THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARCUS AURELIUS

 

THAT was how Jenny Fields became a kind of nurse again; after all her years in her white uniform, nursing the women's movement, Jenny was appropriately dressed for her role. It was at Jenny's suggestion that the Garp family moved into the Fields estate at Dog's Head Harbor. There were many rooms for Jenny to take care of them in, and there was the healing sound of the sea, rushing in and out, rinsing everything clean.

All his life, Duncan Garp would associate the sound of the sea with his convalescence. His grandmother would remove the bandage; there was a kind of tidal irrigation of the hole where Duncan's right eye had been. His father and mother could not stand the sight of that empty hole, but Jenny was an old hand at staring down wounds until they went away. It was with his grandmother, Jenny Fields, that Duncan would see his first glass eye. “See?” Jenny said. “It's big and brown; it's not quite as pretty as your left one, but you just make sure the girls see your left one first.” It was not a very feminist thing to say, she supposed, but Jenny always said that she was, first and foremost, a nurse.

Duncan's eye was gouged out when he was flung forward between the bucket seats; the uncovered tip of the stick-shift shaft was the first thing to break his fall. Garp's right arm, reaching into the gap between the seats, was too late; Duncan passed under it, putting out his right eye and breaking three fingers of his right hand, which was jammed into the seat-belt release mechanism.

By no one's estimate could the Volvo have been moving faster than twenty-five—at the most, thirty-five—miles per hour, but the collision was astonishing. The three-ton Buick did not yield quite an inch to Garp's coasting car. Inside the Volvo the children were like eggs out of the egg box—loose inside the shopping bag—at the moment of impact. Even inside the Buick, the jolt had surprising ferocity.

Helen's head was flung forward, narrowly missing the steering column, which caught her at the back of her neck. Many wrestlers' children have hardy necks, because Helen's did not break—though she wore a brace for almost six weeks, and her back would bother her the rest of her life. Her right collarbone was broken, perhaps by the rising slam of Michael Milton's knee, and her nose was gashed across the bridge—requiring nine stitches—by what must have been Michael Milton's belt buckle. Helen's mouth was snapped shut with such force that she broke two teeth and required two neat stitches in her tongue.

At first she thought she had bitten her tongue off, because she could feel it swimming in her mouth, which was full of blood; but her head ached so severely that she didn't dare open her mouth, until she had to breathe, and she couldn't move her right arm. She spat what she thought was her tongue into the palm of her left hand. It wasn't her tongue, of course. It was what amounted to three quarters of Michael Milton's penis.

The warm wash of blood over her face felt, to Helen, like gasoline; she began to scream—not for her own safety, but for Garp's and the children's. She knew what had hit the Buick. She struggled to get out of Michael Milton's lap because she had to see what had happened to her family. She dropped what she thought was her tongue on the floor of the Buick and with her good left arm she punched Michael Milton, whose lap pinned her against the steering column. It was only then that she heard other screams above her own. Michael Milton was screaming, of course, but Helen heard beyond him—to the Volvo. That was Duncan who was screaming, she was sure, and Helen fought her left arm across Michael Milton's bleeding lap to the door handle. When the door opened, she pushed Michael out of the Buick; she felt incredibly strong. Michael never once corrected his bent-double, sitting-up position; he lay on his side in the freezing slush as if he were still in the driver's seat, though he bellowed and bled like a steer.

When the door light came on in the huge Buick, Garp could dimly see the gore in the Volvo—Duncan's streaming face, split with his gaping wail. Garp began to bellow, too, but his bellow issued forth no louder than a whimper; his own, odd sound scared him so much that he tried to talk softly to Duncan. It was then Garp realized he couldn't talk.

When Garp had flung out his arm to break Duncan's fall, he had turned almost sideways in the driver's seat and his face had struck the steering wheel hard enough to break his jaw and mangle his tongue (twelve stitches). In the long weeks of Garp's recovery, at Dog's Head Harbor, it is fortunate for Jenny that she'd had much experience with Ellen Jamesians, because Garp's mouth was wired shut and his messages to his mother were written ones. He sometimes wrote pages and pages, on the typewriter, which Jenny would then read aloud to Duncan—because, although Duncan could read, he was instructed not to strain his remaining eye more than was necessary. In time, the eye would compensate for the other eye's loss, but Garp had much to say that was immediate—and no “way to say it. When he sensed that his mother was editing his remarks—to Duncan, and to Helen (to whom he also wrote pages and pages)—Garp would grunt his protest through his wires, holding his sore tongue very still. And Jenny Fields, like the good nurse she was, would wisely move him to a private room.

“This is the Dog's Head Harbor Hospital,” Helen said to Jenny once. Although Helen could talk, she said little; she did not have pages and pages to say. She spent most of her convalescence in Duncan's room, reading to the boy, because Helen was a much better reader than Jenny, and there were only two stitches in Helen's tongue. In this period of recovery, Jenny Fields could deal with Garp better than Helen could deal with him.

Helen and Duncan often sat side by side in Duncan's room. Duncan had a fine, one-eyed view of the sea, which he watched all day as if he were a camera. Getting used to having one eye is something like getting used to the world through a camera, there are similarities in depth of field, and in the problems of focus. When Duncan seemed ready to discover this, Helen bought him a camera—a single-lens reflex camera; for Duncan, that kind made the most sense.

It was in this period of time, Duncan Garp would recall, that the thought of being an artist, a painter and a photographer, first occurred to him; he was almost eleven. Although he had been athletic, his one eye would make him (like his father) forever leery of sports involving balls. Even running, he said, he was bothered by the lack of peripheral vision. Duncan claimed it made him clumsy. It was eventually added to Garp's sadness that Duncan did not care for wrestling, either. Duncan spoke in terms of the camera, and he told his father that one of his problems with depth of field included not knowing how far away the mat was. “When I wrestle,” he told Garp, “I feel like I'm going downstairs in the dark; I don't know when I get to the bottom until I feel it.” Garp concluded, of course, that the accident had made Duncan insecure about sports, but Helen pointed out to him that Duncan had always had a certain timidity, a reserve—even though he was good at games, and clearly well coordinated, he'd always had a tendency not to participate. Not as energetically, certainly, as Walt—who was intrepid, who flung his body into every new circumstance with faith and grace and with temerity. Walt, Helen said, was the real athlete between them. After a while, Garp supposed she was right.

“Helen is often right, you know,” Jenny told Garp one night at Dog's Head Harbor. The context of this remark could have been anything, but it was sometime soon after the accident, because Duncan had his own room, and Helen had her own room, and Garp had his own room, and so forth.

Helen is often right, his mother had told him, but Garp looked angry and wrote Jenny a note.

Not this time, Mom,

said the note, meaning—perhaps—Michael Milton. Meaning: the whole thing.

It was not expressly because of Michael Milton that Helen resigned. The availability of Jenny's big hospital on the ocean, as both Garp and Helen would come to think of it, was a way to leave the unwanted familiarity of their house, and of that driveway.

And in the faculty code of ethics, “moral turpitude” is listed as one ground for revoking tenure—though this never came to debate; sleeping with students was not generally treated too harshly. It might be a hidden reason why a faculty member wasn't given tenure; it would rarely be a reason for revoking someone's tenure. Helen may have supposed that biting off three quarters of a student's penis was fairly high on the scale of conceivable abuse to students. Sleeping with them simply happened, though it was not encouraged; there were many worse ways of evaluating students and categorizing them for life. But amputation of their genitalia was certainly severe, even for bad students, and Helen must have felt inclined to punish herself. So she denied herself the pleasure of continuing at the task she had prepared for, so well, and she removed herself from the arousement that books and their discussion had always meant to her. In her later life, Helen would spare herself considerable unhappiness by refusing to feel guilty; in her later life, the whole business with Michael Milton would more often make her angry than it would make her sad—because she was strong enough to believe that she was a good woman, which she was, who'd been made to suffer disproportionately for a trivial indiscretion.

But at least for a time, Helen would heal herself and her family. Never having had a mother, and having had little chance to use Jenny Fields in that way, Helen submitted to this period of hospitalization at Dog's Head Harbor. She calmed herself by nursing Duncan, and she hoped that Jenny could nurse Garp.

This aura of the hospital was not new to Garp, whose earliest experiences—with fear, with dreams, with sex—had all occurred in the infirmary atmosphere of the old Steering School. He adapted. It helped him that he had to write out what he wanted to say, because this made him careful; it made him reconsider many of the things he might have thought he wanted to say. When he saw them written down—these raw thoughts—he realized that he couldn't or shouldn't say them; when he went to revise them, he knew better and threw them away. There was one for Helen, which read:

Three quarters is not enough.

He threw it away.

Then he wrote one for Helen that he did give to her.

I don't blame you.

Later, he wrote another one.

I don't blame me, either,

the note said.

Only in this way can we be whole again,

Garp wrote to his mother.

And Jenny Fields padded whitely through the salt-damp house, room to room with her nursing ways and Garp's notes. It was all the writing he could manage.

Of course, the house at Dog's Head Harbor was used to recoveries. Jenny's wounded women had gotten hold of themselves there; these sea-smelling rooms had histories of sadnesses outlived. Among them, the sadness of Roberta Muldoon, who had lived there with Jenny through the most difficult periods of her sex reassignment. In fact, Roberta had failed at living alone—and at living with a number of men—and she was back living at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny again when the Garps moved in.

As the spring warmed up, and the hole that had been Duncan's right eye slowly healed and was less vulnerable to sticking bits of sand, Roberta took Duncan to the beach. It was on the beach that Duncan discovered his depth-of-field problem as it was related to a thrown ball, because Roberta Muldoon tried playing catch with Duncan and very soon hit him in the face with the football. They gave up the ball, and Roberta contented Duncan with diagraming, in the sand, all the plays she once ran at the tight end position for the Philadelphia Eagles; she focused on the part of the Eagles offense that concerned her, when she was Robert Muldoon, No. 90, and she relived for Duncan her occasional touch down passes, her dropped balls, her offside penalties, her most vicious hits. “It was against the Cowboys,” she told Duncan. “We were playing in Dallas, when that snake in the grass—Eight Ball, everyone called him—came up on my blind side...” And Roberta would regard the quiet child, who had a blind side for life, and she would deftly change the subject.

To Garp, Roberta's subject was the ticklish detail of sex reassignment, because Garp seemed interested and Roberta knew that Garp probably liked hearing about a problem so thoroughly removed from his own.

“I always knew I should have been a girl,” she told Garp. “I dreamed about having love made to me, by a man, but in the dreams I was always a woman; I was never a man having love made to me by another man.” There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta's references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine. There was even a bitchiness about Roberta, when she complained of the other troubled women who came to get well at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny Fields. “That damn lesbian crowd,” Roberta said to Garp. “They're trying to make your mother into something she isn't.”

“I sometimes think that's what Mom is for ,” Garp teased Roberta. “She makes people happy by letting them think she is something she isn't.”

“Well, they tried to confuse me,” Roberta said. “When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. “Be gay,” they said. “If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,” they told me. They were all cowards,” Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.

Roberta's vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother's house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance—yet most of them he'd met seemed especially intolerant of each other. It was a kind of infighting that made no sense to Garp and he marveled at his mother sorting them all out, keeping them happy and out of each other's hair. Robert Muldoon, Garp knew, had spent several months in drag before his actual operation. He'd go off in the morning dressed as Robert Muldoon; he went out shopping for women's clothes, and almost no one knew that he paid for his sex change with the banquet fees he collected for the speeches he gave to boys' clubs and men's clubs. In the evenings, at Dog's Head Harbor, Robert Muldoon would model his new clothes for Jenny and the critical women who shared her house. When the estrogen hormones began to enlarge his breasts and shift the former tight end's shape around, Robert gave up the banquet circuit and marched forth from the Dog's Head Harbor house in mannish women's suits and rather conservative wigs; he tried being Roberta long before he had the surgery. Clinically, now, Roberta had the same genitalia and urological equipment as most other women.

“But of course I can't conceive,” she told Garp. “I don't ovulate and I don't menstruate.” Neither do millions of other women, Jenny Fields had reassured her. “When I came home from the hospital,” Roberta said to Garp, “do you know what else your mother told me?”

Garp shook his head; “home” to Roberta, Garp knew, was Dog's Head Harbor.

“She told me I was less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew,” Roberta said. “I really needed that,” she said, “because I had to use this horrible dilator all the time so that my vagina wouldn't close; I felt like a machine .”

Good old mom,

Garp scribbled.

“There's such sympathy for people, in what you write ,” Roberta told him, suddenly. “But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life,” she said. It was the same thing Jenny had always accused him of.

But now, he felt, he had more. With his jaw wired shut, with his wife with her arm in a sling all day—and Duncan with only half his pretty face intact—Garp felt more generous toward the other wretches who wandered into Dog's Head Harbor.

It was a summer town. Out of season, the bleached shingled house with its porches and garrets was the only occupied mansion along the gray-green dunes and the white beach at the end of Ocean Lane. An occasional dog sniffed through the bone-colored driftwood, and retired people, living some miles inland, in their former summer houses, occasionally strolled the shore, scrutinizing the shells. In summer there were lots of dogs and children and mothers' helpers all over the beach, and always a bright boat or two in the harbor. But when the Garps moved in with Jenny, the shoreline seemed abandoned. The beach, littered with the debris washed in with the high tides of winter, was deserted. The Atlantic Ocean, through April and through May, was the livid color of a bruise—was the color of the bridge of Helen's nose.

Visitors to the town, in the off-season, were quickly spotted as lost women in search of the famous nurse, Jenny Fields. In summer, these women often spent a whole day in Dog's Head Harbor trying to find someone who knew where Jenny lived. But the permanent residents of Dog's Head Harbor all knew: “The last house at the end of Ocean Lane,” they told the damaged girls and women who asked for directions. “It's as big as a hotel, honey. You can't miss it.”

Sometimes these searchers would trudge out to the beach first and view the house for a long time before they got up the nerve to come see if Jenny was home; sometimes Garp would see them, single or in twos and threes, squatting on the windy dunes and watching the house as if they were trying to read the degree of sympathy therein. If there were more than one, they conferred on the beach; one of them was elected to knock on the door while the others huddled on the dunes, like dogs told to stay! until they're called.

Helen bought Duncan a telescope, and from his room with a sea view Duncan spied on the trepid visitors and often announced their presence hours before the knock on the door. “Someone for Grandma,” he'd say. Focusing, always focusing. “She's about twenty-four. Or maybe fourteen. She has a blue knapsack. She has an orange with her but I don't think she's going to eat it. Someone's with her but I can't see her face. She's lying down; no, she's being sick. No, she's wearing a kind of mask. Maybe she's the other one's mother—no, her sister. Or just a friend.

“Now she's eating the orange. It doesn't look very good,” Duncan would report. And Roberta would look, too; and sometimes Helen. It was often Garp who answered the door.

“Yes, she's my mother,” he'd say, “but she's out shopping right now. Please come in, if you want to wait for her.” And he would smile, though all the time he would be scrutinizing the person as carefully as the retired people along the beach looked at their seashells. And before his jaw healed, and his mauled tongue grew back together, Garp would answer the door with a ready supply of notes. Many of the visitors were not in the least surprised by being handed notes, because this was the only way they communicated, too.

Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian.

And Garp would give her his:

Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

And he'd smile at them, and hand them a second note, depending on the occasion. One said:

There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.

And there was one that said:

Don't be upset. My mother will be back very soon. There are other women here. Would you like to see them?

It was in this period that Garp took to wearing a sport jacket again, not out of nostalgia for his days at Steering, or in Vienna—and certainly not out of any necessity to be well dressed at Dog's Head Harbor, where Roberta seemed the only woman who was concerned with what she wore—but only because of his need for pockets; he carried so many notes.

He tried running on the beach but he had to give it up; it jarred his jaw and jangled his tongue against his teeth. But he walked for miles along the sand. He was returning from a walk the day the police car brought the young man to Jenny's house; arm in arm, the policemen helped him up the big front porch.

“Mr. Garp?” one of the policemen asked.

Garp dressed in running gear for his walks; he didn't have any notes on him, but he nodded, yes, he was Mr. Garp.

“You know this kid?” the policeman asked.

“Of course he does,” the young man said. “You cops don't ever believe anybody. You don't know how to relax .”

It was the kid in the purple caftan, the boy Garp had escorted from the boudoir of Mrs. Ralph—what seemed to Garp like years ago. Garp considered not recognizing him, but he nodded.

“The kid's got no money,” the policeman explained. “He doesn't live around here, and he's got no job. He's not in school anywhere and when we called his folks, they said they didn't even know where he was —and they didn't sound very interested to find out. But he says he's staying with you—and you'll speak up for him.”

Garp, of course, couldn't speak. He pointed to his wire mesh and imitated the act of writing a note on his palm.

“When'd you get the braces?” the kid asked. “Most people have them when they're younger. They're the craziest-looking braces I ever saw.”

Garp wrote out a note on the back of a traffic violation form that the policeman handed him.

Yes, I'll take responsibility for him. But I can't speak up for him because I have a broken jaw.

The kid read the note over the policeman's shoulder.

“Wow,” he said, grinning. “What happened to the other guy?”

He lost three quarters of his prick, Garp thought, but he did not write this on a traffic violation form, or on anything else. Ever.

The boy turned out to have read Garp's novels while he was in jail.

“If I'd known you were the author of those books,” the kid said, “I would never have been so disrespectful.” His name was Randy and he had become an ardent Garp fan. Garp was convinced that the mainstream of his fans consisted of waifs, lonely children, retarded grownups, cranks, and only occasional members of the citizenry who were not afflicted with perverted taste. But Randy had come to Garp as if Garp were now the only guru Randy obeyed. In the spirit of his mother's home at Dog's Head Harbor, Garp couldn't very well turn the boy away.

Roberta Muldoon took on the task of briefing Randy on the accident to Garp and his family.

“Who's the great big lovely chick?” Randy asked Garp in an awed whisper.

Don't you recognize her?

Garp wrote.

She was a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles.

But even Garp's sourness could not dim Randy's likable enthusiasm; not right away. The boy entertained Duncan for hours.

God knows how,

Garp complained to Helen.

He probably tells Duncan about all his drug experiences.

“The boy's not on anything,” Helen assured Garp. “Your mother asked him.”

Then he relates to Duncan the exciting history of his criminal record,

Garp wrote.

“Randy wants to be a writer,” Helen said.

Everyone wants to be a writer!

Garp wrote. But it wasn't true. He didn't want to be a writer—not anymore. When he tried to write, only the deadliest subject rose up to greet him. He knew he had to forget it—not fondle it with his memory and exaggerate its awfulness with his art. That was madness, but whenever he thought of writing, his only subject greeted him with its leers, its fresh visceral puddles, and its stink of death. And so he did not write; he didn't even try.

At last Randy went away. Though Duncan was sorry to see him go, Garp felt relieved; he did not show anybody else the note Randy left for him.

I'll never be as good as you—at anything. Even if that's true, you could be a little more generous about how you rub that in.

So I'm not kind, Garp thought. What else is new? He threw Randy's note away.

When the wires came off and the rawness left his tongue, Garp ran again. As the weather warmed up, Helen swam. She was told it was good for restoring her muscle tone and strengthening her collarbone, though this still hurt her—especially the breaststroke. She swam for what seemed to be miles, to Garp: straight out to sea, and then along the shoreline. She said she went out so far because the water was calmer there; closer to shore, the waves interfered with her. But Garp worried. He and Duncan sometimes used the telescope to watch her. What am I going to do if something happens? Garp wondered. He was a poor swimmer.

“Mom's a good swimmer,” Duncan assured him. Duncan was also becoming a good swimmer.

“She goes out too far,” Garp said.

By the time the summer people arrived, the Garp family took its exercise in slightly less ostentatious ways; they played on the beach or in the sea only in the early morning. In the crowded moments of the summer days, and in the early evenings, they watched the world from the shaded porches of Jenny Fields' home; they withdrew to the big cool house.

Garp got a little better. He began to write—gingerly, at first: long plot outlines, and speculations about his characters. He avoided the main characters; at least he thought they were the main characters—a husband, a wife, a child. He concentrated instead on a detective, an outsider to the family. Garp knew what terror would lurk at the heart of his book, and perhaps for that reason he approached it through a character as distant from his personal anxiety as the police inspector is distant from the crime. What business do I have writing about a police inspector? he thought, and so he made the inspector into someone even Garp could understand. Then Garp stood close to the stink itself. The bandages came off Duncan's eye hole and the boy wore a black patch, almost handsome against his summer tan. Garp took a deep breath and began a novel.

It was in the late summer of Garp's convalescence that The World According to Bensenhaver was begun. About that time, Michael Milton was released from a hospital, walking with a postsurgical stoop and a woebegone face. Due to an infection, the result of improper drainage—and aggravated by a common urological problem—he had to have the remaining quarter of his penis removed in an operation. Garp never knew this; and at this point, it might not even have cheered him up.

Helen knew Garp was writing again.

“I won't read it,” she told him. “Not one word of it. I know you have to write it, but I never want to see it. I don't mean to hurt you, but you have to understand. I have to forget it; if you have to write about it, God help you. People bury these things in different ways.”

“It's not about “it,” exactly,” he told her. “I do not write autobiographical fiction.”

“I know that, too,” she said. “But I won't read it just the same.”

“Of course, I understand,” he said.

Writing, he always knew, was a lonely business. It was hard for a lonely thing to feel that much lonelier. Jenny, he knew, would read it; she was tough as nails. Jenny watched them all get well; she watched new patients come and go.

One was a hideous young girl named Laurel, who made the mistake of sounding off about Duncan one morning at breakfast. “Could I sleep in another part of the house?” she asked Jenny. “There's this creepy kid—with the telescope, the camera, and the eye patch? He's like a fucking pirate, spying on me. Even little boys like to paw you over with their eyes—even with one eye.”

Garp had fallen while running in the predawn light on the beach; he had hurt his jaw again, and was—again—wired shut. He had no old notes handy for what he wanted to say to this girl, but he scribbled very hastily on his napkin.

Fuck you,

he scribbled, and threw the napkin at the surprised girl.

“Look,” the girl said to Jenny, “this is just the kind of routine I had to get away from. Some man bullying me all the time, some ding-dong threatening me with his big-prick violence. Who needs it? I mean, especially here —who needs it? Did I come here for more of the same?”

Fuck you to death,

said Garp's next note, but Jenny ushered the girl outside and told her the history of Duncan's eye patch, and his telescope, and his camera, and the girl tried very hard to avoid Garp during the last part of her stay. Her stay was just a few days, and then someone was there to get her: a sporty car with New York plates and a man who looked like a ding-dong—and someone who had, actually, threatened poor Laurel with “big-prick violence,” all the time.

“Hey, you dildos!” he called to Garp and Roberta, who were sitting on the large porch swing, like old-fashioned lovers. “Is this the whorehouse where you're keeping Laurel?”

“We're not exactly “keeping” her,” Roberta said.

Shut up, you big dyke,” said the New York man; he came up on the porch. He'd left the motor running to his sports car, and its idle charged and calmed itself—charged and calmed itself, and charged again. The man wore cowboy boots and green suede bell-bottom pants. He was tall and chesty, though not quite as tall and chesty as Roberta Muldoon.

"I'm not a dyke,” Roberta said.

“Well, you're no vestal virgin either,” the man said. “Where the fuck is Laurel?” He wore an orange T-shirt with bright green letters between his nipples.

SHAPE UP!

the letters read.

Garp searched his pockets for a pencil to scribble a note, but all he came up with was old notes: all the old standbys, which did not seem to apply to this rude person.

“Is Laurel expecting you?” Roberta Muldoon asked the man, and Garp knew that Roberta was having a sex-identity problem again; she was goading the moron in hopes that she could then feel justified in beating the shit out of him. But the man, to Garp, looked as if he might make a fair match for Roberta. All that estrogen had changed more than Roberta's shape, Garp thought—it had unmuscled the former Robert Muldoon, to a degree that Roberta seemed prone to forget.

“Look, sweethearts,” the man said, to both Garp and Roberta. “If Laurel doesn't get her ass out here, I'm going to clean house. What kind of fag joint is this, anyway? Everyone's heard of it. I didn't have any trouble finding out where she went. Every screwy bitch in New York knows about this cunt hangout.”

Roberta smiled. She was beginning to rock back and forth on the big porch swing in a way that was making Garp feel sick to his stomach. Garp clawed through his pockets at a frantic rate, scanning note after worthless note.

“Look, you clowns,” the man said. “I know what sort of douche bags hang out here. It's a big lesbian scene, right?” He prodded the edge of the big porch swing with his cowboy boot and set the swing to moving oddly. “And what are you ?” he asked Garp. “You the man of the house? Or the court eunuch?”

Garp handed the man a note.

There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.

But it was August; that was the wrong note.

“What's this shit?” the man said. And Garp handed him another note, the first one to fly out of his pocket.

Don't be upset. My mother will be back very soon. There are other women here. Would you like to see them?

“Fuck your mother!” the man said. He started toward the big screen door. “Laurel!” he screamed. “You in there? You bitch!”

But it was Jenny Fields who met him in the doorway.

“Hello,” she said.

“I know who you are,” the man said. “I recognize the dumb uniform. My Laurel's not your type, sweetie; she likes to fuck.”

“Perhaps not with you,” said Jenny Fields.

Whatever abuse the man in the SHAPE UP! T-shirt was then prepared to deliver to Jenny Fields went unsaid. Roberta Muldoon threw a cross-body block on the surprised man, hitting him from behind and a little to one side of the backs of his knees. It was a flagrant clip, worthy of a fifteen-yard penalty in Roberta's days as a Philadelphia Eagle. The man hit the gray boards of the porch deck with such force that the hanging flowerpots were set swinging. He tried but could not get up. He appeared to have suffered a knee injury common to the sport of football—the very reason, in fact, why clipping was a fifteen-yard penalty. The man was not plucky enough to hurl further abuse, at anyone, from his back; he lay with a calm, moonlike expression upon his face, which whitened slightly in his pain.

“That was too hard , Roberta,” Jenny said.

“I'll get Laurel,” Roberta said, sheepishly, and she went inside. In Roberta's heart of hearts, Garp and Jenny knew, she was more feminine than anyone; but in her body of bodies, she was a highly trained rock.

Garp had found another note and he dropped it on the New York man's chest, right where it said SHAPE UP! It was a note Garp had many duplicates of.

Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

“My name is Harold,” the man said. “Too bad about your jaw.”

Garp found a pencil and wrote another note.

Too bad about your knee, Harold.

Laurel was fetched.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “You found me!”

“I don't think I can drive the fucking car,” Harold said. Out on Ocean Lane the man's sport car still chugged like an animal interested in eating sand.

“I can drive, baby,” Laurel said. “You just never let me.

“Now I'll let you,” Harold groaned. “Believe me.”

“Oh, baby,” Laurel said.

Roberta and Garp carried the man to the car. “I think I really need Laurel,” the man confided to them. “Fucking bucket seats,” the man complained, when they had gingerly squeezed him in. Harold was large for his car. It was the first time in what seemed like years, to Garp, that Garp had been this near to an automobile. Roberta put her hand on Garp's shoulder, but Garp turned away.

“I guess Harold needs me,” Laurel told Jenny Fields, and gave a little shrug.

“But why does she need him ?” said Jenny Fields, to no one in particular, as the little car drove away. Garp had wandered off. Roberta, punishing herself for her momentarily lapsed femininity, went to find Duncan and mother him.

Helen was talking on the phone to the Fletchers, Harrison and Alice, who wanted to come visit. That might help us, Helen thought. She was right, and it must have boosted Helen's confidence in herself—to be right about something again.

The Fletchers stayed a week. There was at last a child for Duncan to play with, even if it was not his age and not his sex; it was, at least, a child who knew about his eye, and Duncan lost most of his self-consciousness about the eye patch. When the Fletchers left, he was more willing to go to the beach by himself, even at those times of the day when he might encounter other children—who might ask him or, of course, tease him.

Harrison provided Helen with a confidant, as he had been for her before; she was able to tell Harrison things about Michael Milton that were simply too raw to tell Garp, and yet she needed to say them. She needed to talk about her anxieties for her marriage, now; and how she was dealing with the accident so differently from Garp. Harrison suggested another child. Get pregnant, he advised. Helen confided that she was no longer taking the pills, but she did not tell Harrison that Garp had not slept with her—not since it had happened. She didn't really need to tell Harrison that; Harrison noted the separate rooms.

Alice encouraged Garp to stop the silly notes. He could talk if he tried, if he wasn't so vain about how he sounded. If she could talk, certainly he could spit the words out, Alice reasoned—teeth wired together, delicate tongue, and all; he could at least try.

“Alish,” Garp said.

“Yeth,” said Alice. “That'th my name. What'th yours?”

“Arp,” Garp managed to say.

Jenny Fields, passing whitely to another room, shuddered like a ghost and moved on.

“I mish him,” Garp confessed to Alice.

“You mith him, yeth, of courth you do,” said Alice, and she held him while he cried.

It was quite some time after the Fletchers left when Helen came to Garp's room in the night. She was surprised to find him lying awake, because he was listening to what she'd heard, too. It was why she couldn't sleep.

Someone, one of Jenny's late arrivals—a new guest—was taking a bath. First the Garps had heard the tub being drawn, then they'd heard the plunking in the water—now the splashing and soapy sounds. There was even a little light singing, or the person was humming.

They remembered, of course, the years Walt had washed himself within their hearing, how they would listen for any telltale slipping sounds, or for the most frightening sound of all—which was no sound. And then they'd call, “Walt?” And Walt would say, “What?” And they would say, “Okay, just checking!” To make sure that he hadn't slipped under and drowned.

Walt liked to lie with his ears underwater, listening to his fingers climbing the walls of the tub, and often he wouldn't hear Garp or Helen calling him. He'd look up, surprised, to see their anxious faces suddenly above him, peering over the rim of the tub. “I'm all right,” he'd say, sitting up.

“Just answer , for God's sake, Walt,” Garp would tell him. “When we call you, just answer us.”

“I didn't hear you,” Walt said.

“Then keep your head out of the water,” Helen said. “But how can I wash my hair?” Walt asked.

“That's a lousy way to wash your hair, Walt,” Garp said. “Call me. I'll wash your hair.”

“Okay,” said Walt. And when they left him alone, he'd put his head underwater again and listen to the world that way.

Helen and Garp lay beside each other on Garp's narrow bed in one of the guest rooms in one of the garrets at Dog's Head Harbor. The house had so many bathrooms—they couldn't even be sure which bathroom they were listening to, but they listened.

“It's a woman, I think,” Helen said.

“Here?” Garp said. “Of course it's a woman.”

“I thought at first it was a child,” Helen said.

“I know,” Garp said.

“The humming, I guess,” Helen said. “You know how he used to talk to himself?”

“I know,” Garp said.

They held each other in the bed that was always a little damp, so close to the ocean and with so many windows open all day, and the screen doors swinging and banging.

“I want another child,” said Helen.

“Okay,” Garp said.

“As soon as possible,” Helen said.

“Right away,” said Garp. “Of course.”

“If it's a girl,” Helen said, “we'll name her Jenny, because of your mother.”

“Good,” said Garp.

“I don't know, if it's a boy,” said Helen.

“Not Walt,” Garp said.

“Okay,” Helen said.

“Not ever another Walt,” said Garp. “Although I know some people do that.”

“I wouldn't want to,” Helen said.

“Some other name, if it's a boy,” Garp said.

“I hope it's a girl,” said Helen.

“I won't care,” Gart said.

“Of course. Neither will I, really,” said Helen.

“I'm so sorry,” Garp said; he hugged her.

“No, I'm so sorry,” she said.

“No, I'm so sorry,” said Garp.

“I am,” Helen said.

“I am,” he said.

They made love so carefully. Helen imagined that she was Roberta Muldoon, fresh out of surgery, trying out a brand-new vagina. Garp tried not to imagine anything.

Whenever Garp began imagining, he only saw the bloody Volvo. There were Duncan's screams, and outside he could hear Helen calling; and someone else. He twisted himself from behind the steering wheel and kneeled on the driver's seat; he held Duncan's face in his hands, but the blood would not stop and Garp couldn't see everything that was wrong.

“It's okay,” he whispered to Duncan. “Hush, you're going to be all right.” But because of his tongue, there were no words—only a soft spray. Duncan kept screaming, and so did Helen, and someone else kept groaning—the way a dog dreams in its sleep. But what did Garp hear that frightened him so? What else ?

“It's all right, Duncan, believe me,” he whispered, incomprehensibly. “You're going to be all right.” He wiped the blood from the boy's throat with his hand; nothing at the boy's throat was cut, he could see. He wiped the blood from the boy's temples, and saw that they were not bashed in. He kicked open the driver's-side door, to be sure; the door light went on and he could see that one of Duncan's eyes was darting. The eye was looking for help, but Garp could see that the eye could see. He wiped more blood with his hand, but he could not find Duncan's other eye. “It's okay,” he whispered to Duncan, but Duncan screamed even louder.

Over his father's shoulder, Duncan had seen his mother at the Volvo's open door. Blood streamed from her gashed nose and her sliced tongue, and she held her right arm as if it had broken off somewhere near her shoulder. But it was the fright in her face that frightened Duncan. Garp turned and saw her. Something else frightened him.

It was not Helen's screaming, it was not Duncan's screaming. And Garp knew that Michael Milton, who was grunting, could grunt himself to death—for all Garp cared. It was something else. It was not a sound. It was no sound. It was the absence of sound.

“Where's Walt?” Helen said, trying to see into the Volvo. She stopped screaming.

“Walt!” cried Garp. He held his breath. Duncan stopped crying.

They heard nothing. And Garp knew Walt had a cold you could hear from the next room—even two rooms away, you could hear that wet rattle in the child's chest.

“Walt!” they screamed.

Both Helen and Garp would whisper to each other, later, that at that moment they imagined Walt with his ears underwater, listening intently to his fingers at play in the bathtub.

“I can still see him,” Helen whispered, later.

“All the time,” Garp said. “I know.”

“I just shut my eyes,” said Helen.

“Right,” Garp said. “I know.”

But Duncan said it best. Duncan said that sometimes it was as if his missing right eye was not entirely gone. “It's like I can still see out of it, sometimes,” Duncan said. “But it's like memory, it's not real—what I see.”

“Maybe it's become the eye you see your dreams with,” Garp told him.

“Sort of,” Duncan said. “But it seems so real.”

“It's your imaginary eye,” Garp said. “That can be very real.”

“It's the eye I can still see Walt with,” Duncan said. “You know?”

“I know,” Garp said.

Many wrestlers' children have hardy necks, but not all the children of wrestlers have necks that are hardy enough.

For Duncan and Helen, now, Garp seemed to have an endless reservoir of gentleness; for a year, he spoke softly to them; for a year, he was never impatient with them. They must have grown impatient with his delicacy. Jenny Fields noticed that the three of them needed a year to nurse each other.

In that year, Jenny wondered, what did they do with the other feelings human beings have? Helen hid them; Helen was very strong. Duncan saw them only with his missing eye. And Garp? He was strong, but not that strong. He wrote a novel called The World According to Bensenhaver , into which all his other feelings flew.

When Garp's editor, John Wolf, read the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver , he wrote to Jenny Fields. “What in hell is going on out there?” Wolf wrote to Jenny, “It is as if Garp's grief has made his heart perverse.”

But T. S. Garp felt guided by an impulse as old as Marcus Aurelius, who had the wisdom and the urgency to note that “in the life of a man, his time is but a moment...his sense a dim rushlight.”

 

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