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

gestured toward a white dress with daisies all across the bodice, knowing her mother couldn’t afford it. One morning a week later, Kathy awoke to see a shabby copy of that dress hanging on the door. Her mother had stayed up nights to make it. She had sewn it all from scraps and memory and a sharp, desperate hope. Kathy wore the dress that night as Eli tried to charm her, not out of sentiment or vanity. It was the only nice dress she had. Her only thought was how to escape this nice, dull boy, until she began to listen to his babbling monologue about comets and realized he was out of his mind.
    “Wait,” she said, searching his face. “Did you say they were like little girls?”
    Noticing her interest, he perked up, began to move his hands, elaborating. “Like little girls in their dark rooms, combing their long hair, it’s really the image of the hair, and we are, the astronomers, we’re sort of peeking in on them.”
    “Like voyeurs? Watching little girls?”
    “Well, I…”
    She considered this, looking at a picture on the wall. “There’s something so sinister about that image. …”
    He looked confused, a little angry, and another curl came loose over his forehead. “I… I didn’t mean it
that
way!”
    “Oh,” Kathy said, facing him again, clearly disappointed. “You didn’t?”
    But she’d sighted something odd about him, despite all his attempts to cover it. Every time she saw him, it became more clear that he was deeply strange and utterly wrong about himself: He was convinced he thought rationally and carefully, but in fact Kathy could see how he was ruled by contradictory passions, old beliefs, religious superstitions, cowardly prejudices of all kinds. She saw how his thoughts flew recklessly, never landing, and it excited her. Hour by hour, he became more fascinating to her.
    “You look like a married man,” she told him one night in Provincetown, months after the party, when he had arranged for them to spend the night together. Until then, because of her indecision, they had never done anything more than kiss. How long would he seem wonderful to her? Would she reach some final strangeness and watch his personality wither back to normal? Kathy knew what this night meant; she could see how nervous Eli was, that his mind was full of countless ideas about how this night might go, for the better, for the worse, depending on her.
    “Married? Me?” He held up his ringless hand, confused. They were sitting on the couch, in front of a fire, two feet apart. “You think I’m lying to you? You think I’m married and …”
    “I didn’t say you
were
one, I said you
looked like
one, which you do.”
    Kathy watched his desperate stare, his long face half in shadow, his eyes shining, and she saw how in love he was. He had told her the history of his heart, the girls he’d dated, how a beauty last year had toyed with him cruelly and left him childishly moping. Kathy saw in his look how that pain had been wiped away. He thought only of her. Amazing. In the darkness, it lit every inch of his face.
    “I always wanted to look married,” he told her.
    “It becomes you,” she had said as she stood up in the firelight and began to unbutton her blouse. She could hear him catch his breath.
    On the overlook, Kathy watched her husband, a few years older, looking more like a married man than before as he and Denise whispered in the red glow of their flashlights. She watched another student approach, talk with them, then walk away. Denise glanced across the broad, dark stone and caught Kathy’s eye. They must have been talking about her. What would they have said? That she was as odd as ever, Kathy assumed. That’s what people had always said. She saw Denise look away, then back again. How could they be so similar, her husband and this WASP girl? Whispering like spies across the parapet—how had these friends found each other across the crowded plain of youth? Kathy had never done it. She had never found an