The Grasshopper King (7 page)

Was that the best I could do? I who'd called a linebacker a name that made him weep?

“
OK
,” I said, “here it is. What I like about this statue is its very vulgarity and ludicrousness and the fact that it's about to collapse. Which I think is deeply symbolic. Which I think sums up my feelings toward this—” I waved my arms around, unable to come up with a grand enough gesture; it would have to encompass practically everything I'd ever heard of. “This situation,” I concluded. “In which we find ourselves.”

“I think it's gross,” she said, and smartly, without warning, took my arm. “Let's go someplace else. Walk me to class.”

“To class,” I repeated. “Let's go.”

The two of us walked a little ways across the campus, not talking. Julia had put on a pair of sunglasses; she turned her chin up and watched the sky, while I met the eyes of the people passing us, trying to convey by my unconcerned expression that it was ordinary for me to be strolling with an attractive stranger, that were it not for the feather-touch of her hand on my elbow (steely, I refused to look down at my elbow, her hand) I might veer away, not noticing her absence until I deigned to turn my head.

“What's your game?” I said, finally, trying to sound tough; but I was melting, melting.

She looked at me over her sunglass rims. “I don't have a game,” she said. “I'm just a curious person. I'm wondering why you're so disaffected all the time.”

“Why aren't you? That's what I'm curious about. You don't seem brain-damaged. You're sober.”

“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.

“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.