The Grasshopper King Page 10

  “Ellen,” I said, trying not to sound shocked, “you didn’t have to. We brought lunch.”

  Julia stepped on my foot.

  “But thank you—of course. It looks delicious.”

  Ellen shrugged. “I had all this around.” Suddenly I realized she hadn’t vacuumed all day. And Higgs had lost at checkers. . . . Dizzy, I ransacked my memory—were the planets all on one side of the sun today? Was the Mayan calendar about to flip?

  No: so it had to be Julia.

  The two of us set to eating. It really was good; I hadn’t known it until that moment, but I was tired of egg salad. Ellen stood in the corner and watched us, rustling her feet unrhythmically, her eyes focused on some point well beyond the wall. It made me terribly nervous. I hurried through my lunch, swallowing half-chewed bites of sandwich, not pausing to lick the potato chip residue from my palate and the backs of my teeth.

  “Oh,” Julia said.

  “What?”

  She glanced at Ellen. “Nothing. I had a chill.”

  I followed Julia’s eyes to the corner and the little crack there between the molding and the floor. “There’s a grasshopper problem,” I explained.

  “It’s the water main,” Ellen said. “They bollixed up the survey or some such thing and built the house right over it. That’s what draws them in. And there’s always more when it rains.”

  “That must be a nuisance,” Julia said.

  Ellen—was it possible?—sighed. “We’ve tried everything,” she said. “But nothing.”

  Once we’d finished eating, Julia offered brightly to help Ellen with the dishes, then, equally brightly, refused her demurrals. The two of them trooped up the stairs. Just before Julia climbed out of sight she turned, ducked so I could see her face, and blew me a kiss. I held up my hand to catch it, then, feeling foolish, brought it down. The kiss shattered against the wall behind Higgs’s head—whatever that meant.

  When I heard the water go on in the kitchen, I leaned over Higgs’s table, palms planted where the checkerboard and lunch had been. He stared past my shoulder.

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “Your men are getting logjammed on the perimeter. You’re letting her control the center squares. Keep playing like that and you don’t have a chance.”

  The next day, Ellen came down at eleven, as usual, with the vacuum cleaner. But this time she worked efficiently, covering the floor just once, not bothering to move the larger heaps of artifacts aside, and after ten minutes she snapped the power off. I looked up from my translation, startled by the sudden relative quiet.

  “You’re engaged?” she said.

  “Not really. Did Julia say . . .”

  She shrugged. “No. But maybe you were thinking about it.”

  “We’re in the planning stages,” I said, and dropped my eyes ostentatiously back to the page. I knew Julia would have been annoyed with me. This is an offering, she would have told me. You have to respond.

  “You ought to get her a ring,” Ellen said.

  I looked down at my bare fingers. “My finances are a little uncertain right now.”

  “I know how much they pay you.”

  “Well,” I said, off-balance, “still. One doesn’t want to . . .”

  Why were we talking about this?

  “Suit yourself,” she said. She sounded angry and I thought she would start vacuuming again. But instead she hoisted the machine with a grunt and marched upstairs.

  She came down again, an hour later, empty-handed.

  “The last one didn’t have a girl,” she said.

  That was her way of starting: no salutation, no preamble.

  “No?” I said. I could hardly say I was surprised.

  “He only cared about his work.”

  “There’s something to be said for that,” I said, feeling obscurely annoyed.

  “Every man,” she said, “needs a woman by his side. That’s the truth.”

  I nodded.

  “And when I say woman I mean anyone who’ll stand by you. I’m open-minded.”

  “Of course.”

  She seemed satisfied that she’d gotten something across to me. But she didn’t leave. I wished she would. I was a little afraid of Ellen for the same reason I was a little afraid of dogs. When the cards were down one couldn’t rely on them to do what made sense. I was afraid that the language Ellen thought in was different, in subtle but crucial respects, from my own. I thought that the occasions on which I thought I understood her were unfortunate chances which would lead me, if I trusted them, to ruin.

  “Well,” I announced, “I guess I’ll get back to my story.”

  “When I think of what would have happened to Stanley without me . . .” Ellen said. Both of us turned to look at Higgs. He was sitting as quietly as always, his eyes two ciphers, unintent. What would have happened to Higgs without Ellen? What calamity could she possibly think she had spared him?

  Higgs dug two fingers into the snack bowl and rooted around, not looking down, until he found a sesame stick. He put the whole thing in his mouth, and forcefully, deliberately, chewed. A signal? If so, it was in a semaphore I did not yet understand.

  I went to talk to my parents about marriage. I rode my bicycle along the empty upward-slanting avenues of the west side, my twilit childhood streets, and thought of what I’d told Ellen. Was it true? Were we in the planning stages? Were we, as certain hateful girls at school had put it, “engaged to be engaged”? Julia and I had spoken of it, of course, but only jokingly, in the way of manufacturing silly names for our offspring, or thinking of where we’d settle: Samarkand, Antarctica, the San Diego Zoo, no more real to us than the places we sank with our brainpower. In fact they were often the same places. Whenever I tried to consider it more seriously I shied away; it was like thinking about cancer, or the exhaustion of fossil fuels. I had a feeling that marriage—which seemed, on the face of it, like little more than a codification of the life we already led—concealed some secret, unknowable in advance, which would change everything. I didn’t think it was necessarily something bad. But I hated surprises.

  I could see the Grape Arbor coming from three blocks away, a hubbub of green and white light between two warehouses. My mother’s idea had been to bring to Chandler City a little of that Edward Hopper equipoise they admired so much: twilight, cool neon, hardened faces seen through drapes of coffee-steam. With the mood of quiet desolation we’d had no trouble; but the neon had proved our downfall. My father, thorough as always, had ringed every window with it, and the door, and the rain-gutter. He’d planted grapevines, too, at my mother’s direction, and these—as if to make up for everything else my parents had ever set out to do—had flourished. They grew over the tops of the trellises and lay in tired ringlets on the roof. The lights, shining through them, took on a foreboding tint of jungle.

  Inside, my mother sat alone at her window table, a great rectangular oven trough before her. Like many Jewish women of a certain age she was beginning to resemble Ayn Rand.

  “Samuel,” she said, “try this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something new. I burned it. Chicken tetrazzini.”

  “What did you use for the chicken?”

  “I used chicken.”

  “You never use chicken.”

  “Now he tells me,” she said tragically.

  I sat down across from her. The substance in the tray gave off a doughy, acrid smell. It was the deep nuanceless green of a public swimming pool.

  “Why’s it green?” I asked her.

  “It’s cilantro paste.”

  “I don’t think you put cilantro in chicken tetrazzini.”

  She crossed her arms, produced a snort. “Somebody’s full of good advice tonight.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m somewhat harried.”

  “Why? Julia leave you?”

  “No,” I said crossly. “As a matter of fact I’m trying to decide whether we should get married.”

  “Don’t get mad, I was just guessing. S
he wants to marry you?”

  “I don’t exactly know.”

  “You’re my son and I love you,” she said, “but you recognize you’re not much of a catch for her.” She dipped a spoon into the chicken tetrazzini and slid it between her lips. “Aagh,” she murmured. Slowly the tetrazzini closed over the spoon-hole and erased it.

  “Mom.”

  “I burned it,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s actually the point. Whether or not I’m a ‘catch.’”

  “She’s a very personable young woman. With potential.”

  “I have potential.”

  My mother reached out with one slightly greasy hand and swatted me lovingly on the side of the head. “Of course you do.”

  “So you think yes,” I said.

  “I think you’re a lucky boy,” my mother said.

  “I know. Where’s Dad?”

  I found I’d had enough of the restaurant, of the nauseous-making buzz of the neon and the enveloping smell of my mother’s casserole, which may indeed have contained chicken but to which textured vegetable protein, my nostrils told me, was not a stranger.

  “He’s working late,” my mother said.

  “I actually have to go,” I told her. “I’ll let you take care of things here.”

  There was only one customer in the restaurant, a spattered housepainter in his seventies, who was sitting by the door, gumming with all his power of concentration at a mouthful of mixed greens.

  “I’m bored,” she said. “When you see him kick him in the ass for bringing me here.”

  My mother had long since modified that part of our history. If my father wouldn’t bother to correct her I didn’t see why I should.

  “Come on,” she said. “Stay. We’ll play Scrabble.”

  “I’ll see you, Mom.” I stood to go. The old housepainter looked up; his eyes shimmied on either side of my face for a moment and then locked on.

  “Be nice,” he said, “you’ve only got one.”

  I hurtled out into the evening.

  My father worked in a trailer even farther out of town than our restaurant. I set off uphill again, laboring, not letting myself slow until the green-white reflected smear of the Grape Arbor had vanished from my handlebars and the casing of my front wheel. As I pressed toward the city limits, the cross streets gave over to foreigners. I passed Cambyses, Nabopolassar, Shih Huang Ti, Xerxes—the last red light, which I blew through like a ghost. The road turned to thin gravel that champed at my tires. In a few more minutes I passed through a chain-link gate and was there.

  The trailer was no larger than a few elevator cars laid abreast, and there were five people inside. Four of them sat in a rough circle of vinylized chairs, playing canasta. My father, the senior member, was the only one who had a desk. He was behind it—not sitting at it, I mean, but behind it, kneeling on the floor, scrabbling around for something he’d dropped. Above him, on the back wall, a framed photograph of Mayor Meadows peered down at us with bleary self-satisfaction. He was now very old.

  “Dad,” I said.

  One of the canasta players turned and gave me a long look. “He’s your dad?” he said. I had not been to the trailer in almost a year, and none of the men were familiar to me. No one but my father stayed at the station very long. It was agreed to be the lowest and most embarrassing position in the whole Department of the Interior, which offered a wide spectrum of low and embarrassing positions. Enforcing grazing violations on speed-crazed ranchers, counting the used condoms in the Hudson—these were promotions from the spring-finding project. It had been a long time since anyone (again, I mean anyone but my father) thought there was a spring to be found. The other men mostly played cards and searched for loopholes in Indian treaties while they waited for their transfers to come through.

  My father clambered over the desk and lowered himself heavily on the other side. The desk occupied the whole width of the trailer and it was the only way he could get out.

  “Son,” he said. “I happen to have a minute.”

  His eyes had retreated a little in recent years, and the lines from his nose to the corner of his mouth had grown much deeper. I had to admit it; even he was starting to look like Ayn Rand.

  “I think I may be onto something,” he said. “It’s still tentative.”

  It was what he always said.

  “I wondered if we could talk,” I said.

  “I’ll bet we could.”

  He steered me outside, into what was now night. We were at the western rim of town; there was ten more feet of gravel past the trailer, and past that just the sand-shot soil of the mesa. In the other direction, down toward the cliff, the lights of town were coming on. The Grape Arbor glowed greenly in the middle distance like an indicator light.

  “How did you decide to get married?” I asked my father.

  “I think your mother decided,” he said. “Or at least she was the one who brought it up.”

  After a while he said, “Has she?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Has Julia? Brought it up?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Do you love her?” my father asked.

  I had considered this question before.

  “Sure,” I told him.

  But I wasn’t sure. My life had improved since she’d joined it, that was certain. We spoke to each other in sweet tones of voice, and kidded as I’d heard other lovers do; and in our physical relations we acted out what I understood to be the healthful exertions of average young people. But love? I was hampered here by my refusal to admit I didn’t know what it was, or whether it was in my repertoire. Those men of my acquaintance who “didn’t know if they could love” were, without exception, the basest seducers of the campus, and their prey, the callowest, the weakest-willed of girls. That wasn’t Julia; that wasn’t me.

  Henderson had said this about love: “Lovers stick to my shoes/ at which time my shoes stick to the street/ Between the street and my shoes the sticky lovers sweat upon each other.”

  I had told Julia I loved her, and it didn’t feel like a lie. But it did feel like an approximation. Something in the sentimental movies was missing for me; this visible selflessness the heroes experienced, as they emptied themselves utterly into their romantic trials. Take a look at me now—there’s just an empty space—could I speak those words with the conviction that was necessary?

  Something, I thought, had gone wrong with me, my parents’ healthy habits notwithstanding. My mother had eaten a bad helping of seitan, in the crucial early weeks of my gestation, or been struck in the belly by a tragically well-aimed gamma particle from a black light, or maybe one night’s bowl of hash had done it. I didn’t know what had done it. But the tragic and self-sacrificing part of me, the loving part, was missing—perhaps stunted into uselessness, perhaps never formed. The only time I was selfless was when I was asleep.

  My father, with a strange seriousness, took a stick of gum from his pocket, carefully unfolded the paper and the foil wrap, bent it double, and put it in his mouth. The gum migrated to one cheek, where it sat, like a nut.

  “What I think,” he told me, “is that it’s just something that happens. I mean it comes over you like a . . . like a cloud. A rain cloud. And no matter who you’re standing next to, you’re bound to get wet.”

  “What if you’ve got an umbrella?”

  “What? I don’t know.”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “It’s a comparison.”

  “Never mind. Sorry.”

  “Umbrella.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  He shook his head, roughly, as if a bit were attached to it. “What if there were a drought? What if rain fell up instead of down? What if you were made of sugar and when water hit you you just melted into the ground?”

  “Okay.”

  “What if you could dodge the raindrops?”

  Julia began to accompany me regularly to the house.

  “Otherwise I hardly see you,” she sa
id. “And I can work just as well there as at home.” Her work, these days, consisted of searching eighteenth-century English folios for images of women’s stockings, her advisor’s special research interest.

  “Look here,” she’d say, when she turned up a particularly well-concealed example. “There’s a little piece of leg. There, behind the haywain.”

  What her advisor was after was the earliest instance of the stocking fetish in British painting: what he called “The Primal Lingerie Scene.” His most recent book, I See England’s Underpants, had been a great success in the relevant circles. Julia had made me read it.

  I didn’t think much of Julia’s project, and I told her so.

  “Somebody’s got to lay the groundwork,” she said. “I know it seems silly. But how can we talk seriously about the representation of stockings before we know where all the stockings are?”

  How, indeed, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was not inclined to argue the point too strenuously; the last thing I wanted was for Julia to change her mind about spending her days in the basement with me. If stockings behind the haywain would keep her there, then I was all for stockings.

  I’d like to say my motivation was founded wholly on my affection for Julia; but in fact it was just as much for the effect she had on Ellen. When Julia was with me, Ellen vacuumed just once a day, and the frequency of clanging pans diminished to a level commensurate with reasonable use. She kept the snack bowl full. I was pretty sure she had even turned the radio down—although I thought it would be ill-advised to ask.

  And I, too, was quieted, I hardly ever wanted to punch Ellen anymore. That, by my standards, was something very close to friendship.

  Ellen began to spend more time in the basement. The four of us, engaged in our respective pursuits, made up a sort of grotesque double date: I translating the story of Little Bug, Julia hunting stockings, Higgs staring, and Ellen just sitting, in a luridly faked Louis XIV chair that smelled of wood rot. Sometimes she knitted. Other times she wrote letters. I could see her handwriting from where I sat: plump, mild letters in perfect schoolgirlish rows. She wrote to her nieces in Tulsa and Seattle, of whom, from time to time, we saw snapshots.