The Heavens Read online

  Also by Sandra Newman

  The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

  Cake

  How Not to Write a Novel

  Changeling

  Read This Next

  The Western Lit Survival Kit

  The Country of Ice Cream Star

  THE HEAVENS

  A Novel

  SANDRA NEWMAN

  Copyright © 2019 by Sandra Newman

  Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

  Cover artwork New York “ Don Denton/Arcangel;

  portrait of woman by Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo (1483-1561)

  ” Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit. culturali / Art Resource, NY

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book was set in 11.5-pt. Scala LF with Fournier MT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2902-4

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4683-0

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Howard

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Sandra Newman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  II

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  III

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  I

  1

  Ben met Kate at a rich girl’s party. He didn’t know the rich girl personally; it was one of those parties where no one knew the hostess. He’d come with the rich girl’s cousin’s co-worker, whom he instantly lost in the crowd. It had started out as a dinner party, but the invitations proliferated, spreading epidemically through friends of friends until it turned into a hundred people. So the rich girl opened up both floors, made punch instead of risotto, and ordered a thousand dumplings from a Chinese restaurant. It was August and you had to let things happen the way they wanted to happen. Everyone was in their twenties then, anyway, so that was how they thought.

  It turned out to be a mostly francophone party, conversational and quiet; a party with the windows open to the night, a party where people sat talking on the floor. Most of the illumination was from solar-powered tea lights, which the rich girl had hung on the fire escapes all day to charge, then pasted along the walls. That light reflected softly from the heavy glass tumblers into which wine was poured. There wasn’t even music playing. The rich girl said it gave her bad dreams. New York City, so everyone was interning at a Condé Nast publication or a television program or the UN. Everyone a little in love with each other; the year 2000 in the affluent West.

  Ben talked to a dozen girls that night. He wasn’t seriously looking for a girlfriend. He was working and doing his PhD then, so there wasn’t time for emotional investment. Still, it was pleasant to flirt with just anyone, to feel the power of being attractive and six feet tall. A night of receptive postures and parted lips; such an easy blessedness, like ascending a staircase into the air.

  At 1:00 a.m. he went down in the elevator to buy cigarettes. Kate was outside on Eighty-Sixth Street with the rich girl’s dog, which had needed to pee. She wore a loose dress that didn’t look like party attire; at first he wasn’t sure she was from the party. Then he recognized the dog, a terrier mutt with a soupçon of dachshund, elongated and shaggy. Cute. Ben stopped to pat the dog.

  He went and bought his cigarettes. When he came back, Kate was still there. He paused to smoke. They talked desultorily for five minutes, then something shifted. The traffic fell quiet. They were smiling at each other and not saying anything. Already it felt strange.

  Kate said, “What’s your name?”

  “Pedro,” Ben said.

  She laughed. “No, I already asked you, didn’t I? You said you were something else.”

  “No.” He was smiling foolishly. “I don’t think you asked me.”

  “I did, but I don’t remember what you said.” She nodded at the dog. “I’ve forgotten her name too. So if we left town now and went someplace where nobody knows us, you two wouldn’t have names.”

  “I could be Pedro.”

  “No, I know you aren’t Pedro.”

  “I could be Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “Done.”

  He laughed, but she didn’t. She just stood there, smiling her liking at him. He finished his cigarette. Then he should have gone back to the party, but he couldn’t. It was strange.

  And they talked for a while about taking the dog and running off to a town in South America, about the boat they would live on and the smugglers they would meet and the sunsets over the turquoise sea, where blue crabs would scuttle over the beach, and it felt as if they were even younger than they were, as if they didn’t yet have jobs.

  Kate was Hungarian-Turkish-Persian: three romantic, impractical strains, three peoples who had thrown away their empires. Her ancestors wore jewels in their beards; they galloped on horses, waving swords. With them, it was opium dens or Stalinism, no middle ground; so Kate said, laughing at herself. She was talking obliquely about herself.

  Ben was half Bengali, half Jewish. That could be interesting, but it was sedate. He came from a line of rabbis, shopkeepers, lawyers; there was a feeling that he might be uncool by comparison, a feeling Ben had to consciously suppress. He said, “My family didn’t wave swords, but I’m always willing to try.”

  Both Ben and Kate were tawny, black eyed, and aquiline; they looked like members of the same indeterminate race. They commented on this likeness, using self-deprecating terms like “beige” and “beaky,” and became so happy at this—at nothing—that they started to walk the dog downtown. The dog was beige, too, Ben pointed out, and they paused and crouched to compare their arms to the dog’s coat; that was how they first touched. The dog was licking their hands and confusing the issue. Still there was a definite spark.

  Walking back toward the apartment, they traded
the information that goes in dating profiles, with the feeling of belatedly completing the paperwork for something they’d already done under the table. Then up in the elevator, where they were alone, and in which he suffered and wanted to kiss her. She smiled forward at the doors, unkissable, glowing with the idea of sex. They came out, and she unleashed the dog and slung the leash onto a branch of the coat rack. Without discussion, they headed to the balcony.

  There was someone already there, the rich girl’s houseguest, an older New Zealander whom Kate knew and who would later figure prominently in their lives. Ben didn’t think much about him then. All he meant was that Ben wasn’t alone with Kate. The New Zealander talked about a garden he was working on; he was a garden designer, in New York to create a rich person’s garden. Ben listened to his accent and mainly considered him a useful pause, a device that would ease them more gently to the next stage.

  So it was the windy balcony, the lights of New York a nether starscape. The actual stars were dull and few. From this perspective, the city was brighter and more complex than the cosmos; the cosmos in fact seemed rote, like a framed print hung on a wall solely because the wall would look wrong without pictures. There have to be pictures and there has to be a cosmos, even if no one looks at them. And Ben looked at Kate surreptitiously, wishing he could tell her this, convinced that she would understand.

  She had a long nose and long black humorous eyes, a full, red-lipsticked mouth. Persian, his mind said besottedly, Persian. In heels, she was as tall as he was. Full and rounded, like a cat with a lot of fur. She stood uncannily straight, as if she’d never ever slouched, never hunched over work. She didn’t even lean on the balcony’s railing but stood with her arms loose at her sides. Weightless. A queenly bearing. Persian.

  Outside, she’d told him she was an artist—“works on paper”—who’d given up on her BFA at Pratt. She had suddenly not seen the point. “If it were something like geology, maybe,” she’d said (because he’d told her he had a degree in geology, although he was also a poet—published, he had hastily added. She’d volunteered, in a helpful tone: “Well, I read poetry.” He’d said, “Really?” She’d said, “I’m on Apollinaire right now,” and quoted some Apollinaire in French, as if that were a normal ability for a failed art student. She’d added, “My French is awful, sorry,” and he’d said stupidly, “Me neither,” because he was powerfully distracted, he was suddenly thinking in terms of love.

  Then she’d said, “We should get back to the party,” and the world turned cold. How had he got to that point so quickly?)

  Now the windy balcony, the obsolete stars, the city a mystery of glittering towers. Kate and the New Zealander were talking about the Great Man theory of history, according to which human progress was driven by superlative people like Socrates or Muhammad, who single-handedly changed the world. Kate defended this idea, while the New Zealander pooh-poohed it and refused to believe she was serious. He said, “How could anyone be that much better? We all have such similar biologies.”

  “They wouldn’t have to be that much better,” said Kate. “It would be all the circumstances lining up, like with any unusual event, like a supervolcano or a major earthquake.” She looked at Ben.

  Ben said, “Major earthquakes aren’t that unusual.”

  “Ben’s a geologist,” Kate told the New Zealander.

  “But is he a great geologist?” the New Zealander said.

  Kate laughed. Ben laughed, too, although he also wondered if this was a slight that might diminish him in Kate’s eyes. The New Zealander said he was going to get another drink and left. Ben’s heart was suddenly racing. Scraps from the Apollinaire she’d quoted surfaced in his mind: mon beau membre asinin … le sacré bordel entre tes cuisses (my stupid beautiful dick … the sacred bordello between your thighs). When she’d said it, it had certainly seemed like flirting. But it might have just been the only Apollinaire she could call to mind.

  Now Kate smiled at him vaguely and looked back at the French doors. Her face caught the light and her smooth cheek shone. Some new intention appeared in her eyes—a bad moment, where he thought she was about to ditch him. But she turned to him again, smiling wonder-fully, and said, “I’ve got the key to the roof deck. I’m sleeping on the roof, if that sounds like something you might want to do.”

  He was nodding, breathless, while she explained that Sabine (the rich girl) was her good friend. Kate often slept on the roof. She had an inflatable bed up there. “It blows up with a mechanism,” Kate said, making a mechanism gesture in the air.

  He laughed, he was light-headed. He made the mechanism gesture back, and Kate took him by the sleeve, just like that, and led him back to the party. She said, “I’d better ask Sabine, but she’ll say yes.”

  It was breezy and wonderful in the apartment, which had two floors and twelve rooms and belonged to the rich girl’s uncle; it hosted his collection of African drums, and for this reason (somehow this knowledge had filtered through to everyone) the air-conditioning was meant to be always on and the windows closed. The drum skins would perish in humidity. Presumably they were from a dry part of Africa or were meant to be re-skinned periodically by a caste of craftsmen who had died out, whose descendants had become engineers and postal workers. In any case, the windows were open, the air-conditioning was off, and everyone kept looking at the drums, discussing them, aware that this party was subtracting from the drums’ life span. Likewise, Ben now imagined the drums as sacrifices to whatever this was.

  They found Sabine, the rich girl, talking to three men, who were all much taller than she was, so she appeared to be standing in a grove of men. They were speaking French and making what Ben thought of as French gesticulations. Sabine was very blond and as heavy as Kate, though on her it was not provocative but pudgy. She didn’t look rich. She looked unhappy and intelligent. When Kate made her request, Sabine frowned, displeased, as if this were only the most recent in a series of Kate’s unreasonable demands, and said, “Fine. Do whatever.”

  “It’s not whatever,” Kate said, but didn’t pursue it. She just smiled at Sabine, at Ben, at the three tall men who smiled back conspiratorially.

  “I don’t want to cause problems,” Ben said.

  At this, Sabine suddenly changed. She grinned and tousled Kate’s hair, saying to Ben: “You won’t need to cause problems if you’re sleeping with this one. She’ll take care of that.”

  Kate laughed delightedly and looked at Ben as if she were being complimented. The three men were all looking at Kate, looking wistfully at three different parts of Kate’s body. Sabine said, “Enjoy,” and turned back to the men in a peremptory manner, mustering them back to their earlier conversation. They took their eyes off Kate reluctantly.

  So Ben bore her away like a prize he had won by defeating those three men or—looked at another way—he followed her obediently up the stairs, in her absolute and permanent thrall.

  The roof had a deck of solid blond wood, with a plain iron railing around the edge. There was a grill, a picnic table, Adirondack chairs. To Ben’s eye, there were no apparent signs of wealth, though he wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Fountains? There were gardening implements but no garden, only a row of potted plants along the railing—or really several of the same plant, a shaggy blond grass with overtones of purple. The inflatable mattress, a green canvas rectangle with no sheets or blanket, had been set beside these plants. It had already been inflated, and Kate went to it without hesitation and sat, looking back at Ben seriously, as if she were inviting him to something of great moment.

  He came and sat. His immediate lust was gone. He was expecting thirty minutes of conversation, anyway, before anything could happen. And in fact, Kate began to talk about the potted grass—it was an endangered species, which was why the roof hadn’t been opened up for the party and possibly why Sabine had chafed at letting Ben on the roof, because the grass was illegal. It had been smuggled in by a friend of the New Zealander, a mining executive, in his corporate jet. You weren�
�t supposed to take the grass out of its homeland, although in this case it was intended to preserve the grass from becoming extinct, which it soon would be in the part of Argentina where it was native, an area now devastated by mining. The dirt in the pots was Argentine too. It was the sort of thing that happened to Sabine, that she ended up harboring smuggled grasses.

  Ben looked dutifully at the grasses, which—he now noticed—were in two different kinds of pots. Some were standard clay pots; some were green celluloid pots that had been molded to imitate the shape of standard clay pots. He pointed this out to Kate, and she immediately frowned and expressed concern for the grasses in the celluloid pots.

  “I don’t think the grass cares,” Ben said. “Grass isn’t that sensitive to aesthetics.”

  “No, it must affect the soil.”

  “It would be such a tiny difference it wouldn’t matter,” Ben said with the air of a man with a degree in science.

  “Even tiny differences matter. There could be a butterfly effect.”

  “Oh, no, not the butterfly effect,” said Ben teasingly.

  But she insisted that a plant is a complex system, just like weather; there could easily be a butterfly effect. He objected that a plant isn’t very complex; a grass would have thousands of cells, not millions, and most of those cells would be exactly alike. She objected to exactly—they couldn’t be exactly alike. He said, “Well, if you’re going to be like that.” They laughed. Then she reached out suddenly and took his hand, which sent a particular shock through him. He was tamed. He was impressed.

  She said, “I wasn’t inviting you up here to have sex. I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea.”

  “Oh, no,” he lied. “I didn’t expect anything.”

  “Maybe we could have sex next time, though.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, I’m not rejecting you.”

  “Yes,” he said, a little hoarse. “Don’t reject me.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I don’t.”

  They were silent for a minute. He was wondering what the parameters of no sex were. He was thinking about the butterfly effect in the case of falling for people, the small differences between one girl and another creating a cascade of results that changed your life. He looked at the grasses and decided he shouldn’t tell her this.