The Grasshopper King (28 page)

When I came into the apartment Julia was asleep, her head hidden under the covers as always. I stood in the doorway a while and watched the rise and fall of her chest beneath the blankets, the simple almost-periodic motion squeezing out the rest of my thoughts the way breaking waves can, or turn signals not quite in phase. I could think of no good reason to wake her. So I slid the orchids into a soda bottle with some water and set the bottle on the floor by the bed. Then I opened my briefcase and took out a sheaf of British diplomatic communications on which I was hoping to discern Henderson's stealthy mark. I was happy to return at last to my work.

Julia's fingers appeared at the edge of the blanket; she pulled the covers away from her face. Her bangs were tamped flat across her eyes and one cheek was red, where it had rested on her hand.

“I'm awake,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. I sat down at my desk. “Go back to sleep, I'll be quiet.”

“You didn't wake me.”

I lowered my eyes to the top document on the stack, a welter of code words and abbreviations, and parts blacked out; each page, I could see, would take me hours. But now that our race to save Higgs was over, hours seemed like nothing, like billion-mark notes, like solar energy. What did I have but time?

From behind me, Julia said, “Can we move back to New York?”

“Yeah,
OK
,” I said. “Pack your things.”

“I'm serious.”

I swung my chair around so it faced her. She'd propped her neck up on the pillows and pulled the covers halfway back over her face, so just her eyes showed—a soldier peering over the edge of a trench.

“You hate New York,” I said.

“Maybe I just needed some time away from it.”

“So let's discuss it. I'll have choices. What we can do at the end of the year.”

“Can't we just move back now?”

“That doesn't really make sense.”

“I know,” she said; whether despairingly, mischievously, or out of sheer perplexity I couldn't tell. Her voice was perfectly featureless. But then she started to cry.
Really
cry; it was a minute before she could even speak. She mopped her face with the hem of the blanket.

“What if I had a job there?” she said. “A really, really good job?”

“Then of course we'd discuss it.”

“What if I were in love with another man and he lived here and I didn't want to be around him anymore for your sake?”

Sudden fearful sickness, like smelling mercaptan. “Are you?”

Her shoulders slumped and she let her eyes slide shut.
“No,”
she said. “That's not the point. I just want to know what you'd do.”

“What brought this on? Can I ask?”

“Nothing.”

“There has to be something.”

“No,” she said. “There doesn't. There doesn't have to be anything.”

She'd stopped crying. The corners of her eyes were a dull, punched red.

“I don't really know what we're talking about,” I said.

“I don't either. But let's go. I'm sick of it here. I don't want to live—” she lifted an arm out from under the covers and gestured in a circle, “in this, and be Mrs. Assistant Professor of Gravinic Language and Literature.”

“
OK
,” I said, “
OK
. We don't have to do it that way.”

“Sometimes I think I liked it better when you hated everyone,” Julia said.

I had that same pinched, benighted feeling I did at the end of a checkers game: all those possibilities leading to failure, one route out. Higgs had made it seem so easy. I sat down at the corner of the bed and we stared at each other silently while I considered the problem of what might save me—or at least what might not doom me.

But instead I found myself thinking of an afternoon years before, not long after Julia and I had met. We'd been sitting on Tip Chandler's statue, on an eerily hot day in November, and each time someone walked by us, Julia had cried out, “Damn, Sam!” I couldn't remember now how it had started. Each broken reverie, every startled pigeony neck-jerk, was a star turn, was the funniest thing ever, and I was bent over with laughter; my stomach hurt, I was sweaty and my nose was starting to run. We were a monstrous nuisance, but at the same time I had never felt closer to the perchless, nicknameless, vendettaless masses who passed beneath me every day. In my mind our victims made allowances for us, smiled envious inward smiles, wrote off our bad behavior to the exuberance of—here, I'll say it—love. As they hurried off I read congratulations in their scowls:
Well, good, Sammy
, they were thinking—with something like civic pride.
It's about time
. “Damn, Sam!” Julia bellowed after them. The next day I'd woken up with sunburn banded across my ears and cheeks like a blush.

Julia drew her other arm out from the blankets and touched my hand.

“I'm
OK
,” she said. “I'm sorry. Work.”

I knew it was wrong to accept. But I could think of nothing else to do, nothing else I had, at the moment, to say. So I returned to my
desk, sat, arranged my pens and papers in the customary way; and only when everything else was in order did I notice the absence of a familiar weight in my lap. I had left my copy of Kaufmann at Higgs's house.

I came over to the side of the bed. Julia had shut her eyes again, and her free arm was thrown over her face as if in answer to a blinding flash.

“Julia.”

“No,” she said, “it's
OK
.”

“I have to go to the house. Do you want to come?”

“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 . . .”