The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  Outside, Dickie wielded a splitting ax in the woodpile. He did it very well. He stopped splitting when Garp appeared. "Good-bye," Garp called to him, but Dickie walked over to Garp--with the ax.

  "Let's get a look at the hairdo," Dickie said.

  Garp stood still while Dickie examined him.

  "You were a friend of Kenny Truckenmiller's?" Garp asked.

  "Yup," Dickie said. "I was his only friend. I introduced him to Harriet," Dickie said. Garp nodded. Dickie eyed the new hairdo.

  "It's tragic," Garp said; he meant everything that had happened.

  "It ain't bad," Dickie said; he meant Garp's hair.

  "Jenny Fields was my mother," Garp said, because he wanted someone to know, and he felt certain he was taking no emotional advantage of Dickie.

  "You didn't tell her that, did you?" Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.

  "No, no," Garp said.

  "That's good," Dickie said. "She don't want to hear nothin' like that."

  "I didn't think so," Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly. "Your sister is a very nice woman," Garp added.

  "She is, she is," Dickie said, nodding fiercely.

  "Well, so long," Garp said. But Dickie touched him lightly with the handle of the ax.

  "I was one of them who shot him," Dickie said. "You know that?"

  "You shot Kenny?" Garp said.

  "I was one of them who did," Dickie said. "Kenny was crazy. Somebody had to shoot him."

  "I'm very sorry," Garp said. Dickie shrugged.

  "I liked the guy," Dickie said. "But he got crazy at Harriet, and he got crazy at your mother. He wouldn't ever have got well, you know," Dickie said. "He just got sick about women. He got sick for good. You could tell he wasn't ever going to get over it."

  "A terrible thing," said Garp.

  "So long," Dickie said; he turned back to his woodpile. Garp turned toward his car, across the frozen turds that dotted the yard. "Your hair looks good!" Dickie called to him. The remark seemed sincere. Dickie was splitting logs again when Garp waved to him from the driver's seat of his car. In the window of Nanette's Beauty Salon Harriet Truckenmiller waved to Garp: it was not a wave meant to encourage him, or anything, he was quite sure. He drove back through the village of North Mountain--he drank a cup of coffee in the one diner, he got gas at the one gas station. Everyone looked at his pretty hair. In every mirror, Garp looked at his pretty hair! Then he drove home, arriving in time for the celebration: Ellen's first publication.

  If it made him as uneasy as the news had made Helen, he did not admit it. He sat through the lobster, the scallops, and the champagne, waiting for Helen or Duncan to comment on his hair. It was only when he was doing the dishes that Ellen James handed him a soggy note.

  You had your hair done?

  He nodded, irritably.

  "I don't like it," Helen told him, in bed.

  "I think it's terrific," Garp said.

  "It's not like you," Helen said; she was doing her best to muss it up. "It looks like the hair on a corpse," she said in the darkness.

  "A corpse!" Garp said. "Jesus."

  "A body prepared by an undertaker," said Helen, almost frantically running her hands through his hair. "Every little hair in place," she said. "It's too perfect. You don't look alive!" she said. Then she cried and cried and Garp held her and whispered to her--trying to find out what the matter was.

  Garp did not share her sense of the Under Toad--not this time--and he talked and talked to her, and made love to her. Finally, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  --

  The essay by Ellen James, "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," appeared to engender no immediate fuss. It takes a while for most Letters to the Editor to be printed.

  There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men--the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on her side.

  "People will always make sides," Garp said, "--of everything."

  There was not a written word from a single Ellen Jamesian.

  Garp's first Steering wrestling team produced an 8-2 season as it approached its final dual meet with its arch rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team's strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath--sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering's first family--when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.

  Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen's bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine's editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.

  Thus the Ellen Jamesians had that to get their teeth into: Ellen James, poor child, had been brainwashed into her antifeminist stance by the male villain, Garp. The betrayer of his mother! The smirking capitalizer on women's-movement politics! In the various letters, Garp's relationship with Ellen James was referred to as "seductive," "slimy," and "underhanded."

  I'm sorry!

  Ellen wrote.

  "It's okay, it's okay. Nothing's your fault," Garp assured her.

  I'm not an antifeminist!

  "Of course you're not," Garp told her.

  They make everything so black and white.

  "Of course they do," said Garp.

  That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them--or else you're their enemy.

  "Yes, yes," Garp said.

  I wish I could talk.

  And then she dissolved, crying on Garp's shoulder, her wordless, angry blubber rousing Helen from the far-off reading room of the great house, driving Duncan from the darkroom, and waking baby Jenny from her nap.

  So, foolishly, Garp decided to take them on, these grownup crazies, these devout fanatics who--even when their chosen symbol rejected them--insisted they knew more about Ellen James than Ellen James knew about herself.

  "Ellen James is not a symbol," Garp wrote. "She is a rape victim who was raped and dismembered before she was old enough to make up her own mind about sex and men." Thus he began; he went on and on. And, of course, they published it--liking any fuel to any fire. It was also the first published piece of anything by T. S. Garp since the famous novel, The World According to Bensenhaver.

  Actually, it was the second. In a little magazine, shortly after Jenny's death, Garp published his first and only poem. It was a strange poem; it was about condoms.

  Garp felt his life was marred by condoms--man's device to spare himself and others the consequences of his lust. Our lifetime, Garp felt, was stalked by condoms--condoms in the parking lots in the early morning, condoms discovered by children in the playing sand of the beaches, condoms used for messages (one to his mother, on the door knob of their tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex). Condoms unflushed down the dormitory toilets of the Steering School. Condoms lying slick and cocky in public urinals. Once a condom delivered with the Sunday paper. Once a condom in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. And once a condom on the stick-shift shaft of the old Volvo; someone had used the car overnight, but not for driving.

  Condoms found Garp the way ants found sugar. He traveled miles, he changed continents, and there--in the bidet of the otherwise spotless but unfamiliar hotel room...there--in the back seat of the taxi, like the removed eye of a large fish...there--eyeing him, from the bottom of his shoe, where he picked it up, somewhere. From everywhere condoms came to him and vilely surprised him.

  Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow
joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon's mouth!

  It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

  Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

  "More fucking around in the garden," Helen warned. "More bookshelves."

  But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, "the radical self-damage" of the Ellen Jamesians--"the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name." He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, "For whom? Who is serious who doesn't already know the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you've done this for them--not for Ellen, either. You've done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You've done it to get to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them--or why they did what they did. They were a fashion, a stupid fashion, but you couldn't just let them pass by. Why?"

  But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been right--at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone--even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

  "But they started it," Garp insisted.

  Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn't tell--he started it,

  said Ellen James.

  "Okay," Garp said. "Okay, okay." The girl's sad truth hurt him. Hadn't he only wanted to defend her?

  The Steering wrestling team whipped Bath Academy in the season's final dual meet and finished 9-2, with a second-place team trophy in the New England tournament and one individual champion, a 167-pounder whom Garp had personally done the most work with. But the season was over; Garp, the retired writer, once more had too much time on his hands.

  He saw a lot of Roberta. They played endless games of squash; between them, they broke four rackets in three months and the little finger on Garp's left hand. Garp had an unmindful backswing that accounted for nine stitches across the bridge of Roberta's nose; Roberta hadn't had any stitches since her Eagle days and she complained about them bitterly. On a cross-court charge, Roberta's long knee gave Garp a groin injury that had him hobbling for a week.

  "Honestly, you two," Helen told them. "Why don't you just go off and have a torrid affair. It would be safer."

  But they were the best of friends, and if ever such urges occurred--for either Garp or Roberta--they were quickly made into a joke. Also, Roberta's love life was at last coolly organized; like a born woman, she valued her privacy. And she enjoyed the directorship of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta reserved her sexual self for not infrequent but never excessive flings upon the city of New York, where she kept a calm number of lovers on edge for her sudden visits and trysts. "It's the only way I can manage it," she told Garp.

  "It's a good enough way, Roberta," Garp said. "Not everyone is so fortunate--to have this separation of power."

  And so they played more squash, and when the weather warmed, they ran on the curvy roads that stretched from Steering to the sea. On one road, Dog's Head Harbor was a flat six miles from Steering; they often ran from one mansion to the other. When Roberta did her business in New York, Garp ran alone.

  * * *

  --

  He was alone, nearing the halfway point to Dog's Head Harbor--where he would turn around and run back to Steering--when the dirty-white Saab passed him, appeared to slow down, then sped ahead of him and out of sight. That was the only thing strange about it. Garp ran on the left-hand side of the road so that he could see the cars approaching closest to him; the Saab had passed him on the right, in its proper lane--nothing funny about it.

  Garp was thinking about a reading he had promised to give at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta had talked him into reading to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their invited guests; he was, after all, the chief trustee--and Roberta frequently organized small concerts and poetry readings, and so forth--but Garp was leery of it. He disliked readings--and especially now, to women; his put-down of the Ellen Jamesians had left so many women feeling raw. Most serious women, of course, agreed with him, but most of them were also intelligent enough to recognize a kind of personal vindictiveness in his criticisms of the Ellen Jamesians, which was stronger than logic. They sensed a kind of killer instinct in him--basically male and basically intolerant. He was, as Helen said, too intolerant of the intolerant. Most women surely thought Garp had written the truth about the Ellen Jamesians, but was it necessary to have been so rough? In his own wrestling terminology, perhaps Garp was guilty of unnecessary roughness. It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now, even to mixed audiences--at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable--he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

  And Roberta had advised him not to read a sex scene; not that the Fields Foundation fellows were essentially hostile, but they were wary, Roberta said. "You have lots of other scenes to read," Roberta said, "besides sex." Neither of them mentioned the possibility that he might have anything new to read. And it was mainly for this reason--that he had nothing new to read--that Garp had grown increasingly unhappy about giving readings, anywhere.

  Garp topped the slight hill by a farm for black Angus cattle--the only hill between Steering and the sea--and passed the two-mile mark on his run. He saw the blue-black noses of the beasts pointed at him, like double-barreled guns over a low stone wall. Garp always spoke to the cattle; he mooed at them.

  The dirty-white Saab was now approaching him, and Garp moved into the dust of the soft shoulder. One of the black Angus mooed back at Garp; two shied away from the stone wall. Garp had his eyes on them. The Saab was not going very fast--did not appear reckless. There seemed no reason to keep an eye on it.

  It was only his memory that saved him. Writers have very selective memories, and fortunately, for Garp, he had chosen to remember how the dirty-white Saab had slowed--when it first passed him, going the other way--and how the driver's head appeared to be lining him up in the rearview mirror.

  Garp looked away from the Angus and saw the silent Saab, engine cut, coasting straight at him in the soft shoulder, a trail of dust spuming behind its quiet white shape and over the intent, hunched head of the driver. The driver, aiming the Saab at Garp, was the closest visual image Garp would ever have of what a ball turret gunner who was at work looked like.

  Garp took two bounds to the stone wall and vaulted it, not seeing the single line of electric fencing above the wall. He felt the tingle in his thigh as he grazed the wire, but he cleared the fence, and the wall, and landed in the wet green stubble of the field, chewed and pockmarked by the herd of Angus.

  He lay hugging the wet ground, he heard the croak of the vile-tasting Under Toad in his dry throat--he heard the explosion of hooves as the Angus thundered away from him. He heard the rock-and-metal meeting of the dirty-white Saab with the stone wall. Two boulders, the size of his head, bounced lazily beside him. One wild-eyed Angus bull stood his ground, but the Saab's horn was stuck; perhaps the steady blare kept the bull from charging.

  Garp knew he was alive; the blood in his mouth was only because he had bitten his lip. He moved along the wall to the point of impact, where the bashed Saab was imbedded. Its driver had lost more than her tongue.

  She was in her forties. The Saab's engine had driven her knees up around the mangled steering column. She had no rings on her hands, which were short-fingered and reddened by the rough winter, or winters, she had known. The Saab's door post on the driver's side, or else the windshield's frame, had struck he
r face and dented one temple and one cheek. This left her face a little lopsided. Her brown, blood-matted hair was ruffled by the warm summer wind, which blew through the hole where the windshield had been.

  Garp knew she was dead because he looked in her eyes. He knew she was an Ellen Jamesian because he looked in her mouth. He also looked in her purse. There was only the predictable note pad and pencil. There were lots of used and new notes, too. One of them said:

  Hi! My name is...

  and so forth. Another one said:

  You asked for this.

  Garp imagined that this was the note she had intended to stick under the bloody waistband of his running shorts when she left him dead and mangled by the side of the road.

  Another note was almost lyrical; it was the one the newspapers would love to use, and reuse.

  I have never been raped, and I have never wanted to be. I have never been with a man, and I have never wanted to be, either. My whole life's meaning has been to share the suffering of Ellen James.

  Oh boy, Garp thought, but he left that note to be discovered with her other things. He was not the sort of writer, or the sort of man, who concealed important messages--even if the messages were insane.

  He had aggravated his old groin injury by vaulting the stone wall and the electric fence, but he was able to jog back toward town until a yogurt truck picked him up; Garp and the yogurt driver went to tell the police together.

  By the time the yogurt driver passed the scene of the accident, on his way to discover Garp, the black Angus had escaped through the rent in the stone wall and were milling around the dirty-white Saab like large, beastly mourners surrounding this fragile angel killed in a foreign car.

  Maybe that was the Under Toad I felt, Helen thought, lying awake beside the soundly sleeping Garp. She hugged his warm body; she nestled in the smell of her own rich sex all over him. Maybe that dead Ellen Jamesian was the Under Toad, and now she's gone, thought Helen; she squeezed Garp so hard that he woke up.