Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (31 page)

In the middle of the story, when Garp gets “stuck” and stops writing, Garp ponders the following: “But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all — everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world?”

What made “The Pension Grillparzer” special to me (it is my favorite among my short stories) was both the grandmother's dream and the epilogue — everything
does
“connect.” The “ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification” is a foreshadow of the “terminal cases” theme of the novel, which has its own epilogue — I like epilogues, as anyone who's read my novels knows. The younger brother blown up in a history class, the innkeeper frightened to death by the bear “unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes” — the bear himself is “embarrassed to death” — and especially the man who could only walk on his hands, strangled by his necktie on an escalator … these calamities foreshadow some of the violent ends that my characters will meet, not only in
Garp
but in later novels; these are the unlikely disasters that many book reviewers have called my penchant for the bizarre.

But, according to Henry Robbins — and I believed him; I believe him to this day — the
most
bizarre element in
The World According to Garp
is that a 19-year-old could have written ‘The Pension Grillparzer.” Not one book reviewer ever made mention of that.

At the time
I
wrote “Grillparzer,” I had already written three-and-a-half novels; I was 34. And I already knew I was a novelist, not a short-story writer; yet I never worked as hard on a short story, before or since, because I wanted the readers of
The World According to Garp
to know that T. S. Garp was a good writer.

F
red had no recollection of having had a dream life until his wife left him. Then he remembered some vague nightmares from his childhood, and some specific, lustful dreams from what seemed to him to be the absurdly short period of time between his arrival at puberty and his marrying Gail (he had married young). The 10 dreamless years he had been married were wounds too tender for him to probe them very deeply, but he knew that in that time Gail had dreamed like a demon — one adventure after another — and he'd woken each morning feeling baffled and dull, searching her alert, nervous face for evidence of her nighttime secrets. She never told him her dreams, only that she had them — and that she found it very peculiar that he didn't dream. “Either you
do
dream, Fred,” Gail told him, “and your dreams are so sick that you prefer to forget them, or you're really dead. People who don't dream at all are quite dead.”

In the last few years of their marriage, Fred found neither theory so farfetched.

After Gail left, he felt “quite dead.” Even his girlfriend, who had been Gail's “last straw,” couldn't revive him. He thought that everything that had happened to his marriage had been his own fault: Gail had appeared to be happy and faithful — until he'd created some mess and she'd been forced to pay him back. Finally, after he had repeated himself too many times, she had given up on him. “Old fall-in-love Fred,” she called him. He seemed to fall in love with someone almost once a year. Gail said: “I could possibly tolerate it, Fred, if you just went off and got laid, but why do you have to get so stupidly involved?”

He didn't know. After Gail's leaving, his girlfriend appeared so foolish, sexless and foul to him that he couldn't imagine what had inspired his last, alarming affair. Gail had abused him so much for this one that he was actually relieved when Gail was gone, but he missed the child — they had just one child in 10 years, a nine-year-old boy named Nigel. They'd both felt their own names were so ordinary that they had stuck their poor son with this label. Nigel now lay in a considerable portion of Fred's fat heart like an arrested case of cancer. Fred could bear not seeing the boy (in fact, they hadn't gotten along together since Nigel was five), but he could not stand the thought of the boy's hating him, and he was sure Nigel hated him — or, in time, would learn to. Gail had learned to.

Sometimes Fred thought that, if he'd only had dreams of his own, he wouldn't have had to act out his terrible love affairs with someone almost once a year.

For weeks after the settlement he couldn't sleep in the bed they'd shared for 10 years. Gail settled for cash and Nigel. Fred kept the house. He slept on the couch, bothered by restless nights of blurry discomfort — too disjointed for dreams. He thrashed on the couch, his groaning disturbed the dog (he had settled for the dog, too), and his mouth in the morning was the mouth of a hangover — though he hadn't been drinking. One night he imagined he was throwing up in a car; the passenger in the car was Mrs. Beal, and she was beating him with her purse while he retched and spilled over the steering wheel. “Get us home! Get us home!” Mrs. Beal cried at him. Fred didn't know then, of course, that he was having
Mr.
Beal's dream. Mr. Beal had passed out on Fred and Gail's couch many times; he had no doubt had that terrible dream there and had left it behind for the next troubled sleeper.

Fred simply gave up on the couch and sought the slim, hard bed in Nigel's room — a child's captain's bed, with little drawers built under it for underwear and six-guns. The couch had given Fred a backache, but he was not ready to resume his life in the bed he'd shared with Gail.

The first night he slept in Nigel's bed he understood what strange ability he suddenly possessed — or what a strange ability had suddenly possessed him. He had a nine-year-old's dream — Nigel's dream. It was not frightening to Fred, but Fred knew it must have been pure terror for Nigel. In a field Fred-as-Nigel was trapped by a large snake. The snake was immediately comic to Fred-as-Fred, because it was finned like a serpent and breathed fire. The snake struck repeatedly at Fred-as-Nigel's chest; he was so stunned he couldn't scream. Far across the field Fred saw Fred the way Nigel would have seen him. “Dad!” Fred-as-Nigel whispered. But the real Fred was standing over a smoldering fire pit; they had just had a barbecue, apparently. Fred was pissing into the pit — a strong steam of urine rising around him — and he didn't hear his son crying.

In the morning Fred decided that the dreams of nine-year-olds were obvious and trite. He had no fear of further dreams when he sought his own bed that night; at least, while he slept with Gail, he had never had a dream in that bed — and although Gail had been a steady dreamer, Fred hadn't had any of
her
dreams in that bed before. But sleeping alone is different from sleeping with someone else.

He crept into the cold bed in the room reft of the curtains Gail had sewn. Of course he had one of Gail's dreams. He was looking in a floor-length mirror, but he was seeing Gail. She was naked, and for only a second he thought he was having a dream of his own — possibly missing her, an erotic memory, a desirous agonizing for her to return. But the Gail in the mirror was not a Gail he had ever seen. She was old, ugly, and seeing her nakedness was like seeing a laceration you wished someone would quickly close. She was sobbing, her hands soaring beside her like gulls — holding up this and that garment, each more of a violation to her color and her features than the last. The clothes piled up at her feet and she finally sagged down on them, hiding her face from herself; in the mirror, the bumped vertebrae along her backbone looked to him (to her) like some back-alley staircase they had once discovered on their honeymoon in Austria. In an onion-domed village, this alley was the only dirty, suspicious path they had found. And the staircase, which crooked out of sight, had struck them both as ominous; it was the only way out of the alley, unless they retraced their steps, and Gail had suddenly said, “Let's go back.” He immediately agreed. But before they turned away, an old woman reeled around the topmost part of the staircase and, appearing to lose her balance, fell heavily down the stairs. She'd been carrying some things: carrots, a bag of gnarled potatoes and a live goose whose paddle-feet were hobbled together. The woman struck her face when she fell and lay with her eyes open and her black dress bunched above her knees. The carrots spread like a bouquet on her flat, still chest. The potatoes were everywhere. And the goose, still hobbled, gabbled and struggled to fly. Fred, without once touching the woman, went straight to the goose, although — excepting dogs and cats — he had never touched a live animal before. He tried to untie the leather thong that bound the goose's feet together, but he was clumsy and the goose hissed at him and pecked him fiercely, painfully, on the cheek. He dropped the bird and ran after Gail, who was running out of the alley the way they had come.

Now in the mirror Gail had gone to sleep on the pile of her unloved clothes on the floor. That was the way Fred had found her the night he came home from his first infidelity.

He woke up from her dream in the bed alone. He had understood, before, that she had hated him for his infidelity, but this was the first time he realized that his infidelity had made her hate herself.

Was there no place in his own house he could sleep without someone else's dream? Where was it possible to develop a dream of his own? There was another couch, in the TV room, but the dog — an old male Labrador — usually slept there. “Bear?” he called. “Here, Bear.” Nigel had named the dog “Bear.” But then Fred remembered how often he had seen Bear in the fits of his own dreams — woofing in his sleep, his hackles raised, his webbed feet running in place, his pink hard-on slapping his belly — and he thought that surely he had not sunk so low as to submit to dreams of rabbit-chasing, fighting the neighborhood Weimaraner, humping the Beals' sad bloodhound bitch. Of course, baby-sitters had slept on that couch, and might he not expect some savory dream of
theirs?
Was it worth risking one of Bear's dreams for some sweet impression of that lacy little Janey Hobbs?

Pondering dog hair and recalling many unattractive baby-sitters, Fred fell asleep in a chair — a dreamless chair; he was lucky. He was learning that his newfound miracle-ability was a gift that was as harrowing as it was exciting. It's frequently true that we have offered to us much of the insecurity of sleeping with strangers, and little of the pleasure.

When his father died, he spent a week with his mother. To Fred's horror, she slept on the couch and offered him the master bedroom with its vastly historical bed. Fred could sympathize with his mother's reluctance to sleep there, but the bed and its potential for epic dreaming terrified him. His parents had always lived in this house, had always — since he could remember — slept on that bed. Both his mother and father had been dancers — slim, graceful people even in their retirement. Fred could remember their morning exercises, slow and yogalike movements on the sun-room rug, often to Mozart. Fred viewed their old bed with dread. What embarrassing dreams, and
whose
, would enmesh him there?

He could tell, with some relief, that it was his mother's dream. Like most people, Fred sought rules in the chaos, and he thought he had found one: impossible to dream a dead person's dream. At least his mother was alive. But Fred had expected some elderly sentiment for his father, some fond remembrance, which he imagined old people had; he was not prepared for the lustiness of his mother's dream. He saw his father gamboling in the shower, soapy in the underarms and soapy and erect below. This was not an especially young dream, either; his father was already old, the hair white on his chest, his breasts distended in that old man's way — like the pouches appearing around a young girl's nipples. Fred dreamed his mother's hot, wet affection for the goatishness he'd never seen in his father. Appalled at their inventive, agile, even acrobatic lovemaking, Fred woke with a sense of his own dull sexuality, his clumsy straightforwardness. It was Fred's first sex dream as a woman; he felt so stupid to be learning now — a man in his thirties, and from his
mother —
precisely how women liked to be touched. He had dreamed how his mother came. How she quite cheerfully
worked
at it.

Too embarrassed to look in her eyes in the morning, Fred felt ashamed that he had not bothered to imagine this of her — that he'd assumed too
little
of her, and too little of Gail. Fred was still condescending enough, in the way a son is to his mother, to assume that if his mother's appetite was so rich, his wife's would surely have been richer. That this was perhaps not the case didn't occur to him.

He was sadly aware that his mother could not make herself do the morning exercises alone, and in the week he stayed with her — an unlikely comfort he felt himself to be — she seemed to be growing stiffer, less athletic, even gaining weight. He wanted to offer to accompany her in the exercises; to insist that she continue her good physical habits, but he had seen her
other
physical habits and his inferiority had left him speechless.