The Grasshopper King Page 24

  “A letter,” I said.

  The porter looked doubtfully at my accumulated work.

  “To an old girlfriend. She doesn’t know I’m here.”

  He broke out in a low, wide grin. “Hey, man, I hear you. Tell her good.”

  I gave him two dollars.

  But this isn’t my letter to Julia, not yet. I’m putting that off. There’s that story about Woodrow Wilson: his secretary comes into his office and says, Mr. President, they want you to give a one-hour speech on the state of the economy, how long do you need? And Wilson says, give me a month. The next day the secretary comes back and says, now they say they want a two-hour speech, and Wilson says, I can have it in a week. And the next day the secretary comes back in and says, big surprise, now they want three hours, and Wilson gets up and says, where are they? I’m ready now.

  So this is my three-hour speech.

  This morning, Thursday, I stepped out for breakfast (in this city, I find to my delight, egg salad can be had at six-thirty in the morning, and at every corner; I chose to patronize a genial, frizzy-haired Cambodian who called me “Captain” and could have been cousin to my Greek) and, on my return, found the young toughs back in front of my hotel. They were all wearing schoolbags now. It seemed they were waiting for the bus. I looked at them for a little too long; one of them, a blond boy, caught my gaze. He seemed to be the leader.

  “Hey, mister,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  The whole group of them dissolved in laughter, all but the one who’d spoken. “Nothing,” he said. “Just being sociable.”

  “You’re all in school?” I said.

  The blond boy had a little death’s head bauble stuck in his left ear. “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Rockley,” he said. Someone said “Suckley.” Another one: “Dickley.”

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure.”

  “School’s a crock,” the blond boy said. (“Crockley,” someone whispered.)

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “It’s not reality,” he explained. “You know what I mean? Reality’s about taking risks. Going to extremes.”

  “He’s extreme,” another boy said. No—it was a girl. Her olive T-shirt had a little red star on the chest. “He’s a merciless skater.”

  “I have been close to death many times,” the blond said proudly.

  “Geometry, especially, that sucks,” said the red-star girl.

  “I took French for two years,” a fat boy put in, “and all I learned how to say was bawn jore.” The girl gave him five.

  “So are you selling or what?” the leader asked me.

  Their surliness, so careful, so new; I wanted to gather them all to my arms, rummage through their untouslable brush cuts. Youth was just as I remembered!

  “I’m afraid not,” I told him. “Actually, I just moved here.”

  At this, a burst of good humor, razzing from the rear.

  “That is wack,” he said. “Why?”

  “I’m starting a restaurant.”

  It was the first thing that had come to mind; but really, I thought, why not? Cooking was the only real job I had ever had. My family name, even now, might be an asset. Kids like this would work for me; maybe these very kids. I anointed them one by one. Blond boy: you will be my fry cook. Red-star girl: prep, salad, soup. Fatso: security.

  The bus rumbled up at the curb; not a bus at all, I saw, but a well-appointed Japanese minivan with a stopsign-flap attached. It must have been a good school.

  “Peace out,” the blond boy advised me, and raised a fist.

  “No fear,” I said.

  I’m almost out of paper again. I call the porter and ask for a ream to be sent up. He arrives seconds later with forty pages.

  “You know what you should tell her?”

  It occurs to me that he would make a perfect maître d’.

  “What?”

  He sets the paper down at my right. I hand him a dollar.

  “Tell her you’ve changed.”

  “Now come on,” I say, “that’s too easy.”

  “But the point is, don’t say how. Then whatever she really wants out of you, that’s what she’ll think it is.”

  “You don’t know Julia. She takes convincing.”

  “I don’t have to know her. This always works.”

  “Besides,” I say, “I really have changed.”

  The porter stops in the doorway. “Hey, man,” he says. “You’re getting the hang of it.” Then he clattered down the stairs.

  But I have, but I have, but I have. Perhaps I can even say how. I lived with my secret, all those years, as with a wife—as Higgs, I thought now, must have lived with his silence, and Tip Chandler with his vision of a second Athens rising from the scrub. Now my secret’s out. I should never have kept it in the first place. Was that what Higgs had meant?

  I don’t know. I won’t ever, now; I’ve set both feet down in the new world, the Higgsless and Hendersonless world, where everybody else lives—merciless skaters, restauranteurs, mere mortals. There has to be something to it or it would not be so phenomenally popular.

  I’d like to try explaining all this to the porter, but I don’t expect I’ll see him again. I won’t need more paper than I have. And if I’ve rushed over these last parts, I’m sorry; it’s just that I’ve been feeling, these past few hours, about ready to put this aside and write to Julia. I think I won’t have much to say, not until I see her. There are just a few things:

  I miss you.

  Regards to Simeon.

  I look forward to meeting the children.

  I thought it might be nice, after all, to see New York.

  But I promised I would tell what happened to Higgs’s house.

  After Dean Moresby died it was agreed that a new building should be erected in his honor; and while a show was made of considering other sites, it was clear from the start that his memorial would go up on the ground of his daughter’s house. No one was using it now anyway. No one really wanted it. And the view, it was murmured: think of the view.

  McTaggett and I arranged a small ceremony for the day before the demolition. It was February. We shivered, walking up the flagstone path: I, McTaggett, the Mayor, Rosso, some more professors, some cousins of the Dean’s. McTaggett unlocked the stout front door and we followed him down to the basement. Higgs’s table and chairs were still there, but everything else was gone. The concrete floor was so cold I could feel it through my shoes. I could not say I was sorry that the house was going down.

  “Sam?” McTaggett said. “A few words?”

  I had prepared a short address: our debt to the deceased, the importance of commemoration, some relevant aphorisms I’d dug up. The speech was folded up in my coat pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to take it out.

  “I think in a case like this it may be better for each of us to remember Dean Moresby in our own way,” I said. Nods all around.

  “Then it’s your show, Mayor Meadows,” McTaggett said.

  Rosso handed a bulky circular saw to the Mayor, who immediately bent almost double beneath its weight. I plugged it in. We were going to take a square of concrete from the floor, to be used as the ceremonial cornerstone of the new building. In my notes I’d had something like this: “As progress must stand on a foundation of history . . .” It was an awful speech.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” McTaggett said. Wordlessly, the Mayor pulled the trigger and the saw roared on. He grinned—his false teeth as smooth, as perfectly aligned as typewriter keys. He lowered the saw to the floor. The diamond-tipped blade bit into the concrete with a high, intolerable keen and a spray of choking dust. I covered my eyes with my hands. The blade sank into the floor: a quarter-gone, then half. Then it stopped.

  “There’s something—” the Mayor shouted.

  That loose sick feeling struck me, that one I thought I’d never have again: one fatal mistake.

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nbsp; “Pull it out,” I said, but not loud enough, or quickly enough, and in fact I’d probably only just started saying it when the water burst from the pierced main and was on us. The blast knocked me to the wall, then whipped me in somersaults across the floor. I could hear it thrumming on the ceiling like gargantuan applause. I was trying to find something to hold onto, or a place where I could breathe. A hand grasped my neck, another the front of my face—Mayor Meadows? He was torn away before I could tell. The pressure of the water made concentric circles behind my clenched-shut eyelids, black and red, then yellow—my breath was going.

  But then I was outside, in a tremendous current, and in a moment I hit something solid: a pole. I wrapped my arms around it and clung there as the water beat against me.

  I had washed up at the suicide fence. I was holding onto the emergency phone. I pulled myself to my feet, dragged one hand across my face, and looked back toward the house. Water jetted from both basement windows. That was the way I’d come. The water rushing past me was ankle-high and filled with sticks: Higgs’s table.

  Inside, the water was still rising. I watched the froth rise up above the first-floor windows; then those windows exploded outward too. On the left side of the house, close to the ground, the siding was beginning to crimp and bulge like a botulistic can. I locked my wrists and ankles around the pole. After that it was all very fast; the house peeled open, water smashed me, pulled my hair, tugged one of my shoes off and over the cliff. But I held to the pole. When I could see again, the house was cross-sectioned, like a doll’s house. In the center the water gushed upward from the broken main to a point a little higher than the roof. I could see the others now; they were on the campus side of the house, collecting themselves. Everyone else must have made it up the stairs. They hadn’t seen me yet.

  The last wave had knocked the telephone receiver off its cradle. It was already ringing. I picked it up; someone at the hotline, I supposed, could connect me to whatever municipal power one notified at a time like this. A woman answered.

  “Crisis Hotline, tell us about it.”

  Her voice was breathy and without nuance. A leaf of aluminum bigger than me was caught in the suicide fence. As I watched, the water tipped it up and over the edge. It tumbled down the cliff with a sound like—no—like no sound I'd heard before. All over town, showers were drooping, faucets dwindling out. For the moment we were living in a desert again.

  Could I really explain?

  “Crisis Hotline, tell us about it.”

  She sounded perplexed. Who did she think I was—a fool in love? A fat and lonely shut-in? A teen bullied into it? A holder of exhausted credit cards? There were so many paths that led to the phone; so many crises already solved and recorded in their spiral notebooks. I was sure my own story was like nothing to be found there. I knew I should say something; but I couldn’t imagine how to begin.

  “Sir? Or Ma’am? Can you tell us where you are? Is someone threatening you? If you can make a sound safely, please make it once for yes and twice for no. Sir? If you can stay on the line another minute or so we can trace the call and we'll have police there. Ma’am? Can you tell us where you are?”

  A man came on the line.

  “If you’re saying something, we can’t hear you. Please bring your mouth closer to the receiver if you can safely do so. If you can’t safely make a sound, just stay on the line and we’ll find you.”

  The woman: “Larry . . .”

  “It’s OK. It’s probably just a prank call.”

  Was I supposed to hear that? Beyond the fence, to the east, the sun was an innocuous white spot on a sky as blue and blank as pool water.

  Behind me, a shout; the others had seen me. Here came their footsteps now, squelching in the mud.

  “Are you still there?” the man said. I hung up the phone.

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