The Grasshopper King (15 page)

The trailer was no larger than a few elevator cars laid abreast, and there were five people inside. Four of them sat in a rough circle of vinylized chairs, playing canasta. My father, the senior member, was the only one who had a desk. He was behind it—not sitting at it, I mean, but behind it, kneeling on the floor, scrabbling around for something he'd dropped. Above him, on the back wall, a framed photograph of Mayor Meadows peered down at us with bleary self-satisfaction. He was now very old.

“Dad,” I said.

One of the canasta players turned and gave me a long look. “He's your dad?” he said. I had not been to the trailer in almost a year, and none of the men were familiar to me. No one but my father stayed at the station very long. It was agreed to be the lowest and most embarrassing position in the whole Department of the Interior, which offered a wide spectrum of low and embarrassing positions. Enforcing grazing violations on speed-crazed ranchers, counting the used condoms in the Hudson—these were promotions from the spring-finding project. It had been a long time since anyone (again, I mean anyone but my father) thought there was a spring to be found. The other men mostly played cards and searched for loopholes in Indian treaties while they waited for their transfers to come through.

My father clambered over the desk and lowered himself heavily on the other side. The desk occupied the whole width of the trailer and it was the only way he could get out.

“Son,” he said. “I happen to have a minute.”

His eyes had retreated a little in recent years, and the lines from his nose to the corner of his mouth had grown much deeper. I had to
admit it; even he was starting to look like Ayn Rand.

“I think I may be onto something,” he said. “It's still tentative.”

It was what he always said.

“I wondered if we could talk,” I said.

“I'll bet we could.”

He steered me outside, into what was now night. We were at the western rim of town; there was ten more feet of gravel past the trailer, and past that just the sand-shot soil of the mesa. In the other direction, down toward the cliff, the lights of town were coming on. The Grape Arbor glowed greenly in the middle distance like an indicator light.

“How did you decide to get married?” I asked my father.

“I think your mother decided,” he said. “Or at least she was the one who brought it up.”

After a while he said, “Has she?”

“Excuse me?”

“Has Julia? Brought it up?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Do you love her?” my father asked.

I had considered this question before.

“Sure,” I told him.

But I wasn't sure. My life had improved since she'd joined it, that was certain. We spoke to each other in sweet tones of voice, and kidded as I'd heard other lovers do; and in our physical relations we acted out what I understood to be the healthful exertions of average young people. But love? I was hampered here by my refusal to admit I didn't know what it was, or whether it was in my repertoire. Those men of my acquaintance who “didn't know if they could love” were, without exception, the basest seducers of the campus, and their prey, the callowest, the weakest-willed of girls. That wasn't Julia; that wasn't me.

Henderson had said this about love: “Lovers stick to my shoes/ at which time my shoes stick to the street/ Between the street and my shoes the sticky lovers sweat upon each other.”

I had told Julia I loved her, and it didn't feel like a lie. But it did
feel like an approximation. Something in the sentimental movies was missing for me; this visible selflessness the heroes experienced, as they emptied themselves utterly into their romantic trials. Take a look at me now—there's just an empty space—could I speak those words with the conviction that was necessary?

Something, I thought, had gone wrong with me, my parents' healthy habits notwithstanding. My mother had eaten a bad helping of seitan, in the crucial early weeks of my gestation, or been struck in the belly by a tragically well-aimed gamma particle from a black light, or maybe one night's bowl of hash had done it. I didn't know what had done it. But the tragic and self-sacrificing part of me, the loving part, was missing—perhaps stunted into uselessness, perhaps never formed. The only time
I
was selfless was when I was asleep.

My father, with a strange seriousness, took a stick of gum from his pocket, carefully unfolded the paper and the foil wrap, bent it double, and put it in his mouth. The gum migrated to one cheek, where it sat, like a nut.

“What I think,” he told me, “is that it's just something that happens. I mean it comes over you like a . . . like a cloud. A rain cloud. And no matter who you're standing next to, you're bound to get wet.”

“What if you've got an umbrella?”

“What? I don't know.”

“I was just kidding.”

“It's a
comparison
.”

“Never mind. Sorry.”

“Umbrella.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He shook his head, roughly, as if a bit were attached to it. “What if there were a drought? What if rain fell up instead of down? What if you were made of sugar and when water hit you you just melted into the ground?”

“Okay.”

“What if you could dodge the raindrops?”

Julia began to accompany me regularly to the house.

“Otherwise I hardly see you,” she said. “And I can work just as well there as at home.” Her work, these days, consisted of searching eighteenth-century English folios for images of women's stockings, her advisor's special research interest.

“Look here,” she'd say, when she turned up a particularly well-concealed example. “There's a little piece of leg. There, behind the haywain.”

What her advisor was after was the earliest instance of the stocking fetish in British painting: what he called “The Primal Lingerie Scene.” His most recent book,
I See England's Underpants
, had been a great success in the relevant circles. Julia had made me read it.

I didn't think much of Julia's project, and I told her so.

“Somebody's got to lay the groundwork,” she said. “I know it seems silly. But how can we talk seriously about the representation of stockings before we know where all the stockings are?”

How, indeed, I thought, but didn't say it. I was not inclined to argue the point too strenuously; the last thing I wanted was for Julia to change her mind about spending her days in the basement with me. If stockings behind the haywain would keep her there, then I was all for stockings.

I'd like to say my motivation was founded wholly on my affection for Julia; but in fact it was just as much for the effect she had on Ellen. When Julia was with me, Ellen vacuumed just once a day, and the frequency of clanging pans diminished to a level commensurate with reasonable use. She kept the snack bowl full. I was pretty sure she had even turned the radio down—although I thought it would be ill-advised to ask.

And I, too, was quieted, I hardly ever wanted to punch Ellen anymore. That, by my standards, was something very close to friendship.

Ellen began to spend more time in the basement. The four of us, engaged in our respective pursuits, made up a sort of grotesque double date: I translating the story of Little Bug, Julia hunting stockings,
Higgs staring, and Ellen just sitting, in a luridly faked Louis
XIV
chair that smelled of wood rot. Sometimes she knitted. Other times she wrote letters. I could see her handwriting from where I sat: plump, mild letters in perfect schoolgirlish rows. She wrote to her nieces in Tulsa and Seattle, of whom, from time to time, we saw snapshots.

Ellen still unnerved me. For all her noisy appurtenances, she was herself rather quiet, and tended to disappear into corners, so that sometimes I would find myself meeting her distracted, bluish stare before I'd known consciously that she was in the room. That was bad; but not as bad as it had been before. At least now she was willing to talk. Often she would launch without warning into a story of her youth. “At Vassar I attended Friends of Labor meetings on several occasions,” she'd say, or “My father and I enjoyed fishing in the arroyo where Thales Road is now.” It was never clear what Ellen intended us to take from these stories. Sometimes she would stop in what seemed to be the middle, and pick up the thread again only after some weeks, or not at all. Other times she started mid-stream, repeating to us something that, say, Margaret had said, without giving any indication who Margaret was, in what relation she stood to Ellen, and whether we might ever hear of her again. It was as though she were telling one endless story, down in her mind, which through some sporadic malfunction surfaced now and then into speech.

Sometimes she read to us from Higgs's letters. These consisted mostly of sentimental flattery, school advice, and off-hand scholarly remarks—although it was from one of them that I extracted the story of Higgs's introduction to Henderson, plucking it from among the blandishments and declarations of intent just as Higgs himself had plucked
Poems Against the Enemies
from that long-ago trashbin in Düsseldorf.

Whenever Ellen read from the letters, I watched Higgs carefully for any sign of indignation. I wondered if he were embarrassed; certainly I was embarrassed for him. I cringed whenever I thought of his hand scripting out the pet names and nonwords, the occasional heart
drawn at the bottom of a page—or worse, his face, his attentionless gaze, turned to secret contemplation of the charms of young Ellen, goopy Ferris-wheel fantasies . . .

Julia, on the other hand, thought it was sweet.

“You see?” she said. “Not everybody's repressed like you.”

“He was young.”

“
You're
young.”

“You're right,” I countered, “but is that how you want me to get old?”

My stomach tightened a little, as it always did when I inadvertently alluded to a shared future for us.

“I think it's possible,” Julia said, “to be romantic in your youth and yet not eventually stop speaking and withdraw from all human interaction forever.”

“Anything is possible,” I said.

In any case, there was no sign of indignation from Higgs, nor did he appear to be embarrassed; and while this, of course, meant nothing, I liked to think we had his permission to hear the letters. After all, hadn't things improved since my arrival? Didn't Ellen seem happier? Wasn't Julia the most challenging checkers player he'd faced in years? (Yes: Ellen attested to this.) I read gratitude in Higgs's blank expression, seemed to hear him say, “Samuel, though I didn't know it, it was you I've been waiting for.”

Same to you, I said silently back. I had always been a bit of a determinist. Now—just as I had once believed myself fated to join the endless after-dinner drink of my parents' New York—I felt that destiny had brought me to Higgs, with whom I shared a secret, possibly supernatural bond. I tried to analyze the process by which I constructed the thoughts I ascribed to Higgs—half-suspecting that there was no process, no construction, that the thoughts were real and I was receiving some dim transmission available for whatever reason only to me. I reflected often on the series of coincidences that had escorted me to my present position: the new wing at Gunnery Hall, Bobby Trabant's fractured skull, the timely departure of Slotkin. Forces, I thought, were at work.

It was my custom to stop, on my way home from Higgs's house, at a little restaurant not far from campus, the same one where McTaggett had first broached the subject of graduate school. As I sat there in the back, mashing a cinnamon bun about in my mouth (theirs were swollen and uncannily heavy, like sticky meteors) I felt myself sunken in the easy pleasure of regularity. The waitresses knew me, if not my name; the pattern of varnish-lumps and fork scars on my usual table had grown familiar to me, likewise the faces of the usual patrons.

On one of these stops, I found myself staring at someone I did not recognize—or not quite. He was a neat-looking young man in a blue blazer with a steaming cup of tea in front of him. The man caught my eye, then turned away. A moment later he shot a furtive glance in my direction. It was impossible to tell whether he was recognizing me or simply unnerved by my staring. Rudeness didn't bother me—this was my familiar place. Familiarity meant license to stare, or what good was it?

Suddenly the man's brow cleared. He sprang from the counter and strode at me, down the aisle, extending one long hand, shouting, “Sammy Grapearbor, good goddamn!” And by this I knew at once that the neat young man was my old friend from my college days—already, a month out, I was thinking of them as “my college days”—it was Charlie Hascomb, the impressionist, the enemy of vermin. His close-cropped hair had fooled me.

“Charlie,” I said weakly, “sit down, man.”

My relief at recognizing him quickly gave way to apprehension. I had little desire to remind myself of the ugly, disaffected days that Charlie and I had spent together. But Charlie made it immediately clear that he too had abandoned the company of our erstwhile set, and thought no better of them than I did. We spent a pleasant half hour exchanging bad news of our former comrades. Bick Wickman, the purported Englishman, was serving time on vaguely reported interstate charges; another of our circle had gotten a girl pregnant and was living with her and her extended family in a tattery commune
where animal products and carbonated beverages were forbidden.