The Grasshopper King Read online

  “Uh uh.”

  “We won’t be there long. It’s brisk out. You love brisk.”

  I meant to invest my voice with aren’t-we-glad-it’s-all-over, an unanswerable cheer, but instead I just sounded tired and shrill, like the director of a failing cruise, like a camp counselor—grotesque, grotesque.

  “Or we can go later,” I offered.

  “No,” she said, “just go now.”

  “That’s fine too.”

  I stepped backwards and in so doing kicked over the bottle I’d left by the bed. It cracked neatly along the neck and water began burbling onto the floor.

  “What was that?” Julia said.

  I pulled the dripping orchids from the glass.

  “I brought you flowers.”

  She peered over the edge of the bed at the mess I’d made.

  “OK,” she said, with a little smile—was it a smile?—“I’ll sweep it up. And you still should go.”

  “Are you throwing me out?” I said. I rested one hand on her cheek and kissed her, tasting her warm bed-breath and the salt of tears.

  “Go to work,” she said, sweetly, like an invalid. “I release you.”

  “You got it,” I told her. “I’m gone.”

  Before I’d gotten halfway up the street my relief had rolled over and exposed its underside of miserable regret. I had read about, or maybe only seen on television, couples who thrived in the clinch, and I wished it were that way for me, but not so: I just felt old, muddle-hearted, made for solitude. Was I supposed to have stayed? Yes, surely, and it wasn’t too late to turn back. But I kept walking as I played out the things I could have said, could still say. I could tell her how I’d almost killed Higgs. That was a thrilling thought for me: honesty, purgation. But I had learned to mistrust my impulses in that direction. In my life so far I’d seldom failed to reveal what I saw as the truth—I’d spoken my heart on delicate subjects, the flaws in people’s characters, their misapprehensions. What had it gotten me? A name as a straight shooter? Consultation on delicate matters? No, nothing but trouble and a tired philosophy-class uncertainty about what honesty was, anyway, and how one might come by it, and how, when the time came, to use it. I walked on, stoop-shouldered, with the bleak certainty of having committed an inalterable wrong sitting heavily inside me like a sudden cold stomach full of food. I should have stayed. She wanted me to stay. This contemplation occupied the whole of my trip through the drizzly afternoon, which by now was not brisk after all, but ponderous, the rain slack and unpleasantly warm, the sort of rainy day which no amount of saving for can rescue.

  When I got to the Higgses’ house I found the front walk blocked by a university maintenance truck, two of its tires sunk into the damp lawn. Uniformed men were proceeding in steady ant-like columns from the front door to the rear of the truck, carrying bulky boxes. One man emerged from the house struggling with a tall, squarish item hidden by a blue tarpaulin. When the wind lifted the tarpaulin’s corner I saw that he was carrying out one of the Society’s tape recorders. I pushed past him and into the house, through the empty foyer, into the kitchen where Ellen was.

  She was sitting Indian-style on the floor, with her whole china service laid out in front of her like a dinner party for phantoms. She picked up a plate and laid it carefully in a wooden packing crate by her side. Behind her the cupboards were thrown open and nothing was left inside. The drapes were gone.

  “Your book is on the table in the basement,” Ellen said.

  “My book,” I said. “Right. Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “We’re moving out today,” Ellen replied, lifting a plate up into the gray daylight, peering at its underside for cracks. “My brother-in-law in Tampa’s just died and my sister needs someone to stay with her.”

  “So you’re just taking off. Leaving the house behind.”

  Ellen shrugged. “It’s not ours. I’m sure the college can use it for something.”

  “I’d think you would have let people know you were going.”

  “Like who?”

  Like me, I meant, of course; but really, what claim did I have? I was speechless. Yet I couldn’t say, now that it had come to this, that I was entirely surprised. Over the past thirteen years the house had settled into a perfect, silent fixity, with only the Society’s continuing vigil as reminder that Higgs had ever spoken at all; like a vibrating string resolving into stillness and the memory of a tone. Now the silence was broken, and it hardly mattered that it wasn’t Higgs who had broken it. I thought I understood Ellen’s position. For her to continue in her routine, as if nothing had changed, as if the world (or our little twig of the world) were still waiting breathlessly outside for her husband’s secret knowledge, would be a kind of comedy she had no stomach for.

  Ellen’s expression relaxed a bit. She seemed to recognize that she’d bested me. “Stanley and I hate good-byes,” she explained. “It’s better to keep these things quiet and peaceful.”

  “Is it all right if I say good-bye to you anyway?”

  “Do what you have to.”

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Higgs.” I stuck out my hand and she, all business, shook it.

  “On the table in the basement,” she said.

  The basement was stripped bare. The cast-off museum was gone—everything returned, I supposed, to the anthropologists, or cached in cool, locked rooms along the nether corridors of the repository. No sign of it remained but a sequence of mask-shaped regions on the wall where the paint was not as spiderwebbed as elsewhere, and the taped-up names of the continents, written on notebook paper in Julia’s neat hand. There was only one tape recorder left.

  Higgs’s corner was conspicuous in having been left alone. My chair was still there, across from him, and there was Kaufmann on the table, and beside it, the checkerboard, the pieces set around the perimeter in neat stacks of three and four like the columns of a ruined temple.

  “One last game?” I said. Admittedly, it was a sentimental impulse. But despite what Ellen had said about good-byes, I suspected Higgs had a little sentimentality in him. Certainly he knew how to put a drama together, which was almost the same. I sat down and began to array the red checkers into alternating rows. After a moment, Higgs did the same with the black.

  “I’m sorry Julia’s not here,” I said. “It’s probably my fault.”

  Higgs responded only by making his first move, and starting up the murmur in his throat. I found myself believing, for no reason except that it seemed appropriate, that I would beat him this time. It would be the natural close to a certain kind of story: Higgs, the old maestro whose purpose, after sundry trials, is finally concluded in the very person of me, the aw-shucks protégé, and so forth. It implied the endless circle of learning and teaching, children and adults, kill the father, scatter his parts . . . And indeed, I was playing him close.

  “A rare performance for Grapearbor,” I said. “The young man holding his own.”

  I jumped a black checker, evening us at four men apiece.

  “She says she wants to move back to New York. I mean, we could—I just need a little more time here, I’m involved here now. Did I tell you I’m writing a paper with McTaggett? Higgs trying to sneak up the left file there, but Grapearbor’s having none of it . . . Shouldn’t I just marry her? Why should I possibly not? But I keep hesistating . . .”

  One of the workmen came downstairs. He hesitated on the last step as he saw me.

  “Didn’t mean to break in on you,” the workman said. “I’ll just be a second.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him, though in fact I was annoyed at the intrusion. My next few moves, I was certain, would be crucial ones.

  The workman jerked the cord of the last tape recorder from the wall with the solemn carelessness of a nurse disconnecting a feed tube. He wound the wire into a tight bundle and tied off the plug end with a sudden square knot. Then he draped a tarpaulin over the recorder, and, grunting, lifted the package until he could get his knee under it.
r />   “Last one,” he said brightly, and took it up the stairs. I was relieved he hadn’t asked me to help.

  When I turned back to the board I saw an opportunity that I had somehow missed before, by which I could take command of the central squares, by which I could transform the whole landscape of the board. My men were a convoy, rolling inexorably toward Higgs’s king line. His were trapped in culverts, screaming for their mothers.

  “I asked her to come here with me,” I said, “but she wouldn’t. Should I have insisted? Or what? Or do you think I should have stayed?”

  Triumphantly I set my checker down; and just as I took my hand away I saw my error. I had overlooked an obvious, shattering response. Higgs did not miss it. I made my only legal answer. His next move would be one that, in all our afternoons of play, I had never seen before: a quadruple jump. I hadn’t won.

  The noise in Higgs’s throat stopped. I grew hot, must have been, of all things, blushing, imagining his disappointment. It was a mistake not even Ellen—not even Treech—would have made.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “It’s my fault. Do what you have to.”

  But Higgs did not make the move. He stared down at the board, his face overtaken with what looked like fierce, sad calculation—it took me a moment to understand this, so strange was it to see him display any expression at all. The position on the board seemed to remind him of something long unavailable.

  “My advice,” Higgs said, “is to be careful of hasty marriage.”

  Then he picked up his king and removed the rest of my men.

  “My game,” said Higgs.

  Ten years passed.

  PART THREE

  “Once a certain degree of insight has been reached,” said Wylie, “all men speak, when speak they must, the same tripe.”

  —SAMUEL BECKETT

  CHAPTER 8

  HISTORY

  Now that the porter is gone, now that I’ve pressed three corrugated dollars into his grizzled hand (an old tattoo at the join of palm and wrist, a bleary peace sign); now that I’ve followed him, my single bag on my shoulder despite his entreaties, up the deep-pile eggplant-colored staircase to my room; now that I’ve walked stiff-lipped and chest-out past the loitering young toughs on the sidewalk into the hotel I’ve chosen; now that I’ve found the hotel, pinned shoulder to shoulder between two of the lacy, balconied apartment houses that loom like burly old ladies above the park; now that I’ve paid the cabdriver, now that I’ve hailed him at the airport, now that my plane has flopped to the runway with an impact that dashed my hoarded peanuts everywhere—now, that is, that I’ve arrived in New York; now that I’ve left Chandler City—I feel a little sick. I have to sit down on the bed, here in this indistinct room composed of earth tones, a wallpaper of muted stripes like geologic eras, a globe lamp, the requisite fixtures. I get up, kick my bag into the closet, shut the doors, and sit back down. What am I doing here?

  No, wait. I’m not up to that yet. It’s Sunday, January 7, 1996, about half-past eleven. Through my license-plate-sized window I can see the entrance to the restaurant across the street, and the beginning of the line where couples are waiting for brunch. I put my head against the wall to the window’s right, bringing an outdoor table into view. A man and a woman are eating omelettes out of rustic iron pans. They’re holding hands; the sleeves of their cable sweaters join and form a tube across the table. The sunlight is so even and precise that I can see the ice cubes in their glasses, and their faces are all contrast, Rushmore-like. I could read their lips if I knew how. I pull a chair up to the window and stand on it so I can look down at my own side of the street. The toughs are still there, huddled in clawed-up olive drab windbreakers, with logos sewn on, and exhortations drawn in marker: FIGHT! and CONNECT! and NO FEAR, and what must be people’s names in a flouncy graffiti. Every one of them has hair chopped short as a recruit’s. From overhead I can’t tell if they’re talking, but I suspect they’re not. They’re saying everything they need to just by standing there.

  What am I doing here? I’ll try to explain.

  I came home from Higgs’s house so twisted up with joy that it was all I could do not to launch myself into the air with each step; and if we’re to be completely honest (when if not now?) I stopped a few times and did exactly that—picture it! Myself, lank and a little rank, in my pale green interviewing shirt and matching tie, lifting off like a salmon from the mud-streaked sidewalk, flailing at the sky with one fist—yes! It was cool out now, at long last, but by the time I got home I’d sweated through my shirt. I stood exhausted at the door, clasping my hands one in the other, trying all the bodhi tricks I knew to rein my heartbeat in. Failing, I went inside.

  “I’m so sorry,” Julia said. “Look at you. Sit down.”

  She took me smartly by the shoulders and placed me on the side of the bed. My orchids sat in a new pot at my feet, with an odd-looking garnish that I saw after a moment was a ring of chocolate bars embedded in the soil. Julia pulled up a Three Musketeers, my favorite, unwrapped it partway, handed it to me.

  “Did you get your book?”

  “Mm hmm,” I said. My mouth felt like a jammed machine, choked solid with sweet nougat and gratitude. Julia sat down beside me and felt my forehead.

  “Look at you,” she said again. “You’re spectral. I think you’re poised on the shimmying shaking line between life and death.”

  “Nn nn,” I replied. I sucked the nougat off my teeth and swallowed hard. “Not so. I have news.”

  “Me first,” she said. “I have an announcement. I’m going to learn Gravinic. Which I know sounds weird so don’t stop me and which I know will be hard. But my advisor wants me to have a foreign language, and think about it—I’ll have some kind of sympathy with what you do, with what you’re doing—I got my own copy of Kaufmann, look—OK?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Look at me.”

  I did; she was. There was no twist to her lip, no telltale furrowing above one eye. Her features were in perfect balance, smooth and without strain. Stern, her hair pulled back in a tight barrette, she looked like a photograph, an old one, a daguerrotype entitled “Her Faith in Him.”

  “That’s so crazy it just might work,” I said. Love rumbled in my ears, socked me in the gut, memories zig-zagged past my defenses and smote me, stupid little ones—waiting in line at the supermarket, a heartbreaking glance backwards and downwards at me as she stepped off an escalator into a cascade of glare (the airport? a mall?) kisses without number, sleeping on her typewriter in a pool of dingy light with her fingers cross-laced over the Appalachian curve of her neck, saying my name, saying the word “wow”, a long way ahead of me on a street, sleeping again but in bed, then waking—I saw what I would have to do. I’d tell her everything, what I’d done and what Higgs had finally said, tell her and no one else. I’d told lies, yes, and failed to bring up certain truths, but in the end it had come out all right; and now this new secret, this last one, would bind us together forever.

  But something held me back. It was Higgs. He must have felt something like this for Ellen, when they met, or not long after; he too must have swooned, must have thought he could reduce all the conundrums and unsatisfiable demands of the world to just one question: yes or no. Ellen had said yes. And Higgs—I knew now—had never stopped regretting it. I turned away from Julia and let my eyes rest on the wall, its supple, ancient stains like shadows from a fixed sun. What I proposed was irreversible. And if word got out . . . I could already hear the scholars, the whispers across the continents: how convenient for Higgs to talk again, just after the recorders were gone, wouldn’t you think once would be enough? Worse than that: with two revelations to choose from, some would prefer the second, and among those maybe some ambitious enough to play the “grasshopper” tape a little more closely, perhaps side by side with Higgs’s lecture, with an expert present; or might they find just a trace of an unexplained, unexplainable shout, toward the end of the reel, just before the window frame crashed down? />
  “Your news,” Julia said.

  I needed time. With time, things would settle in their places. I’d sweat out all these fervent endocrines and be able to make some sense.

  “The Higgses are moving out,” I said.

  “Actually,” Julia said, “I knew that. I meant to tell you. Ellen told me at the banquet.”

  To my surprise I couldn’t summon up the slightest resentment.

  “Let’s never fight again,” I said impulsively.

  There was her smile again, the cocked corner of her lip. “Well, sometimes,” she said. “With love and fellow-feeling.”

  “With love and fellow-feeling,” I repeated.

  I would have agreed to anything. I just wanted it to be over: that day, this story. I plucked a Kit Kat from the pot, peeled back the foil and took a bite, half-expecting a mouthful of ashes. But no—it tasted like chocolate. I dropped backwards onto the bed and thought of the moving truck that must even now be carrying the Higgses out of town; implausibly I imagined the back door swinging open, and Ellen and Higgs sitting there in twin armchairs among the crates, imperturbable now and from now on, watching Chandler City shrink away. I took another bite, and as I crunched down into the wafer like a layer of soil I felt something like relief, except pleasureless. Or like despair, but not so sad.

  Gravinic didn’t last. At first Julia went at it with her usual forthright industriousness, and we’d pass whole evenings in harmony and study with the words for “moon”, say, spread out on dozens of flashcards on the bed. But before long she tired of the rococo conjugations and fine semantic shadings that so captivated me, and of my coaching, which sounded like carping to her; eventually it sounded like that to me, too.

  I didn’t tell Julia what Higgs had said. I thought about it, yes, as I’d planned to, and on several occasions resolved to come out with it that hour, that day, but each time my urge to unburden myself was weaker, while my reservations retained their full force. And before long I saw that my decision to keep my secret was just as irreversible as the other would have been. If I told her now, I’d have to explain why I’d waited so long; and the fact was, I didn’t think I could. I found myself spending more hours than necessary in my little office. There was something at once inspiring and soothing about my secretary, with her headset phone that never rang and her still, enciphered face. She had a loose-leaf binder full of crosswords and she worked them all day long. When I came home, long after sundown, Julia and I fought—fought without a trace of fellow-feeling, and finally, though I can’t say when this moment came, without love either. So we never married.