The World According To Garp (56 page)

“They’ll need a plastic bag for
him
,” said the deputy, pointing to Oren Rath. “He’s all over the place.”

“I can see with my own eyes,” said Arden Bensenhaver. He looked inside the cab and whistled admiringly.

The deputy started to ask, “Was he doing it when…”

“That’s right,” said Bensenhaver. He put his hand into a horrible mess by the accelerator pedal, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was reaching for the knife on the floor of the passenger’s side. He picked it up in his handkerchief; he looked it over carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.

“Look,” the deputy whispered, conspiratorially. “Did you ever hear of a
rapist
wearing a rubber?”

“It’s not common,” Bensenhaver said. “But it’s not unknown.”

“It’s weird to me,” said the deputy. He looked amazed as Bensenhaver pinched the prophylactic tight, just below its bulge; Bensenhaver snapped the rubber off and held it, without spilling a drop, up to the light. The sack was as large as a tennis ball, it hadn’t leaked. It was full of blood.

Bensenhaver looked satisfied; he tied a knot in the condom, the way you’d knot a balloon, and he flung it so far into the bean field that it was out of sight.

“I don’t want someone suggesting that it might
not
have been a rape,” Bensenhayer said softly to the deputy. “Got it?”

He didn’t wait for the deputy to answer; Bensenhaver went to the back of the truck to be with Mrs. Standish.

“How old was he—that boy?” Hope asked Bensenhaver.

“Old enough,” Bensenhaver told her. “About twenty-five or twenty-six,” he added. He did not want anything to diminish her survival—particularly, in her own eyes. He waved to the pilot, who was to help Mrs. Standish aboard. Then he went to clear things with the deputy. “You stay here with the body and the bad driver,” he told him.

“I’m not a bad driver,” the driver whined. “Christ, if
you’d
seen that lady there-in the road…”

“And keep anyone away from the truck,” Bensenhaver said.

On the road was the shirt belonging to Mrs. Standish’s husband; Bensenhaver picked it up and trotted to the helicopter in his funny, overweight way of running. The two men watched Bensenhaver climb aboard the helicopter and rise away from them. The weak spring sun seemed to leave with the copter and they were suddenly cold and didn’t know where to go. Not in the truck, certainly, and sitting in the driver’s car meant crossing that field of muck. They went to the pickup, lowered the tailgate, and sat on it.

“Will he call a tow truck for my car?” the driver asked.

“He’ll probably forget,” the deputy said. He was thinking about Bensenhaver; he admired him, but he feared him, and he also thought that Bensenhaver was not to be totally trusted. There were questions of orthodoxy, if that’s what it was, which the deputy had never considered. Mainly, the deputy just had too many things to think about at one time.

The driver paced back and forth in the pickup, which irritated the deputy because it jounced him on the tailgate. The driver avoided the foul, bunched blanket crammed in the corner next to the cab; he cleared a see-through spot on the dusted and caked rear window so that he could, occasionally, squint inside the cab at the rigid and disemboweled body of Oren Rath. All the blood was dry now, and through the mottled rear window the body looked to the driver to be similar, in color and in gloss, to an eggplant. He went and sat down on the tailgate beside the deputy, who got up, walked back in the truck, and peered in the window at the gashed corpse.

“You know what?” the driver said. “Even though she was all messed up, you could tell what a really good-looking woman she was.”

“Yes, you could,” the deputy agreed. The driver now paced around in the back of the truck with him, so the deputy went to the tailgate and sat down.

“Don’t get sore,” the driver said.

“I’m not sore,” the deputy said.

“I don’t mean that I can sympathize with anyone who’d want to rape her, you know,” the driver said.

“I know what you don’t mean,” said the deputy.

The deputy knew he was over his head in these matters, but the simple-mindedness of the driver forced the deputy to adopt what he imagined was Bensenhayer’s attitude of contempt for
him
.

“You see a lot of this, huh?” the driver asked. “You know: rape and murder.”

“Enough,” the deputy said with self-conscious solemnity. He had never seen a rape or murder before, and he realized that even now he had not actually seen it through his own eyes as much as he’d been treated to the experience through the eyes of Arden Bensenhaver. He had seen rape and murder according to Bensenhaver, he thought. The deputy felt very confused; he sought some point of view all his own.

“Well”, said the driver, peering in the rear window again, “I seen some stuff in the service, but nothing like this.”

The deputy couldn’t respond.

The World According to Bensenhaver

“This is like war, I guess,” the driver said. “This is like a bad hospital.”

The deputy wondered if he should let the fool look at Rath’s body, if it mattered or not, and to whom? Certainly it couldn’t matter to Rath. But to his unreal family? To the deputy?—
he
didn’t know. And would Bensenhaver object?

“Hey, don’t mind my asking you a personal question,” the driver said. “Don’t get sore, okay?”

“Okay,” said the deputy.

“Well,” the driver said. “What happened to the rubber?”

“
What
rubber?” asked the deputy; he might have had some questions concerning Bensenhaver’s sanity, but the deputy had no doubt that, in this case, Bensenhaver had been right. In the world according to Bensenhaver, no trivial detail should make less of rape’s outrage.

Hope Standish, at that moment, felt safe at last in Bensenhaver’s world. She floated and dipped over the farmlands beside him, trying not to be sick. She was beginning to notice things about her body again—she could smell herself and feel every sore spot. She felt such disgust, but here was this cheerful policeman who sat there admiring her—his heart touched by her violent success.

“Are you married, Mr. Bensenhaver?” she asked him.

“Yes, Mrs. Standish,” he said. “I am.”

“You’ve been awfully nice,” Hope told him, “but I think I’m going to be sick now.”

“Oh, sure,” said Bensenhaver; he grabbed a waxy paper bag at his feet. It was the pilot’s lunch bag; there were some uneaten french-fried potatoes at the bottom and the grease had turned the waxed paper translucent. Bensenhaver could see his own hand, through the french fries and through the bottom of the bag. “Here,” he said. “You go right ahead.”

She was already retching; she took the bag from him and turned her head away. The bag did not feel big enough to contain what vileness she was sure she held inside her. She felt Bensenhaver’s hard, heavy hand on her back. With his other hand, he held a strand of her matted hair out of her way. “That’s right,” he encouraged her, “keep it coming, get it all out and you’ll feel much better.”

Hope recalled that whenever Nicky was being sick, she told him the same thing. She marveled how Bensenhaver could even turn her vomiting into a victory, but she
did
feel much better—the rhythmic heaving was as soothing to her as his calm, dry hands, holding her head and patting her back. When the bag ripped and spilled, Bensenhaver said, “Good riddance, Mrs. Standish! You don’t need the bag. This is a National Guard helicopter. We’ll let the National Guard clean it up! After all—what’s the National Guard
for
?”

The pilot flew on, grimly, his expression never changing.

“What a day it’s been for you, Mrs. Standish!” Bensenhaver went on. “Your husband is going to be so proud of you.” But Bensenhaver was thinking that he’d better make sure; he’d better have a talk with the man. It was Arden Bensenhaver’s experience that husbands and other people did not always take a rape in the right way.

WHAT
do you mean, “This is Chapter One”?” Garp’s editor, John Wolf, wrote him. “How can there be any more of
this
? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?”

“It goes on,” Garp wrote back. “You’ll see.”

“I don’t
want
to see,” John Wolf told Garp on the phone. “Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don’t you take a trip? It would be good for you—and for Helen, I’m sure. And Duncan can travel now, can’t he?”

But Garp not only insisted that
The World According to Bensenhaver
was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp’s writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.

“
Sell
it?” John Wolf said.

“Yes, sell it,” Garp said. “Advance publicity for the novel.”

This had happened with Garp’s first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that
this
chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity—should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a “small but serious” reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed—had won him respected supporters and a “small but serious” audience. Garp said he
hated
the reputation of “small but serious,” though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.

“I would rather be rich and wholly outside
caring
about what the idiots call “serious,”” he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside caring about that?

Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called “the rest of life.”

“What
are
you talking about?” John Wolf asked him.

Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of
The World According to Bensenhaver
. She thought it had all its priorities in order—that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of
lust
. Actually, Jenny’s fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf’s criticism. Garp suspected his mother’s literary judgment above all things.

“My God, look at
her
book,” he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp’s new novel, not one word of it.

“Why does he suddenly want to be
rich
?” John Wolf asked Helen. “What’s all this about?”

“I don’t know,” Helen said. “I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us.”

“From
what
?” John Wolf said. “From
whom
?”

“You’ll have to wait until you read the whole book,” Garp said to his editor. “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don’t care if you
like
it; I want you to
sell
it.”

“I am not a vulgar publisher,” John Wolf said. “And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I’m sorry I have to remind you.” John Wolf’s feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.

“Every business is a shitty business,” Garp repeated. “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have
no
trouble selling it.”

“That’s not the only way it works,” Wolf said, sadly. “No one knows what makes books sell.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Garp said.

“You have no call to speak to me like this,” John Wolf said. “I’m your friend.” Garp knew that was true, so he hung up the telephone and answered no mail and finished
The World According to Bensenhaver
two weeks before Helen delivered, with only Jenny’s help, their third child—a daughter, who spared Helen and Garp the problem of having to agree upon a boy’s name that in no way resembled the name of Walt. The daughter was named Jenny Garp, which was the name Jenny Fields would have had if she had gone about the business of having Garp in a more conventional way.

Jenny was delighted to have someone at least partially named after her. “But there’s going to be some confusion,” she warned, “with two of us around.”

“I’ve always called you “Mom,”” Garp reminded her. He did not remind his mother that a fashion designer had already named a dress after her. It was popular in New York for about a year: a white nurse’s uniform with a bright red heart sewn over the left breast. A
JENNY
FIELDS
ORIGINAL
, the heart said.

When Jenny Garp was born, Helen said nothing. Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt.

The World According to Bensenhaver
, which was Garp’s deliverance from the same insanity, resided in New York, where John Wolf read it over and over again. He had arranged to have the first chapter published in a porno magazine of such loathsome crudity that he felt sure even Garp would be convinced of the book’s doom. The magazine was called
Crotch Shots
, and it was full of exactly that—those wet, split beavers of Garp’s childhood, between the pages of his story of violent rape and obvious revenge. At first Garp accused John Wolf of deliberately placing the chapter there, of not even trying the better magazines. But Wolf assured Garp that he had tried them all; that this was the bottom line of the list—this was exactly how Garp’s story was interpreted. Lurid, sensational violence and sex of no redeeming value whatsoever.

“That’s not what it’s about,” Garp said “You’ll see.”