Read Online The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg - Free Book Online

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.
    After a while the balance began to tilt in horror’s favor. Maybe New York had once been as I’d imagined it; for all I knew, my parents’ restaurant had been the last bulwark against the forces of vulgarity and boredom that had triumphed everywhere else, and the city had succumbed on their departure. In any case I found it increasingly difficult to summon up my old fantasies. The kowtowing doormen disappeared; the grand sweep of society folded its skirts and retired. I had no further desire to light out East. I knew enough now; if there were any further disillusionment to be gained by going there in person, I could do as well without it.
    Which is not to say that I had gained any affection for my hometown in the process. It was the same backwater it had always been—no more glittery, no smarter. My dissatisfaction remained constant, a dull whine, but I no longer had any particular ambition to distract me; that is, I had come around to a more or less ordinary way of life. In a way, of course, this was a kind of despair, but in a way it was a relief. I had been freed of the responsibility to make it anywhere.
    So we settled in, and summer was pulled over us. I worked nights at the restaurant and spent my days lying supine on our ancient bed, a damp towel laid square over my chest and two fans aimed at me from either side. I was bored. But boredom was a welcome change from ceaseless hatred. I no longer fantasized about the university’s destruction, and my loathing for my classmates had diminished to a bearable distaste. My acne had cleared up. Julia was kind to me, and at the time I thought this to be as much as—perhaps more than—anyone could unselfishly expect. Sometimes I still think so. Had events proceeded slightly differently, I’m convinced, we would have gotten married soon enough, bought a house, run a rudimentary gallery or taken over the Grape Arbor, perhaps produced children who would in time grow up to repudiate our beliefs, such as they were. It is important to keep in mind, throughout what follows, that I came very near to leading an entirely unremarkable life. But instead, I awoke on September sixth of my final year of college with a terrific headache. I was so addled that when I arrived at Gunnery Hall at ten that morning for my first class of the semester, I stumbled into the wrong classroom, and by the time I realized my mistake, the unexceptional chain of events described above had receded into utter impossibility. But, of course, I wouldn’t know that for some time.
    My class was in a new wing that had been built just that summer. In my miserable state I was unable to make out the numbering scheme of the rooms, and when I saw at the end of the long, gleaming corridor a man standing half out of a doorway, beckoning me in, I assumed that I had found my destination.
    The class I was looking for was Can Art and Industry Co-Exist?—a question about the answer to which