“Right in the middle of what, darling?” Helen asked him. “Right in the middle of whom? I hope she's nice.”
Helen's voice on the phone had a quality of sexual teasing in it; this always surprised Garp—how she sounded—because Helen was not like that, she was not even flirtatious. Though he found her, privately, very arousing, there was nothing of the sexy come-on about her dress or her habits in the outer world. Yet on the telephone she sounded bawdy to him, and always had.
“I've burned myself,” he said, dramatically. “The oil is too hot and the onions are scorching. What the fuck is it?”
“My poor man,” she said, still teasing him. “You didn't leave any message with Pam.” Pam was the English Department secretary. Garp struggled to think what message he was supposed to have left with her. “Are you burned badly?” Helen asked him.
“No.” He sulked. “What message?”
“The two-by-fours,” said Helen. Lumber, Garp remembered. He was going to call the lumberyards to price some two-by-fours cut to size, Helen would pick them up on her way home from school. He remembered now that the marriage counseling had distracted him from the lumberyards.
“I forgot,” he said. Helen, he knew, would have an alternative plan; she had known this much before she even made the phone call.
“Call them now,” Helen said, “and I'll call you back when I get to the day-care center. Then I'll go pick up the two-by-fours with Walt. He likes lumberyards.” Walt was now five; Garp's second son was in this daycare or preschool place—whatever it was, its aura of general irresponsibility gave Garp some of his most exciting nightmares.
“Well, all right,” Garp said. “I'll start calling now.” He was worried about his tomato sauce, and he hated hanging up on a conversation with Helen when he was in a state so clearly preoccupied and dull. “I've found an interesting job,” he told her, relishing her silence. But she wasn't silent long.
“You're a writer, darling,” Helen told him. “You have an interesting job.” Sometimes it panicked Garp that Helen seemed to want him to stay at home and “just write"—because that made the domestic situation the most comfortable for her. But it was comfortable for him, too; it was what he thought he wanted.
“The onions need stirring,” he said, cutting her off. “And my burn hurts,” he added.
“I'll try to call back when you're in the middle of something,” Helen said, brightly teasing him, that vampish laughter barely contained in her saucy voice; it both aroused him and made him furious.
He stirred the onions and mashed half a dozen tomatoes into the hot oil; then he added pepper, salt, oregano. He called only the lumberyard whose address was closest to Walt's day-care center; Helen was too meticulous about some things—comparing the prices of everything, though he admired her for it. Wood was wood, Garp reasoned; the best place to have the damn two-by-fours cut to size was the nearest place.
A marriage counselor! Garp thought again, dissolving a tablespoon of tomato paste in a cup of warm water and adding this to his sauce. Why are all the serious jobs done by quacks? What could be more serious than marriage counseling? Yet he imagined a marriage counselor was somewhat lower on a scale of trust than a chiropractor. In the way that many doctors scorned chiropractors, would psychiatrists sneer at marriage counselors? There was no one Garp tended to sneer at as much as he sneered at psychiatrists—those dangerous simplifiers, those thieves of a person's complexity. To Garp, psychiatrists were the despicable end of all those who couldn't clean up their own messes.
The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist's objective was to clear the head; it was Garp's opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess—to make the messy things work for you. “That's easy for a writer to say,” Helen had told him. “Artists can “use” a mess; most people can't, and they just don't want messes. I know I don't. What a psychiatrist you'd be! What would you do if a poor man who had no use for his mess came to you, and he just wanted his mess to go away? I suppose you'd advise him to write about it?” Garp remembered this conversation about psychiatry and it made him glum; he knew he oversimplified the things that made him angry, but he was convinced that psychiatry oversimplified everything.
When the phone rang, he said, “The lumberyard off Springfield Avenue. That's close to you.”
“I know where it is,” Helen said “Is that the only place you called?”
“Wood is wood,” Garp said. “Two-by-fours are two-by-fours. Go to Springfield Avenue and they'll have them ready.”
“What interesting job have you found?” Helen asked him; he knew she would have been thinking about it.
“Marriage counseling,” Garp said; his tomato sauce bubbled—the kitchen filled with its rich fumes. Helen maintained a respectful silence on her end of the phone. Garp knew she would find it difficult to ask, this time, what qualifications he thought he had for such a thing.
“You're a writer,” she told him.
“Perfect qualifications for the job,” Garp said. “Years spent pondering the morass of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love,” Garp droned on, “the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion.”
“So write about it,” Helen said. “What more do you want?” She knew perfectly well what was coming next.
“Art doesn't help anyone,” Garp said. “People can't really use it: they can't eat it, it won't shelter or clothe them—and if they're sick, it won't make them well.” This, Helen knew, was Garp's thesis on the basic uselessness of art; he rejected the idea that art was of any social value whatsoever—that it could be, that it should be. The two things mustn't be confused, he thought: there was art, and there was helping people. Here he was, fumbling at both—his mother's son, after all. But, true to his thesis, he saw art and social responsibility as two distinct acts. The messes came when certain jerks attempted to combine these fields. Garp would be irritated all his life by his belief that literature was a luxury item; he desired for it to be more basic—yet he hated it, when it was.
“I'll go get the two-by-fours now,” Helen said.
“And if the peculiarities of my art weren't qualification enough,” Garp said, “I have, as you know, been married myself.” He paused. “I've had children.” He paused again. “I've had a variety of marriage-related experiences—we both have.”
“Springfield Avenue?” Helen said. “I'll be home soon.”
“I have more than enough experience for the job,” he insisted. “I've known financial dependency, I've experienced infidelity.”
“Good for you,” Helen said. She hung up.
But Garp thought: Maybe marriage counseling is a charlatan field even if a genuine and qualified person is giving the advice. He replaced the phone on the hook. He knew he could advertise himself in the Yellow Pages most successfully—even without lying.
MARRIAGE PHILOSOPHY
and FAMILY ADVICE
T. S. GARP
author of Procrastination
and Second Wind of the Cuckold
Why add that they were novels? They sounded, Garp realized, like marriage-counsel manuals.
But would he see his poor patients at home or in an office?
Garp took a green pepper and propped it in the center of the gas burner; he turned up the flame and the pepper began to burn. When it was black all over, Garp would let it cool, then scrape off all the charred skin. Inside would be a roasted pepper, very sweet, and he would slice it and let it marinate in oil and vinegar and a little marjoram. That would be his dressing for the salad. But the main reason he liked to make dressing this way was that the roasting pepper made the kitchen smell so good.
He turned the pepper with a pair of tongs. When the pepper was charred, Garp snatched it up with the tongs and flipped it into the sink. The pepper
hissed at him. “Talk all you want to,” Garp told it. “You don't have much time left.”
He was distracted. Usually he liked to stop thinking about other things while he cooked—in fact, he forced himself to. But he was suffering a crisis of confidence about marriage counseling.
“You're suffering a crisis of confidence about your writing,” Helen told him, walking into the kitchen with even more than her usual authority—the freshly cut two-by-fours slung over and under her arm like matching shotguns.
Walt said, “Daddy burned something.”
“It was a pepper and Daddy meant to,” Garp said. “Every time you can't write you do something stupid,” Helen said. “Though I'll confess this is a better idea for a diversion than your last diversion.”
Garp had expected her to be ready, but he was surprised that she was so ready. What Helen called his last “diversion” from his stalled writing had been a baby-sitter.
Garp drove a wooden spoon deep into his tomato sauce. He flinched as some fool took the corner by the house with a roaring downshift and a squeal of tires that cut through Garp with the sound of a struck cat. He looked instinctively for Walt, who was right there—safe in the kitchen.
Helen said, “Where's Duncan?” She moved to the door but Garp cut in front of her.
“Duncan went to Ralph's,” he said; he was not worried, this time, that the speeding car meant Duncan had been hit, but it was Garp's habit to chase down speeding cars. He had properly bullied every fast driver in the neighborhood. The streets around Garp's house were cut in squares, bordered every block by stop signs; Garp could usually catch up to a car, on foot, provided that the car obeyed the stop signs.
He raced down the street after the sound of the car. Sometimes, if the car was going really fast, Garp would need three or four stop signs to catch up to it. Once he sprinted five blocks and was so out of breath when he caught up to the offending car that the driver was sure there'd been a murder in the neighborhood and Garp was either trying to report it or had done it himself.
Most drivers were impressed with Garp, and even if they swore about him later, they were polite and apologetic to his face, assuring him they would not speed in the neighborhood again. It was clear to them that Garp was in good physical shape. Most of them were high school kids who were easily embarrassed—caught hot-rodding around with their girl friends, or leaving little smoking-rubber stains in front of their girl friends' houses. Garp was not such a fool as to imagine that he changed their ways; all he hoped to do was make them speed somewhere else.
The present offender turned out to be a woman (Garp saw her earrings glinting, and the bracelets on her arm, as he ran up to her from behind). She was just ready to pull away from a stop sign when Garp rapped the wooden spoon on her window, startling her. The spoon, dribbling tomato sauce, looked at a glance as if it had been dipped in blood.
Garp waited for her to roll down her window, and was already phrasing his opening remarks ("I'm sorry I startled you, but I wanted to ask you a personal favor...") when he recognized that the woman was Ralph's mother—the notorious Mrs. Ralph. Duncan and Ralph were not with her; she was alone, and it was obvious that she had been crying.
“Yes, what is it?” she said. Garp couldn't tell if she recognized him as Duncan's father, or not.
“I'm sorry I startled you,” Garp began. He stopped. What else could he say to her? Smeary-faced, fresh from a fight with her ex-husband or a lover, the poor woman looked to be suffering her approaching middle-age like the flu; her body looked rumpled with misery, her eyes were red and vague. “I'm sorry,” Garp mumbled; he was sorry for her whole life. How could he tell her that all he wanted was for her to slow down?
“What is it?” she asked him.
“I'm Duncan's father,” Garp said.
“I know you are,” she said. “I'm Ralph's mother.”
“I know,” he said; he smiled.
“Duncan's father meets Ralph's mother,” she said, caustically. Then she burst into tears. Her face flopped forward and struck the horn. She sat up straight, suddenly hitting Garp's hand, resting on her rolled-down window; his fingers opened and he dropped the longhandled spoon into her lap. They both stared at it; the tomato sauce produced a stain on her wrinkled beige dress.
“You must think I'm a rotten mother,” Mrs. Ralph said. Garp, ever-conscious of safety, reached across her knees and turned off the ignition. He decided to leave the spoon in her lap. It was Garp's curse to be unable to conceal his feelings from people, even from strangers; if he thought contemptuous thoughts about you, somehow you knew.
“I don't know anything about what kind of mother you are,” Garp told her. “I think Ralph's a nice boy.”
“He can be a real shit,” she said.
“Perhaps you'd rather Duncan not stay with you tonight?” Garp asked—Garp hoped. To Garp, she didn't appear to know that Duncan was spending the night with Ralph. She looked at the spoon in her lap. “It's tomato sauce,” Garp said. To his surprise, Mrs. Ralph picked up the spoon and licked it.
“You're a cook?” she asked.
“Yes, I like to cook,” Garp said.
“It's very good,” Mrs. Ralph told him, handing him his spoon. “I should have gotten one like you—some muscular little prick who likes to cook.”
Garp counted in his head to five: then he said, “I'd be glad to go pick up the boys. They could spend the night with us, if you'd like to be alone.”
“Alone!” she cried. “I'm usually alone. I like having the boys with me. And they like it, too,” she said. “Do you know why?” Mrs. Ralph looked at him wickedly.
“Why?” Garp said.
“They like to watch me take a bath,” she said. “There's a crack in the door. Isn't it sweet that Ralph likes to show off his old mother to his friends?”
“Yes,” Garp said.
“You don't approve, do you, Mr. Garp?” she asked him. “You don't approve of me at all.”
“I'm sorry you're so unhappy,” Garp said. On the seat beside her in her messy car was a paperback of Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband: Garp remembered that Mrs. Ralph was going to school. “What are you majoring in?” he asked her, stupidly. He recalled she was a never-ending graduate student; her problem was probably a thesis that wouldn't come.
Mrs. Ralph shook her head. “You really keep your nose clean, don't you?” she asked Garp. “How long have you been married?”
“Almost eleven years,” Garp said. Mrs. Ralph looked more or less indifferent; Mrs. Ralph had been married for twelve.
“Your kid's safe with me,” she said, as if she were suddenly irritated with him, and as if she were reading his mind with utter accuracy. “Don't worry, I'm quite harmless—with children,” she added. “And I don't smoke in bed.”
“I'm sure it's good for the boys to watch you take a bath,” Garp told her, then felt immediately embarrassed for saying it, though it was one of the few things he'd told her that he meant.
“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't seem to do much good for my husband, and he watched me for years.” She looked up at Garp, whose mouth hurt from all his forced smiles. Just touch her cheek, or pat her hand, he thought; at least say something. But Garp was clumsy at being kind, and he didn't flirt.
“Well, husbands are funny,” he mumbled. Garp the marriage counselor, full of advice. “I don't think many of them know what they want.”
Mrs. Ralph laughed bitterly. “My husband found a nineteen-year-old cunt,” she said. “He seems to want her.”
“I'm sorry,” Garp told her. The marriage counselor is the I'm-sorry man, like a doctor with bad luck—the one who gets to diagnose all the terminal cases.
“You're a writer,” Mrs. Ralph said to him, accusingly; she waved her copy of The Eternal Husband at him. “What do you think of this?”
“It's a wonderful story,” Garp said. It was fortunately a book he remembered—neatly complicated, full of perverse and human contradiction.
“I think it's a sick
story,” Mrs. Ralph told him. “I'd like to know what's so special about Dostoevsky.”
“Well,” Garp said, “his characters are so complex, psychologically and emotionally; and the situations are so ambiguous.”
“His women are less than objects,” Mrs. Ralph said, “they don't even have any shape. They're just ideas that men talk about and play with.” She threw the book out the window at Garp; it hit his chest and fell by the curb. She clenched her fists in her lap, staring at the stain on her dress, which marked her crotch with a tomato-sauce bull's-eye. “Boy, that's me all over,” she said, staring at the spot.
“I'm sorry,” Garp said again. “It may leave a permanent stain.”
“Everything leaves a stain!” Mrs. Ralph cried out. A laughter so witless escaped her that it frightened Garp. He didn't say anything and she said to him, “I'll bet you think that all I need is a good lay.”
To be fair, Garp rarely thought this of people, but when Mrs. Ralph mentioned it, he did think that, in her case, this oversimple solution might apply.
“And I'll bet you think I'd let you do it,” she said, glaring at him. Garp, in fact, did think so.
“No, I don't think you would,” he said.
“Yes, you think I would love to,” Mrs. Ralph said.
Garp hung his head. “No,” he said.
“Well, in your case,” she said, “I just might.” He looked at her and she gave him an evil grin. “It might make you a little less smug,” she told him.
The World According to Garp Page 25