasted through the dirty streets. They were both silent. “You can say it now,” she whispered with a little smile. “I’m feeling sorry for myself.”
    “That must be hard,” he told her, baffled, almost horrified that she would give him a trick to work on her.
    But for some reason it appeased her. Something in her unhooked and relaxed. “It is,” she told him, resting her book on her chest and closing her eyes.
    He’d held her moist hand and wondered why she loved him.
    Eli was a few distant yards from her now, gazing at Centaurus above the Southern Cross. Something moved in the blackness—a bat—there were bats crossing the sky and he couldn’t see them, just the way they blocked some stars in a jagged pattern. Instinctively he leaned his head down, and then saw others doing it as well. Denise awoke and let out a little scream of terror. Where was Swift? Farther toward the golden dome, his daughter asleep at his feet, a pale bundle. Eli set his eye to the sky again, and Centaurus leaped toward him like a tiger. In its teeth was everything the men and wives could not see, not if they had the keenest eyes—that irregular galaxy spotting the centaur’s hide, the globular cluster—and there were objects too faint even for normal telescopes, objects Eli knew were there from his late nights up in the mountains of San Jose, above the clouds: two spiral galaxies turning in the centaur, bright and spending gamma rays like drunken sailors. It was true, what he told Kathy, all of it—that life was wonderful, every precious particle of it.
    He would buy her a present. He had already written a note in the margins of his novel, hoping that she would come across it late one night while he was at the telescope. He imagined her in bed, yawning, dutifully reading along until she noticed the tiny message beside the words. Then she might understand what he somehow could not tell her. But more. He would bring something tomorrow while she slept off this night—not a photograph of a fireball, nothing as selfish as that—one of those golden combs. Like the combs in Mrs. Manday’s hair. He would try to talk to the island woman where she sat with a look of girlish concern beside her husband. Kathy was beautiful— the pink-tinted smile, her lost sleepy look in the morning when she was weak and funny, her sharp stare across a room of people which meant she