SECOND CHILDREN, SECOND NOVELS, SECOND LOVE

 

IT was a boy; their second son. Duncan's brother was called Walt—it was never Walter, and never the German Valt ; he was simply a t at the end of a wall. Walt: like a beaver's tail smacking water, like a well-hit squash ball. He dropped into their lives and they had two boys.

Garp tried to write a second novel. Helen took her second job; she became an associate professor of English at the state university, in the town next-door to the women's college. Garp and his boys had a boys' gym to play in, and Helen had an occasional bright graduate student to relieve her of the monotony of younger people; she also had more, and more interesting, colleagues.

One of them was Harrison Fletcher; his field was the Victorian Novel, but Helen liked him for other reasons—among them: he was also married to a writer. Her name was Alice; she was also working on her second novel, although she'd never finished her first. When the Garps met her, they thought she could easily be mistaken for an Ellen Jamesian—she simply didn't talk. Harrison, whom Garp called Harry, had never been called Harry before—but he liked Garp and he appeared to enjoy his new name as if it were a present Garp had given him. Helen would continue to call him Harrison, but to Garp he was Harry Fletcher. He was Garp's first friend, though Garp and Harrison both sensed that Harrison preferred Helen's company.

Neither Helen nor Garp knew what to make of Quiet Alice, as they called her. “She must be writing one hell of a book,” Garp often said. “It's taken all her words away.”

The Fletchers had one child, a daughter whose age put her awkwardly between Duncan and Walt: it was implied that they wanted another. But the book, Alice's second novel, came first; when it was over, they would have a second child, they said.

The couples had dinner together occasionally, but the Fletchers were strictly cook-out people—which is to say, neither of them cooked—and Garp was in a period where he baked his own bread, he had a stockpot always simmering on the stove. Mostly, Helen and Harrison discussed books, teaching, and their colleagues, they ate lunch together at the university union, they conversed—at length—in the evening, on the phone. And Garp and Harry went to the football games, the basketball games, and the wrestling meets; three times a week they played squash, which was Harry's game—his only sport—but Garp could play even with him simply because Garp was a better athlete, in better shape from all his running. For the pleasure of these games, Garp suppressed his dislike of balls.

In the second year of this friendship, Harry told Garp that Alice liked to go to movies. “I don't ,” Harry admitted, “but if you do—and Helen said that you did—why not take Alice?”

Alice Fletcher giggled at movies, especially serious movies, she shook her head in disbelief at almost every thing she saw. It took months for Garp to realize that Alice had something of an impediment or a nervous defect in her speech; perhaps it was psychological. At first Garp thought it was the popcorn.

“You have a speech problem, I think, Alice,” he said, driving her home one night.

“Yeth,” she said, nodding her head. Often it was a simple lisp; sometimes it was completely different. Occasionally, it wasn't there. Excitement seemed to aggravate it.

“How's the book coming?” he asked her.

“Good,” she said. At one movie she had blurted out that she'd liked Procrastination .

“Do you want me to read any of your work?” Garp asked her.

“Yeth,” she said, her small head bobbing. She sat with her short, strong fingers crushing her skirt in her lap, the way Garp had seen her daughter crinkle her clothes—the child would sometimes roll her skirt, like a window shade, right up above her panties (though Alice stopped short of this).

“Was it an accident?” Garp asked her. “Your speech problem. Or were you born with it?”

“Born with,” Alice said. The car stopped at the Fletchers' house and Alice tugged Garp's arm. She opened her mouth and pointed inside, as if this would explain everything. Garp saw the rows of small, perfect teeth and a tongue that was fat and fresh-looking like the tongue of a child. He could see nothing peculiar, but it was dark in the car, and he wouldn't have known what was peculiar if he'd seen it. When Alice closed her mouth, he saw she was crying—and also smiling, as if this act of self-exposure had required enormous trust. Garp nodded his head as if he understood everything.

“I see,” he mumbled. She wiped her tears with the back of one hand, squeezed his hand with her other.

“Harrithon is having an affair,” she said.

Garp knew that Harry wasn't having an affair with Helen, but he didn't know what poor Alice thought.

“Not with Helen,” Garp said.

“Na, na,” Alice said, shaking her head. “Thumone elth .”

“Who?” Garp asked.

“A thtudent!” Alice wailed. “A thtupid little twat!”

It had been a couple of years since Garp had molested Little Squab Bones, but in that time he had indulged himself in one other baby-sitter; to his shame, he had even forgotten her name. He felt, honestly, that baby-sitters were an appetite he was forever through with. Yet he sympathized with Harry—Harry was his friend, and he was an important friend to Helen. He also sympathized with Alice. Alice was alertly lovable; a kind of terminal vulnerability was clearly a part of her, and she wore it as visibly as a too-tight sweater on her compact body.

“I'm sorry,” Garp said. “Can I do anything?”

“Tell him to thtop ,” Alice said.

It had never been hard for Garp to stop, but he had never been a teacher—with “thtudents” on his mind, or on his hands. Perhaps what Harry was involved with was something else. The only thing Garp could think of—that would perhaps make Alice feel better—was to confess his own mistakes.

“It happens, Alice,” he said.

“Not to you,” Alice said.

“Twice to me,” Garp said. She looked at him, shocked.

“Tell the truth ,” she insisted.

“The truth,” he said, “is that it happened twice. A baby-sitter, both times.”

“Jesuth Chritht,” said Alice.

“But they weren't important,” Garp said. “I love Helen.”

“Thith is important,” Alice said. “He hurth me. And I can't white .”

Garp knew about writers who couldn't white ; this made Garp love Alice, on the spot.

“Fucking Harry is having an affair,” Garp told Helen.

“I know,” Helen said. “I've told him to stop, but he keeps going back for more. She's not even a very good student.”

“What can we do?” Garp asked her.

“Fucking lust ,” Helen said. “Your mother was right. It is a man's problem. You talk to him.”

“Alice told me about your baby-sitters,” Harry told Garp. “It's not the same. This is a special girl.”

“A student , Harry,” Garp said. “Jesus Christ.”

“A special student,” Harry said. “I'm not like you. I've been honest, I've told Alice from the first. She's just got to accommodate it. I've told her she's free to do this, too.”

“She doesn't know any students,” Garp said.

“She knows you ,” Harry told him. “And she's in love with you.”

“What can we do?” Garp asked Helen. “He's trying to set me up with Alice so he'll feel better about what he's doing.”

“At least he's been honest with her,” Helen told Garp. There was one of those silences wherein a family can identify its separate, breathing parts in the night. Open doors off an upstairs hall: Duncan breathing lazily, an almost-eight-year-old with lots of time to live; Walt breathing those tentative two-year-old breaths, short and excited; Helen, even and cool. Garp held his breath. He knew she knew about the baby-sitters.

“Harry told you?” he asked.

“You might have told me before you told Alice,” Helen said. “Who was the second one?”

“I forget her name,” Garp admitted.

“I think it's shabby,” Helen said. “It's really beneath me; it's beneath you . I hope you've outgrown it.”

“Yes, I have,” Garp said. He meant he had outgrown baby-sitters. But lust itself? Ah, well. Jenny Fields had fingered a problem at the heart of her son's heart.

“We've got to help the Fletchers,” Helen said. “We're too fond of them to do nothing about this.”

Helen, Garp marveled, moved through their life together as if it were an essay she was structuring—with an introduction, a presentation of basic priorities, then the thesis.

“Harry thinks the student is special ,” Garp pointed out.

“Fucking men ,” Helen said. “You look after Alice. I'll show Harrison what's special.”

So one night, after Garp had cooked an elegant Paprika Chicken and spдtzle, Helen said to Garp, “Harrison and I will do the dishes. You take Alice home.”

“Take her home?” Garp said. “Now?”

“Show him your novel,” Helen said to Alice. “Show him everything you want. I'm going to show your husband what an asshole he is.”

“Hey, come on,” Harry said. “We're all friends, we all want to stay friends, right?”

“You simple son of a bitch,” Helen told him. “You fuck a student and call her special—you insult your wife, you insult me. I'll show you what's special.”

“Go easy, Helen,” Garp said.

“Go with Alice,” Helen said. “And let Alice drive her own baby-sitter home.”

“Hey, come on!” Harrison Fletcher said.

“Shuth up, Harrithon!” Alice said. She grabbed Garp's hand and stood up from the table.

“Fucking men ,” said Helen. Garp, as speechless as an Ellen Jamesian, took Alice home.

“I can take the baby-sitter home, Alice,” he said. “Jutht get back fatht ,” Alice said.

“Very fast, Alice,” Garp said.

She made him read the first chapter of her novel aloud to her. “I want to hear it,” she told him, “and I can't thay it mythelf.” So Garp said it to her; it read, he was relieved to hear, beautifully. Alice wrote with such fluency and care that Garp could have sung her sentences, unselfconsciously, and they would have sounded fine.

“You have a lovely voice, Alice,” he told her, and she cried. And they made love, of course, and despite what everyone knows about such things, it was special.

“Wasn't it?” asked Alice.

“Yes, it was ,” Garp admitted.

Now, he thought, here is trouble.

“What can we do?” Helen asked Garp. She had made Harrison Fletcher forget his “special” student; Harrison now thought that Helen was the most special thing in his life.

“You started it,” Garp said to her. “If it's going to stop, you've got to stop it, I think.”

“That's easy to say,” Helen said. “I like Harrison; he's my best friend, and I don't want to lose that. I'm just not very interested in sleeping with him.”

“He's interested,” Garp said.

“God, I know,” Helen said.

“He thinks you're the best he's had,” Garp told her. “Oh, great,” Helen said. “That must be lovely for Alice.”

“Alice isn't thinking about it,” Garp said. Alice was thinking about Garp , Garp knew; and Garp was afraid the whole thing would stop. There were times when Garp thought that Alice was the best he'd ever had. “And what about you?” Helen asked him. ("Nothing is equal,” Garp would write, one day.)

“I'm fine,” Garp said. “I like Alice, I like you, I like Harry.”

“And Alice?” Helen asked.

“Alice likes me,” Garp said.

“Oh boy,” Helen said. “So we all like each other, except that I don't care that much for sleeping with Harrison.”

“So it's over,” Garp said, trying to hide the gloom in his voice. Alice had cried to him that it could never be over. ("Could it? Could it?” she had cried. “I can't jutht thtop !")

“Well, isn't it still better than it was ?” Helen asked Garp.

“You made your point,” Garp said. “You got Harry off his damn student. Now you've just got to let him down easy.”

“And what about you and Alice?” Helen asked.

“If it's over for one of us, it's over for all of us,” Garp said. “That's only fair.”

“I know what's fair ,” Helen said. “I also know what's human .”

The good-byes that Garp imagined conducting with Alice were violent scenarios, fraught with Alice's incoherent speech and always ending in desperate lovemaking—another failed resolution, wet with sweat and sweet with the lush stickum of sex, oh yeth.

“I think Alice is a little loony ,” Helen said.

“Alice is a pretty good writer,” Garp said. “She's the real thing.”

“Fucking writers ,” Helen mumbled.

“Harry doesn't appreciate how talented Alice is,” Garp heard himself say.

“Oh boy,” Helen murmured. “This is the last time I try to save anyone's marriage except my own.”

It took six months for Helen to let Harry down easy, and in that time Garp saw as much of Alice as he could, while still trying to forewarn her that their foursome was going to be short-lived. He also tried to forewarn himself, because he dreaded the knowledge that he would have to give Alice up.

“It's not the same, for all four of us,” he told Alice. “It will have to stop, and pretty soon.”

“Tho what?” Alice said. “It hasn't thtopped yet, has it?”

“Not yet,” Garp admitted. He read all her written words aloud to her, and they made love so much he stung in the shower and couldn't stand to wear a jock when he ran.

“We've got to do and do it,” Alice said, fervently. “Do it while we can.”

“You know, this can't last,” Garp tried to warn Harry, while they were playing squash.

“I know, I know,” Harry said, “but it's great while it lasts, isn't it?”

“Isn't it?” Alice demanded. Did Garp love Alice? Oh yeth.

“Yes, yes,” Garp said, shaking his head. He thought he did.

But Helen, enjoying it the least of them, suffered it the most; when she finally called an end to it, she couldn't help but show her euphoria. The other three couldn't help but show their resentment: that she should appear so uplifted while they were cast into such gloom. Without formal imposition there existed a six-month moratorium on the couples' seeing each other, except by chance. Naturally, Helen and Harry ran into each other at the English Department. Garp encountered Alice in the supermarket. Once she deliberately crashed her shopping cart into his; little Walt was jarred among the produce and the juice cans, and Alice's daughter looked equally alarmed at the collision.

“I felt the need of thum contact ,” Alice said. And she called the Garps one night, very late, after Garp and Helen had gone to bed. Helen answered the phone.

“Is Harrithon there?” she asked Helen.

“No, Alice,” Helen said. “Is something wrong?”

“He's not here ,” Alice said. “I haven't theen Harrithon all night!”

“Let me come over and sit with you,” Helen suggested. “Garp can go look for Harrison.”

“Can't Garp come over and thit with me?” Alice asked. “You look for Harrithon.”

“No, I'll come over and sit with you,” Helen said. “I think that's better. Garp can go look for Harrison.”

“I want Garp,” Alice said.

“I'm sorry that you can't have him,” Helen said.

“I'm thorry, Helen,” Alice said. She cried into the phone and said a stream of things that Helen couldn't understand. Helen gave the phone to Garp.

Garp talked to Alice, and listened to her, for about an hour. Nobody looked for “Harrithon.” Helen felt she had done a good job of holding herself together for the six months she'd allowed it all to continue; she expected them all to at least control themselves adequately, now that it was over.

“If Harrison is out screwing students, I'm really going to cross him off,” Helen said. “That asshole! And if Alice calls herself a writer, why isn't she writing? If she's got so much to thay , why waste saying it on the phone?”

Time, Garp knew, would ease everything. Time would also prove him wrong about Alice's writing. She may have had a pretty voice but she couldn't complete anything; she never finished her second novel, not in all the years that the Garps would know the Fletchers—or in all the years after. She could say everything beautifully, but—as Garp remarked to Helen, when he was finally exasperated with Alice—she couldn't get to the end of anything. She couldn't thtop .

Harry, too, would not play his cards wisely or well. The university would deny him tenure—a bitter loss for Helen, because she truly loved having Harrison for a friend. But the student Harry had thrown over for Helen had not been let down so easy; she bitched about her seduction to the English Department—although, of course, it was her jilting that really made her bitch. This raised eyebrows among Harry's colleagues. And, of course, Helen's support of Harrison Fletcher's case for tenure was quietly not taken seriously—her relationship with Harry having also been made clear by the jilted student.

Even Garp's mother, Jenny Fields—with all she stood up for, for women—agreed with Garp that Helen's own tenure at the university, so easily granted her when she was younger than poor Harry, had been a token gesture on the part of the English Department. Someone had probably told them that they needed a woman on the department at the associate professor level, and Helen had come along. Although Helen did not doubt her own qualifications, she knew it hadn't been her quality that had gotten her tenure.

But Helen had not slept with any students; not yet. Harrison Fletcher had, unforgivably, allowed his sex life to be more special to him than his job. He got another job, anyway. And perhaps what remained of the friendship between the Garps and the Fletchers was actually saved by the Fletchers' having to move away. This way, the couples saw each other about twice a year; distance diffused what might have been hard feelings. Alice could speak her flawless prose to Garp in letters. The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other—or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

Garp threw away his second novel and began a second second novel. Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer—not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it. “You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more: he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

His second book was swollen, he knew, with the energy he had left over from Alice.

It was a book full of wounding dialogue and sex that left the partners smarting; sex in the book also left the partners guilty, and usually wanting more sex. This paradox was cited by several reviewers who alled the phenomenon, alternately, “brilliant” and “dumb.” One reviewer called the novel “bitterly truthful,” but he hastened to point out that the bitterness doomed the novel to the status of “only a minor classic.” If more of the bitterness had been “refined away,” the reviewer theorized, “a purer truth would have emerged.”

More nonsense was compiled concerning the novel's “thesis.” One reviewer struggled with the idea that the novel seemed to be saying that only sexual relationships could profoundly reveal people to themselves; yet it was during sexual relationships that people appeared to lose what profundity they had. Garp said he never had a thesis and he grumpily told an interviewer that he had written “a serious comedy about marriage, but a sexual farce.” Later he wrote that “human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.”

But no matter what Garp said—or the reviewers, either—the book was not a success. Titled Second Wind of the Cuckold , the novel confused nearly everyone; even its reviews were confusing. It undersold Procrastination by a few thousand copies, and even though John Wolf assured Garp that this was what often happened to second novels, Garp—for the first time in his life—felt he had failed.

John Wolf, who was a good editor, protected Garp from one particular review until he feared Garp would see the review by accident; then Wolf reluctantly sent the clipping, from a West Coast newspaper, with the attached note that he'd heard the reviewer suffered a hormone imbalance. The review remarked, curtly, that it was sordid and pathetic that T. S. Garp, “the talentless son of the famous feminist, Jenny Fields, has written a sexist novel that wallows in sex—and not even instructively.” And so forth.

Growing up with Jenny Fields had not made Garp the sort of person who was easily influenced by other people's opinions of him, but even Helen did not like Second Wind of the Cuckold . And even Alice Fletcher, in all her loving letters, never once mentioned the book's existence.

Second Wind of the Cuckold was about two married couples who have an affair.

“Oh boy,” Helen said, when she first learned what the book was about.

“It's not about us ,” Garp said. “It's not about any of that. It just uses that.”

“And you're always telling me,” Helen said, “that autobiographical fiction is the worst kind.”

“This isn't autobiographical,” Garp said. “You'll see.”

She didn't. Though the novel was not about Helen and Garp and Harry and Alice, it was about four people whose finally unequal and sexually striving relationship is a bust.

Each person in the foursome is physically handicapped. One of the men is blind. The other man has a stutter of such monstrous proportions that his dialogue is infuriatingly difficult to read. Jenny blasted Garp for taking a cheap shot at poor departed Mr. Tinch, but writers, Garp sadly knew, were just observers—good and ruthless imitators of human behavior. Garp had meant no offense to Tinch; he was just using one of Tinch's habits.

“I don't know how you could have done such a thing to Alice,” Helen despaired.

Helen meant the handicaps, especially the women's handicaps. One has muscle spasms in her right arm—her hand is always lashing out, striking wineglasses, flowerpots, children's faces, once nearly emasculating her husband (accidentally) with a pruning hook. Only her lover, the other woman's husband, is able to soothe this terrible, uncontrollable spasm—so that the woman is, for the first time in her life, the possessor of a flawless body, entirely intentional in its movement, truly ruled and contained by herself alone.

The other woman suffers unpredictable, unstoppable flatulence. The farter is married to the stutterer, the blind man is married to the dangerous right arm.

Nobody in the foursome, to Garp's credit, is a writer. ("We should be grateful for small favors?” Helen asked.) One of the couples is childless, and wants to be. The other couple is trying to have a child; this woman conceives, but her elation is tempered by everyone's anxiety concerning the identity of the natural father. Which one was it? The couples watch for tell-tale habits in the newborn child. Will it stutter, fart, lash out, or be blind? (Garp saw this as his ultimate comment—on his mother's behalf—on the subject of genes .)

It is to some degree an optimistic novel, if only because the friendship between the couples finally convinces them to break off their liaison. The childless couple later separates, disillusioned with each other, but not necessarily as a result of the experiment. The couple with the child succeeds as a couple; the child develops without a detectable flaw. The last scene in the novel is the chance meeting of the two women; they pass on an escalator in a department store at Christmas-time, the farter going up, the woman with the dangerous right arm going down. Both are laden with packages. At the moment they pass each other, the woman stricken with uncontrollable flatulence releases a keen, treble fart—the spastic stiff-arms an old man on the escalator in front of her, bowling him down the moving staircase, toppling a sea of people. But it's Christmas. The escalators are jam-packed and noisy; no one is hurt and everything, in season, is forgivable. The two women, moving apart on their mechanical conveyors, seem to serenely acknowledge each other's burdens; they grimly smile at each other.

“It's a comedy!” Garp cried out, over and over again. “No one got it. It's supposed to be very funny . What a film it would make!”

But no one even bought the paperback rights.

As could be seen by the fate of the man who could only walk on his hands, Garp had a thing about escalators.

Helen said that no one in the English Department ever spoke to her about Second Wind of the Cuckold ; in the case of Procrastination , many of her well-meaning colleagues had at least attempted a discussion. Helen said that the book was an invasion of her privacy and she hoped the whole thing had been a kick that Garp would soon be off.

“Jesus, do they think it's you ?” Garp asked her. “What the hell's the matter with your dumb colleagues, anyway? Do you fart in the halls over there? Does your shoulder drop out of socket in department meetings? Was poor Harry a stutterer in the classroom?” Garp yelled. “Am I blind?”

“Yes , you're blind,” Helen said. “You have your own terms for what's fiction, and what's fact, but do you think other people know your system? It's all your experience —somehow, however much you make up, even if it's only an imagined experience. People think it's me, they think it's you. And sometimes I think so, too.”

The blind man in the novel is a geologist. “Do they see me playing with rocks?” Garp hollered.

The flatulent woman does volunteer work in a hospital; she is a nurse's aide. “Do you see my mother complaining?” Garp asked. “Does she write me and point out that she never once farted in a hospital—only at home, and always under control?”

But Jenny Fields did complain to her son about Second Wind of the Cuckold . She told him he had chosen a disappointingly narrow subject of little universal importance. “She means sex,” Garp said. “This is classic. A lecture on what's universal by a woman who's never once felt sexual desire. And the Pope, who takes vows of chastity decides the issue of contraception for millions. The world is crazy!” Garp cried.

Jenny's newest colleague was a six-foot-four transsexual named Roberta Muldoon. Formerly Robert Muldoon, a standout tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles, Roberta's weight had dropped from 235 to 180 since her successful sex-change operation. The doses of estrogen had cut into her once-massive strength and some of her endurance; Garp guessed also that Robert Muldoon's former and famous “quick hands” weren't so quick anymore, but Roberta Muldoon was a formidable companion to Jenny Fields. Roberta worshiped Garp's mother. It had been Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect , that had given Robert Muldoon the courage to have the sex-change operation—one winter as he lay recovering from knee surgery in a Philadelphia hospital.

Jenny Fields was now supporting Roberta's case with the television networks, who, Roberta claimed, had secretly agreed not to hire her as a sports announcer for the football season. Roberta's knowledge of football had not decreased one drop since all the estrogen, Jenny was arguing; waves of support from the college campuses around the country had made the six-foot-four Roberta Muldoon a figure of striking controversy. Roberta was intelligent and articulate, and of course she knew her football; she'd have been an improvement on the usual morons who commented on the game.

Garp liked her. They talked about football together and they played squash. Roberta always took the first few games from Garp—she was more powerful than he was, and a better athlete—but her stamina was not quite up to his, and being the much bigger person in the court, she wore down. Roberta would also tire of her case against the television networks, but she would develop great endurance for other, more important things.

“You're certainly an improvement on the Ellen James Society, Roberta,” Garp would tell her. He enjoyed his mother's visits better when Jenny came with Roberta. And Roberta tossed a football for hours with Duncan. Roberta promised to take Duncan to an Eagles game, but Garp was anxious about that. Roberta was a target figure; she had made some people very angry. Garp imagined various assaults and bomb threats on Roberta—and Duncan disappearing in the vast and roaring football stadium in Philadelphia, where he would be defiled by a child molester.

It was the fanaticism of some of Roberta Muldoon's hate mail that gave Garp such an imagination, but when Jenny showed him some hate mail of her own, Garp was anxious about that, too. It was an aspect of the publicity of his mother's life that he had not considered: some people truly hated her. They wrote Jenny that they wished she had cancer. They wrote Roberta Muldoon that they hoped his or her parents were no longer living. One couple wrote Jenny Fields that they would like to artificially inseminate her, with elephant sperm—and blow her up from the inside. That note was signed: “A Legitimate Couple.”

One man wrote Roberta Muldoon that he had been an Eagles fan all his life, and even his grandparents had been born in Philadelphia, but now he was going to be a Giants or a Redskins fan, and drive to New York or Washington—"or even Baltimore, if necessary"—because Roberta had perverted the entire Eagles offensive line with his pansy ways.

One woman wrote Roberta Muldoon that she hoped Roberta would get gang-banged by the Oakland Raiders. The woman thought that the Raiders were the most disgusting team in football; maybe they would show Roberta how much fun it was to be a woman.

A high school tight end from Wyoming wrote Roberta Muldoon that she had made him ashamed to be a tight end anymore and he was changing his position—to linebacker. So far, there were no transsexual linebackers.

A college offensive guard from Michigan wrote Roberta that if she were ever in Ypsilanti, he would like to fuck her with her shoulder pads on.

“This is nothing,” Roberta told Garp. “Your mother gets much worse. Lots more people hate her .”

“Mom,” Garp said. “Why don't you drop out for a while? Take a vacation. Write another book.” He never thought he'd ever hear himself suggesting such a thing to her, but he suddenly saw Jenny as a potential victim, exposing herself, through other victims, to all the hatred and cruelty and violence in the world.

When asked by the press, always, Jenny would say that she was writing another book; only Garp and Helen and John Wolf knew this was a lie. Jenny Fields wasn't writing a word.

“I've done all I want to do about me , already,” Jenny told her son. “Now I'm interested in other people. You just worry about you ,” she said, gravely, as if in her opinion her son's introversion—his imaginative life—was the more dangerous way to live.

Helen actually feared this, too—especially when Garp wasn't writing, and for more than a year after Second Wind of the Cuckold , Garp didn't write. Then he wrote for a year and threw it all away. He wrote letters to his editor, they were the most difficult letters John Wolf ever had to read, much less answer. Some of them were ten and twelve pages long; most of them accused John Wolf of not “pushing” Second Wind of the Cuckold as hard as he could have.

“Everyone hated it,” John Wolf reminded Garp. “How could we have pushed it?”

“You never supported the book,” Garp wrote.

Helen wrote John Wolf that he must be patient with Garp, but John Wolf knew writers pretty well and he was as patient and as kind as he could be.

Eventually, Garp wrote letters to other people. He answered some of his mother's hate mail—those rare cases with return addresses. He wrote long letters trying to talk these people out of their hatred. “You're becoming a social worker,” Helen told him. But Garp even offered to answer some of Roberta Muldoon's hate mail; Roberta had a new lover, however, and her hate mail was rolling off her like water.

“Jesus,” Garp complained to her, “first a sex reassignment and now you're in love. For a tight end with tits, you're really boring, Roberta.” They were very good friends and they played squash fervently whenever Roberta and Jenny came to town, but this was not frequently enough to occupy all of Garp's restless time. He spent hours playing games with Duncan—and waiting for Walt to get old enough to play games, too. He cooked up a storm.

“The third novel's the big one,” John Wolf told Helen, because he sensed she was wearying of Garp's restlessness and she was in need of a pep talk. “Give him time, it will come.”

“How's he know the third novel's the big one?” Garp fumed. “My third novel doesn't even exist. And the way it was published, my second novel might as well not exist. These editors are full of myths and self-fulfilling prophecies! If he knows so much about third novels, why doesn't he write his own third novel? Why doesn't he write his first ?”

But Helen smiled and kissed him and took up going to the movies with him, although she hated movies. She was happy with her job; the kids were happy. Garp was a good father and a good cook and he made love to her more elaborately when he wasn't writing than he did when he was hard at work. Let it come, Helen thought.

Her father, good old Ernie Holm, had shown signs of early heart trouble, but her father was happy at Steering. He and Garp took a trip together, every winter, to see one of those big wrestling matches out in Iowa. Helen was sure that Garp's writing block was a small thing to endure.

“It will come,” Alice Fletcher told Garp, on the phone. “You can't forth it.”

“I'm not trying to force anything,” he assured her. “There's just nothing there.” But he thought that desirable Alice, who could never finish anything—not even her love for him—was a poor one to understand what he meant.

Then Garp got some hate mail of his own. He was addressed in a lively letter by someone who took offense at Second Wind of the Cuckold . It was not a blind, stuttering, spastic farter—as you might imagine—either. It was just what Garp needed to lift himself out of his slump.

 

Dear Shithead,

[wrote the offended party]

I have read your novel. You seem to find other people's problems very funny. I have seen your picture. With your fat head of hair I suppose you can laugh at bald persons. And in your cruel book you laugh at people who can't have orgasms, and people who aren't blessed with happy marriages, and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead—it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don't have any problems so you can make fun of poor people who do!

Yours sincerely,

(Mrs.) I. B. Poole

Findlay, Ohio

 

That letter stung Garp like a slap; rarely had he felt so importantly misunderstood. Why did people insist that if you were “comic” you couldn't also be “serious"? Garp felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep. Apparently, if you sounded serious, you were. Presumably, other animals could not laugh at themselves, and Garp believed that laughter was related to sympathy, which we were always needing more of. He had been, after all, a humorless child—and never religious—so perhaps he now took comedy more seriously than others.

But for Garp to see his vision interpreted as making fun of people was painful to him; and to realize that his art had made him appear cruel gave Garp a keen sense of failure. Very carefully, as if he were speaking to a potential suicide high up in a foreign and unfamiliar hotel, Garp wrote to his reader in Findlay, Ohio.

 

Dear Mrs. Poole:

The world is a bed of pain, people suffer terribly, few of us believe in God or bring up our children very well, you're right about that. It is also true that people who have problems do not, as a rule, think their problems are funny.

Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you'll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel; in regard to what's comic and what's tragic, Mrs. Poole, the world is all mixed up. For this reason I have never understood why “serious” and “funny” are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people's problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad.

I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave—and nothing but laughter to console them with.

Laughter is my religion, Mrs. Poole. In the manner of most religions, I admit that my laughter is pretty desperate. I want to tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean. The story takes place in Bombay, India, where many people starve to death every day; but not all the people in Bombay are starving.

Among the nonstarving population of Bombay, India, there was a wedding, and a party was thrown in honor of the bride and groom. Some of the wedding guests brought elephants to the party. They weren't really conscious of showing off, they were just using the elephants for transportation. Although that may strike us as a big-shot way to travel around, I don't think these wedding guests saw themselves that way. Most of them were probably not directly responsible for the vast numbers of their fellow Indians who were starving all around them: most of them were just calling “time out” from their own problems, and the problems of the world, to celebrate the wedding of a friend. But if you were a member of the starving Indians, and you hobbled past that wedding party and saw all those elephants parked outside, you probably would have felt some disgruntlement.

Furthermore, some of the revelers at the wedding got drunk and began feeding beer to their elephant. They emptied an ice bucket and filled it with beer, and they went tittering out to the parking lot and fed their hot elephant the whole bucket. The elephant liked it. So the revelers gave him several more buckets of beer.

Who knows how beer will affect an elephant? These people meant no harm, they were just having fun—and chances are fairly good that the rest of their lives weren't one hundred percent fun. They probably needed this party. But the people were also being stupid and irresponsible.

If one of those many starving Indians had dragged himself through the parking lot and seen these drunken wedding guests filling up an elephant with beer, I'll bet he would have felt resentful. But I hope you see I am not making fun of anyone.

What happens next is that the drunken revelers are asked to leave the party because their behavior with their elephant is obnoxious to the other wedding guests. No one can blame the other guests for feeling this way; some of them may have actually thought that they were preventing things from getting “out of hand,” although people have never been very successful at preventing this.

Huffy and brave with beer, the revelers struggled tip on their elephant and veered away from the parking lot—a large exhibition of happiness, surely—bumping into a few other elephants and things, because the revelers' elephant plowed from side to side in a lumbering wooze, bleary and bloated with buckets of beer. His trunk lashed back and forth like a badly fastened artificial limb. The great beast was so unsteady that he struck an electric utility pole, shearing it cleanly and bringing down the live wires on his massive head—which killed him, and the wedding guests who were riding him, instantly.

Mrs. Poole, please believe me: I don't think that's “funny.” But along comes one of those starving Indians. He sees all the wedding guests mourning the death of their friends, and their friends' elephant; much wailing, rending of fine ctothes, spilling of good food and drink. The first thing he does is to take the opportunity to slip into the wedding while the guests are distracted and steal a little of the good food and drink for his starving family. The second thing he does is start to laugh himself sick about the manner in which the revelers disposed of themselves and their elephant. Alongside death by starvation, this method of enormous dying must seem funny, or at least quick, to the undernourished Indian. But the wedding guests don't see it that way. It is already a tragedy to them; they are already talking about “this tragic event,” and although they could perhaps forgive the presence of a “mangy beggar” at their party—and even have tolerated his stealing their food—they cannot forgive him for laughing at their dead friends and their dead friends' elephant.

The wedding guests—outraged at the beggar's behavior (at his laughter, not his thievery and not his rags)—drown him in one of the beer buckets that the late revelers used to water their elephant. They construe this to represent “justice.” We see that the story is about the class struggle—and, of course, “serious,” after all. But I like to consider it a comedy about a natural disaster: they are just people rather foolishly attempting to “take charge” of a situation whose complexity is beyond them—a situation composed of eternal and trivial parts. After all, with something as large as an elephant, it could have been much worse.

I hope, Mrs. Poole, that I have made what I mean clearer to you. In any case, I thank you for taking the time to write to me, because I appreciate hearing from my audience—even critically.

Yours truly,

"Shithead"

 

Garp was an excessive man. He made everything baroque, he believed in exaggeration; his fiction was also extremist. Garp never forgot his failure with Mrs. Poole; she worried him, often, and her reply to his pompous letter must have upset him further.

 

Dear Mr. Garp,

[Mrs. Poole replied]

I never thought you would take the trouble to write me a letter. You must be a sick man. I can see by your letter that you believe in yourself, and I guess that's good. But the things you say are mostly garbage and nonsense to me, and I don't want you to try to explain anything to me again, because it is boring and an insult to my intelligence.

Yours,

Irene Poole

 

Garp was, like his beliefs, self-contradictory. He was very generous with other people, but he was horribly impatient. He set his own standards for how much of his time and patience everyone deserved. He could be painstakingly sweet, until he decided he'd been sweet enough. Then he turned and came roaring back the other way.

 

Dear Irene:

[Garp wrote to Mrs. Poole]

You should either stop trying to read books, or you should try a lot harder.

Dear Shithead,

[wrote Irene Poole]

My husband says that if you write to me again, he'll beat your brains to a pulp.

Very sincerely,

Mrs. Fitz Poole

Dear Fitzy and Irene:

[Garp shot right back]

Fuck you.

 

Thus was his sense of humor lost, and his sympathy taken from the world.

In “The Pension Grillparzer” Garp had somehow struck the chord of comedy (on the one hand) and compassion (on the other). The story did not belittle the people in the story—either with forced cuteness or with any other exaggeration rationalized as necessary for making a point. Neither did the story sentimentalize the people or otherwise cheapen their sadness.

But the balance of this power in storytelling felt lost to Garp now. His first novel, Procrastination —in his opinion—suffered from the pretentious weight of all that fascist history he had taken no real part in. His second novel suffered his failure at imagining enough —that is, he felt he had not imagined far enough beyond his own fairly ordinary experience. Second Wind of the Cuckold came off rather coldly to him; it seemed just another “real” but rather common experience.

In fact, it seemed to Garp now that he was too full of his own lucky life (with Helen and their children). He felt he was in danger of limiting his ability as a writer in a fairly usual way: writing, essentially, about himself. Yet when he looked very far outside himself, Garp saw there only the invitation to pretention. His imagination was failing him—"his sense a dim rushlight.” When anyone asked him how his writing was coming, he managed only a short, cruel imitation of poor Alice Fletcher.

“I've thtopped ,” Garp said.

 

THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

 

IN the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when be discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions.

Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber? Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the long list of names in the Yellow Pages, it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.

There was the Christian Counseling Center and the Community Pastoral Counseling Service; Garp imagined hearty ministers with their dry, fleshy hands constantly rubbing together. They spoke round, moist sentences, like soap bubbles, saying things like, “We have no illusions that the Church can be of very much assistance to individual problems, such as your own. Individuals must seek individual solutions, they must retain their individuality; however, it is our experience that many people have identified their own special individuality in the church.”

There sat the baffled couple who had hoped to discuss the simultaneous orgasm—myth or reality?

Garp noticed that members of the clergy went in for counseling; there was a Lutheran Social Service, there was a Reverend Dwayne Kuntz (who was “certified") and a Louise Nagle who was an “All Souls Minister” associated with something called the United States Bureau of Marriage and Family Counselors (who had “certified” her). Garp took a pencil and drew little zeroes beside the names of the marriage counselors with religious affiliations. They would all offer fairly optimistic counsel, Garp believed.

He was less sure of the point of view of the counselors with more “scientific” training; he was less sure of the training, too. One was a “certified clinical psychologist,” another simply followed his name with “M.A., Clinical"; Garp knew that these things could mean anything, and that they could also mean nothing. A graduate student in sociology, a former business major. One said “B.S."—perhaps in Botany. One was a Ph.D.—in marriage? One was a “Doctor"—but a medical doctor or a Doctor of Philosophy? At marriage counseling, who would be better? One specialized in “group therapy"; someone, perhaps less ambitious, promised only “psychological evaluation.”

Garp selected two favorites. The first was Dr. O. Rothrock—"self-esteem workshop; bank cards accepted.”

The second was M. Neff—"by appointment only.” There was just a phone number after M. Neff's name. No qualifications, or supreme arrogance? Perhaps both. If I needed anybody, Garp thought, I would try M. Neff first. Dr. O. Rothrock with his bank cards and his self-esteem workshop was clearly a charlatan. But M. Neff was serious: M. Neff had a vision, Garp could tell.

Garp wandered a bit past Marriage in the Yellow Pages. He came to Masonry, Maternity Apparel, and Mat Refinishing (only one listing, an out-of-town, Steering phone number: Garp's father-in-law, Ernie Holm, refinished wrestling mats as a slightly profitable hobby. Garp hadn't been thinking about his old coach, he passed over Mat Refinishing to Mattresses without recognizing Ernie's name). Then came Mausoleums and Meat Cutting Equipment—"See Saws.” That was enough. The world was too complicated. Garp wandered back to Marriage.

Then Duncan came home from school. Garp's older son was now ten years old; he was a tall boy with Helen Garp's bony, delicate face and her oval yellow-brown eyes. Helen had skin of a light-oak color and Duncan had her wonderful skin, too. From Garp he had gotten his nervousness, his stubbornness, his moods of black self-pity.

“Dad?” he said. “Can I spend the night at Ralph's? It's very important.”

“What?” Garp said. “No. When?”

“Have you been reading the phone book again?” Duncan asked his father. Whenever Garp read a phone book, Duncan knew, it was like trying to wake him up from a nap. He read the phone book often, for names. Garp got the names of his characters out of the phone book, when his writing was stuck, he read the phone book for more names; he revised the names of his characters over and over again. When Garp traveled, the first thing he looked for in the motel room was the phone book, he usually stole it.

“Dad?” Duncan said—he assumed his father was in his phone book trance, living the lives of his fictional people. Garp had actually forgotten that he had nonfictional business with the phone book today; he had forgotten about the lumber and was thinking only about the audacity of M. Neff and what it would be like to be a marriage counselor. “Dad!” Duncan said. “If I don't call Ralph back before supper, his mother won't let me come over.”

“Ralph?” said Garp. “Ralph isn't here.” Duncan tipped his fine jaw up and rolled his eyes; it was a gesture Helen had, too, and Duncan had her same lovely throat.

“Ralph is at his house,” Duncan said, “and I am at my house and I would like to go spend the night at Ralph's house—with Ralph.”

“Not on a school night,” Garp said.

“It's Friday,” Duncan said. “Jesus.”

“Don't swear, Duncan,” Garp said. “When your mother comes home from work, you can ask her.” He was stalling, he knew; Garp was suspicious of Ralph—worse, he was afraid for Duncan to spend the night at Ralph's house, although Duncan had done it before. Ralph was an older boy whom Garp distrusted; also, Garp didn't like Ralph's mother—she went out in the evening and left the boys alone (Duncan had admitted that). Helen had once referred to Ralph's mother as “slatternly,” a word that had always intrigued Garp (and a look, in women, that had its appeal to him). Ralph's father didn't live at home, so the “slatternly” look of Ralph's mother was enhanced by her status as a woman alone.

“I can't wait for Mom to get home,” Duncan said. “Ralph's mother says she has to know before supper, or I can't come over.” Supper was Garp's responsibility and the idea of it distracted him; he wondered what time it was. Duncan seemed to come home from school at no special time. “Why not ask Ralph to spend the night here?” Garp said. A familiar ploy. Ralph usually spent the night with Duncan, thus sparing Garp his anxiety about the carelessness of Mrs . Ralph (he could never remember Ralph's last name).

“Ralph always spends the night here,” Duncan said. “I want to stay there .” And do what ? Garp wondered. Drink, smoke dope, torture the pets, spy on the sloppy lovemaking of Mrs. Ralph? But Garp knew that Duncan was ten years old and very sane—very careful. The two boys probably enjoyed being alone in a house where Garp wasn't smiling over them, asking them if there was anything they wanted.

“Why not call Mrs. Ralph and ask her if you can wait until your mother comes home before you say whether you'll come or not?” Garp asked.

“Jesus, “Mrs . Ralph"!” Duncan groaned. “Mom is just going to say, “It's all right with me . Ask your father.” That's what she always says.”

Smart kid, Garp thought. He was trapped. Short of blurting out that he was terrified Mrs. Ralph would kill them all by burning them up in the night when her cigarette, with which she slept, set fire to her hair, Garp had nothing more he could say. “Okay, go ahead,” he said, sulkily. He didn't even know if Ralph's mother smoked. He simply disliked her, on sight, and he suspected Ralph—for no better reason than that the child was older than Duncan and therefore, Garp imagined, capable of corrupting Duncan in terrible ways.

Garp suspected most people to whom his wife and children were drawn; he had an urgent need to protect the few people he loved from what he imagined “everyone else” was like. Poor Mrs. Ralph was not the only victim perhaps slandered by his paranoid assumptions. I should get out more, Garp thought. If I had a job, he thought—a thought he had every day, and rethought every day, since he wasn't writing.

There was almost no job in the world that appealed to Garp, and certainly nothing he was qualified for; he was qualified, he knew, for very little. He could write; when he was writing, he believed he wrote very well. But one reason he thought about getting a job was that he felt he needed to know more about other people; he wanted to get over his distrust of them. A job would at least force him to come into contact—and if he weren't forced to be with other people, Garp would stay home.

It was for his writing, in the beginning, that he had never taken the idea of a job seriously. Now it was for his writing that he was thinking he needed a job. I am running out of people I can imagine, he thought, but perhaps it was really that there had never been many people he liked ; and he hadn't written anything he liked in too many years.

“I'm going now!” Duncan called to him, and Garp stopped dreaming. The boy was wearing a bright orange rucksack on his back; a yellow sleeping bag was rolled and tied under the pack. Garp had chosen them both, for visibility.

“I'll give you a ride,” Garp said, but Duncan rolled his eyes again.

“Mom has the car, Dad,” he said, “and she's still at work.”

Of course; Garp grinned foolishly. Then he saw that Duncan was going to take his bicycle and he called out the door to him. “Why don't you walk , Duncan?”

“Why?” Duncan said, exasperated.

So your spine won't be severed when a car driven by a crazed teenager, or a drunken man suffering a heart attack, swipes you off the street, Garp thought—and your wonderful, warm chest is cracked against the curbstone, your special skull split open when you land on the sidewalk, and some asshole wraps you in an old rug as if you were somebody's pet discovered in the gutter. Then the dolts from the suburbs come out and guess who owns it ("That green and white house on the corner of Elm and Dodge, I think"). Then someone drives you home, rings the bell and says to me, “Uh, sorry"; and pointing to the spillage in the bloody back seat, asks, “Is it yours?” But all Garp said was, “Oh, go ahead, Duncan, take the bike. Just be careful!”

He watched Duncan cross the street, pedal up the next block, look before he turned (Good boy; note the careful hand signal—but perhaps this is only for my benefit ). It was a safe suburb of a small, safe city; comfortable green plots, one-family houses—mostly university families, with an occasional big house broken into apartments for graduate students. Ralph's mother, for example, appeared certain to be a graduate student forever, though she had a whole house to herself—and although she was older than Garp. Her former husband taught one of the sciences and presumably paid her tuition. Garp remembered that Helen had been told the man was living with a student.

Mrs. Ralph is probably a perfectly good person, Garp thought; she has a child, and she no doubt loves him. She is no doubt serious about wanting to do something with her life. If she were just more careful ! Garp thought. You must be careful; people didn't realize. It's so easy to blow everything, he thought.

“Hello!” someone said, or he thought someone said. He looked around, but whoever had spoken to him was gone—or was never there. He realized he was barefoot (his feet were cold; it was an early spring day), standing on the sidewalk in front of his house, a phone book in his hand. He would have liked to go on imagining M. Neff and the business of marriage counseling, but he knew it was late—he had to prepare the evening meal and he hadn't even been shopping. A block away he could hear the hum of the engines that powered the big freezers in the supermarket (that was why they had moved into this neighborhood—so that Garp could walk to the store and shop while Helen took the car to work. Also, they were nearer to a park for him to run in). There were fans on the back of the supermarket and Garp could hear them sucking the still air out of the aisles and blowing faint food smells over the block. Garp liked it. He had a cook's heart.

He spent his day writing (or trying to write), running, and cooking. He got up early and fixed breakfast for himself and the children; nobody was home for lunch and Garp never ate that meal; he fixed dinner for his family every night. It was a ritual he loved, but the ambition of his cooking was controlled by how good a day he'd had writing, and how good a run he'd had. If the writing went poorly, he took it out on himself with a long, hard run; or, sometimes, a bad day with his writing would exhaust him so much that he could barely run a mile; then he tried to save the day with a splendid meal.

Helen could never tell what sort of day Garp had experienced by what he cooked for them; something special might mean a celebration, or it might mean that the food was the only thing that had gone well, that the cooking was the only labor keeping Garp from despair. “If you are careful,” Garp wrote, “if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”

He went into the house and looked for a pair of shoes. About the only shoes be owned were running shoes—many pairs. They were in different phases of being broken in. Garp and his children wore clean but rumpled clothes; Helen was a smart dresser, and although Garp did her laundry, he refused to iron anything. Helen did her own ironing, and an occasional shirt for Garp—ironing was the only task of conventional housewifery that Garp rejected. The cooking, the kids, the basic laundry, the cleaning up—he did them. The cooking, expertly; the kids, a little tensely but conscientiously; the cleaning up, a little compulsively. He swore at errant clothes, dishes, and toys, but he left nothing lie; he was a maniac for picking things up. Some mornings, before he sat down to write, he raced over the house with a vacuum cleaner, or he cleaned the oven. The house never looked untidy, was never dirty, but there was always a certain haste to the neatness of it. Garp threw a lot of things away and the house was always missing things. For months at a time he would allow most of the light bulbs to burn out, unreplaced, until Helen would realize that they were living in almost total darkness, huddled around the two lamps that worked. Or when he remembered the lights, he forgot the soap and the toothpaste.

Helen brought certain touches to the house, too, but Garp took no responsibilities for these: plants, for example; either Helen remembered them, or they died. When Garp saw that one appeared to be drooping, or was the slightest bit pale, he would whisk it out of the house and into the trash. Days later, Helen might ask, “Where is the red arronzo?”

“That foul thing,” Garp would remark. “It had some disease. I saw worms on it. I caught it dropping its little spines all over the floor.”

Thus Garp functioned at housekeeping.

In the house Garp found his yellow running shoes and put them on. He put the phone book away in a cabinet where he kept the heavy cooking gear (he stashed phone books all over the house—then would tear the house down to find the one he wanted). He put some olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; he chopped an onion while he waited for the oil to get hot. It was late to be starting supper; he hadn't even gone shopping. A standard tomato sauce, a little pasta, a fresh green salad, a loaf of his good bread. That way he could go to the market after he started the sauce and he'd only need to shop for greens. He hurried the chopping (now some fresh basil) but it was important not to throw anything into the skillet until the oil was just right, very hot but not smoking. There are some things about cooking, like writing, that you don't hurry, Garp knew, and he never hurried them.

When the phone rang, it made him so angry that he threw a handful of onions into the skillet and burned himself with the spattering oil. “Shit!” he cried; he kicked the cabinet beside the stove, snapping the little hinge on the cabinet door; a phone book slid out and he stared at it. He put all the onions and the fresh basil into the oil and lowered the flame. He ran his hand under cold water, and, reaching off-balance, wincing at the pain of the burn, he picked up the phone in his other hand.

(Those fakers, Garp thought. What qualifications could there be for marriage counseling? No doubt, he thought, it is one more thing that those simplistic shrinks claim expertise in.)

“You caught me right in the fucking middle of something,” he snapped to the phone; he eyed the onions wilting in the hot oil. There was no one who could be calling whom he feared he might offend; this was one of several advantages of being unemployed. His editor, John Wolf, would only remark that Garp's manner of answering the phone simply confirmed his notion of Garp's vulgarity. Helen was used to how he answered the phone; and if the call were for Helen, her friends and colleagues already pictured Garp as rather bearish. If it were Ernie Holm, Garp would experience a momentary twinge; the coach always apologized too much, which embarrassed Garp. If it were his mother, Garp knew, she would holler back at him, “Another lie! You're never in the middle of anything. You live on the fringes.” (Garp hoped it wasn't Jenny.) At the moment, there was no other woman who would have called him. Only if it were the daycare center, reporting an accident to little Walt; only if it were Duncan, calling to say that the zipper on his sleeping bag was broken, or that he'd just broken his leg, would Garp feel guilty for his bullying voice. One's children certainly have a right to catch one in the middle of something—they usually do.

“Right in the middle of what , darling?” Helen asked him. “Right in the middle of whom ? I hope she's nice.”

Helen's voice on the phone had a quality of sexual teasing in it; this always surprised Garp—how she sounded—because Helen was not like that, she was not even flirtatious. Though he found her, privately, very arousing, there was nothing of the sexy come-on about her dress or her habits in the outer world. Yet on the telephone she sounded bawdy to him, and always had.

“I've burned myself,” he said, dramatically. “The oil is too hot and the onions are scorching. What the fuck is it?”

“My poor man,” she said, still teasing him. “You didn't leave any message with Pam.” Pam was the English Department secretary. Garp struggled to think what message he was supposed to have left with her. “Are you burned badly?” Helen asked him.

“No.” He sulked. “What message?”

“The two-by-fours,” said Helen. Lumber, Garp remembered. He was going to call the lumberyards to price some two-by-fours cut to size, Helen would pick them up on her way home from school. He remembered now that the marriage counseling had distracted him from the lumberyards.

“I forgot,” he said. Helen, he knew, would have an alternative plan; she had known this much before she even made the phone call.

“Call them now,” Helen said, “and I'll call you back when I get to the day-care center. Then I'll go pick up the two-by-fours with Walt. He likes lumberyards.” Walt was now five; Garp's second son was in this daycare or preschool place—whatever it was, its aura of general irresponsibility gave Garp some of his most exciting nightmares.

“Well, all right,” Garp said. “I'll start calling now.” He was worried about his tomato sauce, and he hated hanging up on a conversation with Helen when he was in a state so clearly preoccupied and dull. “I've found an interesting job,” he told her, relishing her silence. But she wasn't silent long.

“You're a writer, darling,” Helen told him. “You have an interesting job.” Sometimes it panicked Garp that Helen seemed to want him to stay at home and “just write"—because that made the domestic situation the most comfortable for her. But it was comfortable for him, too; it was what he thought he wanted.

“The onions need stirring,” he said, cutting her off. “And my burn hurts,” he added.

“I'll try to call back when you're in the middle of something,” Helen said, brightly teasing him, that vampish laughter barely contained in her saucy voice; it both aroused him and made him furious.

He stirred the onions and mashed half a dozen tomatoes into the hot oil; then he added pepper, salt, oregano. He called only the lumberyard whose address was closest to Walt's day-care center; Helen was too meticulous about some things—comparing the prices of everything, though he admired her for it. Wood was wood, Garp reasoned; the best place to have the damn two-by-fours cut to size was the nearest place.

A marriage counselor! Garp thought again, dissolving a tablespoon of tomato paste in a cup of warm water and adding this to his sauce. Why are all the serious jobs done by quacks? What could be more serious than marriage counseling? Yet he imagined a marriage counselor was somewhat lower on a scale of trust than a chiropractor. In the way that many doctors scorned chiropractors, would psychiatrists sneer at marriage counselors? There was no one Garp tended to sneer at as much as he sneered at psychiatrists—those dangerous simplifiers, those thieves of a person's complexity. To Garp, psychiatrists were the despicable end of all those who couldn't clean up their own messes.

The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist's objective was to clear the head; it was Garp's opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess—to make the messy things work for you. “That's easy for a writer to say,” Helen had told him. “Artists can “use” a mess; most people can't, and they just don't want messes. I know I don't. What a psychiatrist you'd be! What would you do if a poor man who had no use for his mess came to you, and he just wanted his mess to go away? I suppose you'd advise him to write about it?” Garp remembered this conversation about psychiatry and it made him glum; he knew he oversimplified the things that made him angry, but he was convinced that psychiatry oversimplified everything.

When the phone rang, he said, “The lumberyard off Springfield Avenue. That's close to you.”

“I know where it is,” Helen said “Is that the only place you called?”

“Wood is wood,” Garp said. “Two-by-fours are two-by-fours. Go to Springfield Avenue and they'll have them ready.”

“What interesting job have you found?” Helen asked him; he knew she would have been thinking about it.

“Marriage counseling,” Garp said; his tomato sauce bubbled—the kitchen filled with its rich fumes. Helen maintained a respectful silence on her end of the phone. Garp knew she would find it difficult to ask, this time, what qualifications he thought he had for such a thing.

“You're a writer,” she told him.

“Perfect qualifications for the job,” Garp said. “Years spent pondering the morass of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love,” Garp droned on, “the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion.”

“So write about it,” Helen said. “What more do you want?” She knew perfectly well what was coming next.

“Art doesn't help anyone,” Garp said. “People can't really use it: they can't eat it, it won't shelter or clothe them—and if they're sick, it won't make them well.” This, Helen knew, was Garp's thesis on the basic uselessness of art; he rejected the idea that art was of any social value whatsoever—that it could be, that it should be. The two things mustn't be confused, he thought: there was art, and there was helping people. Here he was, fumbling at both—his mother's son, after all. But, true to his thesis, he saw art and social responsibility as two distinct acts. The messes came when certain jerks attempted to combine these fields. Garp would be irritated all his life by his belief that literature was a luxury item; he desired for it to be more basic—yet he hated it, when it was.

“I'll go get the two-by-fours now,” Helen said.

“And if the peculiarities of my art weren't qualification enough,” Garp said, “I have, as you know, been married myself.” He paused. “I've had children.” He paused again. “I've had a variety of marriage-related experiences—we both have.”

“Springfield Avenue?” Helen said. “I'll be home soon.”

“I have more than enough experience for the job,” he insisted. “I've known financial dependency, I've experienced infidelity.”

“Good for you,” Helen said. She hung up.

But Garp thought: Maybe marriage counseling is a charlatan field even if a genuine and qualified person is giving the advice. He replaced the phone on the hook. He knew he could advertise himself in the Yellow Pages most successfully—even without lying.

MARRIAGE PHILOSOPHY

and FAMILY ADVICE

T. S. GARP

author of Procrastination

and Second Wind of the Cuckold

Why add that they were novels? They sounded, Garp realized, like marriage-counsel manuals.

But would he see his poor patients at home or in an office?

Garp took a green pepper and propped it in the center of the gas burner; he turned up the flame and the pepper began to burn. When it was black all over, Garp would let it cool, then scrape off all the charred skin. Inside would be a roasted pepper, very sweet, and he would slice it and let it marinate in oil and vinegar and a little marjoram. That would be his dressing for the salad. But the main reason he liked to make dressing this way was that the roasting pepper made the kitchen smell so good.

He turned the pepper with a pair of tongs. When the pepper was charred, Garp snatched it up with the tongs and flipped it into the sink. The pepper hissed at him. “Talk all you want to,” Garp told it. “You don't have much time left.”

He was distracted. Usually he liked to stop thinking about other things while he cooked—in fact, he forced himself to. But he was suffering a crisis of confidence about marriage counseling.

“You're suffering a crisis of confidence about your writing ,” Helen told him, walking into the kitchen with even more than her usual authority—the freshly cut two-by-fours slung over and under her arm like matching shotguns.

Walt said, “Daddy burned something.”

“It was a pepper and Daddy meant to,” Garp said. “Every time you can't write you do something stupid,” Helen said. “Though I'll confess this is a better idea for a diversion than your last diversion.”

Garp had expected her to be ready, but he was surprised that she was so ready. What Helen called his last “diversion” from his stalled writing had been a baby-sitter.

Garp drove a wooden spoon deep into his tomato sauce. He flinched as some fool took the corner by the house with a roaring downshift and a squeal of tires that cut through Garp with the sound of a struck cat. He looked instinctively for Walt, who was right there—safe in the kitchen.

Helen said, “Where's Duncan?” She moved to the door but Garp cut in front of her.

“Duncan went to Ralph's,” he said; he was not worried, this time, that the speeding car meant Duncan had been hit, but it was Garp's habit to chase down speeding cars. He had properly bullied every fast driver in the neighborhood. The streets around Garp's house were cut in squares, bordered every block by stop signs; Garp could usually catch up to a car, on foot, provided that the car obeyed the stop signs.

He raced down the street after the sound of the car. Sometimes, if the car was going really fast, Garp would need three or four stop signs to catch up to it. Once he sprinted five blocks and was so out of breath when he caught up to the offending car that the driver was sure there'd been a murder in the neighborhood and Garp was either trying to report it or had done it himself.

Most drivers were impressed with Garp, and even if they swore about him later, they were polite and apologetic to his face, assuring him they would not speed in the neighborhood again. It was clear to them that Garp was in good physical shape. Most of them were high school kids who were easily embarrassed—caught hot-rodding around with their girl friends, or leaving little smoking-rubber stains in front of their girl friends' houses. Garp was not such a fool as to imagine that he changed their ways; all he hoped to do was make them speed somewhere else.

The present offender turned out to be a woman (Garp saw her earrings glinting, and the bracelets on her arm, as he ran up to her from behind). She was just ready to pull away from a stop sign when Garp rapped the wooden spoon on her window, startling her. The spoon, dribbling tomato sauce, looked at a glance as if it had been dipped in blood.

Garp waited for her to roll down her window, and was already phrasing his opening remarks ("I'm sorry I startled you, but I wanted to ask you a personal favor...") when he recognized that the woman was Ralph's mother—the notorious Mrs. Ralph. Duncan and Ralph were not with her; she was alone, and it was obvious that she had been crying.

“Yes, what is it?” she said. Garp couldn't tell if she recognized him as Duncan's father, or not.

“I'm sorry I startled you,” Garp began. He stopped. What else could he say to her? Smeary-faced, fresh from a fight with her ex-husband or a lover, the poor woman looked to be suffering her approaching middle-age like the flu; her body looked rumpled with misery, her eyes were red and vague. “I'm sorry,” Garp mumbled; he was sorry for her whole life. How could he tell her that all he wanted was for her to slow down?

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I'm Duncan's father,” Garp said.

“I know you are,” she said. “I'm Ralph's mother.”

“I know,” he said; he smiled.

“Duncan's father meets Ralph's mother,” she said, caustically. Then she burst into tears. Her face flopped forward and struck the horn. She sat up straight, suddenly hitting Garp's hand, resting on her rolled-down window; his fingers opened and he dropped the longhandled spoon into her lap. They both stared at it; the tomato sauce produced a stain on her wrinkled beige dress.

“You must think I'm a rotten mother,” Mrs. Ralph said. Garp, ever-conscious of safety, reached across her knees and turned off the ignition. He decided to leave the spoon in her lap. It was Garp's curse to be unable to conceal his feelings from people, even from strangers; if he thought contemptuous thoughts about you, somehow you knew .

“I don't know anything about what kind of mother you are,” Garp told her. “I think Ralph's a nice boy.”

“He can be a real shit,” she said.

“Perhaps you'd rather Duncan not stay with you tonight?” Garp asked—Garp hoped . To Garp, she didn't appear to know that Duncan was spending the night with Ralph. She looked at the spoon in her lap. “It's tomato sauce,” Garp said. To his surprise, Mrs. Ralph picked up the spoon and licked it.

“You're a cook?” she asked.

“Yes, I like to cook,” Garp said.

“It's very good,” Mrs. Ralph told him, handing him his spoon. “I should have gotten one like you—some muscular little prick who likes to cook.”

Garp counted in his head to five: then he said, “I'd be glad to go pick up the boys. They could spend the night with us, if you'd like to be alone.”

“Alone!” she cried. “I'm usually alone. I like having the boys with me. And they like it, too,” she said. “Do you know why?” Mrs. Ralph looked at him wickedly.

“Why?” Garp said.

“They like to watch me take a bath,” she said. “There's a crack in the door. Isn't it sweet that Ralph likes to show off his old mother to his friends?”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“You don't approve, do you, Mr. Garp?” she asked him. “You don't approve of me at all.”

“I'm sorry you're so unhappy,” Garp said. On the seat beside her in her messy car was a paperback of Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband : Garp remembered that Mrs. Ralph was going to school. “What are you majoring in?” he asked her, stupidly. He recalled she was a never-ending graduate student; her problem was probably a thesis that wouldn't come.

Mrs. Ralph shook her head. “You really keep your nose clean, don't you?” she asked Garp. “How long have you been married?”

“Almost eleven years,” Garp said. Mrs. Ralph looked more or less indifferent; Mrs. Ralph had been married for twelve.

“Your kid's safe with me,” she said, as if she were suddenly irritated with him, and as if she were reading his mind with utter accuracy. “Don't worry, I'm quite harmless—with children,” she added. “And I don't smoke in bed.”

“I'm sure it's good for the boys to watch you take a bath,” Garp told her, then felt immediately embarrassed for saying it, though it was one of the few things he'd told her that he meant.

“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't seem to do much good for my husband, and he watched me for years.” She looked up at Garp, whose mouth hurt from all his forced smiles. Just touch her cheek, or pat her hand, he thought; at least say something. But Garp was clumsy at being kind, and he didn't flirt.

“Well, husbands are funny,” he mumbled. Garp the marriage counselor, full of advice. “I don't think many of them know what they want.”

Mrs. Ralph laughed bitterly. “My husband found a nineteen-year-old cunt ,” she said. “He seems to want her .”

“I'm sorry,” Garp told her. The marriage counselor is the I'm-sorry man, like a doctor with bad luck—the one who gets to diagnose all the terminal cases.

“You're a writer,” Mrs. Ralph said to him, accusingly; she waved her copy of The Eternal Husband at him. “What do you think of this?”

“It's a wonderful story,” Garp said. It was fortunately a book he remembered—neatly complicated, full of perverse and human contradiction.

“I think it's a sick story,” Mrs. Ralph told him. “I'd like to know what's so special about Dostoevsky.”

“Well,” Garp said, “his characters are so complex, psychologically and emotionally; and the situations are so ambiguous.”

“His women are less than objects,” Mrs. Ralph said, “they don't even have any shape . They're just ideas that men talk about and play with.” She threw the book out the window at Garp; it hit his chest and fell by the curb. She clenched her fists in her lap, staring at the stain on her dress, which marked her crotch with a tomato-sauce bull's-eye. “Boy, that's me all over,” she said, staring at the spot.

“I'm sorry,” Garp said again. “It may leave a permanent stain.”

“Everything leaves a stain!” Mrs. Ralph cried out. A laughter so witless escaped her that it frightened Garp. He didn't say anything and she said to him, “I'll bet you think that all I need is a good lay .”

To be fair, Garp rarely thought this of people, but when Mrs. Ralph mentioned it, he did think that, in her case, this oversimple solution might apply.

“And I'll bet you think I'd let you do it,” she said, glaring at him. Garp, in fact, did think so.

“No, I don't think you would,” he said.

“Yes, you think I would love to,” Mrs. Ralph said.

Garp hung his head. “No,” he said.

“Well, in your case,” she said, “I just might .” He looked at her and she gave him an evil grin. “It might make you a little less smug,” she told him.

“You don't know me well enough to talk to me like this,” Garp said.

“I know that you're smug ,” Mrs. Ralph said. “You think you're so superior.” True, Garp knew; he was superior. He would make a lousy marriage counselor, he now knew.

“Please drive carefully,” Garp said; he pushed himself away from her car. “If there's anything I can do, please call.”

“Like if I need a good lover ?” Mrs. Ralph asked him, nastily.

“No, not that,” Garp said.

“Why did you stop me?” she asked him.

“Because I thought you were driving too fast,” he said.

“I think you're a pompous fart,” she told him.

“I think you're an irresponsible slob,” Garp told her. She cried out as if she were stabbed.

“Look, I'm sorry,” he said (again), “but I'll just come pick up Duncan.”

“No, please ,” she said. “I can look after him, I really want to. He'll be all right—I'll look after him like he was my own!” This didn't truly comfort Garp. “I'm not that much of a slob—with kids ,” she added; she managed an alarmingly attractive smile.

“I'm sorry,” Garp said—his litany.

“So am I,” said Mrs. Ralph. As if the matter were resolved between them, she started her car and drove past the stop sign and through the intersection without looking. She drove away—slowly, but more or less in the middle of the road—and Garp waved his wooden spoon after her.

Then he picked up The Eternal Husband and walked home.

 

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