He didn’t respond for a while, which she resented but also respected (after all, she had once been his student), but then he called her, which thrilled her and also made her think less of him (for god’s sake, she was his student just yesterday!). They met for coffee, or maybe lunch, no, probably just coffee, and she remembers that she warmed to his kindness, lusted after his hands, wished he’d let her cut his hair and powder his nose, and wondered how quickly his total absorption in his subject would drive her crazy. She also wondered if he was a virgin. She liked the idea, anyway. (“Who’s the professor now?”) But it turned out he’d had a couple of girlfriends in his twenties. Still, maybe they only held hands and shopped together for Rubik’s Cubes.
He worked a lot, so it took three or four weeks to accomplish, but she thinks they had a lunch date, and definitely a dinner date. He was considerate of the waitstaff, which earned him brownie points. Unlike many men, he asked her questions about herself and her opinions and seemed actually to find her answers interesting. On the other hand, it was a lucky thing she was already into astronomy, because he did talk an awful lot about it, and she could more or less tell when his mind fell into a rut in his brain and proceeded to rattle down it like a driverless stagecoach. She dislikes labels, because what’s most interesting about people are the things that make them unique, but she supposes this could be called perseverating.
In April he asked her if she wanted to see the Lyrids with him and she thought, Ahh, this is how astronomers get up the nerve to kiss a gal.
Because not the tiniest whiff of that had occurred in their three dates thus far. When he said good night, he stepped back, tucked his elbow, and executed a vibrating little-boy wave. It occurred to her that he might be unconsciously invoking childishness to hide from himself what he really wanted and perhaps felt ambivalent about (she had been his student, etc). Sure, she could have grabbed his lapels and done a chin-up, but for chrissake, he was thirty-four years old. It was time to grow up. If he liked it, he should put a smooch on it.
She had never let him drive to the old commune to pick her up because that felt way too old-school, too Ozzie and Harriet (and besides, she didn’t like people seeing the conditions she lived in), so on the night in question she borrowed Jo’s clapped-out Honda and fetched him from his cute little Arts and Crafts house in a less palatial part of Cayuga Heights. He piled in with blankets and a thermos of hot chocolate and the little-boy wave. It was 35 degrees Fahrenheit, 1:30 a.m., April 20, 1994.
He’d explained at a length that would have been absurd even if she’d been an ignoramus on matters lunar, which she was far from being, but she’d let him do it (see condition that will remain unlabeled, above): the peak of the meteor shower would occur on the night of April 22–23, but by then the moon would be only three days away from full, which would make viewing harder because it would be up for most of the night and, you know, when there’s a bright light like the near-full moon in the sky, then seeing fainter meteors is harder because, you know, your eyes adjust to the brighter light, that is, your pupils contract, and your retina receives less light, which it needs if you want to clearly perceive fainter signals, such as—
She drove them to the top of Mount Pleasant, where there was a 360-degree view and the grounds around the small university observatory made a comfortable place to lie down. The pesky moon was just setting. They spread out one blanket and piled the others at its foot for use as needed, shared hot chocolate while waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dark, then lay down side by side. After a moment he sat up again to take one of the spare blankets and cover himself. He was careful to keep the blanket from touching her also, because who knows, that might suggest something. After another minute she grabbed another blanket to cover herself.
They lay in silence. After several minutes of meteor-free viewing, he said, “We might see only five or six an hour. They’ll radiate out of the constellation Lyra.”
“That’s why they’re called the Lyrids,” she confirmed.
“You can find Lyra by—”
“It’s there.” She pointed. “It’s easy to find because of Vega.”
He didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “You’re a professor, you can’t help it. And since I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff about the Lyrids you know and I don’t, why don’t you tell me, while we lie here and wait for—” you to get up the fucking courage to lay one on me “—some celestial fireworks?”
So he rattled on, and it turned out that the comet responsible for the Lyrids has an orbital period of 415 years, and they’re more spectacular once every sixty years, but this year wasn’t one of those years, and it used to be thought that there was a cloud of debris that had shifted into a 60-year orbit, but now they know that it’s a consequence of gravitational mechanics that steer into the path of the Earth the one-revolution dust trail, by which term is meant the material shed during the revolution prior to the last return, which was in one, two, buckle my shoe, near, far
