The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

“A little, I guess.”

  “Why would he be excited?” Megan asked.

  “Oh, I’d be excited. New classes, new teachers. Meeting new friends. Dances, dating, all that.”

  “Your first kiss. That’s something to look forward to,” said my father. “Maybe Meg can give you some pointers. Huh, Meg? What about that? Huh?” He laughed, an abrupt snorting sound.

  Megan frowned. “Dad, you’re being gross.”

  “Yes, Alan, that is a little gross,” my mother said.

  “Anyhoo. I know I’m excited,” he said, settling back and digging into his cake. Though it was summer, he wore his teaching outfit: black shoes, dark pants, white short-sleeved shirt, and a narrow tie. He’d just returned from a science-teaching seminar in Baton Rouge that day, where, he told us, he’d picked up some nifty ideas for his class this year—group projects, cross-curricular study activities, interactive demonstrations.

  “That’s how you make a lesson more fun,” he said, gesturing with his fork. “You get the students up and moving around. Science is interesting. It’s just the teachers that are boring. Of course, it would help if we had a decent lab. We can hardly do anything with that junk we’ve got now.”

  He launched into his usual complaint about the lack of support for the sciences in the Louisiana public schools. No respect, he said, none at all. Football and baseball, that was all anyone cared about. While Principal Lee showered money on Coach DuPleiss, his labs meantime were falling to pieces.…

  Megan rolled her eyes, and my mother gave a little sigh as she began picking at a ridge of frosting with her fork. We had no interest in what my father had to say, but we were his family, after all, the kindest audience he had, and so we ate our cake and let him talk.

  Other people—tellers at the bank, cashiers at the IGA—all had a way of grinning when my father began to speak, as if they couldn’t take him quite seriously. And certainly, he was peculiar. A tall, angular man, he was always blinking and peering around, like he’d just stumbled into a room and wasn’t sure where he was. He rode a rattling Raleigh three-speed bicycle to school, instead of driving a car like any normal person would do, and he carried a brown briefcase that he swung stiffly at his right side with a ridiculous air of importance. More than once I had seen students, high schoolers, even third graders, following my father down the hallway and imitating his jerky walk, swinging invisible briefcases, twitching and snorting and then falling all over themselves with laughter.

  That year I would be entering his freshman Earth and Space Science class, and the thought of being his student, sitting in his classroom, filled me with dread.

  “God help you. Although not even God can help you there,” my sister had warned me. “I have yet to recover.”

  He pushed back from the table. “I picked up something else in Baton Rouge.” He winked. “Special order. Be right back,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom.

  “He’s really excited. He could hardly wait to give it to you,” my mother whispered as she bent in to take my plate. “At least try to pretend you like it, okay? It means a lot to him.”

  My father reappeared carrying a bulky gift-wrapped box. “Here we are.” He rested it carefully on the coffee table and called us into the front room. “Go ahead, open it. It’s yours.”

  My heart sank. I knew what it was. He’d been hinting at it all summer. I sat on the couch and cradled the gift in my lap. Megan settled heavily on the armrest. “What is it?” she asked. My father stood at the edge of the rug, bracing his hands on his hips and twitching all over, like he was holding himself back from diving in and ripping off the paper himself. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

  “It’s a telescope,” I said when I got the wrapping off. “Wow. Gosh. Look at that.” I turned the box around and looked it up and down, trying to show some enthusiasm.

  “Huh? Yeah? Huh?” he said.

  “Look up. Smile!” my mother called, and took a Polaroid.

  My father already had his own telescope, of course, but his was old and not very powerful. What a person really needed, he’d been saying—if you really wanted to get good resolution—was a Celestron C8. It was the Mercedes-Benz of telescopes, the latest thing, made in California. A high-quality telescope like that wasn’t cheap, but a good one would last a lifetime. An investment, he called it. Wouldn’t I like something like that? We’d be able to track the comet with it, catch it before anyone else saw it, follow it all the way to the Sun and back.

  “That’s not a toy, you know,” he said as I lifted it out of the box. “It’s a serious piece of scientific equipment. But I figured that you were old enough now.…”

  Megan asked practical questions about the telescope: How far could you see with it? How did it work? And why was it so short and stumpy-looking? I knew all the answers; my father had already schooled me on the C8. It was a compound refractor-reflector, which was why it was so short. The light came in at the open end, bounced off a big mirror at the back, bounced off another mirror at the front, and then was focused down to the viewing lens, here—

  My father interrupted my explanation. “With the forty millimeter Plössl eyepiece, you’ll get a magnification of about fifty power. Although theoretically, with the C8 you could get a maximum magnification of four hundred and eighty power. Cool, huh?”

  “Far out,” said Megan. Her interest spent, her family obligations fulfilled, she headed upstairs to listen to records. “Happy birthday,” she called and closed the door to her bedroom.

  My father couldn’t hold back any longer. He scooted in and squatted next to me. Soon he had the telescope in his own hands, running his fingers excitedly over the tube, his eyes bright behind his glasses. “How about that? You like it? Huh? You like it?”

  While he checked all the parts, my mother, to make the occasion more festive, put a Pete Fountain record on the hi-fi and made drinks, a Coke for me, a rum and Coke for her and my father—“For fun,” as she liked to say. If our family had anything like a cheerleader, she was it. She was the one who staged all our birthdays, planned our holidays, arranged the group photos, and signed our names to Christmas cards when she mailed them out. That we had any sense at all of “the Broussards” as a family unit was mostly due to her—although, to be sure, she rarely got credit for this. If anything, my sister and I wondered why our mother bothered to make such a fuss over such a lost cause.

  She was just returning with the drinks when my father stood up.

  “Let’s bring it outside,” he said, and, carrying the scope in his arms, he headed for the door.

  The air was swampy and warm. To either side were more homes like ours, small boxy hutches with clapboard siding, screened-in porches, and muddy yards. A broken line of bald cypresses and tupelos marked the edge of Bayou Black, a low, sluggish creek that passed behind the neighborhood. When a north breeze blew, as it did tonight, you could smell the Gulf. Bullfrogs and crickets kept up their noisy racket, lending a feeling of wildness to our damp little backyard, and a reminder that we barely had a foothold here—that given half a chance, the water and swamp would rush back in and reclaim the land from under us. “Terra non firma,” my father liked to call it, stamping his foot on the ground as though to demonstrate its unsoundness.

  I stood by while he set up the telescope. My mother stood back by the porch, arms crossed lightly over her chest with her drink in one hand, smiling at her two boys.

  “Check the ground surface first to make sure it’s level, no rocks or holes,” my father said as he bobbed around the tripod. He still had on his party hat, a red cone with white polka dots, like what a clown would wear. “Be sure the legs are locked. You don’t want it tipping over. Now, the first thing we do is polar align it.”

  I looked over the top of his hat, across the black water to our new neighbors’ house on the opposite bank of the bayou. Spotlights shone on the walls and up into the fronds of tall, freshly planted palm trees on the back patio. Upstairs and down, lights glowed goldenly behind the win
dows, suggesting a rich, vibrant interior life. Their house stood out like a jewel in the darkness.

  “Man-oh-man. Look at that. Sharp.”

  My father stepped back and called me over. I bent to the eyepiece, curious in spite of myself. A bright blob wavered into view.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the Moon, silly. Don’t you recognize the Moon?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “You have to hold still. Breathe easy. I trained it on the Sea of Tranquility. They were right there, Mr. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walking around. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  I blinked and breathed. The image steadied itself in the glass, revealing a silvery, desolate landscape. My father squatted at my side, pointing out some of the more prominent lunar features while reciting their names at my ear: The Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Fecundity, the rays of Tycho, the rays of Copernicus. I peered closer, hoping I might see something interesting, an American flag, maybe, or leftover pieces of a landing module, but all I could make out were dusty hills and shadows. I wondered why anyone would ever want to go there, it looked so cold and lonely.

  “Come see,” he called to my mother.

  She tottered down the yard in her high-heeled sandals and, holding her drink aside in one hand, bent to the telescope.

  “Careful you don’t spill on it,” he said.

  “I won’t!”

  She had a slim figure, narrow shoulders, and a straight back. Even though she was my mother, I could see it was true what people said about her, that she was a pretty woman. Even in a cardboard party hat, Lydia Simoneaux Broussard managed to look pretty. It was only lately that I had begun to notice what an unlikely couple my parents made: she petite and stylish and full of spunk, he gawky and birdlike and dull as a stick. I sometimes wondered what they were even doing together in the first place. Did they love each other? What did love even look like between two adults like them? And who in the world were these two strange creatures, Alan and Lydia, who called themselves my parents, anyway?

  “Is this the comet?” my mother asked, blinking into the eyepiece.

  “No, it’s not the comet. It’s the Moon! My god, doesn’t anyone recognize the Moon when they see it?”

  “Wowser. Gosh. Look at that. It looks really close,” she said, and then pulled away and headed inside, as little interested in the Celestron as Megan, apparently.

  “Let’s see what else this baby can do,” my father said.

  He fiddled some more with the knobs, talking about declination and right ascension and azimuth. After some time studying the Moon, he went for Venus, and then Mercury. Then he began scanning the spaces between stars, “just to see what’s out there.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. There’d been some remarkable discoveries made by amateurs doing just what we were. A Japanese man, a factory worker, had discovered half a dozen comets on his own using an ordinary old Seiko Polarex. Another man, a British pastor, found a new comet while looking out his living room window one night with a pair of binoculars. All it took was time. Time and perseverance. Tradition held that the comet was named after its discoverer.

  “What if we found one, huh? Wouldn’t that be neat? Comet Broussard. How about that? Comet Junior.”

  But I’d soon had enough of the telescope, too. I didn’t want to leave all at once, for fear of disappointing my father, so at first I stood a little distance apart on the lawn, and then sat on the back porch steps, and then stood near the door, before finally saying I had to use the bathroom and ducking inside. My father didn’t seem to notice. He was gone, lost in his love for worlds millions of miles from our own.

  I retreated upstairs to my room. There was my bed, my desk, my bookcase full of books. My junior high school twenty-five-pound junior barbell set rested against one wall, gathering dust. Next door, my sister played “Killing Me Softly with His Song” over and over on her stereo. From the window I could see my father down in the backyard working the telescope beneath the big, deep sky.

  I had just turned fourteen and nothing had changed. I could wish all I wanted, but I was still the same lonely, frustrated boy I was when I was thirteen. My parents, too, were the same, my sister the same. My room, our house, our small dull town, the night sky, everything exactly the same. Birthdays, I was beginning to suspect, were a kind of dirty trick, a way to get you all excited about nothing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I moved closer to my dormer window. The window was up, the air outside tepid and still. By leaning to the right, I could see between the trees and across the bayou to her house. Its lights fell on the black water, creating a shimmering, inverted double of itself, like a castle floating upside down in a dream. I wondered what she was doing there tonight, at home in her dream castle. Only a twenty-foot-wide canal separated us, but it might as well have been an ocean, and she was on the other side of it, as remote and inaccessible to me as a Roman princess.

  Over the past year and a half, my mother and I had watched as the new house went up on the other side of the water: first the sprawling foundation, then the ground floor, then the second floor. A walled-in patio with a pool and a cabana were added, then a fanciful gazebo in the side yard, and then a boardwalk leading down to a boat dock on the water. The house was so marvelous, so grand that it looked almost absurdly out of place there at the edge of our muddy bayou. “Good lord, it’s huge,” my mother said.

  All the neighbors on our side of the canal were curious. People knew that Frank Martello was an oil man from Shreveport—he’d been coming here for years on business and he kept a condo in Thibodaux. But what about the rest of the family? We sometimes caught glimpses of a lady, sometimes two, stepping out of a white Cadillac at the front of the building site. “Wowser,” my mother said, straining to make out their clothes and features from our back porch. “Look at them. Like movie stars at a premiere.”

  When the family finally moved in two weeks ago, I biked across the Franklin Street bridge and watched from the end of the block as freight trucks from New Orleans department stores came and went and men in uniforms unloaded furniture all day. That’s when I first spotted her, standing beside the fountain in their yard of newly plugged grass. She was wearing pink shorts and a pink top that showed off her bare arms and legs. Her skin was tanned a golden brown—although it wasn’t a tan, exactly, but a hue. Her color came from inside her, as if she held the heat and glow of the Sun inside her. Her hair was thick and black, pulled up in back. Standing in the yard perched on one leg, the other craned up with her foot resting on her inner thigh, she looked like some exotic tropical bird who’d flown off course and landed by mistake in our town. Even then, even in that first view from a block away, I knew she was special. The movers, every one of them, stopped to talk to her—grown men sweating and grunting under heavy pieces of furniture, lingering in the yard just for a chance to speak to her, to admire her lithe teenage body. My mother soon managed to learn their names: Frank’s wife was Barbara, and their daughter was Gabriella.

  Gabriella: even her name was beautiful, angelic, impossible.

  Down in the backyard, I saw my father fold up the telescope and carry it inside. In a minute he appeared at my bedroom door with it, talking excitedly about what an amazing instrument it was and how good it’d be for viewing the comet.

  “We ought to take it out of the town some night soon. Get away from the lights and find some elevation. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Save my money, he said, and I could buy a more powerful eyepiece. A good twenty-five millimeter wouldn’t be that expensive. He could help me out if I wanted.

  He carefully stood the telescope in the corner and stepped back, hands on his hips, admiring it, this fine, expensive instrument, the Mercedes-Benz of telescopes. His present, I understood, was meant to be a bond between us, the thing that would hold us together even as my adolescence tried to pry us apart. In his eyes, nothing could have been better than this: a father, a son, their telescope.

  “Well. Happy birthday, son.”<
br />
  “Night, Dad.”

  My father looked at me as if he meant to say something more. He still wore his clown hat—he’d forgotten he had it on, apparently. He blinked and nodded, shoved his glasses up on his nose. Then he inexplicably laughed—one short, goofy snort—turned, and left.

  I looked at the Celestron standing in the corner of my room. What kind of a gift was that? What kind of a father was this? I didn’t want a telescope for a birthday present. Who would? No doubt he meant well, but my father moved in a universe of his own—“His head in the stars,” as my mother put it. I wondered if he could even see me at all, blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. As a parent, he was practically useless. Like the telescope—good for nothing. I felt like kicking the damn thing.

  But then, staring at his ridiculous present, an idea occurred to me. Yes, of course.

  I pushed my desk chair out of the way, pulled the telescope over to the window, and adjusted the legs. The angle was a little awkward, owing to the narrowness of my dormer window, and the brick wall around their patio blocked most of my view of the downstairs. But by panning along the wall, I found the set of tall iron gates giving access to their patio. I adjusted the focus until I could see across the patio to the back of their house, where a room with large windows and a sliding glass door faced the pool.

  Inside I found Mr. Martello sitting in a leather recliner, drinking from a bottle of beer, his image jittering in the lens of the scope. I panned a fraction of a degree to the right and discovered the corner of a TV cabinet, and then a painting of a horse and hound, and a wooden floor lamp, and the edge of a couch. And there, hanging out over the corner of the couch, was a bare, tanned knee. My breath caught in my throat. It was her. It had to be her. I could hardly believe my luck.

  She was sitting with her legs crossed Indian style, watching TV with her father while reading a magazine she held in her lap. She turned a page of the magazine, and then she tilted her head into view and lifted her hand to her hair. She twirled her fingers in her hair, curling and uncurling strands of it around her index finger. Her fingernails, I could see, were painted a bright, playful, achingly suggestive pink.