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was bored and missed him, the times when he could read her mind, those few times—she was beautiful. If only she asked him questions about the sky, told him her secrets. He strained to see her in her chair but she was turned away. He would tell her. He would bring her combs. That was why she loved him.
    “Do me a favor,” Denise said, appearing close with her hair falling between them, smelling too rich and flowery. She had clearly slept off the bourbon; she looked determined as she often did under the stars. Off at the far end of the overlook, one of the students was signaling and approaching. Eli looked at Denise, and saw a piece of sunburned skin on her nose, curling from her like smoke. He recognized, too, some new tension in her face, some new tone in her voice.
    “Do me a favor when Jorgeson comes over here.” She was talking about the graduate student, a gangly Midwesterner with horn-rimmed glasses, the one with the mail-order bride. “Find out about Carlos.”
    Eli sat struck for a moment by this shift, almost angry. He watched Jorgeson waving his arms. Eli had been relaxed and fine a moment before, and now here was Denise, reminding him of her ridiculous love affair, her fling with that crew-cutted Chicano rich boy, that married Republican cad. Eli looked at his poor friend and thought
Don’t be so sad,
and not from sympathy, not because he knew what it might be like to have moods like this one, dropping like spiders inside her. It was a command, a wish made because he couldn’t deal with sad women, especially one who wasn’t his wife. He almost couldn’t stand their sudden, crystal grief. Professor Swift had predicted that the comet, tonight, would bring with it a meteor shower. So why not make such wishes? Thousands of stars were already poised, ready to fall.
    “What?” Eli asked, feigning ignorance. The Swede was listening to a colleague, stopped maybe fifteen yards away.
    “He’s his friend. Find out.”
    “Find out what?”
    Denise didn’t answer, sniffing the vegetable air.
    Eli remembered when she’d met this Carlos. A garden party at Jorgeson’s house, and Denise in a green frilly dress, talking to some handsome, military-stiff man, cocking her grinning head to one side in a girlish way that was utterly unlike her, some remnant of the upper-class coquetry she’d been taught in San Francisco. Eli could tell the man was a swindler. When he heard this Carlos had a wife, sitting inside the house, he assumed the meeting had been harmless. Carlos left, Denise came over and listened to one of Eli’s astronomy jokes, joined Kathy in a few drinks, and all was as it had been. It was months before Denise admitted she was seeing him—and then only through Kathy, who told the story plainly, as if it were a natural course of events and not a painful mistake. Brainy Denise had been seduced by married Carlos, had believed a promise from a man who could make no promises. And, Kathy told her husband, their blond friend was in love.
    It had been infuriating to watch. Denise came to dinner far less often, rarely made it to the movie dates they all had together, and in general began to treat the Spivaks like a phase she had passed through, an old routine she wanted to forget. She was still friendly at school, but he could never catch her for coffee after class because of her complex schedule with Carlos, one that involved grabbing his lunch hours and breaks and free weekend moments, tiling her life with these shards of love.
    When it had ended, a few weeks ago, Denise had returned. The prodigal friend. Kathy had listened to the whole tale, gone over the words Carlos had spoken, sat with Denise late at night in the living room with brandy and read these phrases like entrails, telling a fortune. As if this Carlos were a deity, hiding his heart in this tangle of cliches! Eli kept quiet; he knew the phrases, the phone calls and visits meant nothing. There was no code to break; there was no lock to pick; there was