The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  “Fucking lust,” Helen said. “Your mother was right. It is a man's problem. You talk to him.”

  “Alice told me about your baby-sitters,” Harry told Garp. “It's not the same. This is a special girl.”

  “A student, Harry,” Garp said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “A special student,” Harry said. “I'm not like you. I've been honest, I've told Alice from the first. She's just got to accommodate it. I've told her she's free to do this, too.”

  “She doesn't know any students,” Garp said.

  “She knows you,” Harry told him. “And she's in love with you.”

  “What can we do?” Garp asked Helen. “He's trying to set me up with Alice so he'll feel better about what he's doing.”

  “At least he's been honest with her,” Helen told Garp. There was one of those silences wherein a family can identify its separate, breathing parts in the night. Open doors off an upstairs hall: Duncan breathing lazily, an almost-eight-year-old with lots of time to live; Walt breathing those tentative two-year-old breaths, short and excited; Helen, even and cool. Garp held his breath. He knew she knew about the baby-sitters.

  “Harry told you?” he asked.

  “You might have told me before you told Alice,” Helen said. “Who was the second one?”

  “I forget her name,” Garp admitted.

  “I think it's shabby,” Helen said. “It's really beneath me; it's beneath you. I hope you've outgrown it.”

  “Yes, I have,” Garp said. He meant he had outgrown baby-sitters. But lust itself? Ah, well. Jenny Fields had fingered a problem at the heart of her son's heart.

  “We've got to help the Fletchers,” Helen said. “We're too fond of them to do nothing about this.”

  Helen, Garp marveled, moved through their life together as if it were an essay she was structuring—with an introduction, a presentation of basic priorities, then the thesis.

  “Harry thinks the student is special,” Garp pointed out.

  “Fucking men,” Helen said. “You look after Alice. I'll show Harrison what's special.”

  So one night, after Garp had cooked an elegant Paprika Chicken and spдtzle, Helen said to Garp, “Harrison and I will do the dishes. You take Alice home.”

  “Take her home?” Garp said. “Now?”

  “Show him your novel,” Helen said to Alice. “Show him everything you want. I'm going to show your husband what an asshole he is.”

  “Hey, come on,” Harry said. “We're all friends, we all want to stay friends, right?”

  “You simple son of a bitch,” Helen told him. “You fuck a student and call her special—you insult your wife, you insult me. I'll show you what's special.”

  “Go easy, Helen,” Garp said.

  “Go with Alice,” Helen said. “And let Alice drive her own baby-sitter home.”

  “Hey, come on!” Harrison Fletcher said.

  “Shuth up, Harrithon!” Alice said. She grabbed Garp's hand and stood up from the table.

  “Fucking men,” said Helen. Garp, as speechless as an Ellen Jamesian, took Alice home.

  “I can take the baby-sitter home, Alice,” he said. “Jutht get back fatht,” Alice said.

  “Very fast, Alice,” Garp said.

  She made him read the first chapter of her novel aloud to her. “I want to hear it,” she told him, “and I can't thay it mythelf.” So Garp said it to her; it read, he was relieved to hear, beautifully. Alice wrote with such fluency and care that Garp could have sung her sentences, unselfconsciously, and they would have sounded fine.

  “You have a lovely voice, Alice,” he told her, and she cried. And they made love, of course, and despite what everyone knows about such things, it was special.

  “Wasn't it?” asked Alice.

  “Yes, it was,” Garp admitted.

  Now, he thought, here is trouble.

  “What can we do?” Helen asked Garp. She had made Harrison Fletcher forget his “special” student; Harrison now thought that Helen was the most special thing in his life.

  “You started it,” Garp said to her. “If it's going to stop, you've got to stop it, I think.”

  “That's easy to say,” Helen said. “I like Harrison; he's my best friend, and I don't want to lose that. I'm just not very interested in sleeping with him.”

  “He's interested,” Garp said.

  “God, I know,” Helen said.

  “He thinks you're the best he's had,” Garp told her. “Oh, great,” Helen said. “That must be lovely for Alice.”

  “Alice isn't thinking about it,” Garp said. Alice was thinking about Garp, Garp knew; and Garp was afraid the whole thing would stop. There were times when Garp thought that Alice was the best he'd ever had. “And what about you?” Helen asked him. ("Nothing is equal,” Garp would write, one day.)

  “I'm fine,” Garp said. “I like Alice, I like you, I like Harry.”

  “And Alice?” Helen asked.

  “Alice likes me,” Garp said.

  “Oh boy,” Helen said. “So we all like each other, except that I don't care that much for sleeping with Harrison.”

  “So it's over,” Garp said, trying to hide the gloom in his voice. Alice had cried to him that it could never be over. ("Could it? Could it?” she had cried. “I can't jutht thtop!")

  “Well, isn't it still better than it was?” Helen asked Garp.

  “You made your point,” Garp said. “You got Harry off his damn student. Now you've just got to let him down easy.”

  “And what about you and Alice?” Helen asked.

  “If it's over for one of us, it's over for all of us,” Garp said. “That's only fair.”

  “I know what's fair,” Helen said. “I also know what's human.”

  The good-byes that Garp imagined conducting with Alice were violent scenarios, fraught with Alice's incoherent speech and always ending in desperate lovemaking—another failed resolution, wet with sweat and sweet with the lush stickum of sex, oh yeth.

  “I think Alice is a little loony,” Helen said.

  “Alice is a pretty good writer,” Garp said. “She's the real thing.”

  “Fucking writers,” Helen mumbled.

  “Harry doesn't appreciate how talented Alice is,” Garp heard himself say.

  “Oh boy,” Helen murmured. “This is the last time I try to save anyone's marriage except my own.”

  It took six months for Helen to let Harry down easy, and in that time Garp saw as much of Alice as he could, while still trying to forewarn her that their foursome was going to be short-lived. He also tried to forewarn himself, because he dreaded the knowledge that he would have to give Alice up.

  “It's not the same, for all four of us,” he told Alice. “It will have to stop, and pretty soon.”

  “Tho what?” Alice said. “It hasn't thtopped yet, has it?”

  “Not yet,” Garp admitted. He read all her written words aloud to her, and they made love so much he stung in the shower and couldn't stand to wear a jock when he ran.

  “We've got to do and do it,” Alice said, fervently. “Do it while we can.”

  “You know, this can't last,” Garp tried to warn Harry, while they were playing squash.

  “I know, I know,” Harry said, “but it's great while it lasts, isn't it?”

  “Isn't it?” Alice demanded. Did Garp love Alice? Oh yeth.

  “Yes, yes,” Garp said, shaking his head. He thought he did.

  But Helen, enjoying it the least of them, suffered it the most; when she finally called an end to it, she couldn't help but show her euphoria. The other three couldn't help but show their resentment: that she should appear so uplifted while they were cast into such gloom. Without formal imposition there existed a six-month moratorium on the couples' seeing each other, except by chance. Naturally, Helen and Harry ran into each other at the English Department. Garp encountered Alice in the supermarket. Once she deliberately crashed her shopping cart into his; little Walt was jarred among the produce and the juice cans, and Alice's
daughter looked equally alarmed at the collision.

  “I felt the need of thum contact,” Alice said. And she called the Garps one night, very late, after Garp and Helen had gone to bed. Helen answered the phone.

  “Is Harrithon there?” she asked Helen.

  “No, Alice,” Helen said. “Is something wrong?”

  “He's not here,” Alice said. “I haven't theen Harrithon all night!”

  “Let me come over and sit with you,” Helen suggested. “Garp can go look for Harrison.”

  “Can't Garp come over and thit with me?” Alice asked. “You look for Harrithon.”

  “No, I'll come over and sit with you,” Helen said. “I think that's better. Garp can go look for Harrison.”

  “I want Garp,” Alice said.

  “I'm sorry that you can't have him,” Helen said.

  “I'm thorry, Helen,” Alice said. She cried into the phone and said a stream of things that Helen couldn't understand. Helen gave the phone to Garp.

  Garp talked to Alice, and listened to her, for about an hour. Nobody looked for “Harrithon.” Helen felt she had done a good job of holding herself together for the six months she'd allowed it all to continue; she expected them all to at least control themselves adequately, now that it was over.

  “If Harrison is out screwing students, I'm really going to cross him off,” Helen said. “That asshole! And if Alice calls herself a writer, why isn't she writing? If she's got so much to thay, why waste saying it on the phone?”

  Time, Garp knew, would ease everything. Time would also prove him wrong about Alice's writing. She may have had a pretty voice but she couldn't complete anything; she never finished her second novel, not in all the years that the Garps would know the Fletchers—or in all the years after. She could say everything beautifully, but—as Garp remarked to Helen, when he was finally exasperated with Alice—she couldn't get to the end of anything. She couldn't thtop.

  Harry, too, would not play his cards wisely or well. The university would deny him tenure—a bitter loss for Helen, because she truly loved having Harrison for a friend. But the student Harry had thrown over for Helen had not been let down so easy; she bitched about her seduction to the English Department—although, of course, it was her jilting that really made her bitch. This raised eyebrows among Harry's colleagues. And, of course, Helen's support of Harrison Fletcher's case for tenure was quietly not taken seriously—her relationship with Harry having also been made clear by the jilted student.

  Even Garp's mother, Jenny Fields—with all she stood up for, for women—agreed with Garp that Helen's own tenure at the university, so easily granted her when she was younger than poor Harry, had been a token gesture on the part of the English Department. Someone had probably told them that they needed a woman on the department at the associate professor level, and Helen had come along. Although Helen did not doubt her own qualifications, she knew it hadn't been her quality that had gotten her tenure.

  But Helen had not slept with any students; not yet. Harrison Fletcher had, unforgivably, allowed his sex life to be more special to him than his job. He got another job, anyway. And perhaps what remained of the friendship between the Garps and the Fletchers was actually saved by the Fletchers' having to move away. This way, the couples saw each other about twice a year; distance diffused what might have been hard feelings. Alice could speak her flawless prose to Garp in letters. The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other—or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

  Garp threw away his second novel and began a second second novel. Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer—not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it. “You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more: he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

  His second book was swollen, he knew, with the energy he had left over from Alice.

  It was a book full of wounding dialogue and sex that left the partners smarting; sex in the book also left the partners guilty, and usually wanting more sex. This paradox was cited by several reviewers who alled the phenomenon, alternately, “brilliant” and “dumb.” One reviewer called the novel “bitterly truthful,” but he hastened to point out that the bitterness doomed the novel to the status of “only a minor classic.” If more of the bitterness had been “refined away,” the reviewer theorized, “a purer truth would have emerged.”

  More nonsense was compiled concerning the novel's “thesis.” One reviewer struggled with the idea that the novel seemed to be saying that only sexual relationships could profoundly reveal people to themselves; yet it was during sexual relationships that people appeared to lose what profundity they had. Garp said he never had a thesis and he grumpily told an interviewer that he had written “a serious comedy about marriage, but a sexual farce.” Later he wrote that “human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.”

  But no matter what Garp said—or the reviewers, either—the book was not a success. Titled Second Wind of the Cuckold, the novel confused nearly everyone; even its reviews were confusing. It undersold Procrastination by a few thousand copies, and even though John Wolf assured Garp that this was what often happened to second novels, Garp—for the first time in his life—felt he had failed.

  John Wolf, who was a good editor, protected Garp from one particular review until he feared Garp would see the review by accident; then Wolf reluctantly sent the clipping, from a West Coast newspaper, with the attached note that he'd heard the reviewer suffered a hormone imbalance. The review remarked, curtly, that it was sordid and pathetic that T. S. Garp, “the talentless son of the famous feminist, Jenny Fields, has written a sexist novel that wallows in sex—and not even instructively.” And so forth.

  Growing up with Jenny Fields had not made Garp the sort of person who was easily influenced by other people's opinions of him, but even Helen did not like Second Wind of the Cuckold. And even Alice Fletcher, in all her loving letters, never once mentioned the book's existence.

  Second Wind of the Cuckold was about two married couples who have an affair.

  “Oh boy,” Helen said, when she first learned what the book was about.

  “It's not about us,” Garp said. “It's not about any of that. It just uses that.”

  “And you're always telling me,” Helen said, “that autobiographical fiction is the worst kind.”

  “This isn't autobiographical,” Garp said. “You'll see.”

  She didn't. Though the novel was not about Helen and Garp and Harry and Alice, it was about four people whose finally unequal and sexually striving relationship is a bust.

  Each person in the foursome is physically handicapped. One of the men is blind. The other man has a stutter of such monstrous proportions that his dialogue is infuriatingly difficult to read. Jenny blasted Garp for taking a cheap shot at poor departed Mr. Tinch, but writers, Garp sadly knew, were just observers—good and ruthless imitators of human behavior. Garp had meant no offense to Tinch; he was just using one of Tinch's habits.

  “I don't know how you could have done such a thing to Alice,” Helen despaired.

  Helen meant the handicaps, especially the women's handicaps. One has muscle spasms in her right arm—her hand is always lashing out, striking wineglasses, flowerpots, children's faces, once nearly emasculating her husband (accidentally) with a pruning hook. Only her lover, the other woman's husband, is able to soothe this terrible, uncontrollable spasm—so that the woman is, for the first time in her life, the possessor of a flawless body, entirely intentional in its movement, truly ruled and contained by herself alone.

  The other
woman suffers unpredictable, unstoppable flatulence. The farter is married to the stutterer, the blind man is married to the dangerous right arm.

  Nobody in the foursome, to Garp's credit, is a writer. ("We should be grateful for small favors?” Helen asked.) One of the couples is childless, and wants to be. The other couple is trying to have a child; this woman conceives, but her elation is tempered by everyone's anxiety concerning the identity of the natural father. Which one was it? The couples watch for tell-tale habits in the newborn child. Will it stutter, fart, lash out, or be blind? (Garp saw this as his ultimate comment—on his mother's behalf—on the subject of genes.)

  It is to some degree an optimistic novel, if only because the friendship between the couples finally convinces them to break off their liaison. The childless couple later separates, disillusioned with each other, but not necessarily as a result of the experiment. The couple with the child succeeds as a couple; the child develops without a detectable flaw. The last scene in the novel is the chance meeting of the two women; they pass on an escalator in a department store at Christmas-time, the farter going up, the woman with the dangerous right arm going down. Both are laden with packages. At the moment they pass each other, the woman stricken with uncontrollable flatulence releases a keen, treble fart—the spastic stiff-arms an old man on the escalator in front of her, bowling him down the moving staircase, toppling a sea of people. But it's Christmas. The escalators are jam-packed and noisy; no one is hurt and everything, in season, is forgivable. The two women, moving apart on their mechanical conveyors, seem to serenely acknowledge each other's burdens; they grimly smile at each other.

  “It's a comedy!” Garp cried out, over and over again. “No one got it. It's supposed to be very funny. What a film it would make!”

  But no one even bought the paperback rights.

  As could be seen by the fate of the man who could only walk on his hands, Garp had a thing about escalators.

  Helen said that no one in the English Department ever spoke to her about Second Wind of the Cuckold; in the case of Procrastination, many of her well-meaning colleagues had at least attempted a discussion. Helen said that the book was an invasion of her privacy and she hoped the whole thing had been a kick that Garp would soon be off.