The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  In the same secondhand bookstore Garp bought an English translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; he had been made to read Marcus Aurelius in a Latin class at Steering but he had never read him in English before. He bought the book because the bookstore owner told Garp that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna.

  “In the life of a man,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” Garp somehow thought that Marcus Aurelius must have lived in Vienna when he wrote that.

  The subject of Marcus Aurelius's dreary observations was certainly the subject of most serious writing, Garp thought; between Grillparzer and Dostoevsky the difference was not subject matter. The difference, Garp concluded, was intelligence and grace; the difference was art. Somehow this obvious discovery pleased him. Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was “sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.”

  “Maybe so,” Garp wrote. “But he was also an extremely bad writer.”

  Garp's conviction that Franz Grillparzer was a “bad” writer seemed to provide the young man with his first real confidence as an artist—even before he had written anything. Perhaps in every writer's life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job. Garp's killer instinct in regard to poor Grillparzer was almost a wrestling secret; it was as if Garp had observed an opponent in a match with another wrestler; spotting the weaknesses, Garp knew he could do better. He even forced Jenny to read “The Poor Fiddler.” It was one of the few times he would seek her literary judgment.

  “Trash,” Jenny pronounced it. “Simplistic. Maudlin. Cream puff.”

  They were both delighted.

  “I didn't like his room, really,” Jenny told Garp. “It was just not a writer's room.”

  “Well, I don't think that matters, Mom,” Garp said.

  “But it was a very cramped room,” Jenny complained. “It was too dark, and it looked very fussy.”

  Garp peered into his mother's room. Over her bed and dresser, and taped to her wall mirror—nearly obscuring his mother's own image—were the scattered pages of her incredibly long and messy manuscript. Garp didn't think his mother's room looked very much like a writer's room, either, but he didn't say so.

  He wrote Helen a long, cocky letter, quoting Marcus Aurelius and slamming Franz Grillparzer. In Garp's opinion, “Franz Grillparzer died forever in 1872 and like a cheap local wine does not travel very far from Vienna without spoiling.” The letter was a kind of muscle-flexing; perhaps Helen knew that. The letter was calisthenics; Garp made a carbon copy of it and decided he liked it so well that he kept the original and sent Helen the carbon. “I feel a little like a library,” Helen wrote him. “It's as if you intend to use me as your file drawer.”

  Was Helen really complaining? Garp was not sensitive enough to Helen's own life to bother to ask her. He merely wrote back that he was “getting ready to write.” He was confident she would like the results. Helen may have felt warned away from him, but she didn't indicate any anxiety. At college she was gobbling courses at nearly triple the average rate. Approaching the end of her first semester, she was about to become a second-semester junior. The self-absorption and ego of a young writer did not frighten Helen Holm, she was moving at her own remarkable pace and she appreciated someone who was determined. Also she liked Garp's writing to her: she had an ego, too, and his letters, she kept telling him, were awfully well written.

  In Vienna Jenny and Garp went on a spree of Grillparzer jokes. They began to uncover little signs of the dead Grillparzer all over the city. There was a Grillparzergasse, there was a Kaffeehaus des Grillparzers; and one day in a pastry shop they were amazed to find a sort of layer cake named after him: Grillparzertorte! It was much too sweet. Thus, when Garp cooked for his mother, he asked her if she wanted her egg soft-boiled or Grillparzered. And one day, at the Schцnbrunn Zoo, they observed a particularly gangling antelope, its flanks spindly and beshitted; the antelope stood sadly in its narrow and foul winter quarters. Garp identified it: der Gnu des Grillparzers.

  Of her own writing, Jenny one day remarked to Garp that she was guilty of “doing a Grillparzer.” She explained that this meant she had introduced a scene or a character “like an alarm going off.” The scene she had in mind was the scene in the movie house in Boston when the soldier had approached her. “At the movie,” wrote Jenny Fields, “a soldier consumed with lust approached me.”

  “That's awful, Mom,” Garp admitted. The phrase “consumed with lust” was what Jenny meant by “doing a Grillparzer.”

  “But that's what it was,” Jenny said. “It was lust, all right.”

  “It's better to say he was thick with lust,” Garp suggested.

  “Yuck,” Jenny said. Another Grillparzer. It was the lust she didn't care for, in general. They discussed lust, as best they could. Garp confessed his lust for Cushie Percy and rendered a suitably tame version of the consummation scene. Jenny did not like it. “And Helen?” Jenny asked. “Do you feel that for Helen?”

  Garp admitted he did.

  “How terrible,” Jenny said. She did not understand the feeling and did not see how Garp could ever associate it with pleasure, much less with affection.

  “"All that is body is as coursing waters,"” Garp said lamely, quoting Marcus Aurelius; his mother just shook her head. They ate dinner in a very red restaurant in the vicinity of Blutgasse. “Blood Street,” Garp translated for her, happily.

  “Stop translating everything,” Jenny told him. “I don't want to know everything.” She thought the decor of the restaurant was too red and the food was too expensive. The service was slow and they started for home too late. It was very cold and the gay lights of the Kдrntnerstrasse did little to warm them.

  “Let's get a taxi,” Jenny said. But Garp insisted that in another five blocks they could take a streetcar just as easily. “You and your damn Strassenbahns,” Jenny said.

  It was clear that the subject of “lust” had spoiled their evening.

  The first district glittered with Christmas gaudiness; between the towering spires of Saint Stephen's and the massive bulk of the opera house lay seven blocks of shops and bars and hotels; in those seven blocks, they could have been anywhere in the world at wintertime. “Some night we've got to go to the opera, Mom,” Garp suggested. They had been in Vienna for six months without going to the opera, but Jenny did not like to stay up late at night.

  “Go by yourself,” Jenny said. She saw, ahead of them, three women standing in long fur coats: one of them had a matching fur muff and she held the muff in front of her face and breathed into it to warm her hands. She was quite elegant to look at, although there was something of the tinsel of Christmas about the other two women with her. Jenny envied the woman her muff. “That's what I want,” Jenny announced. “Where can I get one of those?” She pointed to the women ahead of them but Garp didn't know what she meant.

  The women, he knew, were whores.

  When the whores saw Jenny coming up the street with Garp, they were puzzled at the relationship. They saw a handsome boy with a plain but handsome woman who was old enough to be his mother, but Jenny hooked Garp's arm rather formally when she walked with him, and there was something like tension and confusion in the conversation Garp and Jenny were having—which made the whores think Jenny could not have been Garp's mother. Then Jenny pointed at them and they were angry—they thought Jenny was another whore who was working their territory and had snagged a boy who looked well-off and not sinister—a pretty boy who might have paid them.

  In Vienna, prostitution is legal and complexly controlled. There is something like a union; there are medical certificates, periodical checkups,
identification cards. Only the best-looking prostitutes are allowed to work the posh streets in the first district. In the outlying districts the prostitutes are uglier or older, or both; they are also cheaper, of course. District by district, their prices are supposed to be fixed. When the whores saw Jenny they stepped out on the sidewalk to block Jenny's and Garp's way. They had quickly decided that Jenny was not quite up to the standard of a first-district prostitute, and that she was probably working independently—which is illegal—or had stepped out of her assigned district to try to pull a little more money; that would get her in a lot of trouble with the other prostitutes.

  In truth, Jenny would not have been mistaken for a prostitute by most neople, but it is hard to say exactly what she looked like. She had dressed as a nurse for so many years that she did not really know how to dress in Vienna; she tended to overdress when she went out with Garp, perhaps in compensation for the old bathrobe in which she wrote. She had no experience in buying clothes for herself, and in a foreign city all the clothes looked slightly different to her. With no particular taste in mind, she simply bought the more expensive things: after all, she did have money and she did not have the patience or the interest for any comparative shopping. As a consequence, she looked new and shiny in her clothes, and beside Garp she did not look as if she came from the same family. Garp's constant dress, at Steering, had been a jacket and tie and comfortable pants—a kind of sloppy city standard uniform that made him anonymous almost anywhere.

  “Would you ask that woman where she got that muff?” Jenny said to Garp. To her surprise, the women blocked the sidewalk to meet them.

  “They're whores, Mom,” Garp whispered to her.

  Jenny Fields froze. The woman with the muff spoke sharply to her. Jenny didn't understand a word, of course, she stared at Garp for a translation. The woman spoke a stream of things to Jenny, who never took her eyes off her son.

  “My mother wanted to ask you where you got your pretty muff.” Garp said in his slow German.

  “Oh, they're foreigners,” said one.

  “God, it's his mother,” said another.

  The woman with the muff stared at Jenny, who now stared at the woman's muff. One of the whores was a young girl with her hair piled very high and sprinkled with little gold and silver stars; she also had a green star tattoo on one cheek and a scar, which pulled her upper lip only slightly out of line—so that, for a moment, you didn't know what was wrong with her face, only that something was wrong. There was nothing at all wrong with her body, though: she was tall and lean and very hard to look at, though Jenny now found herself staring at her.

  “Ask her how old she is,” Jenny said to Garp.

  “Ich bin eighteen,” the girl said. “I know good English.”

  “That's how old my son is,” Jenny said, nudging Garp. She did not understand that the they had mistaken her for one of them; when Garp told her, later, she was furious—but only at herself. “It's my clothes!” she cried. “I don't know how to dress!” And from that moment on, Jenny Fields would never dress as anything but a nurse: she put her uniform back on and wore it everywhere—as if she were forever on duty, though she would never be a nurse again.

  “May I see your muff?” Jenny asked the woman who had one. Jenny had assumed that they all spoke English, but only the young girl knew the language. Garp translated and the woman reluctantly removed her muff—a scent of perfume emerging from the warm nest where her long hands, sparkling with rings, had been clutched together.

  The third whore had a pockmark on her forehead, like an impression made with a peach pit. Aside from this flaw, and a small fat mouth like the mouth of an overweight child, she was standardly ripe—in her twenties, Garp guessed; she probably had an enormous bosom, but under her black fur coat it was hard to be sure.

  The woman with the muff, Garp thought, was beautiful. She had a long, potentially sad face. Her body, Garp imagined, was serene. Her mouth was very calm. Only her eyes and her bare hands in the cold night let Garp see that she was his mother's age, at least. Maybe she was older. “It was a gift,” she said to Garp, about the muff. “It came with the coat.” They were a silver-blond fur, very sleek.

  “It is the real thing,” said the young whore who spoke English; she obviously admired everything about the older prostitute.

  “Of course, you can buy something, not quite so expensive almost anywhere,” the pockmarked woman told Garp. “Go to Stef's,” she said, in a queer slang that Garp barely understood, and she pointed up the Kдrntnerstrasse. But Jenny didn't look and Garp only nodded and continued to gaze at the older woman's long bare fingers twinkling with rings.

  “My hands are cold,” she said softly to Garp, and Garp took the muff from Jenny and gave it back to the whore. Jenny seemed in a daze.

  “Let's talk to her,” Jenny told Garp. “I want to ask her about it.”

  “About what, Mom?” Garp said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What we were talking about,” Jenny said. “I want to ask her about lust.”

  The two older whores looked at the one who knew English but her English was not fast enough to catch any of this.

  “It's cold, Mom,” Garp complained. “And it's late. Let's just go home.”

  “Tell her we want to go to some place warm, just to sit and talk,” Jenny said. “She'll let us pay her for that, won't she?”

  “I suppose so,” Garp groaned. “Mom, she doesn't know anything about lust. They probably don't feel anything very much like that.”

  “I want to know about male lust,” Jenny said. “About your lust. She must know something about that.”

  “For God's sake, Mom!” Garp said.

  “Was macht's?” the lovely prostitute asked him. “What's the matter?” she asked. “What's going on here? Does she want to buy the muff?”

  “No, no,” Garp said. “She wants to buy you.”

  The older whore looked stunned; the whore with the pockmark laughed.

  “No, no,” Garp explained. “Just to talk. My mother just wants to ask you some questions.”

  “It's cold,” the whore told him, suspiciously.

  “Some place inside?” Garp suggested. “Any place you like.”

  “Ask her what she charges,” Jenny said.

  “Wie viel kostet?” mumbled Garp.

  “It costs five hundred schillings,” the whore said, “usually.” Garp had to explain to Jenny that this was about twenty dollars. Jenny Fields would live for more than a year in Austria and never learn the numbers, in German, or the money system.

  “Twenty dollars, just to talk?” Jenny said.

  “No, no, Mom,” Garp said, “that's for the usual.” Jenny thought. Was twenty dollars a lot for the usual? She didn't know.

  “Tell her we'll give her ten,” Jenny said, but the whore looked doubtful—as if talk, for her, might be more difficult than the “usual.” Her indecision was influenced by more than price, however; she didn't trust Garp and Jenny. She asked the young whore who spoke English if they were British or American. Americans, she was told—this seemed to relieve her, slightly.

  “The British are often perverse,” she told Garp, simply. “Americans are usually ordinary.”

  “We just want to talk with you,” Garp insisted, but he could see that the prostitute firmly imagined some mother-and-son act of monstrous oddity.

  “Two hundred and fifty schillings,” the lady with the mink muff finally agreed. “And you buy my coffee.”

  So they went to the place all the whores went to get warm, a tiny bar with miniature tables; the phone rang all the time but only a few men lurked sullenly by the coat rack, looking the women over. There was some rule that the women could not be approached when they were in this bar; the bar was a kind of home base, a time-out zone.

  “Ask her how old she is,” Jenny said to Garp; but when he asked her, the woman softly shut her eyes and shook her head. “Okay,” said Jenny, “ask her why she thinks men like her.” Garp rolled his eyes. “Well, you
do like her?” Jenny asked him. Garp said he did. “Well, what is it about her that you want?” Jenny asked him. “I don't mean just her sex parts, I mean is there something else that's satisfying? Something to imagine, something to think about, some kind of aura?” Jenny asked.

  “Why don't you pay me two hundred and fifty schillings and not ask her any questions, Mom,” Garp said tiredly.

  “Don't be fresh,” Jenny said. “I want to know if it degrades her to feel wanted in that way—and then to be had in that way, I suppose—or whether she thinks it only degrades the men?” Garp struggled to translate this. The woman appeared to think very seriously about it; or else she didn't understand the question, or Garp's German.

  “I don't know,” she finally said.

  “I have other questions,” Jenny said.

  For an hour, it continued. When the whore said she had to get back to work, Jenny seemed neither satisfied nor disappointed by the interview's lack of concrete results; she just seemed insatiably curious. Garp had never wanted anyone as much as he wanted the woman.

  “Do you want her?” Jenny asked him, so suddenly that he couldn't lie. “I mean, after all this—and looking at her, and talking with her—do you really want to have sex with her, too?”

  “Of course, Mom,” Garp said, miserably. Jenny looked no closer to understanding lust than she was before dinner. She looked puzzled and surprised at her son.

  “All right,” she said. She handed him the 250 schillings that they owed the woman, and another 500 schillings. “You do what you want to do,” she told him, “or what you have to do, I guess. But please take me home first.”

  The whore had watched the money change hands; she had an eye for recognizing the correct amount. “Look,” she said to Garp, and touched his hand with her fingers, as cold as her rings. “It's all right with me if your mother wants to buy me for you, but she can't come along with us. I will not have her watch us, absolutely not. I'm still a Catholic, believe it or not,” she said, “and if you want anything funny like that, you'll have to ask Tina.”