Free The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg Page B

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œMass communications,” McTaggett said. “With the basketball team.”
    â€œMost of them, yes.”
    â€œAll 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.
    â€œHave 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.
    â€œI can understand if this all sounds dreary to you,” McTaggett said. “Go ahead and say no.”
    â€œI’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