The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work during the Christmas season--when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.

  My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even "political." In his last letter to my parents he wrote: "The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable." Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.

  It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.

  The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the place. Gone was her tart appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.

  The Hungarian singer had gone away--another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away--to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.

  Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pin-striped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.

  The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator--where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed--marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.

  After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced. Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.

  For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbearlike and devious--only pretending to sleep--and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schonbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.

  His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schonbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification--the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.

  In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings--as void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.

  In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.

  "When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer," my second wife said to me, "I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place."

  "It's a long story," I admitted.

  I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her--as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

  7

  MORE LUST

  And so she married him; she did what he asked. Helen thought it was a pretty good story for a start. Old Tinch liked it, too. "It is rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow," Tinch told Garp. Tinch recommended that Garp send "The Pension Grillparzer" to Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp waited three months for this reply:

  The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.

  Garp was puzzled and he showed the rejection to Tinch. Tinch was also puzzled.

  "I guess they're interested in n-n-newer fiction," Tinch said.

  "What's that?" Garp asked.

  Tinch admitted he didn't really know. "The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess," Tinch said. "But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think," Tinch said.

  "About itself?" Garp said.

  "It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction," Tinch told him.

  Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.

  Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story "only mildly interesting"; the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:

  I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form.

  Thanks for asking me, though.

  Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awk
ward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches--and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.

  Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job--an assistant professor at a women's college--when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer--even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.

  Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp--who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure--a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.

  The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.

  "There's a nurse to see you," his secretary said, rolling her eyes--as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.

  "It's about me," she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. "When can you read it?" It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ("In this dirty-minded world..."), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?

  Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!--they would certainly publish this!--he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).

  "Where can they go every night?" Jenny asked. "They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car."

  They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.

  "They say they want children," Ernie complained. "Helen should finish her education."

  "Garp will never finish a book, with children," Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.

  "They're both hard workers," Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.

  "They'll have to be," Jenny said.

  "I don't know why they can't just live together," Ernie said. "And if it works out, then let them get married; then let them have a baby."

  "I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else," said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.

  "Well, you like Garp living with you," he reminded her, "and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school."

  "It's lust," Jenny said, ominously. "The world is sick with lust."

  Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. "Do you want a beer?" he asked Jenny.

  "No, thank you," Jenny said.

  "They're good kids," Ernie reminded her.

  "But lust gets them all, in the end," said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.

  It was the "lust" chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need--his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.

  "Lust makes the best of men behave out of character," wrote Jenny Fields--a line that particularly infuriated Garp.

  "What the hell does she know about it?" he screamed. "She never felt it, not once. Some authority she is! It's like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!"

  But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. "The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another," somebody wrote. "This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of any kind," wrote somebody else.

  "These days," John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, "you're either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you're going to be put down as all wrong." She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse's uniform--in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers--felt discomfort at the word feminism. She was not sure what it meant, but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she'd only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she'd felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny's choice very popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called "doing a Jenny Fields." But Garp always called it "doing a Grillparzer." As for Jenny, she felt only that women--just like men--should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

  John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how "political" a book it was--or how it would be used as such a book.

  "I was trained to be a nurse," she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. "Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy--and I have always been healthy--to help people who weren't healthy or who couldn't help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too."

  In Garp's opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of A Sexual Suspect, Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny's own example of making unpopular decisions.

  She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now--just as she'd decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she'd decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was never through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of A Sexual Suspect; although Jenny's mother never blamed Jenny's book for the tragedy--and Jenny never blamed herself--Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny's mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog's Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.

  Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog's Head Harbor mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make
decisions.

  "Even weird decisions!" Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. "It was a novel of short takes," he claimed, later, "and the credit is wholly Duncan's." Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonable happy homemaker; as long as Garp's novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women's college where Helen taught--running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.

  Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. "This is where your daddy wrestled," he told him.

  "It's where your daddy did everything," Helen told Duncan, referring--of course--to Duncan's own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.