The World According To Garp (27 page)

Garp was unable to write for months because of it, but the article impressed all the locals who knew Garp only from the super-market, the gymnasium, the drugstore. In the meantime,
Procrastination
had been published—but almost no one seemed to know. For weeks, clerks and salespeople would introduce him to other customers: “Here’s Mr. Garp, the one who nabbed that molester in the park.”

“What molester?”

“That one in city park. The Mustache Kid. He went after little girls.”

“Children?”

“Well, Mr. Garp here is the one who got him.”

“Well, actually,” Garp would say, “it was the policeman on his horse.”

“Knocked all his teeth down his throat, too!” they would crow with delight—the druggist and the clerk and the salespeople here and there.

“Well, that was actually the horse,” Garp admitted, modestly.

And sometimes someone would ask, “And what is it you
do
, Mister Garp?”

The following silence would pain Garp, as he stood thinking that it was probably best to say that he
ran
—for a living. He cruised the parks, a molester-nabber by profession. He hung around phone booths, like that man in the cape—waiting for disasters. Any of this would make more sense to them than what he really did.

“I write,” Garp would finally admit. Disappointment—even suspicion—all over their once-admiring faces.

In the drugstore—to make matters worse—Garp
dropped
the package of three prophylactics.

“
A-ha
!” the old man cried. “Look there! What’s he up to with those?”

Garp wondered what options there were for what he
could
be up to with those.

“A pervert on the loose,” the old man assured the druggist. “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!”

The old geezer’s self-righteousness was irritating to the point that Garp had no desire to settle the misunderstanding; in fact, he rather enjoyed the “memory of unpantsing the old bird in the park and he was not in the least sorry for the accident.

It was some time later when Garp realized that the old gentleman had no monopoly on self-righteousness. Garp took Duncan to a high school basketball game and was appalled that the ticket-taker was none other than the Mustache Kid—the real molester, the attacker of that helpless child in the city park.

“You’re
out
,” Garp said, amazed. The pervert smiled openly at Duncan.

“One adult, one kiddy,” he said, tearing off tickets.

“How’d you ever get free?” Garp asked; he felt himself tremble with violence.

“Nobody proved nothing,” the kid said, haughtily. “That dumb girl wouldn’t even
talk
.” Garp thought again of Ellen James with her tongue cut off at eleven.

He felt a sudden sympathy for the madness of the old man he had so unpleasantly unpantsed. He felt such a terrible sense of injustice that he could even imagine some very unhappy woman despairing enough to cut off her own tongue. He knew that he wanted to hurt the Mustache Kid, on the spot—in front of Duncan. He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.

But there was a crowd wanting basketball tickets; Garp was holding things up.

“Move along, hair pie,” the kid said to Garp. In the kid’s expression, Garp thought he recognized the leer of the world. On the kid’s upper lip was the insipid evidence that he was growing
another
mustache…

It was
years
later when he saw the child, a girl grown up; it was only because she recognized him that he recognized her. He was coming out of a movie theater in another town; she was in the line waiting to come in. Some of her friends were with her.

“Hello, how are you?” Garp asked. He was glad to see she had friends. That meant, to Garp, that she was normal.

“Is it a good movie?” the girl asked.

“You’ve certainly grown!” Garp said; the girl blushed and Garp realized what a stupid thing he’d said. “Well, I mean it’s been a long time—and it was a time well worth forgetting!” he added, heartily. Her friends were moving inside the movie theater and the girl gave a quick look after them to make sure she was really alone with Garp.

“Yes, I’m graduating this month,” she said.

“High school?” Garp wondered aloud. Could it have been that long ago?

“Oh no,
junior
high,” the girl said, laughing nervously.

“Wonderful!” Garp said. And without knowing why, he said, “I’ll try to come.”

But the girl looked suddenly stricken. “No, please,” she said. “Please don’t come.”

“Okay, I won’t,” Garp agreed quickly.

He saw her several times after this meeting, but she never recognized him again because he shaved off his beard. “Why don’t you grow another beard?” Helen occasionally asked him. “Or at least a mustache.” But whenever Garp encountered the molested girl, and escaped unrecognized, he was convinced he should remain clean-shaven.

“I feel uneasy,” Garp wrote, “that my life has come in contact with so much rape.” Apparently, he was referring to the ten-year-old in the city park, to the eleven-year-old Ellen James and her terrible society—his mother’s wounded women with their symbolic, self-inflicted speechlessness. And later he would write a novel, which would make Garp more of “a household product,” which would have much to do with rape. Perhaps rape’s offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself—with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilt by association.

In Garp’s own case, he likened his guilt for the seduction of Little Squab Bones to a rapelike situation. But it was hardly a rape. It was deliberate, though. He even bought the condoms weeks in advance, knowing what he would use them for. Are not the worst crimes premeditated? It would not be a sudden passion for the baby-sitter that Garp would succumb to; he would plan, and be ready when Cindy succumbed to
her
passion for him. It must have given him a twinge, then, to
know
what those rubbers were for when he dropped them in front of the gentleman from the city park and heard the old man accuse him: “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!” How true.

Still, he arranged obstacles in the path of his desire for the girl; he twice hid the prophylactics, but he also remembered where he’d hidden them. And the day of the last evening that Cindy would baby-sit for them, Garp made desperate love to Helen in the late afternoon. When they should have been dressing for dinner, or fixing Duncan’s supper, Garp locked the bedroom and wrestled Helen out of her closet.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him. “We’re going out.”

“Terrible lust,” he pleaded. “Don’t deny it.”

She teased him. “
Please
, sir, I make a point of never doing it before the hors d’oeuvres.”

“
You’re
the hors d’oeuvres,” Garp said.

“Oh,
thanks
,” said Helen.

“Hey, the door’s locked,” Duncan said, knocking. “Duncan,” Garp called, “go tell us what the weather is doing.”

“The weather?” Duncan said, trying to force the bedroom door.

“I think it’s snowing in the backyard!” Garp called. “Go see.”

Helen stifled her laughter, and her other sounds, against his hard shoulder; he came so quickly he surprised her. Duncan trotted back to the bedroom door, reporting that it was springtime in the backyard, and everywhere else. Garp let him in the bedroom now that he was finished.

But he wasn’t finished. He knew it—driving home with Helen from the party, he knew exactly where the rubbers were: under his typewriter, quiet these dull months since the publication of
Procrastination
.

“You look tired,” Helen said. “Want me to take Cindy home?”

“No, that’s okay,” he mumbled. “I’ll do it.”

Helen smiled at him and nuzzled her cheek against his mouth. “My wild afternoon lover,” she whispered. “You can
always
take me out to dinner that way, if you like.”

He sat a long time with Little Squab Bones in the car outside her dark apartment. He had chosen the time well—the college was letting out; Cindy was leaving town. She was already upset at having to say goodbye to her favorite writer; he was, at least, the only writer she’d actually met.

“I’m sure you’ll have a good year, next year, Cindy,”he said. “And if you come back to see anyone, please stop and see us, Duncan will miss you.” The girl stared into the cold lights of the dashboard, then looked over at Garp, miserably—tears and the whole flushed story on her face.

“I’ll miss
you
,” she whined.

“No, no,” Garp said. “
Don’t
miss me.”

“I
love
you,” she whispered, and let her slim head bump awkwardly against his shoulder.

“No, don’t say that,” he said, not touching her. Not yet.

The three-pack of condoms nestled patiently in his pocket, coiled like snakes.

In her musty apartment, he used only one of them. To his surprise, all her furniture had been moved out; they jammed her lumpy suitcases together and made an uncomfortable bed. He was careful not to stay a second more than necessary, lest Helen think he’d spent too long a time for even a
literary
goodbye.

A thick swollen stream ran through the women’s college grounds and Garp discarded the remaining two prophylactics there, throwing them furtively out the window of his moving car—imagining that an alert campus cop might have seen him and would already be scrambling down the bank to retrieve the evidence: the rubbers plucked out of the current! The discovered weapon that leads back to the crime for which it was used.

But no one saw him, no one found him out. Even Helen, already asleep, would not have found the smell of sex peculiar: after all, only hours before, he had legitimately acquired the odor. Even so, Garp showered, and slipped cleanly into his own safe bed; he curled against Helen, who murmured some affection; instinctively, she thrust one long thigh over his hip. When he failed to respond, she forced her buttocks back against him. Garp’s throat ached at her trust, and at his love for her. He felt fondly the slight swell of Helen’s pregnancy.

Duncan was a healthy, bright child. Garp’s first novel had at least made him what he said he wanted to be. Lust still troubled Garp’s young life, but he was fortunate that his wife still lusted for him, and he for her. Now a second child would join their careful, orderly adventure. He felt Helen’s belly anxiously—for a kick, a sign of life. Although he’d agreed with Helen that it would be nice to have a girl, Garp
hoped
for another boy.

Why? he thought. He recalled the girl in the park, his image of the tongueless Ellen James, his own mother’s difficult decisions. He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate her. But he remembered the Kärntnerstrasse whores, and Cushie Percy (who would die making a baby). And now—her scent still on him, or at least on his mind, although he had washed—the plundered Little Squab Bones. Cindy had cried under him, her back bent against a suitcase. A blue vein had pulsed at her temple, which was the translucent temple of a fair-skinned child. And though Cindy still had her tongue, she’d been
unable
to speak to him when he left her.

Garp didn’t want a daughter because of
men
. Because of
bad
men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like
me
.

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.