The Grasshopper King Page 11

  Ellen still unnerved me. For all her noisy appurtenances, she was herself rather quiet, and tended to disappear into corners, so that sometimes I would find myself meeting her distracted, bluish stare before I’d known consciously that she was in the room. That was bad; but not as bad as it had been before. At least now she was willing to talk. Often she would launch without warning into a story of her youth. “At Vassar I attended Friends of Labor meetings on several occasions,” she’d say, or “My father and I enjoyed fishing in the arroyo where Thales Road is now.” It was never clear what Ellen intended us to take from these stories. Sometimes she would stop in what seemed to be the middle, and pick up the thread again only after some weeks, or not at all. Other times she started mid-stream, repeating to us something that, say, Margaret had said, without giving any indication who Margaret was, in what relation she stood to Ellen, and whether we might ever hear of her again. It was as though she were telling one endless story, down in her mind, which through some sporadic malfunction surfaced now and then into speech.

  Sometimes she read to us from Higgs’s letters. These consisted mostly of sentimental flattery, school advice, and off-hand scholarly remarks—although it was from one of them that I extracted the story of Higgs’s introduction to Henderson, plucking it from among the blandishments and declarations of intent just as Higgs himself had plucked Poems Against the Enemies from that long-ago trashbin in Düsseldorf.

  Whenever Ellen read from the letters, I watched Higgs carefully for any sign of indignation. I wondered if he were embarrassed; certainly I was embarrassed for him. I cringed whenever I thought of his hand scripting out the pet names and nonwords, the occasional heart drawn at the bottom of a page—or worse, his face, his attentionless gaze, turned to secret contemplation of the charms of young Ellen, goopy Ferris-wheel fantasies . . .

  Julia, on the other hand, thought it was sweet.

  “You see?” she said. “Not everybody’s repressed like you.”

  “He was young.”

  “You’re young.”

  “You’re right,” I countered, “but is that how you want me to get old?”

  My stomach tightened a little, as it always did when I inadvertently alluded to a shared future for us.

  “I think it’s possible,” Julia said, “to be romantic in your youth and yet not eventually stop speaking and withdraw from all human interaction forever.”

  “Anything is possible,” I said.

  In any case, there was no sign of indignation from Higgs, nor did he appear to be embarrassed; and while this, of course, meant nothing, I liked to think we had his permission to hear the letters. After all, hadn’t things improved since my arrival? Didn’t Ellen seem happier? Wasn’t Julia the most challenging checkers player he’d faced in years? (Yes: Ellen attested to this.) I read gratitude in Higgs’s blank expression, seemed to hear him say, “Samuel, though I didn’t know it, it was you I’ve been waiting for.”

  Same to you, I said silently back. I had always been a bit of a determinist. Now—just as I had once believed myself fated to join the endless after-dinner drink of my parents’ New York—I felt that destiny had brought me to Higgs, with whom I shared a secret, possibly supernatural bond. I tried to analyze the process by which I constructed the thoughts I ascribed to Higgs—half-suspecting that there was no process, no construction, that the thoughts were real and I was receiving some dim transmission available for whatever reason only to me. I reflected often on the series of coincidences that had escorted me to my present position: the new wing at Gunnery Hall, Bobby Trabant’s fractured skull, the timely departure of Slotkin. Forces, I thought, were at work.

  It was my custom to stop, on my way home from Higgs’s house, at a little restaurant not far from campus, the same one where McTaggett had first broached the subject of graduate school. As I sat there in the back, mashing a cinnamon bun about in my mouth (theirs were swollen and uncannily heavy, like sticky meteors) I felt myself sunken in the easy pleasure of regularity. The waitresses knew me, if not my name; the pattern of varnish-lumps and fork scars on my usual table had grown familiar to me, likewise the faces of the usual patrons.

  On one of these stops, I found myself staring at someone I did not recognize—or not quite. He was a neat-looking young man in a blue blazer with a steaming cup of tea in front of him. The man caught my eye, then turned away. A moment later he shot a furtive glance in my direction. It was impossible to tell whether he was recognizing me or simply unnerved by my staring. Rudeness didn’t bother me—this was my familiar place. Familiarity meant license to stare, or what good was it?

  Suddenly the man’s brow cleared. He sprang from the counter and strode at me, down the aisle, extending one long hand, shouting, “Sammy Grapearbor, good goddamn!” And by this I knew at once that the neat young man was my old friend from my college days—already, a month out, I was thinking of them as “my college days”—it was Charlie Hascomb, the impressionist, the enemy of vermin. His close-cropped hair had fooled me.

  “Charlie,” I said weakly, “sit down, man.”

  My relief at recognizing him quickly gave way to apprehension. I had little desire to remind myself of the ugly, disaffected days that Charlie and I had spent together. But Charlie made it immediately clear that he too had abandoned the company of our erstwhile set, and thought no better of them than I did. We spent a pleasant half hour exchanging bad news of our former comrades. Bick Wickman, the purported Englishman, was serving time on vaguely reported interstate charges; another of our circle had gotten a girl pregnant and was living with her and her extended family in a tattery commune where animal products and carbonated beverages were forbidden.

  “His first time!” Charlie told me, frowning hilariously.

  And Barberie was writing pornographic science fiction novels to make ends meet, and there was Kack’s aborted career as a stock car racer, and peccadillos, and botched suicides. And some of them were still undergraduates, and this, we agreed, was somehow most piteous of all.

  Charlie, for his part, was working at his father’s record store, which, he gave me quietly to understand, was also a head shop. “So if you need anything . . .” he said suggestively; and when I told him I’d quit marijuana, he cackled. “I noticed your zits had cleared up,” he said, and at that I had to smile.

  “Do Bick Wickman,” I said, on impulse.

  “It’s been a long time. You’re asking a lot of my talents.”

  But with hardly any more encouragement Charlie dropped into Bick’s wobbly British accent, his foppish intonation, and began to admit to a sequence of crimes, each more unnatural and defiled than the last.

  “I’m so bloody sorry for all that I’ve done,” he wailed, his voice stopping up with simulated guilt.

  “Stop it,” I begged him, teary, choking with laughter. “It’s too cruel.”

  “Okay,” he said, himself again. “But what about Beemish?” And he went on in this way, mimicking each of our old acquaintances, confessing in their earnest voices to every kind of perversion, iniquity, and bad faith. I felt almost nostalgic.

  Finally Charlie looked at his watch and grew serious.

  “I’m late already,” he said. “But let’s get together soon. I want to see the famous Julia again. I remember her well.” Then he took on her voice. Even after all these months, he had it down. “Come here and take me, you big, brutish man!” he said. At another table a slight trucker looked up hopefully from the menu.

  “You warned me off her, remember? You said she had a secret radiation beam.”

  “Radiation beam.” He grinned, dazzlingly. “Sounds like something I would have said. But I don’t remember it.”

  “Now I’m not sure,” I said—and why I told this little lie I really don’t know—“maybe it was somebody else.”

  Charlie wrote his phone number on my napkin, paid for his half-consumed coffee, and left. I tucked the napkin in my pocket, thinking that perhaps I would make plans to see him, that there were, after a
ll, drawbacks to the joined hermits’ lives that Julia and I had taken up. As I drank the rest of Charlie’s coffee I resolved that I would call him. It might do us good—who could say?—to entertain.

  Ellen’s stories, as I’ve said, were almost always concerned with her youth. About the thirteen years since Higgs had fallen silent, she seemed to have nothing to say. Sometimes I wondered whether she knew how much time had passed. Once, unable to sleep, I considered the shopworn idea that time was a road. If it were true, I thought, the Higgses’ carriage had caught a wheel in a rut, or the horses had broken their tethers and run; or they had simply slowed their pace further and further until finally they had come to rest, settling there in the dust, the rest of the world’s wagon train having long ago passed out of earshot. That was why the front door was so thick. Otherwise the accumulated pressure of time would break it down, would flood in and kick out the walls, sweeping everything away and off the cliff.

  Even in the dark, I knew this was nonsense. That door was opened every day—no flood. But the fact remained that she showed a peculiar unconcern for what any reasonable person would consider the distinguishing feature of her life: her husband’s silence. In all the time I spent there, she spoke about it only once.

  Julia had brought that month’s Cosmopolitan to the house. She was fond of all the women’s magazines; she read them fervently and with mock-disregard. Now she sat in her chair (a three-legged Shaker) and flipped efficiently through the pages for something that would amuse her. The perfume samples, meant to be activated one at a time by a more deliberate reader, mingled uneasily in the air of the basement. Together they smelled fruity and dank, a little spoiled—strangely, I thought, like meat. Maybe it was ambergris.

  “Listen to this,” Julia said. “Forty-three percent of American women have had a sexual fantasy involving President Reagan.”

  “Define ‘involving,’” I said.

  “And thirty percent with Bush.” She looked up from the magazine with her lower lip tucked in. “Who reads this stuff?” she said.

  “You do,” I pointed out.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Reagan. Maybe Bush.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Never assume.”

  I was looking down at my text, and Julia was facing my direction, so neither of us saw Ellen lift herself with unprecedented quickness from her chair; and when her palm slammed down on the open magazine, nearly upending Higgs’s spindly table, Julia screamed, and I leaped from my chair in alarm, spilling my papers onto the already cluttered floor. Ellen snatched the magazine off the table.

  “Were you reading this?” she asked Julia—all tranquility.

  “Oh, no,” Julia said, clasping her hands. “I was through.”

  The quiet, perfumed air had swallowed up Julia’s scream; it was already hard to believe that she had screamed at all. I sat back down and bent to collect the pages of Henderson’s story. Ellen stayed standing, peering closely at the magazine’s jaunty type. I wondered what her interest in it could be. I found it impossible to imagine her fantasizing about any government official, past or present. Then I saw that she wasn’t looking at the article Julia had been reading. Her eyes were fixed on the facing page. It was some sort of questionnaire.

  “Is your marriage in a rut?” Ellen said grandly. “Is . . . your . . . marriage . . .” She glanced at Higgs. “In a rut?”

  “I think those questionnaires are more for newer couples,” Julia said apprehensively; but Ellen’s momentum would not be deflected. She had already begun to read.

  “Do you and your mate go out less often than you once did?” she said. She took a moment to consider. “Yes. Do you find that your day has settled into a fixed routine? Yes.”

  Her face was held tightly, and her jaw worked, as if she were engaged in some awesome concentration, as if the questions were not yes or no but formulas to be solved, equations to be balanced, a final examination in some difficult science.

  “Do you and your mate have trouble communicating? Yes. Do the following aspects of your life lack variety: meals? leisure? career? sex?”

  “Honestly,” Julia said, sounding panicky now, “nobody puts any stock in these things. They’re entertainment.”

  “Yes,” Ellen said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  She continued down the page, reading every question aloud, answering each with a toneless affirmative. Finally she came to the end, where the tallied-up scores were interpreted.

  “It says here,” she announced, “that my marriage is in a rut.”

  “Oh, no,” Julia said. “We don’t think so.”

  “Julia’s right,” I told her. I tried to drag out a comforting maxim; but before I could remember one, Ellen began to speak.

  “I’ve been called all kinds of things,” she said. “People”—here she held up the magazine, “feel they have a right to comment.”

  She spoke haltingly, but with forceful inflections, as if reciting a well-memorized speech in a language she only partially understood.

  “My own father believes Stanley to be in some way ill. As you can see—” she gestured at the bank of recorders, “he is not at all solicitous of my feelings. He feels quite strongly that Stanley ought to speak—that it is always better to speak than to refrain from speaking. As if some sort of moral axiom were involved. Of him, if we ourselves were on speaking terms, I might ask: what about ‘Silence is golden’? What about ‘Forever hold your peace’?”

  “I will concede there’s something to be said for variety; but then again there is something to be said for the lack of variety. Death—that’s variety. Beating—variety. Adultery—extreme variety. You read about these things. My marriage lacks variety—all right, why shouldn’t it? What about domestic tranquility? It’s in the Constitution. And we have it.”

  She closed the magazine—releasing a final exhalation of perfume—and set it back on the table.

  “And Stanley agrees with me,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

  We fought all the way home, scattering pigeons with our passage. It was Saturday, and the streets, except for the pigeons, were empty. Without the background of traffic, our voices sounded strangely earnest, and our pauses unnaturally long, as if we were acting in a movie with artistic ambitions.

  “She’s deranged,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m being sensible. She needs to see somebody. It’s her you ought to be scared of, not Higgs. She’s the one who’ll pick up a knife someday.”

  Julia folded her arms. “If you ask me, she made some pretty good points.”

  We walked a few blocks without speaking. This was the kind of trifling, unworthy argument that either one of us could have shut down with a word. I could have told her that I was overreacting, that I’d been tired lately, or sick, that the steady toll of my work had made me raw-skinned and quick to see threats. All of these things were more or less true. But it would be just as easy for her to make equivalent admissions; and so I was reluctant to give in. I waited her out, as the pigeons fled before us. I knew that in the end she would speak. It was part of her being better than me. We’d played this game before.

  “Listen,” she said, finally. “Do you want me to stop coming?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’d hate to leave Higgs.”

  “Really?”

  She turned a little upward and away from me, as if she were expecting something in the rooftops, a face behind the crumbled cornices. “It’s hard to explain. I guess I’m starting to find him—I don’t know. Appealing.”

  “Should I be worried about this?” I asked her, joking.

  “I don’t think so. It’s weird. But he is sort of sexy.”

  I stopped dead, underneath a streetlight.

  “What?”

  “Not that I’d ever let anything happen. It’s purely mental.” She twirled her hands as if trying to gather something up from the air. “It’s sort of f
un, not knowing what he’s thinking. Not like you—I know you by now.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said.

  Julia toyed with the bottom of her shirt. “I wonder what I’d have to do,” she said dreamily, “to make him talk . . .” I gaped at her; she met my gaze evenly. I was short of breath, as if someone was sitting on my chest: someone with a cruel face and a mocking laugh, a little goblin in spurs. I tried to tell myself it was nothing to worry about. Just as she’d said, it was purely mental, abstract. But I couldn’t force down the taste of catastrophe. What now? I thought. Just walk home? Or take off gibbering into the streets?

  The lamp above us cracked and hummed into light. Both our heads jerked up; then we looked at each other. The light jaundiced us, made our skin waxy and grooved, turned our eyes the color of parchment.

  “I’m kidding,” Julia said. “You are the stupidest boy ever.”

  “Oh, ha ha.”

  She looped a companionable arm over my shoulder. “Seriously,” she asked me, “is there anything you can’t believe?”

  That night, we settled into the saggy center of our bed, supine and pressed together; and Julia let one of her hands twiddle in my hair while the other roamed down my flank; but I picked up that hand and put it back on her side of the bed. I was one-third asleep and my thoughts were bubbling down into a confused and unappealing stew—like a stew my mother would have made. Sexy Higgs was in my mind, and the long and tedious haul of translation that waited for me in the morning, and, still, the voice and the portentous drumming of Phil Collins: You’re the only one who really knew me at all . . . With a delicate renunciatory thrill, I turned myself to face the peeling wall.

  “Are you OK?” Julia said.

  Instead of answering her I issued a small and worthless mumble: I’m asleep, no talking. And within a few minutes this lie was true.

  The next day Ellen was herself again: hospitable, shifty-eyed, and unforthcoming, which was as I preferred it. We returned relievedly—anyway, I was relieved—to our ordinary routine. The four of us worked silently all morning; then Ellen brought us lunch; and once the plates were cleared away we got down to checkers.