The Grasshopper King Read online

  Am I rushing this? There isn’t much to linger on. Our fights were the usual ones: petty domestic contentions, followed by hot silence, occasional half-hearted attempts at talking it over. In the end she always forgave me, and after a while I began illogically to resent her lenience. Once she’d been so ready to correct me—why not now? Couldn’t she tell I was hiding something? Didn’t she know I’d have to own up if she forced me? I thought she must be building up a case against me. Each little dispute was a new article, filed away with her damning commentary penciled in. The day she left she’d reveal it to me entire, its unanswerable bulk all the good-bye and consolation I deserved.

  But when she packed her things and went, it was without a hint of confrontation. With her hand on the knob I blurted out: “Don’t you want to tell me something?”

  “Like what?” she said. Through the window I could see the taxi with her boxes piled in front of it, and the driver sitting on the hood, hands in pockets—he’d seen this sort of thing before.

  “Like what an asshole I’ve been. Like everything I’ve done wrong ever.”

  I watched her search for a rejoinder. Then she relaxed. She opened the door.

  “No,” she said.

  So: Julia and I never married, or, I should say, I never married, and Julia married someone else, a gentlemanly professor named Simeon, to whose fifty-word advertisement in the hopeful back pages of the Lantern-Bugle (“EXPECTATIONS REASONABLE, NO GAMES”) she had, kind as always, responded.

  I met Simeon just once, at the engagement party. He had tired eyes and his puffy, contourless surface made no suggestion of internal architecture beneath; I thought cutting him open might reveal a perfect cross-section of undifferentiated vegetable stuff, like cooked potato. I prowled the perimeter of the room and watched him with a naturalist’s eye, swearing I’d see in him what she did, even if it took all night. Julia left his side to tend to something, and his knuckles flew immediately to his lips. He seemed on the verge of a stammered retraction. I took this chance to approach him.

  “Hey,” I said. I gulped fraternally at my drink. “No hard feelings. I’m happy for you both.”

  I was being sincere; but my reassurance seemed to make him even more uncomfortable. He chewed at his knuckle furiously. Deep potato currents, I sensed, were flowing where all was ordinarily placid.

  “I hear you’re a chemist,” I said.

  “That’s right—a polymer man.”

  I had nothing to add to that.

  “It must be really interesting,” I tried.

  “Well, it is,” he said, sounding hurt.

  “I meant, of course it is.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I see I’m making him sound worse than he was. In fact he presented a certain genial and soft-edged charm. I supposed he was gentle, handy, even-tempered, susceptible to a romantic impulse now and then—he’d said as much in his ad. (I’d trudged through the microfiched old newspapers for days until I’d found it.) She could have done much worse; here, of course, I was thinking of myself.

  Simeon and I stood there nodding at each other and exchanging weak, sporadic smiles until Julia arrived, accompanied by my parents. She’d moved in with them after all; she slept in my old bedroom now, beneath where Gregory Corso still smiled and awaited his first ecstatic forkful of wax beans. For a second, standing there in my bunched-up sprung-collared tuxedo (the same one, I was wretchedly certain, I’d rented for the Henderson Society banquet) with my parents and Julia fanned out before me and the band playing “Memories,” I felt as if some incautious step had dropped me into an alternate history; that Mesozoic butterfly had flapped its wings one extra time, with all that that entailed, and I was the groom, not him, and millions of people had never been born . . . Then I met Julia’s eyes and saw in their uncomplicated amity that time was still on track. My father shuffled his feet like an unquiet child.

  “Getting acquainted?” my mother said brightly. She had one hand on Julia’s arm. My mother had taken to her so quickly and with such force that she let Julia suggest changes to her recipes, a privilege never before granted, and already the de-wheatgermed hamburgers and the BLT with bacon and lettuce standing in for breaded lentils were beginning to draw new faces to our door.

  “Like gangbusters,” I said. Simeon nodded gravely.

  “Simeon’s in chemistry,” she said.

  “He was just telling me.”

  “When the two of them met, he was holding his diploma out.”

  “What?” Simeon said. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re sure you weren’t holding your diploma out?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “It’s in storage.”

  My mother encompassed us all in a conspiratorial glance. “The reason I thought you were is because there was chemistry between you.”

  Julia’s eyes flicked across mine, then came to rest on Simeon’s. She took a step closer to him—bodies in motion, I thought, imagining everything schematic and viewed from above.

  “You get it?” my mother said. “Then there would have been chemistry . . . between you!”

  “That’s good,” Simeon said, while I burned, with embarrassment, with envy. My mother beamed. “That’s very good,” he said.

  Simeon was offered a job at a company in New Jersey that, Julia wrote me in her first letter from there, “buys up unsafe products and makes them into plastic—asbestos, lead paint, old car batteries now, and, if Simeon’s team comes through, DDT . . .” Julia started teaching art in a private girls’ school. She writes me once a month or so—the achingly perfect, no-nonsense declinations of her script like an affectionate chastening. Her letters are made up of good wishes, earnest advice, and virtuosic simulations of interest in the departmental politicking that fills my drab, occasional replies. It’s hard to tell one letter from another, except by the things she includes: recipes clipped from the “Bachelor’s Banquet” in her town paper, photos of her tiny, scrubbed children, cartoons about professors, magazine articles she suspects will interest or vex me. All these things I read and throw away. The letters themselves I keep, though I never look at them.

  At the end of every letter she asks me when I’m coming for a visit. Each time I put her off. I tell her I’m afraid I’d never come back.

  Once I asked her if she missed Chandler City.

  “I don’t know if that’s the way to put it,” she wrote in reply. “I miss you, Sammy. I suppose I miss a few of my teachers. I think of Ellen sometimes—I do miss her. But I certainly don’t miss Chandler City, as a city, if that’s what you mean. I guess it seemed to me the sort of place you could either be from, and then leave, or just stop there for some amount of time. I can’t picture it as someplace to end up.”

  And indeed, no one did; no one but me. Rosso retired to Georgia eight years ago, at his doctor’s behest. Slotkin teaches at Yale. Dean Moresby lived just two years after I saw him at the banquet; Karl-Heinz Sethius is dead too. Treech is in New York City, rewarded for his successes with an executive post in the Henderson Society. And McTaggett went to Kyoto, the first American Gravinicist, I’m told, in the Far East.

  Charlie stayed in town a while longer. As it turned out, the certain parcel had arrived on his father’s watch, and consequently he too found himself out of a job at the end of my scheme. Feeling responsible, I persuaded my parents to take him on as a waiter. To everyone’s surprise, he was a tremendous success. It happened like this: one night, bored, contemptuous, sick to death of the smell of couscous, he began to hurry the night along by waiting tables in character. And just like that, stardom—within weeks the whole city had heard of his uncanny skills. He specialized in tough guys: Reagan, Nicholson, Elliot Gould. “People feel bad about being served these days,” Charlie told me. “Deep down they want a waiter who won’t take their crap.” We had lines out the door. Holistic awareness on the rise, according to my mother. She told anyone who’d listen: it was the satori-quake we�
�d all been waiting for, and the first shock was here, right here in Chandler City. But as soon as there was money enough my parents franchised the restaurant and moved back to New York. Happy Clappy’s is a Grape Arbor now. Charlie left soon afterwards, eloping with an enamored customer to Philadelphia, where he used his acquired knowledge of the vegetable trade to open a produce market, which, he gives me unsurprisingly to understand, is also a head shop.

  Ellen came back to Chandler City when her father checked into the hospital for what no one pretended was anything but the last time. I met her there, out in a bright hall lined with ficus trees and the brass-etched names of the donors. She looked different. I wanted to say younger, but it wasn’t quite that. The haze in her blue eyes was gone. She seemed a participant in the physical world in a way she had not before; I remarked her shadow, the shape her weight made on the vinyl cushion of the bench.

  “How is he?” I said.

  “Well, dying. You can see him if you want.”

  “I saw him yesterday.”

  This wasn’t true. I hadn’t visited the Dean, and had no plans to. I didn’t have anything to say to him and I was afraid that in his gummy blindness he would mistake me for someone who did.

  “I wondered if you would come,” I told her.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t think you were going to forgive him.”

  “I haven’t forgiven him.”

  “But you’re here.”

  Ellen nodded.

  “I thought you were never going to speak to him again.”

  “Nothing’s final,” Ellen said. “Not things like that.”

  “I guess not,” I said. Glumness settled on me, more than could be accounted for by the headachy tube lights and the frost-cool nurses clicking through their rounds, from one exhausted package of malfunction to the next.

  “And Professor Higgs?” I said.

  “He’s well.”

  “Still playing checkers?”

  “With my sister. I mostly play mah-jongg now.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “It’s true. And I pick up trash at the park with a stick, too, and go to lectures about gardening. I’m being an old lady—why not? Tampa’s filled with us.”

  “So you like Florida.”

  “We both do.”

  I leaned forward. “He told you that?”

  “I just know,” Ellen said. “All right?”

  “All right. I got it.”

  “I was sorry to hear about Julia.”

  “How did you know?”

  My question seemed to take her by surprise. “She wrote me.”

  “So she told you the whole story.”

  “Yes,” Ellen said.

  “We probably have pretty different perspectives on it.”

  “It’s always that way.”

  Two stout doctors came squabbling by us. Ellen and I watched them until they turned the corner. I wondered if someone had just died.

  “There are other women,” Ellen said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  “But really,” she said, and a little urgency entered her voice. “You should think about that.”

  After a little while she looked down at her watch. “Visiting hour’s starting,” she said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come in with me? I don’t mind.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll see you . . .”

  “Whenever,” I said. “Under happier circumstances.”

  “Yes,” Ellen agreed. “That sounds nice.”

  But six months later she was dead. Something in Florida—its thwarted swampiness, or all those old ladies—had released her constitution’s long-suppressed complaints. One day, as she folded miniature hot dogs into jackets of dough for her afternoon’s company, something in her lungs lay down gently and relaxed. The mah-jongg club found her kneeling at the counter with her head against the formica. She had died so quietly and gracefully that no one in the living room had heard a thing.

  I didn’t find out about this until three years afterwards, when one Charlotte Amanezar, a student nurse at a retirement complex in Clearwater, wrote to tell me that Higgs, too, was dead. Ellen (remembering my feelings on good-byes?) had listed me as after-next-of-kin.

  The retirement complex was called Sylvan Woods. Ellen’s sister had sent him there. His considerable pension paid for it all: a room of his own, swimming lessons, new-American high-fiber cooking by a two-star chef, and Miss Amanezar, his private attendant. I learned all this from the brochure she sent me, which had Higgs on the front cover. He was sitting in a sturdy-looking chair, angled three-quarters to the camera, in his usual attitude of distant calculation, as if he were momentarily to deliver an accounting of the costs and benefits of spending one’s twilight years at Sylvan Woods instead of some other, cheaper place of repose. One could imagine which way the sum would go.

  Miss Amanezar thought I’d like to know that Higgs had been a model patient, popular among the staff and clientele. (Why not? He would have listened politely to people’s war stories, their dimly recollected oat-sowage. He would never have sent his food back.) His funeral, a simple service, had been chock with mourners. “And I too,” she wrote, “will be sorry not to have him with us anymore; though I hope you will comfort yourself as I do that he has been taken to a better place.”

  I looked at the brochure again. It was hard to imagine a better place.

  The cause of Higgs’s death was recorded as “respiratory failure”—the coroner’s shrug. Miss Amanezar assured me that his passing had been painless and that, to the last, Higgs had been in perfect health. “It was just as if God had reached inside him and switched him off. Just like that.”

  And me? I stayed in Chandler City, stayed alive. On occasion this thought occurred to me, banal and agreeable: I have done well for myself. The department granted me my doctorate the day my Sethius paper was accepted. A month later they offered me a permanent position.

  Of course, they were not the first to do so; I had offers stacked on my bookshelves from every Gravinic department in the country, and most of those elsewhere. They’d sent me glossy campus albums, photos of my office-to-be, and the letters—committee chairs, distinguished men, fawning and wheedling like eunuchs. They were just the kind of letters Higgs used to get. And like Higgs, I decided to stay home. For maximum effect I kept my motive obscure; but in fact it was perfectly simple. I was happy where I was. I still lived in the L-shaped apartment, almost unsqualid now that I had it to myself. There seemed no reason, apart from the sentimental one, to move out. The ordinary thing, I understand, is to see the lost loved one in every corner, to move out (alternately drink, act, play football) in order to leave the accusing spirits behind, so that one might at last forget. But there was not a trace of Julia in the apartment. Even at the moment she’d left there hadn’t been; even, I thought now, for some time before that. So why move? It was bad enough that other people did.

  I took McTaggett’s place, teaching the rudiments of Gravinic syntax for the first few weeks of each semester, and returning to my own investigations once the last of my students slunk bemusedly away. Even when Rosso left us, grinning and coughing, and I was named department chair, I continued to teach—still harboring some hope, I suppose, of finding a successor. So far I have been disappointed.

  My deception was never uncovered. I came almost to believe in it myself, so implausible was the alternative version, my audacious, half-cocked secret-agentry, its unreasonable success. Even the most credulous, the dullest, zittiest, movie-hooked teen would have to shake his head: “Never happen.” But it had happened. And within months the silt of time and study had closed over my hoax and it was good as proved, good as if witnessed by angels. After a year: not a Gravinicist of any note but was willing to hold forth on how obvious it should have been to everyone what Higgs would say—and how, in certain of the Gravinicist’s own papers, it must be said by somebody, one could make out glimmerings of the revelation to c
ome; one could, that is, so long as one was willing to read fairly, and not with an eye toward denying the insights of others, in the interest, presumably, of one’s own rather far-fetched claim to primacy . . . And back and forth, and so on.

  I held myself out of this wrangling, and once I was certain I would not be found out, I ceased even to read the claims and counterclaims. My interests lay elsewhere. I was bent on realizing my Jugendtraum, the new history of Europe—though before long it became clear that this ambition, dizzy, avaricious as it was, had been too small. It was the whole world we were after now. My colleagues and I placed copies of Poems Against the Enemies with Lin Biao on the Long March, and with an aide-de-camp to Abdel Nasser, of mysterious provenance, whose advice to his commander on the eve of the Six-Day War—“Strike now, and their limbs are pulped, their penises lie as dry sticks for the chickens to peck apart; wait, and ichor runs from our own ankles, and defeat, the black washerwoman, claims her husband”—differed only in its relative cordiality from the speech of the Minister of Ants in Henderson’s “Feces: for Thisbe.” And more, and more, until there was not a two-bit revolution anywhere, no civil war, no organized slaying of any kind that had no Henderson in it.

  And no one cared but us. I couldn’t blame them, the real historians. We had our methods, and they had theirs: hundreds of them. So it was capital behind everything? You could make a case for that. Or the concentration of poor old agrarian man in the cities and the towns, or the coming dust-up of the races, or whatever was fashionable these days—you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I can’t take these “revisions” too seriously. Year by year they supplant one another—what is it, genetics now?—while we Hendersonists stay fixed on course.