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

deadpan. “Just not very good ones.”
    Two American boys, a redhead and a fat kid, ran by, coaxing a local boy to join their game of catch. He failed to catch a baseball and it went flying, once more, over the edge of the parapet into the darkness and down to the beach fifty feet below. Parents were shushing them but they would not listen, producing another ball and tossing it again.
    “Do you have him?” Lydia asked, meaning the monkey.
    Kathy ignored the question. “But why do they yell ‘Time’?”
    Lydia sniffed and brushed loose curls out of her eyes. “I don’t know. So Mr. Manday can write it down. Didn’t they tell you?”
    “I don’t think I was listening.”
    “You should really listen.”
    “You’re right.”
    “Sometimes,” Lydia said quite seriously, leaning forward, “I’m a princess.” Then she went away.
    Kathy was more astonished by this little girl than by anything happening above her. The stars were forever falling, the sky turned nightly; but how often did you find a subtle strangeness in an ordinary girl? It was a precious thing to see. Most of the people who knew her would have called Kathy a misanthrope, but they misunderstood her. She adored people, loved being with them and talking to them, but she didn’t like any of the obvious things about them. She hated joke-tellers, “charming" people, beauty or grace in any form, raconteurs or wits or geniuses. What Kathy loved were the hidden, tiny madnesses in ordinary people.
    At a party, for instance, she often found herself confronted with grinning, clever couples. The man could always talk wittily about the president, and the wife could whisper cunningly about the hostess. This kind of stable marriage, this vaudeville act, bored Kathy to tears. She had come up with clever ways to separate the spouses and then pry past their dull exteriors until she discovered an obsession, an old regret, or a long-abiding fury that quickly subsided in an embarrassed murmur. It wasn’t that she wanted to humiliate these people. Really, Kathy just wanted to like them a little more. She wanted to discover how they, too, were human. And when she told you that she liked someone, what she really meant was that she’d glimpsed some unexpected oddity within them, and loved them for it. It was why she liked Denise, for instance—that ordinary rich girl who revealed her craziness so easily, almost happily, at the first scratch of a nail. It was also what had drawn her to Eli.
    Eli had at first, like all people, seemed unnecessary. Another Jewish boy at a chemistry party, another dark-browed and selfish intellectual for her mother to adore. After being introduced to him, Kathy had quickly escaped to a corner where she could sit by herself, but he had persistently found her and the safe corner became a trap; they were walled in by laughing scientists and girlfriends, and Kathy was forced to sit beside this dull man on the plush red love seat, listening to him chat about his life and prospects. Kathy pretended to listen, sipping her gin, looking at Eli’s face; noticing how he had tried to slick his curls back; thinking how, in his narrow tie and dark suit, he looked like a child dressed up for a wedding.
    She wasn’t pretty or clever, and she knew it. Kathy was plain, odd and aloof and, as she understood it, men wanted nothing to do with such a creature. Her mother had often yelled at her to stop reading, fix her hair, sit in the parlor when boys came around so they might see her. Her mother tried to teach her a secret way to bake a pie, thinking this kind of talent might give Kathy’s ashen skin a buttery glow, but cooking had merely made the girl interested in chemistry. Once, before a school dance, her mother took Kathy downtown to look at dresses, promising her a book if she would go into Sears, if she would at least point out something she liked. Kathy dreamed of her book—
The Waves,
by Virginia Woolf—and, impatient for the feel of its cover,