The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  But it was actually more than merely wanting a second child that prompted Garp to reproduce again. He knew he was an overwatchful, worrisome father and he felt he might relieve Duncan of some of the pressure of fatherly fears if there was another child to absorb some of Garp's excess anxiety.

  “I'm very happy,” Helen told him. “If you want another baby, we'll make one. I just wish you'd relax, I wish you'd be happier. You wrote a good book, now you'll write another one. Isn't it just what you always wanted?”

  But he bitched about the reviews of Procrastination, and he moaned about the sales. He carped at his mother, and roared about her “sycophantic friends.” Finally Helen said to him, “You want too much. Too much unqualified praise, or love—or something that's unqualified, anyway. You want the world to say, “I love your writing, I love you,” and that's too much to want. That's really sick, in fact.”

  “That's what you said,” he reminded her, “I love your writing, I love you.” That's exactly what you said.”

  “But there can only be one of me,” Helen reminded him.

  Indeed, there would only be one of her, and he loved her very much. He would always call her “the wisest of my life's decisions.” He made some unwise decisions, he would admit; but in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, he was unfaithful to her only once—and it was brief.

  It was a baby-sitter from the college where Helen taught, a freshman girl from Helen's Freshman English class; she was nice with Duncan, though Helen said that the girl was not a very special student. Her name was Cindy; she had read Garp's Procrastination, and she'd been properly awed. When he drove her home, she would ask him one question after another about his writing: How did you think of THAT? and what made you do it THIS way? She was a tiny thing, all flutters and twitches and coos—as trusting, as constant, and as stupid as a Steering pigeon. “Little Squab Bones,” Helen called her, but Garp was attracted; he called her nothing. The Percy family had given him a permanent dislike of nicknames. And he liked Cindy's questions.

  Cindy was dropping out of school because she felt a women's college was not right for her; she needed to live with grownups, and with men, she said, and although the college allowed her to move off-campus—into her own apartment, in the second semester of her freshman year—still she felt the college was too “restricted” and she wanted to live in a “more real environment.” She imagined that Garp's Vienna had been a “more real environment,” though Garp struggled to assure her that it had not been. Little Squab Bones, Garp thought, was puppy-brained, and as soft and as easily influenced as a banana. But he wanted her, he realized, and he saw her as simply available—like the whores on the Kдrntnerstrasse, she would be there when he asked her. And she would cost him only lies.

  Helen read him a review from a famous news magazine; the review called Procrastination “a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances...the drama encompasses the longings and agonies of youth.”

  “Oh fuck “the longings and agonies of youth,"” Garp said. One of those youthful longings was embarrassing him now.

  As for the “drama": in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, T. S. Garp experienced only one real-life drama, and it did not have that much to do with him.

  Garp had been running in the city park when he found the girl, a naked ten-year-old running ahead of him on the bridle path. When she realized he was gaining on her, she fell down and covered her face, then covered her crotch, then tried to hide her insubstantial breasts. It was a cold day, late fall, and Garp saw the blood on the child's thighs and her frightened, swollen eyes. She screamed and screamed at him.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, though he knew very well. He looked all around them, but there was no one there. She hugged her raw knees to her chest and screamed. “I won't hurt you,” Garp said. “I want to help you.” But the child wailed even louder. My God, of course! Garp thought: the terrible molester had probably said those very words to her, not long ago. “Where did he go?” Garp asked her. Then he changed his tone, trying to convince her he was on her side. “I'll kill him for you,” he told her. She stared quietly at him, her head shaking and shaking, her fingers pinching and pinching the tight skin on her arms. “Please,” Garp said, “can you tell me where your clothes are?” He had nothing to give her to wear except his sweaty T-shirt. He was dressed in his running shorts, his running shoes. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and felt instantly cold; the girl cried out, awfully loud, and hid her face. “No, don't be frightened, it's for you to put on,” Garp told her. He let the T-shirt drop on her but she writhed out from under it and kicked at it; then she opened her mouth very wide and bit her own fist.

  “She was not old enough to be Boy or Girl yet,” Garp, wrote. “Only in the pudginess around her nipples was there anything faintly girlish. There was certainly no visible sex about her hairless pudenda, and she had a child's sexless hands. Perhaps there was something sensual about her mouth—her lips were puffy—but she had not done that to herself.”

  Garp began to cry. The sky was gray, dead leaves were all around them, and when Garp began to wail aloud, the girl picked up his T-shirt and covered herself with it. They were in this queer position to each other—the child crouched under Garp's T-shirt, cringing at Garp's feet with Garp crying over her—when the mounted park police, a twosome, rode up the bridle path and spotted the apparent child molester with his victim. Garp wrote that one of the policemen split the girl and Garp apart by steering his horse between them, “nearly trampling the girl.” The other policeman brought his billy down on Garp's collarbone; one side of his body, he wrote, felt paralyzed—"but not the other.” With “the other” Garp unseated the policeman and tipped him from the saddle. “It's not me, you son of a bitch!” Garp howled. “I just found her, just here—just a minute ago.”

  The policeman, sprawled in the leaves, held his drawn gun very still. The other policeman, mounted and prancing, shouted to the girl. “Is it him?” he yelled. The child seemed terrified of the horses. She stared back and forth from the horses to Garp. She probably isn't sure what happened, Garp thought—much less who. But the girl, violently, shook her head. “Where'd he go?” said the policeman on his horse. But the girl still looked at Garp. She tugged her chin and rubbed her cheeks—she tried to talk to him with her hands. Apparently, her words were gone; or her tongue, Garp thought, recalling Ellen James.

  “It's the beard,” said the cop in the leaves; he had gotten to his feet but he had not holstered his gun. “She's telling us there was a beard,” Garp had a beard then.

  “It was someone with a beard,” said Garp. “Like mine?” he asked the girl, stroking his dark, round beard, glossy with sweat. But she shook her head and ran her fingers over her sore upper lip.

  “A mustache!” cried Garp, and the girl nodded.

  She pointed back the way Garp had come, but Garp remembered seeing no one near the entrance to the park. The policeman hunched on his horse and through the thrown leaves he rode away from them. The other policeman was calming his horse, but he had not remounted. “Cover her, or find her clothes,” Garp said to him; he started to run down the bridle path after the first policeman; he knew there were things you could see from ground level that you couldn't see on a horse. Also, Garp was such a fool about his running that he imagined he could outlast, if not outrun, any horse.

  “Hey, you better wait here!” the policeman called after him, but Garp was in stride and clearly not stopping.

  He followed the great rents in the ground that the horse had made. He had not gone even half a mile back along the path before he saw the bent figure of a man, maybe twenty-five yards off the path and almost hidden by the trees. Garp yelled at the figure, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache, who looked over his shoulder at Garp with an expression so surprised and ashamed that Garp was sure he'd found the child molester. He thundered through the vines and small, whiplike trees to the man, who had been peeing and was hastening to fold himself
back into his trousers. He looked very much like a man caught doing something he shouldn't have done.

  “I was just...” the man began, but Garp was upon him and thrust his stiff, cropped beard into the man's face. Garp sniffed him over like a hound.

  “If it's you, you bastard, I can smell it on you!” Garp said. The man flinched away from this half-naked brute, but Garp seized both the man's wrists and snapped the man's hands up under his nose. He sniffed again, and the man cried out as if he feared Garp was going to bite him. “Hold still!” Garp said. “Did you do it? Where are the child's clothes?”

  “Please!” the man piped. “I was just going to the bathroom.” He had not had time to close his fly and Garp eyed his crotch suspiciously.

  “There is no smell like sex,” Garp wrote. “You cannot disguise it. It is as rich and clear as spilled beer.”

  So Garp dropped to his knees in the woods and unbuckled the man's belt and tore open the man's pants and yanked the man's undershorts straight down to the man's ankles; he stared at the man's frightened equipment.

  “Help!” the old gentleman screamed. Garp took a deep sniff and the man collapsed in the young trees; staggering like a puppet strung under the arms, he thrashed in a thicket of slender trunks and branches too dense to allow him to fall. “Help, God!” he cried, but Garp was already running back out to the bridle path, his legs digging through the leaves, his arms pummeling the air, his struck collarbone throbbing.

  At the entrance to the park the mounted policeman clattered about the parking lot, peering in parked cars, circling the squat brick hut where the rest rooms were. A few people watched him, sensing his eagerness. “No mustaches,” the policeman called to Garp.

  “If he got back here before you did, he could have driven away,” Garp said.

  “Go look in the men's room,” the policeman said, riding toward a woman with a baby carriage piled high with blankets.

  Every men's room made Garp remember every W.C.; at the door to this sour place, Garp passed a young man who was just leaving. He was clean-shaven, his upper lip so smooth that it almost shone; he looked like a college kid. Garp entered the men's room like a dog with his hair standing up on the back of his neck and his hackles curling. He checked for feet under the crapper-stall doors; he would not have been surprised to see a pair of hands—or a bear. He looked for backs turned toward him at the long urinal—or for anyone at the dirty brown sinks, peering into the pitted mirrors. But there was no one in the men's room. Garp sniffed. He had worn a full but trimmed beard for a long time and the smell of shaving cream was not instantly recognizable to him. He just knew he smelled something foreign to this dank place. Then he looked in the nearest sink: he saw the gobs of lather, he saw the whiskers rimming the bowl.

  The young, clean-shaven man who looked like a college kid was crossing the parking lot, quickly but calmly, when Garp came out the men's room door. “It's him!” Garp hollered. The mounted cop looked at the young molester, puzzled.

  “He doesn't have a mustache,” the policeman said.

  “He just shaved it off!” Garp cried; he ran across the lot, straight at the kid, who began to run toward the maze of paths lacing the park. A litter of things flew out from under his jacket as he ran: Garp saw the scissors, a razor, a shaving cream can, and then came the little batches of clothes—the girl's, of course. Her jeans with a ladybug sewn at the hip, a jersey with the beaming face of a frog on the breast. Of course there was no bra; there was no need. It was her panties that got to Garp. They were simply cotton, and a simple blue, stitched at the waistband was a blue flower, sniffed at by a blue bunny.

  The mounted policeman simply rode over the kid who was running away. The chest of the horse pounded the kid face forward into the cinder entry path and one rear hoof took a U-shaped bite of flesh out of the kid's calf; he curled, fetal, on the ground, holding his leg. Garp came up then, the girl's blue-bunny panties in his hand; he gave them to the mounted cop. Other people—the woman with the blanketed carriage, two boys on bikes, a thin man carrying a newspaper—approached them. They brought the cop the other things the kid had dropped. The razor, the rest of the girl's clothes. Nobody spoke, Garp wrote later that at that moment he saw the short history of the young child molester spread out at the horse's hooves: the scissors, the shaving cream can. Of course! The kid would grow a mustache, attack a child, shave the mustache (which would be all most children would remember).

  “Have you done this before?” Garp asked the kid. ”

  You're not supposed to ask him anything,” the policeman said. But the kid grinned stupidly at Garp. “I've never been caught before,” he told him, cockily. When he smiled, Garp saw that the young man had no upper front teeth: the horse had kicked them out. There was just a bleeding flap of gum. Garp realized that something had probably happened to this kid so that he didn't feel very much—not much pain, not much of anything else.

  Out of the woods at the end of the bridle path the second policeman came walking his horse—the child in the saddle, covered by the policeman's coat. She clutched Garp's T-shirt in her hands. She did not seem to recognize anybody. The policeman led her right up to where the molester lay on the ground, but she didn't really look at him. The first policeman dismounted; he went to the molester and tilted his bleeding face up toward the child. “Him?” he asked her. She stared at the young man, blankly. The molester gave a short laugh, spat out a mouthful of blood; the child made no response. Then Garp gently touched his finger to the molester's mouth; with the blood on his finger, Garp lightly smeared a mustache on the young man's upper lip, tbe child began to scream and scream. The horses needed quieting. The child kept screaming until the second policeman took the molester away. Then she stopped screaming and gave Garp back his T-shirt. She kept patting the thick ridge of black hair on the back of the horse's neck as if she had never been on a horse before.

  Garp thought it must have hurt her to sit on horse back, but suddenly she asked, “Can I have another ride?” Garp was at least glad to hear that she had a tongue.

  It was then that Garp saw the nattily dressed, elderly gentleman whose mustache had been innocent; he was making his meek way out of the park, coming cautiously into the parking lot, looking anxiously about for the madman who'd so savagely snatched his pants down and sniffed him like some dangerous omnivore. When the man saw Garp standing beside the policeman, he seemed relieved—he assumed Garp had been apprehended—and he more boldly walked toward them. Garp contemplated running—to avoid the confusion, the explanation—but just then the policeman said, “I have to get your name. And what it is that you do. Besides run in the park.” He laughed.

  “I'm a writer,” Garp told him. The policeman was apologetic that he hadn't heard of Garp, but at the time Garp hadn't published anything except “The Pension Grillparzer"—there was very little the policeman could have read. This seemed to puzzle the policeman.

  “An unpublished writer?” he asked. Garp was rather glum about it. “Then what do you do for a living?” the policeman said.

  “My wife and my mother support me,” Garp admitted.

  “Well, I have to ask you what they do,” the policeman said. “For the record, we like to know how everyone makes a living.”

  The offended gentleman with the white mustache, who had overheard only the last bits of this interrogation, said, “Just as I would have thought! A vagrant, a despicable bum!”

  The policeman stared at him. In his early, unpublished years Garp felt angry whenever he was forced to admit how he had enough to live on; he felt more like inviting confusion at this moment than he felt moved to clear things up.

  “I'm glad to see you've caught him, anyway,” the old gentleman said. “This used to be a nice park, but the people who get in here these days—you ought to patrol it more closely,” he told the policeman, who guessed that the old man was referring to the child molester. The cop didn't want the business discussed in front of the child, so he rolled his eyes up toward her—she sat rig
id in the saddle—and tried to indicate to the old gentleman why he shouldn't continue.

  “Oh no, he didn't do it to that child!” the man cried, as if he'd just noticed her, mounted beside him, or just noticed she was not dressed under the policeman's coat—her small clothes bugged in her arms. “How vile!” he cried, glaring at Garp. “How disgusting! You'll want my name, of course?” he asked the policeman.

  “What for?” the policeman said. Garp had to smile.

  “Look at him smirking there!” the old man cried. “Why, as a witness, of course—I'd tell my story to any court in the country, if it could condemn such a man as that!”

  “But what were you a witness to?” the policeman said.

  “Why, he did that...thing...to me, too!” the man said.

  The policeman looked at Garp; Garp rolled his eyes. The policeman still clung to the sanity that the old gentleman was referring to the child molester, but he didn't understand why Garp was being treated with such abuse. “Well, sure,” the policeman said, to humor the old fool. He took his name and address.

  Months later Garp was buying a package of three prophylactics when this same old gentleman walked into the drugstore.

  “What?! It's you!” the old man shouted. “They let you out already, did they? I thought they'd put you away for years!”

  It took Garp a moment to recognize the person. The druggist assumed that the old codger was a lunatic. The gentleman in his trimmed, white mustache advanced cautiously on Garp.

  “What's the law coming to?” he asked. “I suppose you're out on good behavior? No old men or young girls to sniff in prison, I suppose! Or some lawyer got you off on some slick technicality? That poor child traumatized for all her years and you're free to roam the parks!”

  “You've made a mistake,” Garp told him.

  “Yes, this is Mr. Garp,” the druggist said. He didn't add, “the writer.” If he'd considered adding anything, Garp knew, it would have been “the hero,” because the druggist had seen the ludicrous newspaper headlines about the crime and capture in the park.