The Grasshopper King Read online

  We had all long since grown tired of playing the usual way. We experimented with the Spanish and Italian rules; we played Damenspiel, Russian shashki, and loser’s draughts; Ellen taught us several nameless variants she’d learned in childhood. All these felt like gimmicks, and all lost their luster in time. It was Julia who suggested a tournament; and it was this idea that finally proved to hold our attention. Our schedule was a simple cycle of the six possible pairings: first Julia and I, then Ellen and Higgs, Julia and Higgs, Ellen and I, Julia and Ellen, Higgs and I, and around again to the start. Ellen established a cumulative scoring system. A victory against the first-ranked player counted four points, beating the second-best earned three, and so on. We kept a running tally on a blackboard which Ellen had propped next to Higgs’s seat, under the row of windows.

  Higgs held the top rank permanently, maintaining a comfortable if not insurmountable lead over Julia in second place. Ellen and I were far behind; the two of us traded the third and fourth spots every few days, since whichever of us was ahead had to win two games of every three to keep from losing ground. Neither of us ever beat Higgs. I had a few successes against Julia, but I suspected she was letting me win, and after I alerted her to my suspicions, though she denied any leniency, I never defeated her again. That was all right with me. I enjoyed checkers much more when there was no doubt about the outcome. A close game seized me up, especially at the end, when there was room for nothing but response to my opponent’s moves, trying to pull my men away from the threats in every direction, looking for the one adequate move in the heap of sure disasters. Losing was a relief.

  Sometimes we lured Treech into a game, during his monthly visit. He was ludicrously bad; even I had no trouble against him. Whenever he jumped one of my pieces, even when it worsened his position, he cackled, thumped my back, and shouted, “Chalk one up for the old man!” I abided the games solely because his tenacity gave me a weird pleasure; it seemed each time as though he thought he actually might win. There were no points for beating Treech.

  The matches between Julia and Higgs became the center of our afternoons. Higgs’s style was one of ferocious, omnidirectional assault, while Julia preferred to hang back, holding two checkers on the king line as long as possible and protecting her double corner. When she was able to king a man before Higgs, she almost always won. During their games the two of them seemed to share an obscure understanding. Higgs’s throat-noise took on a patterned (I thought) variation of tremble and pitch, about which I imagined Julia knew more than she was letting on. I despaired of ever decoding it myself; and when the two of them were playing my supposed bond with Higgs seemed a vain product of my hopefulness and folly.

  He and Julia played from a tournament deck, a collection of one hundred and thirty-seven laminated cards, each of which displayed one of the three-move openings that gave no immediate advantage to either side. When their turn came around, Julia drew a card from the deck and laid it face up in the center of the board. Then the two of them took a moment to contemplate the game into which they were about to be thrust. When I recall those afternoons of checkers it’s this moment that comes to mind: the caesura between consideration and play, the respite of Ellen’s knitting needles, the slow graduation of the noise in Higgs’s throat, and at the end of it the punctuation of the checkers clicking against the board, three times, as Julia and Higgs carried out their predetermined moves, three full stops, or—I should say—an ellipsis.

  Around the end of August a heat wave settled into Chandler City, a high-pressure system, a heavy, grayish air mass squatting over us like a sweaty giant. It was the kind of heat a thunderstorm would break up. But there was no sign of a storm. Outside it was impossible to tell morning from evening. In the evening peoples’ clothes were wet through; that was the only difference.

  In Higgs’s house, built before central air, Julia and I stripped to our undershirts and gulped for breath like lungfish. It was eighty-five degrees in the basement by noon, and the slack breezes that made their way in through the half-height windows only served to remind us of other, more refreshing breezes. Ellen carried down an ancient box fan which, thanks to some old sabotage of hers, clattered like a wooden rollercoaster car when it was at full strength—and we always kept it at full strength. I was in a terrible temper. Ellen had built a commanding lead over me in the contest for third place, and my work on “The Four Wives of Little Bug” was going poorly. The traveling salesman’s part was rendered in a soupy provincial patois which I was unable to translate. I was waiting for some papers from a dialectologist at Cornell; until they arrived I could not proceed. I resolved to spend my enforced sabbatical studying the finer points of the Gravinic postconclusive. There were many relevant points, and they were very, very fine. The work, even by my standards, was difficult, uninspiring, and slow.

  Julia was having troubles of her own. A team in Leeds had succeeded in programming a computer to scan paintings for pictures of stockings. The machine was not perfect, but it was much faster than Julia—faster indeed than a hundred Julias. Her advisor, not to be outdone, had rushed a paper into print declaring that, in all sensible constructions, stockings would have to take a second place to handkerchiefs. It would be months or years before the hated Leedsians could have a new program ready. In the meantime, it fell to Julia to return to all those volumes of paintings she’d counted as complete, now with an eye toward handkerchiefs, and moreover—as a precaution against greater-than-expected versatility on the computer’s part—for ascots, tippets, chemisettes . . . Week by week her advisor added to her list. She could study the paintings for, at best, an hour at a time before her attention began to flag, and the too-familiar images began resolving themselves into brushstrokes and fields of color.

  At home she’d lay herself across our bed with a raft of art books and a magnifying glass; but before long she’d flip on the little television set she’d bought for ten dollars at a yard sale. The set had color; but not the right color. A light green Julia Child wavered across the screen, hoisting a saucepan whose contents were impossible to make out through the snow.

  “I’ve seen this one,” Julia—my Julia—said.

  I crouched behind her and watched as an intricate deglazing began to take shape. The fan chilled the sweat on the back of my neck in an unpleasant way.

  Julia rolled over to look up at me. “I feel like a lump.”

  “You’ve got to have a system,” I told her. “You can set a number of paintings to do and give yourself a little reward when you finish. Like ice cream or a gold star.”

  “And yet I cannot,” Julia said.

  It was not the first time—not the tenth time—I’d made this suggestion, which I’d learned, long ago, from a pallid guidance counselor in my high school, a kindly and awkward woman who’d mistaken my disobedience and sloth for frustrated promise.

  “Lumps don’t have boyfriends,” I pointed out.

  The night after Ellen’s speech, I’d again kept Julia on her own side of the bed; and the night after that, and the succeeding nights, she’d stayed there on her own. We didn’t speak about it. But each night I felt a strange, thin, pride—like a hungry cross-desert driver, like a monk whacking himself with thorny branches. How far—the unspoken question—could we go?

  As summer approached its technical conclusion, Julia took on a new project, which seemed to me more hopeless than handkerchiefs, more unrewarding than undershirts; but she wouldn’t be dissuaded. She was going to organize the Higgses’ basement. She tacked hand-lettered signs to the walls, one for each continent except Antarctica, and set herself to the task of sorting the heaped artifacts by landmass. North America was pinned up on the back wall, to the right of the tape recorders; South America in the corner beside the mummy; Europe next to the blackboard where we recorded our day’s wins and losses, with Africa occupying the remainder of the windowed wall; Australia behind the false Louis XIV chair, on the staircase side; and Asia on the wall across from the windows, where Julia was wont t
o sit. Within each continent she separated the pieces by function: ornamental, household use, weaponry, devotional, other, and unknown.

  Julia’s project made me uneasy. In its doggedness, its zeal for taxonomy, its stubborn attention to things ignored by all reasonable people, it was altogether too familiar—too much, I mean, like something I would do. I didn’t want Julia to become more like me. Our romance, I suspected, would founder.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Nobody’s ever going to use these things. They’re trash.”

  She looked me over, weighing a confidence.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m doing it for Professor Higgs.”

  I was unable to conceal my bewilderment.

  “I know,” she went on, “but it just seems as though he wouldn’t want everything all mixed up this way. I keep thinking maybe it’s distracting, sitting in all this mess. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t say anything.”

  “I doubt that’s what it is.”

  “I just thought I had a sense. I’ve been here practically as long as you have.”

  I had to concede that—and, if only inwardly, that Julia could after all be right. Did I have any better explanation? Maybe it was the disarray of the basement. Nothing could be ruled out. Maybe it was a rite of some kind, or a political statement, as Harry Reasoner had thought; maybe a lost wager, or a rare and unnamed neurological syndrome; maybe nothing but a prolonged mulish sulk at some unintended insult perpetrated on him by the world. Or maybe the Henderson Society was right, and he was still en route to some revelation that would make up for it all. I had no way of knowing.

  Nor, strange as it seems, had I given the question much thought. After the first few days Higgs’s silence had begun to seem immutable, part of the world, even ordinary. It was hard to imagine that he had ever spoken, impossible to imagine that he would ever again speak. Why was Higgs silent? I couldn’t exactly make sense of the question. It was like asking why I was five-foot eleven and pigeon-toed, or—better—why Julia was a woman. He just was. All I knew for certain was that whenever Julia claimed to know what Higgs wanted I felt helpless and a little ill.

  “I suppose it can’t hurt,” I said. I started to set up the checkerboard; it was my turn to be beaten by Higgs.

  Just then there was a sound that it took both of us a moment to recognize; it was one we had not heard (and would not hear again) the whole time we stayed in Higgs’s house. It was the telephone ringing.

  Neither of us knew where the phone was, and Ellen was upstairs; but finally, by following the sound, I turned it up in the back cupboard, encarceled behind a stack of back-up tapes. The man on the phone asked to speak to Higgs. Behind him I could hear music, furniture moving around, girls talking.

  “Who is this?” I asked him. “Alpha Chi Beta? Sig Sig?”

  “I’d like to speak to Professor Higgs, please,” the man said again. I heard him swallow hard. He was far gone.

  “This is he,” I said.

  There was a pause on the other end. Someone was asking the caller a question. “He says it’s him,” the caller told the someone. He sounded almost indignant.

  The man came back on the line.

  “I just called to tell you you suck!” he said.

  “Good luck,” I told him. “I hope you get into whatever house this is.” But he’d already hung up.

  “Don’t they have anything better to do?” Julia said, a little peevishly.

  I rose up from the cabinet.

  “Almost certainly not,” I said.

  My unease with Julia’s endless sorting and shuffling began to shade into anger. Sitting at the table, my back and behind sweat-stuck to my chair, my gaze resting heavily, immovably, on a sentence of Kaufmann, I could not help but take her diligence as a reproach. Every time she set an object in its continent I lost my place, and my eye floated slowly, resentfully, back to the passage I’d been reading; if indeed I could be said to be reading at all. For weeks I’d been stuck fast on one page, the one that started, “The dual manifestation of the Gravinic postconclusive is easily conducive to the apparent misinterpretation.” The sentence galloped hectic through my mind, a lumpy stanza: “The dual manifestation”—bum bum—“of the Gravinic postconclusive”—bum bum—“is easily conducive”—ba da bum—“to the apparent misinterpretation”—bum bum. To this day I don’t know exactly what it means.

  Worse than the distraction was the apparent calm lightness with which Julia carried out her task, seemingly unaffected by the heat, by her now-constant defeats at Higgs’s hands, or by her abdication of her academic responsibilities—for it was a rare day now that found her at her folios. There at my table, I fumed, and was quiet. Smoldering silence was a tactic that usually worked well for me; after a while, Julia would ask what was wrong and I could proceed from the strengthened position of not having broached whatever subject I was smoldering about. But this time she seemed prepared to ignore me indefinitely, despite the undue vigor with which I permuted my papers and the many pained upturnings of my eyes.

  Once it was clear that my behavior would not have its intended effect, I began to see that it was inappropriate and childish. One afternoon, in a spasm of high spirits—I had just unraveled the postconclusive in its collective manifestation, though the dual remained as mysterious as ever—I resolved that I would not only tolerate but take an interest in Julia’s project. At the moment she was considering an object which seemed to be about two-thirds of a three-legged bowl, dull orange and painted with stairsteps.

  “Aztec?” I asked her.

  “Zapotec.”

  She set the bowl down in a little bramble of ceramic shards at the foot of the sarcophagus. Ellen glanced down without interest, then returned to a letter.

  “But Mexican, right?” I said.

  “Mm hmm.” She turned the bowl over and peered at the handwritten label. “From Oaxaca State.”

  “So it should be North America.”

  “No, I’ve got it in South.”

  “Mexico is North America.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But everything Mesoamerican goes with South America. It makes more cultural sense.”

  “Then the ‘South America’ sign should say ‘South America and Mesoamerica.’”

  “This is the stupidest argument we’ve ever had,” Julia said.

  “Think about what you’re saying. Of all our stupid arguments . . .”

  She cocked her head for a moment and thought.

  “To the best of my recollection,” she said, “this is the very stupidest.”

  “Fine,” I said, and returned sullenly to my studies, feeling ill-rewarded for what had after all been an improvement, however slight, in my demeanor. To demonstrate that I was no longer available for chit chat I assumed a voice of concentration and read aloud the sentence I had just succeeded in analyzing.

  “Grinto mapplethorpe watusi bah,” Julia said suddenly. “Frente chico matuba hiawatha. Hepzibah barada nikto.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I did?”

  “I have my own language now,” she said. “It’s called Juliatic.”

  “And what was that you said?”

  “‘My boyfriend is annoying.’”

  “Huh.”

  “The reason it’s so long is Juliatic has no word for ‘boyfriend.’ Literally it comes out as ‘he who sleeps in my bed and thinks he knows much more about everything than he does.’”

  “That sounds sort of inefficient.”

  “But once you get used to it . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said, burning. “I’d imagine so.”

  She knelt to the floor and came up with a tangled quipu slung over one hand.

  “I guess we could just break up,” I said.

  “Who’d get the apartment?”

  “You found it.”

  “True,” she said. “So I guess I get it.”

  “Then can I take the bed?”

  “It’s yours.”

  “I�
��d hate telling my parents.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Julia said. “They’ll understand.”

  Ellen had been gaping at us in turn, her head jerking back and forth, her mouth growing steadily rounder and wider as if an invisible sphere were working its way out. Now she released a shrill uninterpretable syllable of dismay.

  “She’s kidding,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

  “He’s kidding too,” Julia said.

  “Did Julia tell you why she’s cleaning up?” I asked Ellen.

  “Oh, don’t,” Julia said.

  “Women like things orderly,” Ellen said. “Men don’t care about things like that. It’s a fact. In my youth I was ready to turn everything upside down—all the traditions, everything. But now I see that people are fixed into being what they’re like.” Some memory overtook her. “Marriage and property—we’d tear it all down, we thought—oh, and the parietal rules—how we lied . . . !”

  “She says she’s doing it for your husband.”

  “Oh,” Ellen said. She put one hand to her lips. “Did he ask you?”

  “Of course not,” Julia said tightly.

  “Well put,” I said.

  Julia turned back to me. “I don’t know why you think you know so much.”

  “I’m not quite sure why I’ve never cleaned this place up myself,” Ellen mused. “I suppose you can get used to anything.”

  “You can’t study Henderson and care about things being neat,” I said. “If you did, you would know what I mean. It’s all about sloppiness and ruining things.”

  “Oh,” Julia said, “so I’m unable to participate in this discussion because I haven’t read the collected works of your third-rate poet. Mister Sunrise. Fourth-rate.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “You’re the worst checkers player I’ve ever seen,” Julia said.

  “I’m better than Treech.”

  “Treech likes you. I think he lets you win.”