A Trip to the Stars (3 page)

On my first night in New Orleans I lay awake under the rough sheet on a narrow iron bed. The bed was pushed up against the wall, and through the window I looked across the street at the old asylum that was now a dance hall. Now, even when I slept at night, I didn’t dream. In fact, the moment I left New York I stopped having those dreams about Loren writing to me in Latin. When he filled my thoughts, as he often did, I heard only the language of guilt and remorse, spoken dully in my own voice.

It was nearly dawn, and through the parted venetian blinds I could see the first pale blue light reflecting off the tall windows of the dance hall. All night a fine drizzle had been falling, and as the light slowly shifted, now orange, now yellow, across the trees, glistening in the wet leaves, I turned against the wall in my cramped bed and began to cry, clutching and digging my nails into the blanket and biting the sheet to stifle my sobs. Crying as I had never heard Loren cry, not when my mother died, or even when he had finished telling me in the diner how it was he hadn’t been killed along with Luna and Milo. Instead, he had turned to the window beside our booth and with his index finger in the thick vapor drew a face like his own with hands clapped over the ears, no mouth, and closed eyes below which he dotted tears, all down the cheeks.

As the Elevator lurched to a stop, I was suddenly sure I would never again return to my grandmother’s house.

The previous night I had found Alma hunched over the dining room table at two
A.M
. in the dim rays of the overhead lamp. I was on my way to the kitchen for a glass of milk to help me sleep when I stopped short in the foyer, and gazing across the living room, saw her in the small alcove that was our dining room.

Wearing an old green bathrobe, her long hair tucked over one shoulder, she was lost in concentration, scratching away at a legal pad with a well-chewed pencil. She was massaging her forehead with the fingers of her free hand and tapping her feet nervously. Beside her, in an ashtray filled with stubs, a cigarette was burning. In the living room she had left the television on, the blank screen flickering with snow. A glass of wine, untouched, was on the table beside the easy chair where she had been sitting. She must have gotten up impulsively, I thought, to do whatever it was she was doing on that pad.

I watched her for a long time. After she had smoked another cigarette and crumpled and tossed away a few more pages from the pad, I called out her name as I entered the living room. She was startled, and turning to me, covered the legal pad with her arm. In the morning I would find one of the crumpled pages under the table: a tortured page of computations, figures everywhere, many of them crossed out, at the center of which was a list of expenditures—
rent, utilities, car insurance, food, clothing, medical
—below my name and hers. She had been trying to draw up a bare-bones budget for the life she thought we might be sharing. It pained me at that moment to think of her plight:
twenty-one years old, with barely any money and her whole life ahead of her, suddenly burdened with what must have felt like a bag of bricks around her neck. After I had smoothed out that page, it was hard standing there in the dining room, watching the sun, the color of ice, rise through the frozen trees, and trying to understand how Alma must feel. At the bottom of the page there was a small annotation, obviously an afterthought to all the arithmetic:
Find a job & learn to cook
.

I hardly knew Alma, but I had always liked her in the way kids like relatives they seldom see. She was beautiful, smooth and elegant in her movements, with piercing blue eyes, long chestnut hair, and lips that made the back of my neck tingle whenever she planted a kiss on my cheek. To me she had always been a mysterious, even exotic figure. Wearing sunglasses and a suede coat and a beret when she came home, and always some flashy earrings. She smoked and played blues records on the old phonograph in her room, and after one or two nights she’d be gone. Probably I liked her for the very reasons my grandmother so disapproved of her. Alma certainly didn’t like to cook: this was one of my grandmother’s pet grievances about her. As well as the fact that Alma didn’t relish housekeeping in general, or socializing with my grandmother’s friends, or family holidays, or attending church. My grandmother’s all-purpose modifier for Alma was “no-good.” When she was feeling more generous, she limited herself to “wild.”

I, on the other hand, could do no wrong in my grandmother’s eyes. I enjoyed keeping my room in order (how could I not when having a room at all was such a novelty) and raking leaves and drying dishes and even going to church, where I loved listening to the choir sing hymns. I was at that time, in my Brooklyn life, a quiet and orderly boy who had already had a bellyful of being tossed around on rough seas during my years with Luna and Milo.

All the more reason that I should so admire Alma’s attitude. And her independence, which was so much more solid and real to me than Luna’s scattershot rebelliousness that never took her anywhere. Luna was constantly returning home and then taking off again in a huff. Alma just stayed away. And when she did show up, say for Christmas, she never took the bait when my grandmother tried to provoke her. About her studies:
You can’t become a priest, yet all you study is
Latin
; her private life:
Your sister had bad taste in men, too, but at least one of them married her
(I was still trying to figure that one out); and her appearance:
If that skirt gets any shorter, and you grow your hair any longer, you won’t need a skirt at all
. I realized soon enough that Alma hadn’t always been so composed in the face of such attacks, that she had come by her detachment the hard way—after years of heated arguments and recriminations—and I respected her all the more for it. Despite my dependence on, and loyalty to, my grandmother, I resented her meanness toward Alma. I had developed bonds with my grandmother, I loved her, but I also felt most uncomfortable with her when Alma was around. So I kept my mouth shut and, to make it easier on myself, stayed out of the way—even out of the house—during Alma’s infrequent visits. This was another reason we felt like such strangers when we were thrown together for that brief period after my grandmother’s death.

My room in that house had been Luna’s room before she ran off with Milo. It still had the same pale blue walls and blue drapes, the narrow bed and low chest of drawers of matching cherry wood, and the full-length mirror screwed to the back of the door where Luna had primped herself and combed her hair. That afternoon, before Alma and I left for the planetarium, I dressed before that mirror. There were many things my grandmother had done for me in my two and a half years with her which were brand-new to me and for which I hope she knew I was grateful: laying out a hot supper, however bland, every night; buying me new shoes and sneakers in the fall; and, unlike Luna, making sure that the shirts I wore to school were not only laundered, but also the right size. I pulled on the last of these from my top drawer, a blue turtleneck, creased neatly where she had folded down the sleeves and tucked them under.

I heard Alma start up her car in front of the house, so I hurried, throwing on my pea coat and pulling on my woolen cap. As I locked the front door, she was gunning the engine, trying to get the heater warm, her breath misting up the windshield and the car’s exhaust fumes sputtering into the snowbank along the curb. She had the radio turned on, and the announcer went from the escalation of troops in Vietnam—fifty thousand to be shipped out right after Christmas—to the launching that morning of the Pioneer 6 satellite from Cape Kennedy. I had seen the satellite on television the night before, atop a tall white rocket on the
brightly lit launchpad, and now I closed my eyes and imagined it streaking out of the earth’s atmosphere.

After lunch, during the drive to the planetarium, we hardly talked. There were snow flurries, and then it snowed harder, but the snow wasn’t sticking on the highway. Alma seemed far away, rarely looking away from the road. I was sure she was still preoccupied with those figures I had seen on the scratch sheet, still trying to make it all add up in her head so that the two of us wouldn’t end up in the poorhouse.

Just before she parked the Impala in a lot near the planetarium, I felt I had to speak. “Alma,” I said, “I wanted you to know that Grandma loved you, even if she didn’t say so anymore.”

Her eyebrows went up. “It’s okay if she didn’t love me,” she replied. Then she softened her voice, and added, “But you may be right. Maybe she did in her own way.”

I nodded.

“The fact is, Loren, she was a different person after you came into her life.”

I wasn’t sure this was true, but I said nothing.

“You know,” Alma went on, “Mom and I got off to such a bad start. She never saw my father again before I was born. She must have been angry about that—frustrated, at the very least—but she never talked about it, ever. She just held all that in, and then she and I went at it over the years.”

I thought about this. “I don’t know my father, either. You know, my real father. Maybe he’s dead, too, and that’s why I was put up for adoption.”

She switched off the ignition and dangled the keys thoughtfully. “Maybe so. But, you know, sometimes I feel like I know my father just as if I’d met him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s like I actually remember him.” She was gazing out the window. “I spent so much time trying to imagine what he was like.” She patted my shoulder. “But that’s because I had nobody else. That won’t happen to you. You’ll have other people to love.”

Again I nodded my assent, though I was thinking: And who will they be, these people I’m going to love? It felt like, in ten years, I had already used them all up.

Zaren Eboli was holding up a large glass jar in both hands and speaking to me loudly over the rain that lashed the windows and drummed on the roof. He had been born with only eight fingers—no pinkies—and as I looked at him through the refraction of the jar, his long fingers looked even longer. Around five three, he was at least four inches shorter than me and must have hovered near my own weight of one hundred twenty. He was pigeon-toed, with stooped shoulders and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Invariably he wore soft Turkish slippers with silver stitching, a black velvet smoking jacket, and a string tie with a clasp in the form of crossed swords. His wire-rimmed spectacles were thick: without them he could barely make his way through a cluttered room.

And all the rooms in his house—fifteen of them not counting the enormous basement—were cluttered. With books, magazines, looseleaf folders, specimen jars, slide racks, and filing cabinets packed to capacity. His furniture was of a dark, heavy, rococo design, imported from France by a spendthrift ancestor just after the Civil War: big-legged tables and chairs, overstuffed sofas, deep-drawered cabinets. Musty wall hangings alternated with thickly lacquered oil paintings of Louisiana swamplands, the myriad birds and insects that populated them rendered so realistically—a swooping kingfisher or electric dragonfly—that they often startled me when I passed them.

“The trap-door spider,” Eboli was saying in his up-and-down-the-scale singsong voice, “a close relative of the tarantula’s, ambushes his prey from a silk-lined burrow covered by a hinged door. His life span
is one year, in which time he never strays more than a few inches from the entrance to the burrow.”

Wearing the leather gloves with which I handled live specimens, I paused with my back to a tall window where the light from the storm powdered the air like phosphorus. After working in silence for four hours at opposite ends of the second-floor library, I had just stood up to take my one break, for coffee and a sandwich, on the screened-in verandah downstairs.

Without so much as a glance at me, Eboli knew he had my attention, for he seldom addressed me directly when he was working. Afterward, before I’d drive back downtown, he would sometimes sit on the verandah with me to chat for a few minutes, but in the twin sanctuaries of his study and his basement laboratory the silence was palpable, subliminally fed by the hum of countless heat and sun lamps, infrared bulbs, air filters, miniature humidifiers (for the jungle spiders) and dehumidifiers (for their desert cousins), and of course the constant complex spinning of hundreds of webs.

“Among all spiders, the trap-door is the most accomplished burrower and the most gifted artisan. Up to three and a half inches in length, he lives alone in a tubelike burrow five to twelve inches deep, which he digs with a comblike rake of spines on his chelicerae. Then he waterproofs it with saliva and lines it with silk. His burrows vary in complexity, from a simple tube secured with a beveled door to a cylinder capped with a trapdoor that has an oblique side tunnel with a second door. Some of these doors are even fitted with a set of bolts. And all the burrows are designed against a single predator: the spider wasp, who is capable of prying open the trapdoor and cornering the spider. With superior sensory equipment and agility, the wasp quickly overpowers the spider and paralyzes him with venom. Then the wasp deposits an egg on the spider’s abdomen and a larva hatches which feeds off the spider before and after he dies.” He lowered the jar onto the table and adjusted his string tie. “His death mirrors the fatal sequence spiders inflict on their prey: ambush, entrapment, paralysis, and slow death.” Preparing to open the jar, he slipped on his own gloves, custom-made without the pinky slots. “Still, the trap-door spider must be counted, among all creatures, as one of the finest natural architects.”

That afternoon I ate half my pepper-cheese sandwich and drank
two cups of black coffee on the verandah. It was a relief to be out there, even in the heat and humidity, which were not nearly so oppressive as the overheatedness of the house; on the job I wore only the lightest cotton dresses and rope sandals, and still the sweat ran down my back. The river through the mangrove trees in the driving rain was wide and turbulent, overhung with green mist, rushing toward the gulf. In the canopy of the foliage I saw a pair of red birds huddled with folded wings. And, higher up, one of the striped green owls that hunted by day. The arboreal spiders, I knew now, wove exquisite, complex nets impervious to water. I had learned, too, that all spiders are carnivorous. That they never take in solid food through their mouths, but after predigesting their prey with a secretion of fluids, suck the liquid remains into their stomachs by means of powerful muscles. That though their average life span is one year or less, the female tarantula can live to be thirty years old. That most spiders have eight eyes and eight legs. And that there are spiders who live underwater, inside silken diving bells that store air, spinning their webs, laying eggs, and preying on other aquatic insects. In the high grass below the mangrove trees they could be found in the mesh of slow-moving streams that fed into the river, but not in the river itself.