The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  Sometimes these searchers would trudge out to the beach first and view the house for a long time before they got up the nerve to come see if Jenny was home; sometimes Garp would see them, single or in twos and threes, squatting on the windy dunes and watching the house as if they were trying to read the degree of sympathy therein. If there were more than one, they conferred on the beach; one of them was elected to knock on the door while the others huddled on the dunes, like dogs told to stay! until they're called.

  Helen bought Duncan a telescope, and from his room with a sea view Duncan spied on the trepid visitors and often announced their presence hours before the knock on the door. “Someone for Grandma,” he'd say. Focusing, always focusing. “She's about twenty-four. Or maybe fourteen. She has a blue knapsack. She has an orange with her but I don't think she's going to eat it. Someone's with her but I can't see her face. She's lying down; no, she's being sick. No, she's wearing a kind of mask. Maybe she's the other one's mother—no, her sister. Or just a friend.

  “Now she's eating the orange. It doesn't look very good,” Duncan would report. And Roberta would look, too; and sometimes Helen. It was often Garp who answered the door.

  “Yes, she's my mother,” he'd say, “but she's out shopping right now. Please come in, if you want to wait for her.” And he would smile, though all the time he would be scrutinizing the person as carefully as the retired people along the beach looked at their seashells. And before his jaw healed, and his mauled tongue grew back together, Garp would answer the door with a ready supply of notes. Many of the visitors were not in the least surprised by being handed notes, because this was the only way they communicated, too.

  Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian.

  And Garp would give her his:

  Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

  And he'd smile at them, and hand them a second note, depending on the occasion. One said:

  There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.

  And there was one that said:

  Don't be upset. My mother will be back very soon. There are other women here. Would you like to see them?

  It was in this period that Garp took to wearing a sport jacket again, not out of nostalgia for his days at Steering, or in Vienna—and certainly not out of any necessity to be well dressed at Dog's Head Harbor, where Roberta seemed the only woman who was concerned with what she wore—but only because of his need for pockets; he carried so many notes.

  He tried running on the beach but he had to give it up; it jarred his jaw and jangled his tongue against his teeth. But he walked for miles along the sand. He was returning from a walk the day the police car brought the young man to Jenny's house; arm in arm, the policemen helped him up the big front porch.

  “Mr. Garp?” one of the policemen asked.

  Garp dressed in running gear for his walks; he didn't have any notes on him, but he nodded, yes, he was Mr. Garp.

  “You know this kid?” the policeman asked.

  “Of course he does,” the young man said. “You cops don't ever believe anybody. You don't know how to relax.”

  It was the kid in the purple caftan, the boy Garp had escorted from the boudoir of Mrs. Ralph—what seemed to Garp like years ago. Garp considered not recognizing him, but he nodded.

  “The kid's got no money,” the policeman explained. “He doesn't live around here, and he's got no job. He's not in school anywhere and when we called his folks, they said they didn't even know where he was—and they didn't sound very interested to find out. But he says he's staying with you—and you'll speak up for him.”

  Garp, of course, couldn't speak. He pointed to his wire mesh and imitated the act of writing a note on his palm.

  “When'd you get the braces?” the kid asked. “Most people have them when they're younger. They're the craziest-looking braces I ever saw.”

  Garp wrote out a note on the back of a traffic violation form that the policeman handed him.

  Yes, I'll take responsibility for him. But I can't speak up for him because I have a broken jaw.

  The kid read the note over the policeman's shoulder.

  “Wow,” he said, grinning. “What happened to the other guy?”

  He lost three quarters of his prick, Garp thought, but he did not write this on a traffic violation form, or on anything else. Ever.

  The boy turned out to have read Garp's novels while he was in jail.

  “If I'd known you were the author of those books,” the kid said, “I would never have been so disrespectful.” His name was Randy and he had become an ardent Garp fan. Garp was convinced that the mainstream of his fans consisted of waifs, lonely children, retarded grownups, cranks, and only occasional members of the citizenry who were not afflicted with perverted taste. But Randy had come to Garp as if Garp were now the only guru Randy obeyed. In the spirit of his mother's home at Dog's Head Harbor, Garp couldn't very well turn the boy away.

  Roberta Muldoon took on the task of briefing Randy on the accident to Garp and his family.

  “Who's the great big lovely chick?” Randy asked Garp in an awed whisper.

  Don't you recognize her?

  Garp wrote.

  She was a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles.

  But even Garp's sourness could not dim Randy's likable enthusiasm; not right away. The boy entertained Duncan for hours.

  God knows how,

  Garp complained to Helen.

  He probably tells Duncan about all his drug experiences.

  “The boy's not on anything,” Helen assured Garp. “Your mother asked him.”

  Then he relates to Duncan the exciting history of his criminal record,

  Garp wrote.

  “Randy wants to be a writer,” Helen said.

  Everyone wants to be a writer!

  Garp wrote. But it wasn't true. He didn't want to be a writer—not anymore. When he tried to write, only the deadliest subject rose up to greet him. He knew he had to forget it—not fondle it with his memory and exaggerate its awfulness with his art. That was madness, but whenever he thought of writing, his only subject greeted him with its leers, its fresh visceral puddles, and its stink of death. And so he did not write; he didn't even try.

  At last Randy went away. Though Duncan was sorry to see him go, Garp felt relieved; he did not show anybody else the note Randy left for him.

  I'll never be as good as you—at anything. Even if that's true, you could be a little more generous about how you rub that in.

  So I'm not kind, Garp thought. What else is new? He threw Randy's note away.

  When the wires came off and the rawness left his tongue, Garp ran again. As the weather warmed up, Helen swam. She was told it was good for restoring her muscle tone and strengthening her collarbone, though this still hurt her—especially the breaststroke. She swam for what seemed to be miles, to Garp: straight out to sea, and then along the shoreline. She said she went out so far because the water was calmer there; closer to shore, the waves interfered with her. But Garp worried. He and Duncan sometimes used the telescope to watch her. What am I going to do if something happens? Garp wondered. He was a poor swimmer.

  “Mom's a good swimmer,” Duncan assured him. Duncan was also becoming a good swimmer.

  “She goes out too far,” Garp said.

  By the time the summer people arrived, the Garp family took its exercise in slightly less ostentatious ways; they played on the beach or in the sea only in the early morning. In the crowded moments of the summer days, and in the early evenings, they watched the world from the shaded porches of Jenny Fields' home; they withdrew to the big cool house.

  Garp got a little better. He began to write—gingerly, at first: long plot outlines, and speculations about his characters. He avoided the main characters; at least he thought they were the main characters—a husband, a wife, a child. He concentrated instead on a detective, an outsider to the family. Garp knew what terror would lurk at the heart of his book, and perhaps for t
hat reason he approached it through a character as distant from his personal anxiety as the police inspector is distant from the crime. What business do I have writing about a police inspector? he thought, and so he made the inspector into someone even Garp could understand. Then Garp stood close to the stink itself. The bandages came off Duncan's eye hole and the boy wore a black patch, almost handsome against his summer tan. Garp took a deep breath and began a novel.

  It was in the late summer of Garp's convalescence that The World According to Bensenhaver was begun. About that time, Michael Milton was released from a hospital, walking with a postsurgical stoop and a woebegone face. Due to an infection, the result of improper drainage—and aggravated by a common urological problem—he had to have the remaining quarter of his penis removed in an operation. Garp never knew this; and at this point, it might not even have cheered him up.

  Helen knew Garp was writing again.

  “I won't read it,” she told him. “Not one word of it. I know you have to write it, but I never want to see it. I don't mean to hurt you, but you have to understand. I have to forget it; if you have to write about it, God help you. People bury these things in different ways.”

  “It's not about “it,” exactly,” he told her. “I do not write autobiographical fiction.”

  “I know that, too,” she said. “But I won't read it just the same.”

  “Of course, I understand,” he said.

  Writing, he always knew, was a lonely business. It was hard for a lonely thing to feel that much lonelier. Jenny, he knew, would read it; she was tough as nails. Jenny watched them all get well; she watched new patients come and go.

  One was a hideous young girl named Laurel, who made the mistake of sounding off about Duncan one morning at breakfast. “Could I sleep in another part of the house?” she asked Jenny. “There's this creepy kid—with the telescope, the camera, and the eye patch? He's like a fucking pirate, spying on me. Even little boys like to paw you over with their eyes—even with one eye.”

  Garp had fallen while running in the predawn light on the beach; he had hurt his jaw again, and was—again—wired shut. He had no old notes handy for what he wanted to say to this girl, but he scribbled very hastily on his napkin.

  Fuck you,

  he scribbled, and threw the napkin at the surprised girl.

  “Look,” the girl said to Jenny, “this is just the kind of routine I had to get away from. Some man bullying me all the time, some ding-dong threatening me with his big-prick violence. Who needs it? I mean, especially here—who needs it? Did I come here for more of the same?”

  Fuck you to death,

  said Garp's next note, but Jenny ushered the girl outside and told her the history of Duncan's eye patch, and his telescope, and his camera, and the girl tried very hard to avoid Garp during the last part of her stay. Her stay was just a few days, and then someone was there to get her: a sporty car with New York plates and a man who looked like a ding-dong—and someone who had, actually, threatened poor Laurel with “big-prick violence,” all the time.

  “Hey, you dildos!” he called to Garp and Roberta, who were sitting on the large porch swing, like old-fashioned lovers. “Is this the whorehouse where you're keeping Laurel?”

  “We're not exactly “keeping” her,” Roberta said.

  Shut up, you big dyke,” said the New York man; he came up on the porch. He'd left the motor running to his sports car, and its idle charged and calmed itself—charged and calmed itself, and charged again. The man wore cowboy boots and green suede bell-bottom pants. He was tall and chesty, though not quite as tall and chesty as Roberta Muldoon.

  "I'm not a dyke,” Roberta said.

  “Well, you're no vestal virgin either,” the man said. “Where the fuck is Laurel?” He wore an orange T-shirt with bright green letters between his nipples.

  SHAPE UP!

  the letters read.

  Garp searched his pockets for a pencil to scribble a note, but all he came up with was old notes: all the old standbys, which did not seem to apply to this rude person.

  “Is Laurel expecting you?” Roberta Muldoon asked the man, and Garp knew that Roberta was having a sex-identity problem again; she was goading the moron in hopes that she could then feel justified in beating the shit out of him. But the man, to Garp, looked as if he might make a fair match for Roberta. All that estrogen had changed more than Roberta's shape, Garp thought—it had unmuscled the former Robert Muldoon, to a degree that Roberta seemed prone to forget.

  “Look, sweethearts,” the man said, to both Garp and Roberta. “If Laurel doesn't get her ass out here, I'm going to clean house. What kind of fag joint is this, anyway? Everyone's heard of it. I didn't have any trouble finding out where she went. Every screwy bitch in New York knows about this cunt hangout.”

  Roberta smiled. She was beginning to rock back and forth on the big porch swing in a way that was making Garp feel sick to his stomach. Garp clawed through his pockets at a frantic rate, scanning note after worthless note.

  “Look, you clowns,” the man said. “I know what sort of douche bags hang out here. It's a big lesbian scene, right?” He prodded the edge of the big porch swing with his cowboy boot and set the swing to moving oddly. “And what are you?” he asked Garp. “You the man of the house? Or the court eunuch?”

  Garp handed the man a note.

  There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.

  But it was August; that was the wrong note.

  “What's this shit?” the man said. And Garp handed him another note, the first one to fly out of his pocket.

  Don't be upset. My mother will be back very soon. There are other women here. Would you like to see them?

  “Fuck your mother!” the man said. He started toward the big screen door. “Laurel!” he screamed. “You in there? You bitch!”

  But it was Jenny Fields who met him in the doorway.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I know who you are,” the man said. “I recognize the dumb uniform. My Laurel's not your type, sweetie; she likes to fuck.”

  “Perhaps not with you,” said Jenny Fields.

  Whatever abuse the man in the SHAPE UP! T-shirt was then prepared to deliver to Jenny Fields went unsaid. Roberta Muldoon threw a cross-body block on the surprised man, hitting him from behind and a little to one side of the backs of his knees. It was a flagrant clip, worthy of a fifteen-yard penalty in Roberta's days as a Philadelphia Eagle. The man hit the gray boards of the porch deck with such force that the hanging flowerpots were set swinging. He tried but could not get up. He appeared to have suffered a knee injury common to the sport of football—the very reason, in fact, why clipping was a fifteen-yard penalty. The man was not plucky enough to hurl further abuse, at anyone, from his back; he lay with a calm, moonlike expression upon his face, which whitened slightly in his pain.

  “That was too hard, Roberta,” Jenny said.

  “I'll get Laurel,” Roberta said, sheepishly, and she went inside. In Roberta's heart of hearts, Garp and Jenny knew, she was more feminine than anyone; but in her body of bodies, she was a highly trained rock.

  Garp had found another note and he dropped it on the New York man's chest, right where it said SHAPE UP! It was a note Garp had many duplicates of.

  Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

  “My name is Harold,” the man said. “Too bad about your jaw.”

  Garp found a pencil and wrote another note.

  Too bad about your knee, Harold.

  Laurel was fetched.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “You found me!”

  “I don't think I can drive the fucking car,” Harold said. Out on Ocean Lane the man's sport car still chugged like an animal interested in eating sand.

  “I can drive, baby,” Laurel said. “You just never let me.

  “Now I'll let you,” Harold groaned. “Believe me.”

  “Oh, baby,” Laurel said.

  Roberta and Garp carried the man to th
e car. “I think I really need Laurel,” the man confided to them. “Fucking bucket seats,” the man complained, when they had gingerly squeezed him in. Harold was large for his car. It was the first time in what seemed like years, to Garp, that Garp had been this near to an automobile. Roberta put her hand on Garp's shoulder, but Garp turned away.

  “I guess Harold needs me,” Laurel told Jenny Fields, and gave a little shrug.

  “But why does she need him?” said Jenny Fields, to no one in particular, as the little car drove away. Garp had wandered off. Roberta, punishing herself for her momentarily lapsed femininity, went to find Duncan and mother him.

  Helen was talking on the phone to the Fletchers, Harrison and Alice, who wanted to come visit. That might help us, Helen thought. She was right, and it must have boosted Helen's confidence in herself—to be right about something again.

  The Fletchers stayed a week. There was at last a child for Duncan to play with, even if it was not his age and not his sex; it was, at least, a child who knew about his eye, and Duncan lost most of his self-consciousness about the eye patch. When the Fletchers left, he was more willing to go to the beach by himself, even at those times of the day when he might encounter other children—who might ask him or, of course, tease him.

  Harrison provided Helen with a confidant, as he had been for her before; she was able to tell Harrison things about Michael Milton that were simply too raw to tell Garp, and yet she needed to say them. She needed to talk about her anxieties for her marriage, now; and how she was dealing with the accident so differently from Garp. Harrison suggested another child. Get pregnant, he advised. Helen confided that she was no longer taking the pills, but she did not tell Harrison that Garp had not slept with her—not since it had happened. She didn't really need to tell Harrison that; Harrison noted the separate rooms.

  Alice encouraged Garp to stop the silly notes. He could talk if he tried, if he wasn't so vain about how he sounded. If she could talk, certainly he could spit the words out, Alice reasoned—teeth wired together, delicate tongue, and all; he could at least try.