The Grasshopper King (9 page)

There, she asked me about my night's work, and made me recite from it; she laughed delightedly at my struggles with the unfamiliar consonants.

“You just said one twice,” she'd say, and I'd go back, repeating, trying to illuminate the difference between the dental and semipalatal
t
, the proper position of the tongue.

Or: “What does that one mean?”—although of course she already knew.

“I kicked the dog,” I told her, pretending to think about it, playing along.

“That poor dog,” she said. “Every single night.”

“It depends on the translation. Tonight the dog deserved it.”

She pursed her lips like a skeptical child; but what followed was adult enough, and any doubts I may have had were put aside.

I'm wondering now what sort of impression I've given of Julia. I had taken her at first for a free spirit, a carpe-deist—mostly, perhaps, on the basis that she was willing to sleep with me. I had thought we'd always be doing foolish and impressive things, things she'd have to drag me into but that afterwards I'd agree we couldn't have missed. But she was not exactly that type. I had assumed—on the same basis—that she had been promiscuous; but in fact, I was only her third lover (how I hate that word) and by far the one she had least made to wait. She had withheld herself, I learned, even from the carnie who'd made off with her. “I think I meant to do it,” she said, “but somehow my back hurt from
all the driving and there was never a convenient time.” No barefoot cartwheels through the sprinklers for Julia, no sudden changes of hair color, never a ludicrous purchase. She wasn't shy, but only duty made her really sociable. With my parents she was easy and deferent; she praised my mother's couscous and seemed, even to me, to mean it. At heart, I'd learned, she was deeply domestic; she seemed happy enough staying home with me, sitting at her desk in the opposite leg of our
L
, writing her thesis as my egg salad waned.

She must never have imagined we would stay together so long. I think her idea, conscious or not, was to do something about my awfulness; and that, by now, she had accomplished. But something made her stay. I do not want to exaggerate my charms. It may be that I was still more awful than I thought.

Thinking back now, it seems to me that those dog-kicking weeks were the happiest time I have known. I have it absolutely clear: the comforting hum and clack of Julia's electric typewriter from around the corner, so sharp I imagine I can reproduce the rhythm of it, whole sentences at a time. Effortlessly I can call to mind the taste of egg yolk and mayonnaise lingering on my tongue and on the ridge behind my teeth; and I could describe, if I chose, every flaw in the bricks of the wall I faced. On that wall, just above the edge of my desk, someone (a long-ago line worker, I supposed) had chiseled out the words, “
THIS IS THE LIFE
.” At the time it must have been ironic. But for me—my hyperextended tantrum of an adolescence forgotten, my meeting with Higgs and all that followed still ahead—it was the plain truth. What could I do but agree? Guilelessly, with all my heart?

CHAPTER 3

LITTLE BUG, LITTLE BUG

One morning in January, McTaggett asked me about my plans for the future. We were sitting in the shabby coffee shop where we had shifted our meetings some weeks before. Our relationship, removed from the classroom, had grown informal. As often as not we would pass over the elided ultrasubjunctive entirely and devote our hour to departmental politics, the day's news, the generally degraded status of the college and the state. McTaggett always looked unhappy; on occasion he visibly despaired, and the best mood he ever mustered was downcast. At the same time he took a frantic interest in my own good cheer. Whenever I showed any reaction to one of his gloomy anecdotes, he seemed startled and ashamed.

“Hey, but no,” he'd say, “don't let this old man get you down. Hang in there. Buck up. Smile and it seems like the whole world's also smiling, what do you say? Let's get back to work. Good Lord, I'm a bore.” Then he would release a thin chuckle, to forestall any earnest contradictions I might offer. I began to think of us as friends.

So when McTaggett asked what I expected to be doing after graduation, I took it as an off-hand query, one friend to another, and therefore—instead of replying so as to impress him, or at least so as to avoid embarrassment—I answered him honestly.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I'm a mass communications major. I'll probably go work in my parents' restaurant.”

It was not, actually, the strict truth. I had some idea of writing, which was partly a vestige of my youthful idealization of New York and the poets, partly a long-nursed desire to correct the follies of my former acquaintances by satirizing them, transparently disguised, in print. But I had never worked very hard at writing, nor had I displayed much ability when I had worked at all. So I'd mostly given up on literary immortality. My expectation of waiting tables at the Grape Arbor (and in no restaurant had that job more accurately been called “waiting”) had, by that time, hardened to a near-certainty.

“Mass communications,” McTaggett said. “With the basketball team.”

“Most of them, yes.”

“All of them,” he told me. “We keep track of these things.”

Up on the counter next to us was a glass case in which a blistery corned beef sat half-submerged in its own juice, like an island where a horrible test had taken place.

“Have you given any thought to graduate study?” McTaggett asked.

Strangely, I hadn't. Graduate school was certainly the first refuge of the directionless, in those days as always. But I had started college with the idea that school was to be gotten through at top speed, with head down; and despite all that had changed I had never really let that idea go. It had not occurred to me to stay a moment longer than was necessary to be certified a bachelor of arts.

McTaggett went on: I did not, of course, possess the ordinary qualifications to enter a doctoral program in Gravinic. He assured me that in my case the department would be willing to waive the requirements. I gathered their cooperativeness was related to the fact that there was just one graduate student left in the department, and he was receiving his degree in June. Even so, McTaggett insisted, I was an excellent candidate on my own account. Simply by virtue of attendance I was the most promising undergraduate in years.

I raised the question of my finances. Through a series of part-time jobs which do not rate mention here I had managed to pay my rent so far. But I was often fired; and I could certainly not afford tuition for graduate school. McTaggett coughed. There were no teaching fellows in Gravinic, the faculty being embarrassingly adequate for the courses offered. And the professors, given the slightness of their pedagogical responsibilities, needed no assistance with their research. However, there was one job available, a position about to be vacated by the graduate student now departing, and which, McTaggett told me, I was already qualified to take on. That job, of course, was listening to Higgs.

“I can understand if this all sounds dreary to you,” McTaggett said. “Go ahead and say no.”

“I'll take it,” I told him.

He brightened; that is, his mournfulness became briefly less intense. “Wonderful,” he said, “that's just wonderful.” Then, as a sort of afterthought, earnest and final as a deathbed conversion: “Welcome to the family!”

Julia took the news well. We agreed that she would apply to the doctoral program in her own department, where she, like me, had become something of a favorite. In fact, she had already considered staying on; but knowing my feelings about the university, she had not yet broached the subject. She was delighted at my change of heart.

“But this Higgs,” she said doubtfully.

“What about him?”

“Don't you think it's a little creepy? Thirteen years without saying a word?”

She had a certain way of tucking in her lower lip that meant she was being practical.

“I wouldn't worry,” I said. “I doubt he's going to
kill
anybody.”

“That's not necessarily what I meant.”

“If he tries anything funny I'll be ready. I'll kick the knife out of
his hand. I'll get physical with extreme prejudice.” And by way of demonstration I seized Julia around the waist.

“What if he resists?” asked Julia, crooking one arm behind my neck.

“I'll sacrifice myself to save the world.” And together, tussling, we plunged to the mattress.

Later, awake before dawn, I reconsidered Julia's question. Did I think Higgs was creepy? Honestly, I'd hardly thought of him at all. Stanley Higgs, my charge, was little more to me than a name I'd seen on the flyleaves of translations, in bibliographies, in the earlier issues of the
Journal of the Henderson Society;
although once, as a freshman, I had telephoned his house.

An acquaintance of mine from high school, a year older than I, had prevailed upon me to rush his fraternity. I had repeatedly explained to this acquaintance my feelings toward the university's social organization in general and Greek life in particular; but in the end his pallish persistence overcame my surliness—or, as I would have put it then, my principles. So I went to the rush party, eager to detest everyone and everything I saw. I had decided that I would stand in a corner and speak rudely to everyone who approached, so that my acquaintance would suffer a social blow for having brought me. I was a success at standing in the corner; but no one approached, so there was not much to do but drink cup after cup of the sweet, rummy punch that was back there with me, and about an hour after I arrived, following a sequence of events which I am unable to reconstruct, I found myself standing before a battered Princess phone, surrounded by a circle of cheering fraternity men and men-to-be. My acquaintance took me by the shoulder.

“You gotta call Higgs,” he said. He handed me a beery scrap of paper with a telephone number on it.

“Who's Higgs?” I asked him, but he had vanished into the crowd. A rhythmic chant set in:
Go! Go! Go! Go!
And nothing would have pleased me better than to go. But the men in the circle were by and large large, much more so than I, and I did not believe I had much
chance of breaking through. So I picked up the phone. At this, the crowd grew quiet. I dialed the number and after three rings a woman answered, not
Hello?
but
Yes?
Behind her there was country music playing.

“I was wondering if I could please speak to Mr. Higgs,” I said weakly. I realized I sounded even drunker than I was. I had no idea what I might say next. But the woman just put down the phone.

“She hung up,” I said, turning to my audience, managing a smile. And the crowd swept over me, pounded my back, handed me a beer, within seconds forgot about me. My acquaintance found me just as I reached the front door.

“You're a lock,” he said. “They loved you.” But I never went back.

My project throughout the winter and spring was to translate a collection of Gravinian nursery rhymes into English. These were different from the little verses I had known as a child; they were more like aphorisms, or, speaking loosely, haiku. Most of them concerned a character named Little Bug, a generalized figure of youth and folly. There was one of these that stuck doggedly in my mind. In Gravinic it formed a series of perfect dactyls, which by an unfortunate chance coincided exactly with the endless
TACK
-eta of something inside our radiator; so I seemed always to be hearing it, whenever the nights got cold. My English version of the rhyme went as follows: