The Grasshopper King (30 page)

I didn't tell Julia what Higgs had said. I thought about it, yes, as I'd planned to, and on several occasions resolved to come out with it that hour, that day, but each time my urge to unburden myself was weaker, while my reservations retained their full force. And before long I saw that my decision to keep my secret was just as irreversible as the other would have been. If I told her now, I'd have to explain why I'd waited so long; and the fact was, I didn't think I could. I found myself spending more hours than necessary in my little office. There was something at once inspiring and soothing about my secretary, with her headset phone that never rang and her still, enciphered face. She had a loose-leaf binder full of crosswords and she worked them all day long. When I came home, long after sundown, Julia and I fought—fought without a trace of fellow-feeling, and finally, though I can't say when this moment came, without love either. So we never married.

Am I rushing this? There isn't much to linger on. Our fights were the usual ones: petty domestic contentions, followed by hot silence, occasional half-hearted attempts at talking it over. In the end she always forgave me, and after a while I began illogically to resent her lenience. Once she'd been so ready to correct me—why not now? Couldn't she tell I was hiding something? Didn't she know I'd have to own up if she forced me? I thought she must be building up a case against me. Each little dispute was a new article, filed away with her damning commentary penciled in.
The day she left she'd reveal it to me entire, its unanswerable bulk all the good-bye and consolation I deserved.

But when she packed her things and went, it was without a hint of confrontation. With her hand on the knob I blurted out: “Don't you want to tell me something?”

“Like what?” she said. Through the window I could see the taxi with her boxes piled in front of it, and the driver sitting on the hood, hands in pockets—he'd seen this sort of thing before.

“Like what an asshole I've been. Like everything I've done wrong ever.”

I watched her search for a rejoinder. Then she relaxed. She opened the door.

“No,” she said.

So: Julia and I never married, or, I should say, I never married, and Julia married someone else, a gentlemanly professor named Simeon, to whose fifty-word advertisement in the hopeful back pages of the
Lantern-Bugle
(“
EXPECTATIONS REASONABLE
,
NO GAMES
”) she had, kind as always, responded.

I met Simeon just once, at the engagement party. He had tired eyes and his puffy, contourless surface made no suggestion of internal architecture beneath; I thought cutting him open might reveal a perfect cross-section of undifferentiated vegetable stuff, like cooked potato. I prowled the perimeter of the room and watched him with a naturalist's eye, swearing I'd see in him what she did, even if it took all night. Julia left his side to tend to something, and his knuckles flew immediately to his lips. He seemed on the verge of a stammered retraction. I took this chance to approach him.

“Hey,” I said. I gulped fraternally at my drink. “No hard feelings. I'm happy for you both.”

I was being sincere; but my reassurance seemed to make him even more uncomfortable. He chewed at his knuckle furiously. Deep potato currents, I sensed, were flowing where all was ordinarily placid.

“I hear you're a chemist,” I said.

“That's right—a polymer man.”

I had nothing to add to that.

“It must be really interesting,” I tried.

“Well, it is,” he said, sounding hurt.

“I meant, of course it is.”

“Yes,” he said.

I see I'm making him sound worse than he was. In fact he presented a certain genial and soft-edged charm. I supposed he was gentle, handy, even-tempered, susceptible to a romantic impulse now and then—he'd said as much in his ad. (I'd trudged through the microfiched old newspapers for days until I'd found it.) She could have done much worse; here, of course, I was thinking of myself.

Simeon and I stood there nodding at each other and exchanging weak, sporadic smiles until Julia arrived, accompanied by my parents. She'd moved in with them after all; she slept in my old bedroom now, beneath where Gregory Corso still smiled and awaited his first ecstatic forkful of wax beans. For a second, standing there in my bunched-up sprung-collared tuxedo (the same one, I was wretchedly certain, I'd rented for the Henderson Society banquet) with my parents and Julia fanned out before me and the band playing “Memories,” I felt as if some incautious step had dropped me into an alternate history; that Mesozoic butterfly had flapped its wings one extra time, with all that that entailed, and I was the groom, not him, and millions of people had never been born . . . Then I met Julia's eyes and saw in their uncomplicated amity that time was still on track. My father shuffled his feet like an unquiet child.

“Getting acquainted?” my mother said brightly. She had one hand on Julia's arm. My mother had taken to her so quickly and with such force that she let Julia suggest changes to her recipes, a privilege never before granted, and already the de-wheatgermed hamburgers and the
BLT
with bacon and lettuce standing in for breaded lentils were beginning to draw new faces to our door.

“Like gangbusters,” I said. Simeon nodded gravely.

“Simeon's in chemistry,” she said.

“He was just telling me.”

“When the two of them met, he was holding his diploma out.”

“What?” Simeon said. “I don't think so.”

“You're sure you weren't holding your diploma out?”

“I'm sure.”

“I thought you were.”

“It's in storage.”

My mother encompassed us all in a conspiratorial glance. “The reason I thought you were is because there was chemistry between you.”

Julia's eyes flicked across mine, then came to rest on Simeon's. She took a step closer to him—bodies in motion, I thought, imagining everything schematic and viewed from above.

“You get it?” my mother said. “Then there would have been
chemistry
. . . between you!”

“That's good,” Simeon said, while I burned, with embarrassment, with envy. My mother beamed. “That's very good,” he said.

Simeon was offered a job at a company in New Jersey that, Julia wrote me in her first letter from there, “buys up unsafe products and makes them into plastic—asbestos, lead paint, old car batteries now, and, if Simeon's team comes through,
DDT
. . .” Julia started teaching art in a private girls' school. She writes me once a month or so—the achingly perfect, no-nonsense declinations of her script like an affectionate chastening. Her letters are made up of good wishes, earnest advice, and virtuosic simulations of interest in the departmental politicking that fills my drab, occasional replies. It's hard to tell one letter from another, except by the things she includes: recipes clipped from the “Bachelor's Banquet” in her town paper, photos of her tiny, scrubbed children, cartoons about professors, magazine articles she suspects will interest or vex me. All these things I read and throw away. The letters themselves I keep, though I never look at them.

At the end of every letter she asks me when I'm coming for a visit. Each time I put her off. I tell her I'm afraid I'd never come back.

Once I asked her if she missed Chandler City.

“I don't know if that's the way to put it,” she wrote in reply. “I miss
you
, Sammy. I suppose I miss a few of my teachers. I think of Ellen sometimes—I do miss her. But I certainly don't miss Chandler City, as a
city
, if that's what you mean. I guess it seemed to me the sort of place you could either
be
from, and then leave, or just stop there for some amount of time. I can't picture it as someplace to end up.”

And indeed, no one did; no one but me. Rosso retired to Georgia eight years ago, at his doctor's behest. Slotkin teaches at Yale. Dean Moresby lived just two years after I saw him at the banquet; Karl-Heinz Sethius is dead too. Treech is in New York City, rewarded for his successes with an executive post in the Henderson Society. And McTaggett went to Kyoto, the first American Gravinicist, I'm told, in the Far East.

Charlie stayed in town a while longer. As it turned out, the certain parcel
had
arrived on his father's watch, and consequently he too found himself out of a job at the end of my scheme. Feeling responsible, I persuaded my parents to take him on as a waiter. To everyone's surprise, he was a tremendous success. It happened like this: one night, bored, contemptuous, sick to death of the smell of couscous, he began to hurry the night along by waiting tables in character. And just like that, stardom—within weeks the whole city had heard of his uncanny skills. He specialized in tough guys: Reagan, Nicholson, Elliot Gould. “People feel bad about being served these days,” Charlie told me. “Deep down they want a waiter who won't take their crap.” We had lines out the door. Holistic awareness on the rise, according to my mother. She told anyone who'd listen: it was the satori-quake we'd all been waiting for, and the first shock was here, right here in Chandler City. But as soon as there was money enough my parents franchised the restaurant and moved back to New York. Happy Clappy's is a Grape Arbor now. Charlie left soon afterwards, eloping with an enamored customer to
Philadelphia, where he used his acquired knowledge of the vegetable trade to open a produce market, which, he gives me unsurprisingly to understand, is also a head shop.

Ellen came back to Chandler City when her father checked into the hospital for what no one pretended was anything but the last time. I met her there, out in a bright hall lined with ficus trees and the brass-etched names of the donors. She looked different. I wanted to say younger, but it wasn't quite that. The haze in her blue eyes was gone. She seemed a participant in the physical world in a way she had not before; I remarked her shadow, the shape her weight made on the vinyl cushion of the bench.

“How is he?” I said.

“Well, dying. You can see him if you want.”

“I saw him yesterday.”

This wasn't true. I hadn't visited the Dean, and had no plans to. I didn't have anything to say to him and I was afraid that in his gummy blindness he would mistake me for someone who did.

“I wondered if you would come,” I told her.

“Why?”

“I didn't think you were going to forgive him.”

“I haven't forgiven him.”

“But you're here.”

Ellen nodded.

“I thought you were never going to speak to him again.”

“Nothing's final,” Ellen said. “Not things like that.”

“I guess not,” I said. Glumness settled on me, more than could be accounted for by the headachy tube lights and the frost-cool nurses clicking through their rounds, from one exhausted package of malfunction to the next.

“And Professor Higgs?” I said.

“He's well.”

“Still playing checkers?”

“With my sister. I mostly play mah-jongg now.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“It's true. And I pick up trash at the park with a stick, too, and go to lectures about gardening. I'm being an old lady—why not? Tampa's filled with us.”

“So you like Florida.”

“We both do.”

I leaned forward. “He told you that?”

“I just know,” Ellen said. “All right?”

“All right. I got it.”

“I was sorry to hear about Julia.”

“How did you know?”

My question seemed to take her by surprise. “She wrote me.”

“So she told you the whole story.”

“Yes,” Ellen said.

“We probably have pretty different perspectives on it.”

“It's always that way.”

Two stout doctors came squabbling by us. Ellen and I watched them until they turned the corner. I wondered if someone had just died.

“There are other women,” Ellen said.

“Yes, I've heard that.”

“But really,” she said, and a little urgency entered her voice. “You should think about that.”

After a little while she looked down at her watch. “Visiting hour's starting,” she said. “Are you sure you wouldn't like to come in with me? I don't mind.”

“I'm sure.”

“Then I suppose I'll see you . . .”

“Whenever,” I said. “Under happier circumstances.”

“Yes,” Ellen agreed. “That sounds nice.”

But six months later she was dead. Something in Florida—its thwarted swampiness, or all those old ladies—had released her constitution's long-suppressed complaints. One day, as she folded miniature hot dogs into
jackets of dough for her afternoon's company, something in her lungs lay down gently and relaxed. The mah-jongg club found her kneeling at the counter with her head against the formica. She had died so quietly and gracefully that no one in the living room had heard a thing.