They say there are three rules to good stargazing. Or tips, rather: dark skies, dark skies, and dark skies. And that’s why he is here, on top of a mountain, where the yellowy glow of streetlights and storefronts cannot reach. Here there are always dark skies, and tonight the clouds cover only the moon, leaving a dark theater of stars glowing in the blackness like punched out holes between him and God. He’s left the radio on in his car and windows down, but he’s lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.
First, Ursa Major as Big Dipper, burning hot on the left side of his view. Henry follows it to Polaris and then to Queen Cassiopeia, punished for her vanity, stuck upside down near her husband, King Cepheus. They hang there so quietly and so solemnly he can almost see them—cold and dark and blue and watching Henry the way he is watching them. Perhaps in some twist of space and time they are there, perched in lawn chairs with the finest gold and ruby decor in Aethiopia, and Cepheus is pointing at the Watching Boy, an arrangement of stars that is him, slung long and low between Dubhe and Solaris, a reclining boy with binoculars peering into the pools of time. And their daughter, the fair-haired Andromeda, will giggle when Cepheus tells her that someday she’ll be in the stars with her beautiful mother Cassiopeia. Henry smiles, laughing at himself as he watches this troubled family float above him in points of light.
He thinks of Annie now. He can almost see her because they were here, once, and King Cepheus’s family looked down on him sadly out of dead blue eyes for stars. She was wearing yellow and that necklace she wore when she was a bridesmaid for her sister, and her hair was straight, just the way he liked it, and she was laughing again at something he said.
“I just don’t know what to say,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what to say to you.”
“Why does anything have to be said? Why can’t we just sit here?”
Her legs are crossed and she is leaning on one hand, her silver watch caught shining at him from the crook of her wrist. He wants to say something different this time, because she’s here, looking at him with those eyes, and he wants to say whatever will make her stay. But it’s confusion in his mind, like the stars look now—a mess of points with no form, no lines, no Polaris and no constellation. And one of those stars is supposed to be his, but he can’t tell them apart anymore. They burn at him fiercely, a backdrop of dread and confusion behind her expectant look. “Henry?”
“I don’t know either.”
He is thinking. What if you could do something differently? What if you could change it and make it the way it was supposed to be. Wasn’t there fate in the stars? Wouldn’t Romeo tell him to watch them more carefully, watch for clues and signs and a warning?
“You know how I feel,” he says at last.
“I know, I know. But what can I do? This is how I feel.”
“You can’t force it.”
Cepheus is looking at Watching Boy and tells Andromeda that Watching Boy once had a true love that he let slip away forever. “Why forever?” she asks. Practical and questioning, like her mother. “What’s forever?”
“Forever is as long as the stars, Andromeda. That’s why he’s there.”
Henry is telling Ann again about Andromeda tied to the rocks at the shore of Aethiopia, tied there to wait for the dragon of the sea. And Cassiopeia, sentenced to an upside down chair of torture, caught hanging with her vanity in a milky stream of light. And then, Cepheus, his constellation the crown—a symbol of his nobility, his dignity, his sadness. There is nothing the King can do to save them. “That’s like us,” says Henry. And he is watching her eyes. He’ll say something different this time. He’ll say something that will prove to her how much he cares, and she won’t wonder, and she won’t question, and above all, she won’t choose anyone but him.
“Hey? I have to go.”
“Then we’ll go,” he says. She is crazy to wear sandals when it’s so cold outside, almost winter, but she does it because no one else does and it’s just her and she’s stepping over rocks back to the car. She pretends not to hear him, and he knows that they’ll drive in silence back to her house and she’ll disappear beneath the trees that tunnel the walk in front.
“I don’t know what to say.” she says.
He wants to tell her that Robbie doesn’t feel that way about her, and never will, because that’s what happens. He likes someone else. That’s what happens you know, he whispers at her as she glides underneath her canopy of trees at stage center. He doesn’t love you and I love you. But he doesn’t say it. He is lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.
