The Grasshopper King (29 page)

One of the workmen came downstairs. He hesitated on the last step as he saw me.

“Didn't mean to break in on you,” the workman said. “I'll just be a second.”

“Don't worry about it,” I told him, though in fact I was annoyed at the intrusion. My next few moves, I was certain, would be crucial ones.

The workman jerked the cord of the last tape recorder from the wall with the solemn carelessness of a nurse disconnecting a feed tube. He wound the wire into a tight bundle and tied off the plug end with a sudden square knot. Then he draped a tarpaulin over the recorder, and, grunting, lifted the package until he could get his knee under it.

“Last one,” he said brightly, and took it up the stairs. I was relieved he hadn't asked me to help.

When I turned back to the board I saw an opportunity that I had somehow missed before, by which I could take command of the central squares, by which I could transform the whole landscape of the board. My men were a convoy, rolling inexorably toward Higgs's king line. His were trapped in culverts, screaming for their mothers.

“I asked her to come here with me,” I said, “but she wouldn't. Should I have insisted? Or what? Or do you think I should have stayed?”

Triumphantly I set my checker down; and just as I took my hand away I saw my error. I had overlooked an obvious, shattering response. Higgs did not miss it. I made my only legal answer. His next move would be one that, in all our afternoons of play, I had never seen before: a quadruple jump. I hadn't won.

The noise in Higgs's throat stopped. I grew hot, must have been, of all things, blushing, imagining his disappointment. It was a mistake not even Ellen—not even
Treech
—would have made.

“Go ahead,” I said. “It's my fault. Do what you have to.”

But Higgs did not make the move. He stared down at the board, his face overtaken with what looked like fierce, sad calculation—it
took me a moment to understand this, so strange was it to see him display any expression at all. The position on the board seemed to remind him of something long unavailable.

“My advice,” Higgs said, “is to be careful of hasty marriage.”

Then he picked up his king and removed the rest of my men.

“My game,” said Higgs.

Ten years passed.

CHAPTER 8

HISTORY

Now that the porter is gone, now that I've pressed three corrugated dollars into his grizzled hand (an old tattoo at the join of palm and wrist, a bleary peace sign); now that I've followed him, my single bag on
my
shoulder despite his entreaties, up the deep-pile eggplant-colored staircase to my room; now that I've walked stiff-lipped and chest-out past the loitering young toughs on the sidewalk into the hotel I've chosen; now that I've found the hotel, pinned shoulder to shoulder between two of the lacy, balconied apartment houses that loom like burly old ladies above the park; now that I've paid the cabdriver, now that I've hailed him at the airport, now that my plane has flopped to the runway with an impact that dashed my hoarded peanuts everywhere—now, that is, that I've arrived in New York; now that I've left Chandler City—I feel a little sick. I have to sit down on the bed, here in this indistinct room composed of earth tones, a wallpaper of muted stripes like geologic eras, a globe lamp, the requisite fixtures. I get up, kick my bag into the closet, shut the doors, and sit back down. What am I doing here?

No, wait. I'm not up to that yet. It's Sunday, January 7, 1996, about half-past eleven. Through my license-plate-sized window I can see the entrance to the restaurant across the street, and the beginning of the line where couples are waiting for brunch. I put my head against the wall to the window's right, bringing an outdoor table into view. A man and a
woman are eating omelettes out of rustic iron pans. They're holding hands; the sleeves of their cable sweaters join and form a tube across the table. The sunlight is so even and precise that I can see the ice cubes in their glasses, and their faces are all contrast, Rushmore-like. I could read their lips if I knew how. I pull a chair up to the window and stand on it so I can look down at my own side of the street. The toughs are still there, huddled in clawed-up olive drab windbreakers, with logos sewn on, and exhortations drawn in marker:
FIGHT
! and
CONNECT
! and
NO FEAR
, and what must be people's names in a flouncy graffiti. Every one of them has hair chopped short as a recruit's. From overhead I can't tell if they're talking, but I suspect they're not. They're saying everything they need to just by standing there.

What am I doing here? I'll try to explain.

I came home from Higgs's house so twisted up with joy that it was all I could do not to launch myself into the air with each step; and if we're to be completely honest (when if not now?) I stopped a few times and did exactly that—picture it! Myself, lank and a little rank, in my pale green interviewing shirt and matching tie, lifting off like a salmon from the mud-streaked sidewalk, flailing at the sky with one fist—
yes!
It was cool out now, at long last, but by the time I got home I'd sweated through my shirt. I stood exhausted at the door, clasping my hands one in the other, trying all the bodhi tricks I knew to rein my heartbeat in. Failing, I went inside.

“I'm so sorry,” Julia said. “
Look
at you. Sit down.”

She took me smartly by the shoulders and placed me on the side of the bed. My orchids sat in a new pot at my feet, with an odd-looking garnish that I saw after a moment was a ring of chocolate bars embedded in the soil. Julia pulled up a Three Musketeers, my favorite, unwrapped it partway, handed it to me.

“Did you get your book?”

“Mm hmm,” I said. My mouth felt like a jammed machine, choked solid with sweet nougat and gratitude. Julia sat down beside me and felt my forehead.

“Look at you,” she said again. “You're spectral. I think you're poised on the shimmying shaking line between life and death.”

“Nn nn,” I replied. I sucked the nougat off my teeth and swallowed hard. “Not so. I have news.”

“Me first,” she said. “I have an announcement. I'm going to learn Gravinic. Which I know sounds weird so don't stop me and which I know will be hard. But my advisor wants me to have a foreign language, and think about it—I'll have some kind of sympathy with what you do, with what you're doing—I got my own copy of Kaufmann, look—
OK
?”

“Are you serious?”

“Look at me.”

I did; she was. There was no twist to her lip, no telltale furrowing above one eye. Her features were in perfect balance, smooth and without strain. Stern, her hair pulled back in a tight barrette, she looked like a photograph, an old one, a daguerrotype entitled “Her Faith in Him.”

“That's so crazy it just might work,” I said. Love rumbled in my ears, socked me in the gut, memories zig-zagged past my defenses and smote me, stupid little ones—waiting in line at the supermarket, a heartbreaking glance backwards and downwards at me as she stepped off an escalator into a cascade of glare (the airport? a mall?) kisses without number, sleeping on her typewriter in a pool of dingy light with her fingers cross-laced over the Appalachian curve of her neck, saying my name, saying the word “wow”, a long way ahead of me on a street, sleeping again but in bed, then waking—I saw what I would have to do. I'd tell her everything, what I'd done and what Higgs had finally said, tell her and no one else. I'd told lies, yes, and failed to bring up certain truths, but in the end it had come out all right; and now this new secret, this last one, would bind us together forever.

But something held me back. It was Higgs. He must have felt something like this for Ellen, when they met, or not long after; he too must have swooned, must have thought he could reduce all the
conundrums and unsatisfiable demands of the world to just one question: yes or no. Ellen had said yes. And Higgs—I knew now—had never stopped regretting it. I turned away from Julia and let my eyes rest on the wall, its supple, ancient stains like shadows from a fixed sun. What I proposed was irreversible. And if word got out . . . I could already hear the scholars, the whispers across the continents: how convenient for Higgs to talk again, just after the recorders were gone, wouldn't you think once would be enough? Worse than that: with two revelations to choose from, some would prefer the second, and among those maybe some ambitious enough to play the “grasshopper” tape a little more closely, perhaps side by side with Higgs's lecture, with an expert present; or might they find just a trace of an unexplained, unexplainable shout, toward the end of the reel, just before the window frame crashed down?

“Your news,” Julia said.

I needed time. With time, things would settle in their places. I'd sweat out all these fervent endocrines and be able to make some sense.

“The Higgses are moving out,” I said.

“Actually,” Julia said, “I knew that. I meant to tell you. Ellen told me at the banquet.”

To my surprise I couldn't summon up the slightest resentment.

“Let's never fight again,” I said impulsively.

There was her smile again, the cocked corner of her lip. “Well,
sometimes
,” she said. “With love and fellow-feeling.”

“With love and fellow-feeling,” I repeated.

I would have agreed to anything. I just wanted it to be over: that day, this story. I plucked a Kit Kat from the pot, peeled back the foil and took a bite, half-expecting a mouthful of ashes. But no—it tasted like chocolate. I dropped backwards onto the bed and thought of the moving truck that must even now be carrying the Higgses out of town; implausibly I imagined the back door swinging open, and Ellen and Higgs sitting there in twin armchairs among the crates, imperturbable now and from now on, watching Chandler City shrink away.
I took another bite, and as I crunched down into the wafer like a layer of soil I felt something like relief, except pleasureless. Or like despair, but not so sad.

Gravinic didn't last. At first Julia went at it with her usual forthright industriousness, and we'd pass whole evenings in harmony and study with the words for “moon”, say, spread out on dozens of flashcards on the bed. But before long she tired of the rococo conjugations and fine semantic shadings that so captivated me, and of my coaching, which sounded like carping to her; eventually it sounded like that to me, too.