Free The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer Page B

A cloud moved away from the sun and warm light made its way to them, first to Swift, then to Manday, as they both stood in awkward contemplation of this invisible object and its course. It seemed to Manday that Swift had forgotten him, or could see through him, and that he simply didn’t matter. Even standing in the doorway with a bottle of red table wine, he didn’t matter. The bearded man finally took the bottle and patted his shoulder.
    “Let’s hope the old boy’s fine,” he said.
    Manday stepped into the house; he was careful about crossing thresholds here. Americans were so territorial. “The old boy?”
    Swift brandished the gleaming blade as they walked through the mud room and into the kitchen. “1953 Two,” he said. “The old vile star.” He always used the numerical name for it, being too humble or aware to call it Comet Swift.
    “You think it’s gone?” This made no sense to Manday; there was no way to calculate such a thing. The comet, with no tail now, could not be seen or even sensed on Earth.
    “Well, that’s always the fun part, isn’t it?” Swift said, violently pulling open drawers in search of a corkscrew (he always had to relearn this house, his mistress). “You remember Van Meehern, poor guy. He was my best friend, you know. I remember we were so young when he got his comet. He was … oh, it was called 1948 Three, so how old was I? Thirty-five or something, truly young, truly young. Beautiful comet, brand-new from the Oort Cloud, just bright and amazing.” Swift seemed to be talking wistfully about a woman as he opened the wine bottle between his legs. “We were at Palomar at the next calculated return, just a few years later—oh, it was exciting! Were you ever young, Manday?”
    Manday hadn’t expected a question. He was just holding a wineglass, waiting for it to be filled, and then here he was, being asked if he had ever been young. It felt like a punch—him, young, no he hadn’t ever been young. He had been a different person. How could he ever explain it to this man?
    But Swift didn’t wait for any reply: “We had signed up nights for a week, and we were there with some grad students, up all night with coffee, talking, looking at the sky to see that signature glimmer. Five nights passed before we realized it wasn’t coming back, and then another night before Van Meehern ran outside and just looked up at the sky. Damn cold. Never trust a woman or a comet, Manday.”
    “Was it Jupiter?” Manday asked, although he knew this story, and knew Swift’s old expression. He knew what was missing from the story, too: the real grief of Dr. Van Meehern that night, something they all had felt at four in the morning when the lenses showed nothing, a strange sadness over empty numbers; forgetting, in that cold air, the people whom they loved or ought to love.
    Swift poured wine happily, never mentioning that embarrassing sight of his friend under the dark sky, weeping. “Who knows? Did it break up, or was it too big? Did it shoot out into space? It’s lost. So, as for 1953 Two, who knows?”
    “Here is to 1953 Two,” Manday proposed, lifting his glass. They toasted, old friends, and talked in very specific, mathematical terms about the stars and clouds of dust, a nonsense topic they could float in harmlessly.
    The doorbell rang again, rhythmically—
shave-and-a-hair-cut
— someone funny must have arrived. Grad students.
    Up in the loft of the barn, Lydia was missing her sister and, specifically, missing the pot they had smoked together over Christmas on Alice’s last break from boarding school. Part of her parents’ fight over custody had ended in Alice, a thin, gloomy, guitar-playing girl who wrote verse plays in a flowered notebook, being sent off to a boarding school near Mendocino. This was a perfect, King Solomonlike solution to the adults’ wrangling, but baffled both sixteen-year-old Alice and her sister. But Alice hadn’t really changed—she had grown harder, of