The Grasshopper King Page 5

  “I like it here.”

  “You must have an unusual definition of ‘like.’ You don’t like a place just because you can tolerate being trapped there.”

  “I wanted to come here,” Julia said. This stopped me in my tracks.

  She had transferred from Bryn Mawr, it turned out. She’d grown up in Greenwich Village: backdrop of my daydreams, the place where I was going to share joints and bon mots with scat singers, painters, and the attractively poor. She had come to Chandler City of her own free will, bound to it by no necessities of blood or finance. I couldn’t believe it. I was fascinated—intellectually, I told myself—by this challenge to my ordering of the world.

  “New York is bullshit,” she said.

  “But come on,” I said, “the culture.”

  “Culture is wasted on liars and slobs,” she said. She seemed suddenly a little peeved. “And New York is ninety-five percent liars and slobs.”

  “In Chandler City it’s ninety-nine. Point nine repeating.”

  “The difference is, I like the slobs here.”

  The place where we’d come to a stop was on the western edge of the campus, where the agricultural buildings stood at discreet distances from one another and the browning grass was a yard high, fizzing with gnats.

  “What class do you have here?” I asked her.

  “I don’t have a class now,” she said. “I actually just wanted to get away from that statue.”

  At the next meeting of my psychology course I sat down, for the first time ever, in the front row. From this vantage the blackboard was huge and foreboding. It turned out all kinds of material pertinent to the course was written there. How could people take their education this close up?

  A minute later, Julia came down the aisle and sat beside me. She drew from her military surplus bag a neat spiral notebook with graph paper pages.

  “Buena mañana,” I said, with, I thought, a touch of ironic style. It was 2:55.

  “Viva la revolución,” Julia replied in kind. “I’m supposed to ask you, are you going to the thing tonight?”

  The thing was a college dance, one of the dreary events my group and I tried to make more dreary by our presence. That game had gotten old long ago.

  “I’ll go,” I said. That seemed too quick. I recalled that a certain diffidence was asked of me.

  “Right, why not,” Julia said.

  “You’ve been to one of these things before?”

  “Not here. But my friends are going.”

  “It’ll be completely appalling,” I said. This seemed to strike a better note.

  “So you don’t want to go?”

  “But I might as well go.”

  She just nodded again. My brief sensation of know-how had spiraled away, and I tapped my pencil on the desk while I waited without much hope for it to return. The professor had arrived at the podium and was taking his time about his sheaf of notes.

  Never had I anticipated so keenly—never before, in fact, had I anticipated—the beginning of a lecture.

  Julia came to the dance with her friends, and I brought the few friends I still had: Charlie Hascomb with his girlfriend, Bick Wickman, and Barberie. Julia’s friends were a tight group of girls I’d seen before and begrudgingly failed to disdain. They were angry girls, in ripped-up pink T-shirts, black lipstick, and pocket chains; one of them, tall and awkward, even wore a smart three-inch Mohawk. Next to them, Julia in her ponytail, in her unobtrusive slacks, looked cut out from a box-lunch social.

  The Chinese American Club had sponsored the dance in honor of some holiday of theirs—there were about fifteen members and they danced in a bouncy little knot at the front of the half-empty field-house, near the speakers. Our group stood in the back and made sparse conversation. We hated Depeche Mode, they hated Depeche Mode: that was all we had in common. Bick Wickman gazed up with longing at the Mohawked girl; Barberie, the fattest and the baldest of all of us, had given up, and transmitted to me with his baleful glances his resentment at my having brought so forcefully to his attention the sexual intercourse he would not be having with these women, the Chinese American women, any women. The beat of the synthesized bass failed to fill up the hall. Whenever I looked at Julia, she was cultivating a small smile; I wanted badly to know whether she was smiling, too, when I wasn’t looking. It seemed right to get her alone; but there was no avenue I could think of that did not involve having to dance.

  Instead I took Charlie aside to ask his advice.

  “Nice girl,” Charlie said, with a manner that somehow both acknowledged and belittled the man-to-man moment I’d been after. “But it doesn’t look good.”

  “No?”

  “She’s playing with you,” he told me, gazing affectionately at the roof, the ancient championship banners barely aflicker with the strobe light. “It’s what women like. She tracked your abject vulnerability with her secret radiation beam.”

  Charlie’s girlfriend returned from the bathroom—I’ve forgotten her name now. Charlie had unreckonably many girlfriends in the time I knew him, all identical: athletic, straight-haired, flat-chested girls who appeared to brook no nonsense and smelled like talcum.

  “Don’t listen to him, he just hates women,” the girlfriend said chummily.

  “Secret radiation beam,” Charlie repeated firmly. “And from New York . . .” He shook his head. “They’ve got versions of gonorrhea there even radiation can’t kill. She’s probably totally microbial. My advice to you is to stick with the homegrown.”

  Charlie knew perfectly well that I had not enjoyed even the most modest success with the “homegrown” women of Chandler City. So his advice was either optimistic or needlessly cruel.

  We rejoined the group as it was about to break up. Bick had said something too forward to the tall, awkward girl; he beamed at me and Charlie as the girls gathered to go.

  I meant to say goodnight to Julia, also to avoid saying goodnight to her in order to convey a certain immunity. Superimposed, these impulses caused my upper body to lurch toward her while my legs—is this possible?—began their retreat from the dance floor.

  “See you, night,” I said, and backed at top speed out of the hall.

  The five of us gathered outside and watched our classmates proceed home with their dates.

  “She wanted me, mate,” Bick said in a sad and dreamy way, when Julia and her friends came out. “She wanted me, but she didn’t know how to tell me.”

  Who knew what they wanted? Who knew what they knew how to tell? Charlie was right—it didn’t look good. Earlier that day I’d dropped psychology, so there was no reason I’d see Julia again. At home, sober and annoyed, I set myself to the long, solitary task of making sense of what I’d learned.

  But the next day I found her again at my statue.

  “I thought you hated this place,” I said.

  She hopped down. “I do. So let’s go.”

  This time we walked east, to the cliff. We stood on the grass behind the little house there—Higgs’s house, of course, though I knew it only as the building that stood where Chandler’s spring had allegedly gushed—and looked out over the crumbly verge. Before us, at the cliff’s farthest jut, there was a short section of fencing and a yellow phone mounted on a sturdy post.

  “It’s for suicides,” I told her. “You pick up the phone, it calls the hotline, and they tell you why not to jump.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never tried it.”

  We both looked over the edge.

  “I’m sorry about Bick,” I said. “He’s not really from Liverpool.”

  “We guessed that.”

  I put my hand over her hand. I hadn’t forgotten Charlie’s advice. But look—I’d seen sentimental movies, like anybody else. If I saw someone I knew at the theater I claimed I was there for the air conditioning. But I’d paid very close attention. I knew approximately what to do; first you put your hand over her hand. She smiled again. There were her gums again.<
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  “My friends all said you were a geek.”

  “Charlie said you had gonorrhea.” At this she looked less pleased. So I kissed her; not much of a kiss, no more really than a brushing of her lips with my own, a momentary contact of foreheads, but still the first kiss I’d had in more than a year, and the first ever from which I had not been gently and with mortifying concern for my self-esteem pushed away. Julia’s body rested warmly against mine with what I experienced, even with my movie-watching experience, as startling frankness. When I kissed her again I let my fingers rest lightly on her right shoulder, at the scratchy neckline of her rough cotton dress.

  “I really thought you didn’t like me,” she said.

  I could feel the rusty poles of the suicide fence against the backs of my legs. “You thought wrong,” I told her, feeling brave.

  There at the cliff we spent the remainder of the afternoon. Julia told me about leaving Bryn Mawr; it hadn’t been, as she’d let me believe, a grand put-down to her schoolmates, the liars and slobs. She’d followed a man out here—a raffish carnie with a little rose tattooed on the back of his shoulder, whom she’d met at the Pennsylvania State Fair, at the Fool the Guesser booth. He’d guessed she was twenty-three. Two days later she was in his car, heading for California and the lucrative circuit of agriculture fairs: the Garlic Festival, Eggplant Carnival, Artichoke Days. . . . But somewhere around Chandler City he’d revealed that he wasn’t a carnie at all. He was an attorney for the outdoor lighting company that kept the carnival running at night; the real carnies let him run a booth as a favor to his bosses. There was, naturally, a fiancée. Julia got out and hitchhiked to the closest town. That was us.

  “Why didn’t you go back?” I asked her.

  “Are you kidding? It’s humiliating. I’d rather die.”

  “I’d rather die than live in Chandler City,” I said, a touch of my usual self-righteousness returning to me like an old, irritating friend.

  “Okay,” she said. Without further warning she wrapped her arms around my chest, pressed herself against me, and made as if to lever me over the side.

  “No, no,” I said, “I potentially have so much to live for.”

  “That’s more like it,” she said.

  Julia had expected Chandler City to be a city full of simple, wise people, brimming with aphorism and household advice. Instead she found me—poor girl!

  But, then again, it was inevitable that she would find me, or someone just like me. Julia had a passion for impossible causes. In the last election she had rung doorbells for Carter all the way to the end. (I had loudly declined to state a preference.) She was eternally trying to get people to read difficult novels. Her favorite movies (she admitted to me, after we’d been seeing each other for some time) were those in which some former sports hero, alternately crippled, ruined by drink, or betrayed, battles back into condition, steps back alternately onto the field, the ring, the court, the alley, or the rink, and against colossal odds beats the unsympathetically portrayed opponent, thus regaining the love of, alternately, a woman grown cynical or a towheaded, neotenic orphan. At the climactic moments of these movies I would lean over to Julia and whisper cruel insinuations; for instance, that the boastful champion was throwing the match, or that the hero’s interest in the orphan was something more than paternal. She ignored this, as she did all my uglinesses.

  I’ll speed through the months that followed, since they followed a conventional script: introduction to my startled parents, first quarrel, salvos of tenderness, second quarrel, the awkward but gratifying disposal of my virginity. I bid farewell to Charlie Hascomb and the remaining members of my set, shaved my terrible beard, gave up marijuana. At the semester break Julia and I moved into a low L-shaped apartment in a cheap part of town, where the streets were named for natural philosophers. We lived on Lucretius. Our building had been converted from a soap factory, and the smell of industrial lubricant had sunk into the walls and floor. We spent all day inside and saw nobody; I had given up all my friends, and Julia’s stayed away. Apparently they found me a bit hard to take. I changed my major to art history, the same as Julia’s, so that even our brief time outside the apartment was spent together. And each night, at my insistence, she would tell me stories about New York. She had compiled an inexhaustible catalogue. Her rendition of the city was a grotesque inversion of my parents’ misty recollections. In Julia’s New York, the art world had gone sour and corporate, the air was particulate and soggy, good poets went hungry and bad ones taught in college, every taxi was taken up by cokehead debutantes, who would shove you off the corner without a word or a look back. I listened to Julia’s stories with mingled horror and desire, like a housewife reading about the wretched improprieties of soap opera stars.

  After a while the balance began to tilt in horror’s favor. Maybe New York had once been as I’d imagined it; for all I knew, my parents’ restaurant had been the last bulwark against the forces of vulgarity and boredom that had triumphed everywhere else, and the city had succumbed on their departure. In any case I found it increasingly difficult to summon up my old fantasies. The kowtowing doormen disappeared; the grand sweep of society folded its skirts and retired. I had no further desire to light out East. I knew enough now; if there were any further disillusionment to be gained by going there in person, I could do as well without it.

  Which is not to say that I had gained any affection for my hometown in the process. It was the same backwater it had always been—no more glittery, no smarter. My dissatisfaction remained constant, a dull whine, but I no longer had any particular ambition to distract me; that is, I had come around to a more or less ordinary way of life. In a way, of course, this was a kind of despair, but in a way it was a relief. I had been freed of the responsibility to make it anywhere.

  So we settled in, and summer was pulled over us. I worked nights at the restaurant and spent my days lying supine on our ancient bed, a damp towel laid square over my chest and two fans aimed at me from either side. I was bored. But boredom was a welcome change from ceaseless hatred. I no longer fantasized about the university’s destruction, and my loathing for my classmates had diminished to a bearable distaste. My acne had cleared up. Julia was kind to me, and at the time I thought this to be as much as—perhaps more than—anyone could unselfishly expect. Sometimes I still think so. Had events proceeded slightly differently, I’m convinced, we would have gotten married soon enough, bought a house, run a rudimentary gallery or taken over the Grape Arbor, perhaps produced children who would in time grow up to repudiate our beliefs, such as they were. It is important to keep in mind, throughout what follows, that I came very near to leading an entirely unremarkable life. But instead, I awoke on September sixth of my final year of college with a terrific headache. I was so addled that when I arrived at Gunnery Hall at ten that morning for my first class of the semester, I stumbled into the wrong classroom, and by the time I realized my mistake, the unexceptional chain of events described above had receded into utter impossibility. But, of course, I wouldn’t know that for some time.

  My class was in a new wing that had been built just that summer. In my miserable state I was unable to make out the numbering scheme of the rooms, and when I saw at the end of the long, gleaming corridor a man standing half out of a doorway, beckoning me in, I assumed that I had found my destination.

  The class I was looking for was Can Art and Industry Co-Exist?—a question about the answer to which I cared not an atom. As soon as I sat down I began to suspect I was in the wrong place. There was no slide projector set up, and the students were not ones I had seen in other art history classes. In fact, they were not ones I had seen anywhere. There were three men in identical oxford shirts and razor ties, who as far as I could see were unacquainted with each other; a very fat black man with a lazy eye; an impatient-looking punk wearing that T-shirt with the Milky Way and the legend, “YOU ARE HERE”; in the front, a hyperglandular adolescent boy who, after some minutes of examination, I realized was in f
act a woman of no less than forty. I felt as if I were at a casting call for a film whose tortured, whimsical plot I could never hope to understand. I wondered briefly what my own part in it could be.

  The class was Introductory Gravinic. The man who had beckoned me in was Professor Gregory McTaggett—that same man whose broken wrist, decades before, had turned him from basketball to the life of the mind. He was the department chair now. Seeing me wandering, he’d taken me for the final student on his roll, a freshman named Bobby Trabant, who, I later found out, had tripped on a sidewalk outcropping on his way to class and split his forehead from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. Bobby never did come to that class, even after the stitches came out.

  But I stayed. Why not stay? Julia had opted out of Can Art? in favor of a course for which I lacked the prerequisites. Anyway, it had recently become clear to me (although I had not yet told Julia) that no amount of diligence would allow me to graduate in art history at the end of that year. I was going to have to switch to mass communications. Consequently I had a great deal of room for electives in my schedule.

  The first day was not what I expected—no hello, good-bye, my name is, I would like. Instead McTaggett outlined the history of the Gravine and its strange language, assuming correctly that the material was unfamiliar to all of us.

  McTaggett’s lecture began in the final, heady days of the Pleistocene, about 35,000 years past, when an arm of glacier retreated over a ridge in the Carpathians and revealed a bowl-shaped valley. Some time later, a troop of fresh-minted Cro-Magnons happened in, and, finding game plentiful and the climate to their liking, stayed. The only entrance, a narrow, snow-clogged pass, was easy to defend even with Paleolithic ordnance. So the proto-Gravinians retained the integrity of blood and territory, while clans displaced clans in violent feuds outside. Their language, too, developed without interference. There had been attempts to link Gravinic with other pre-Indo-European remnants: Basque, Finnish, the Tiktiksprache of certain Baltic islands. None were convincing. As far as was known, Gravinic constituted a linguistic family in and of itself.