“Come back again!” cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.
Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.
I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. “What does the gauge tell us?” he asked.
“Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it,” I said.
“That terrible bear has been in here,” Grandmother said. “There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him.”
“I don't smell anything,” Father said.
“And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban,” Grandmother said. “It is hovering near the ceiling of the car.” Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.
On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all—out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man, on his hands beside him—waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife—his great head brushing the upholstered roof, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap—the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.
“Those poor people,” Mother said, her eyes still closed.
“Liars and criminals,” Grandmother said. “Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals.”
“They were trying hard,” Father said, “but they weren't coming up with the prizes.”
“Better off in a zoo,” said Grandmother.
“I had a good time,” Robo said.
“It's hard to break out of Class C,” I said.
“They have fallen post Z,” said old Johanna. “They have disappeared from the human alphabet.”
“I think this calls for a letter,” Mother said.
But Father raised his hand—as if he were going to bless us—and we were quiet. He was writing in the giant pad and wished to be undisturbed. His face was stern. I knew that Grandmother felt confident of his verdict. Mother knew it was useless to argue. Robo was already bored. I steered us off through the tiny streets; I took Spiegelgasse to Lobkowitzplatz. Spiegelgasse is so narrow that you can see the reflection of your own car in the windows of the shops you pass, and I felt our movement through Vienna was superimposed(like that)—like a trick with a movie camera, as if we made a fairy-tale journey through a toy city.
When Grandmother was asleep in the car, Mother said, “I don't suppose that in this case a change in the classification will matter very much, one way or another.”
“No,” Father said, “not much at all.” He was right about that, though it would be years until I saw the Pension Grillparzer again.
When Grandmother died, rather suddenly and in her sleep, Mother announced that she was tired of traveling. The real reason, however, was that she began to find herself plagued by Grandmothers dream. “The horses are so thin,” she told me, once. “I mean, I always knew they would be thin, but not this thin. And the soldiers—I knew they were miserable,” she said, “but not that miserable.”
Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work durinq the Christmas season—when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.
My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even “political.” In his last letter to my parents he wrote: “The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable.” Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.
It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.
The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the place. Gone was her tort appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.
The Hungarian singer had gone away—another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away—to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.
Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pin-striped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.
The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator—where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed—marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.
After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced, Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.
For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbear-like and devious—only pretending to sleep—and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schцnbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.
His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schцnbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification—the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A sh
aved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.
In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings—void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.
In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.
“When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer,” my second wife said to me, “I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place.”
“It's a long story,” I admitted.
I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her—as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.
7. MORE LUST
And so she married him; she did what he asked. Helen thought it was a pretty good story for a start. Old Tinch liked it, too. “It is rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow,” Tinch told Garp. Tinch recommended that Garp send “The Pension Grillparzer” to Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp waited three months for this reply:
The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.
Garp was puzzled and he showed the rejection to Tinch. Tinch was also puzzled.
“I guess they're interested in n-n-newer fiction,” Tinch said.
“What's that?” Garp asked.
Tinch admitted he didn't really know. “The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess,” Tinch said. “But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think,” Tinch said.
“About itself?” Garp said.
“It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction,” Tinch told him.
Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.
Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story “only mildly interesting", the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:
I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for asking me, though.
Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awkward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches—and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.
Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job—an assistant professor at a women's college—when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer—even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.
Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp—who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure—a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.
The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.
“There's a nurse to see you,” his secretary said, rolling her eyes—as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.
“It's about me,” she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. “When can you read it?” It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ("In this dirty-minded world..."), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?
Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!—they would certainly publish this!—he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).
“Where can they go every night?” Jenny asked. “They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car.”
They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.
“They say they want children,” Ernie complained. “Helen should finish her education.”
“Garp will never finish a book, with children,” Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.
“They're both hard workers,” Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.
“They'll have to be,” Jenny said.
“I don't know why they can't just live together,” Ernie said. “And if it works out, then let them get married—then let them have a baby.”
“I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else,” said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.
“Well, you like Garp living with you,” he reminded her, “and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school.”
“It's lust,” Jenny said, ominously. “The world is sick with lust.”
Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. “Do you want a beer?” he asked Jenny.
“No, thank you,” Jenny said.
“They're good kids,” Ernie reminded her.
“But lust gets them all, in the end,” said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.
It was the “lust” chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need—his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.
“Lust makes the best men behave out of character,” wrote Jenny Fields—a line that particularly infuriated Garp.
“What the hell does she know about it?” he screamed. “She never felt it, not once. Some authority she is! It's like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!”
But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided
her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. “The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another,” somebody wrote. “This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of any kind,” wrote somebody else.
“These days,” John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, “you're either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you're going to be put down as all wrong.” She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse's uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word feminism. She was not sure what it meant, but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she'd only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she'd felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny's choice very popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” But Garp always called it “doing a Grillparzer.” As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how “political” a book it was—or how it would be used as such a book.
The World According to Garp Page 18