The Grasshopper King (18 page)

“So it should be North America.”

“No, I've got it in South.”

“Mexico is North America.”

“I know that,” she said. “But everything Mesoamerican goes with South America. It makes more cultural sense.”

“Then the ‘South America' sign should say ‘South America and Mesoamerica.'”

“This is the stupidest argument we've ever had,” Julia said.

“Think about what you're saying. Of all our stupid arguments . . .”

She cocked her head for a moment and thought.

“To the best of my recollection,” she said, “this is the very stupidest.”

“Fine,” I said, and returned sullenly to my studies, feeling ill-rewarded
for what had after all been an improvement, however slight, in my demeanor. To demonstrate that I was no longer available for chit chat I assumed a voice of concentration and read aloud the sentence I had just succeeded in analyzing.

“Grinto mapplethorpe watusi bah,” Julia said suddenly. “Frente chico matuba hiawatha. Hepzibah barada nikto.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I did?”

“I have my own language now,” she said. “It's called Juliatic.”

“And what was that you said?”

“‘My boyfriend is annoying.'”

“Huh.”

“The reason it's so long is Juliatic has no word for ‘boyfriend.' Literally it comes out as ‘he who sleeps in my bed and thinks he knows much more about everything than he does.'”

“That sounds sort of inefficient.”

“But once you get used to it . . .”

“Yeah,” I said, burning. “I'd imagine so.”

She knelt to the floor and came up with a tangled quipu slung over one hand.

“I guess we could just break up,” I said.

“Who'd get the apartment?”

“You found it.”

“True,” she said. “So I guess I get it.”

“Then can I take the bed?”

“It's yours.”

“I'd hate telling my parents.”

“I'll tell them,” Julia said. “They'll understand.”

Ellen had been gaping at us in turn, her head jerking back and forth, her mouth growing steadily rounder and wider as if an invisible sphere were working its way out. Now she released a shrill uninterpretable syllable of dismay.

“She's kidding,” I told her. “Don't worry.”

“He's kidding too,” Julia said.

“Did Julia tell you why she's cleaning up?” I asked Ellen.

“Oh, don't,” Julia said.

“Women like things orderly,” Ellen said. “Men don't care about things like that. It's a fact. In my youth I was ready to turn everything upside down—all the traditions, everything. But now I see that people are fixed into being what they're like.” Some memory overtook her. “Marriage and property—we'd tear it all down, we thought—oh, and the parietal rules—how we lied . . . !”

“She says she's doing it for your husband.”

“Oh,” Ellen said. She put one hand to her lips. “Did he ask you?”

“Of course not,” Julia said tightly.

“Well put,” I said.

Julia turned back to me. “I don't know why you think you know so much.”

“I'm not quite sure why I've never cleaned this place up myself,” Ellen mused. “I suppose you can get used to anything.”

“You can't study Henderson and care about things being neat,” I said. “If you did, you would know what I mean. It's all about sloppiness and ruining things.”

“Oh,” Julia said, “so I'm unable to participate in this discussion because I haven't read the collected works of your third-rate poet. Mister Sunrise.
Fourth
-rate.”

“I'm just saying—”

“You're the worst checkers player I've ever seen,” Julia said.

“I'm better than Treech.”

“Treech likes you. I think he lets you win.”

She brought the quipu over to South America.

“Can you not do that now?” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it's distracting.”

“It's not as though you're really working,” she said. “Not until your
papers come from Cornell.”

I tried to look at my book again; that was a lost cause.

“I'm sure you'd find somebody else right away,” I said. “You're young and attractive.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Julia said evenly.

“You know how to be aggressive with a man,” I said. “We respond well to that.”

“I had to be aggressive with you,” Julia said, “because you were a pathetic dipshit.”

“And this is convenient, it's almost time for the state fair.”

Julia raised her eyebrows.

“I think I heard the guy running the Whack-A-Mole's available.”

“Oh,” she said. “That's really nice.” She threw down the quipu, which landed among the spoils of the Taino and the Nahua, their sacrificial knives, their carvings. All at once I was acutely conscious of being in a room full of weapons. Ellen stared at me with terrifying interest, as if I were a stranger who had opened my coat to her and revealed some novel deformity. It struck me suddenly, and with some force, that I had at last reached the end of Julia's kindness and the end of her kidding. She was serious. Following just behind that thought, a little slower and not so forcefully, but hugely, sickeningly worse, came the understanding that I had been working toward this moment all along.

But, of course, this realization—like all the other epiphanies in my life, large and small—had come too late.

That night I slept at my card table, my head resting on the
X
of my crossed forearms, the workman's legend—“
THIS IS THE LIFE
”—grinning down at me from the wall. The next day, to my surprise, Julia wordlessly gathered her things and accompanied me to Higgs's house. Along the way I attempted a rapprochement, filled with thin hope and self-recrimination; I spoke jauntily of the day's news, various of our former acquaintances, even the weather. I listed and repudiated my unappealing qualities, one by one, with a grit-toothed likeness of
cheer. I flung apologies like candy from a float. None of it availed me anything. When we arrived at the house, Julia started immediately on a stack of jugs and pots that occupied the corner by the stairs, taking care to set each object in its place as deliberately and noisily as possible. I opened Kaufmann and closed it again, unable to bear the sight of that same page: bum-
bum
. I rested my chin on my joined hands, clenched my eyes shut, tried to pull myself inward to some clear, meditative state, where the route back to normalcy would be apparent, a bright portal. But I couldn't concentrate; couldn't not notice the chalky scrape of pottery on pottery, the radio from upstairs, the chattering grasshoppers. I was trapped in the sensory world. I was sweating. I began to succumb to a matter-of-fact despair.

Who knows how long this might have gone on, had Ellen not interrupted us with news of the most startling kind?

We heard her shout from upstairs. Immediately she came barreling down, agitated into speechlessness, waving a fat blue envelope in her right hand. It was a letter: the first of two we would receive that week, in a house that didn't see much mail. I stood up from my chair.

“A letter for Stanley,” Ellen forced out, catching her breath in whoops. “It's a letter for Stanley from Germany.”

All of us looked at Higgs. I knew already of the letters Higgs had posted to Berlin in his attempts to uncover Henderson's biography. But what sort of reply could take thirty years to compose?

“Open it,” I said. “He won't mind.”

Ellen tore the envelope open and withdrew a neatly folded sheaf of papers. “It's in English,” she said, flattening it out, and then—glancing once more at her husband—she began to read.

CHAPTER 5

HENDERSON BETWEEN THE WARS

September 10, 1985

Dear Professor Higgs:

Excitedly am I responding to your letter concerning the tall man with the cough, which you have sent to various addresses in Berlin during approximately the first week of April, 1951. I know this Henderson! Also have I often wondered what has become of him! If I am correct, he was a poet, some sort of Russian, whom I knew for a time in my youth. Please accept my very heartfelt apologies for the slowness of my reply! Let me explain. Three months ago passed my sister Ulrike away. She was a fine woman, but it must be said that in her whole long life she had never thrown a thing in the rubbish. So it was, that in the sorting of her many papers, which has occupied me every day since my dear sister's funeral—we old men are always grateful to find ways to fill up the time!—as I was saying, while sorting yesterday morning I turned up a page to find your old letter. Imagine my surprise at seeing there a perfect description of my old friend Henderson! Well, at once put I aside my task and sat myself down to recall as much as I could about that funny character. Henderson! If you know where he may be now, then must you tell me where to find him! I am certain, that he and I could spend a few marvelous hours talking over
all our memories, as we old men love to do! Well, you know this? If you are still alive and reading this, Professor, you must be an old man too!

But enough about me!

I met your poet Henderson in 1932, when I was a boy of eighteen. Though my father was a humble cabinetmaker, we were related on my mother's mother's side to the Schönaich-Carolaths, wherefrom came the Empress Hermione, the second wife of Emperor Wilhelm. Well, as you know, life in Germany was not so good under the Republic! Many people were trying to get away for a while into another country. So it was very good luck, that through my family connections was I offered an appointment as a stable boy at the Emperor's court in exile at House Doorn, in the Netherlands.

The night that I met Henderson—it was March or April of that year—was the Emperor hosting a tremendous banquet. Great people of all sorts were there, barons and baronesses, dukes and duchesses, and artists; they had been arriving at the estate for days. All of us servants, even those not ordinarily allowed inside the house, had been brought in to assist with the party. What an affair! Even now can I recall the glittering jewels of the fine German ladies, also their rich gowns. You see, the Republic was not so bad for everybody!

Outside, there was a terrible storm. Now and then would a thunderclap shake the whole house, and the ladies would fearfully gasp. But the food and wine were very good and they kept everyone from worrying too much about the weather. Then suddenly there was a howl: a very loud howl! I remember saying to my friend Heinrich, whom all of us called Hieronymus—how we remember these little things after so great a time!—that the howl sounded like some terrifying thing from the grave. Now began all the guests to look nervous and set down their silvery forks.

The chief butler gathered the servants around. “Arno has caught something,” he told us. “Some of you boys go out and quiet him.”