by John Irving
6
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER
When spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished "The Pension Grillparzer"; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues. Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a higher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.
"In this dirty-minded world," Jenny wrote, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore--or fast on your way to becoming one or the other." The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life's story together--the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.
"I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone," she wrote. "That made me a sexual suspect." And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniforms for a century.
"Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one," Jenny wrote. "That made me a sexual suspect, too." Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.
But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.
"Do you know how to drive?" Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn't ever learned; there had never been a need. "Well, I don't know how, either," she told him. "And besides, I'm working; I can't stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself."
It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. "Hey, how about us?" one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. "We're all prep school stuff."
Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny cafe table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp's knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. "I just went to a dent-hisht," she explained to him. "Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don't know whether it's open or shut."
"Sort of half and half," Garp said to her. But he thought: Oh, what the hell. He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make him feel like a sexual suspect. Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him; though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.
Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers' checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.
It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the source of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp's opinion, "Bath clap." By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. "I caught a dose of Boo's goo," he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn't dare seek his mother's professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn't caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been less angry with him.
"You'd think Americans would know a little simple hygiene!" Charlotte said furiously. "You should think of your mother! I'd expect you to have better taste. People who give it away for free to someone they hardly know--well, they should make you suspicious, shouldn't they?" Once again, Garp had been caught without a condom.
Thus Garp winced his way to Charlotte's personal physician, a hearty man named Thalhammer who was missing his left thumb. "And I was once left-handed," Herr Doktor Thalhammer told Garp. "But everything is surmountable if we have energy. We can learn anything we can set our minds to!" he said, with firm good cheer; he demonstrated for Garp how he could write the prescription, with an enviable penmanship, with his right hand. It was a simple and painless cure. In Jenny's day, at good old Boston Mercy, they would have given Garp the Valentine treatment and he'd have learned, more emphatically, how not all rich kids are clean kids.
He didn't write Helen about this, either.
His spirits slumped; spring wore on, the city opened in many small ways--like buds. But Garp felt he had walked Vienna out. He could barely get his mother to stop writing long enough to eat dinner with him. When he sought out Charlotte, her colleagues told him she was sick; she hadn't worked for weeks. For three Saturdays, Garp did not see her at the Naschmarkt. When he stopped her colleagues one May evening on the Karntnerstrasse, he saw they were reluctant to discuss Charlotte. The whore whose forehead appeared to have been pockmarked by a peach pit merely told Garp that Charlotte was sicker than she first thought. The young girl, Garp's age, with the misshapen lip and the half-knowledge of English, tried to explain to him. "Her sex is sick," she said.
That was a curious way to put it, Garp thought. Garp was not surprised to hear that anyone's sex was sick, but when he smiled at the remark, the young whore who spoke English frowned at him and walked away.
"You don't understand," said the overlush prostitute with the pockmark. "Forget Charlotte."
It was mid-June, and Charlotte had still not come back, when Garp called Herr Doktor Thalhammer and asked where he could find her. "I doubt that she wants to see anybody," Thalhammer told him, "but human beings can adjust to almost anything."
* * *
--
Very near Grinzing and the Vienna Woods, out in the nineteenth district where the whores don't go, Vienna looks like a village imitation of itself; in these suburbs, many of the streets are still cobblestoned and trees grow along the sidewalks. Unfamiliar with this part of the city, Garp rode the No. 38 Strassenbahn too far out the Grinzinger Allee; he had to walk back to the corner of Billrothstrasse and Rudolfinergasse to the hospital.
The Rudolfinerhaus is a private hospital in a city of socialized medicine; its old stone walls are the same Maria Theresa yellow as the palace at Schonbrunn, or the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Its own gardens are enclosed in its own courtyard, and it costs as much as almost any hospital in the United States. The Rudolfinerhaus does not normally provide pajamas for its patients, for example, because its patients usually prefer their own nightclothes. The well-to-do Viennese treat themselves to the luxury of being sick there--and most foreigners who are afraid of socialized medicine end up there, where they are shocked at the prices.
In June, when Garp went there, the hospital struck him as full of pretty young mothers who'd just delivered babies. But it was also full of well-off people who'd come there to get seriously well again, and it was partially full of well-off people, like Charlotte, who'd come there to die.
Charlotte had a private room because, she said, there was no reason to save her money now. Garp knew she was dying as soon as he saw her. She had lost almost thirty pounds. Garp saw that she wore what was left of her rings on her index and middle fingers; her other fingers were so shrunken that her rings would slide off. Charlotte was the color of the dull ice on the brack
ish Steering River. She did not appear very surprised to see Garp, but she was so heavily anesthetized that Garp imagined Charlotte was fairly unsurprised in general. Garp had brought a basket of fruit; since they had shopped together, he knew what Charlotte liked to eat, but she had a tube down her throat for several hours each day and it left her throat too sore to swallow anything but liquid. Garp ate a few cherries while Charlotte enumerated the parts of her body that had been removed. Her sex parts, she thought, and much of her digestive tract, and something that had to do with the process of elimination. "Oh, and my breasts, I think," she said, the whites of her eyes very gray and her hands held above her chest where she flattered herself to imagine her breasts used to be. To Garp it appeared that they had not touched her breasts; under the sheet, there was still something there. But he later thought that Charlotte had been such a lovely woman that she could hold her body in such a way as to inspire the illusion of breasts.
"Thank God I've got money," Charlotte said. "Isn't this a Class A place?"
Garp nodded. The next day he brought a bottle of wine; the hospital was very relaxed about liquor and visitors; perhaps this was one of the luxuries one paid for. "Even if I got out," Charlotte said, "what could I do? They cut my purse out." She tried to drink some wine, then fell asleep. Garp asked a nurse's aide to explain what Charlotte meant by her "purse," though he thought he knew. The nurse's aide was Garp's age, nineteen or maybe younger, and she blushed and looked away from him when she translated the slang.
A purse was a prostitute's word for her vagina.
"Thank you," Garp said.
Once or twice when he visited Charlotte he encountered her two colleagues, who were shy and girlish with Garp in the daylight of Charlotte's sunny room. The young one who spoke English was named Wanga; she had cut her lip that way as a child when she tripped while running home from the store with a jar of mayonnaise. "We were on a picnic going," she explained, "but my whole family had me instead to the hospital to bring."
The ripper, sulkish woman with the peach pit pockmark on her forehead, and the breasts like two full pails, did not offer to explain her scar; she was the notorious "Tina," for whom nothing was too "funny."
Occasionally Garp ran into Herr Doktor Thalhammer there, and once he walked with Thalhammer to Thalhammer's car; they happened to be leaving the hospital together. "Do you want a lift?" Thalhammer offered him, pleasantly. In the car was a pretty young schoolgirl whom Thalhammer introduced to Garp as his daughter. They all talked easily about Die Vereinigten Staaten and Thalhammer assured Garp it was no trouble to drive Garp all the way to his doorstep at the Schwindgasse. Thalhammer's daughter reminded Garp of Helen, but he could not even imagine asking to see the girl again; that her father had recently treated him for clap seemed to Garp to be an insurmountable awkwardness--despite Thalhammer's optimism that people can adjust to anything. Garp doubted that Thalhammer could have adjusted to that.
All around Garp, now, the city looked ripe with dying. The teeming parks and gardens reeked of decay to him, and the subject of the great painters in the great museums was always death. There were always cripples and old people riding the No. 38 Strassenbahn out to Grinzinger Allee, and the heady flowers planted along the pruned paths of the courtyard in the Rudolfinerhaus reminded Garp only of funeral parlors. He recalled the pensions he and Jenny had stayed in when they first arrived, over a year ago: the faded and unmatched wallpaper, the dusty bric-a-brac, the chipped china, the hinges crying for oil. "In the life of a man," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "his time is but a moment...his body a prey of worms...."
The young nurse's aide whom Garp had embarrassed by asking about Charlotte's "purse" was increasingly snotty to him. One day when he arrived early, before visitors were permitted, she asked him a little too aggressively what he was to Charlotte, anyway. A member of the family? She had seen Charlotte's other visitors--her gaudy colleagues--and she assumed Garp was just an old hooker's customer. "She's my mother," Garp said; he didn't know why, but he appreciated the shock of the young nurse's aide, and her subsequent respect.
"What did you tell them?" Charlotte whispered to him, a few days later. "They think you're my son." He confessed his lie; Charlotte confessed she had done nothing to correct it. "Thank you," she whispered. "It's nice to trick the swine. They think they're so superior." And mustering her former and fading lewdness, she said, "I'd let you have it once for free, if I still had the equipment. Maybe twice for half price," she said.
He was touched and cried in front of her.
"Don't be a baby," she said. "What am I to you, really?" When she was asleep, he read on her hospital chart that she was fifty-one.
She died a week later. When Garp went to her room, it was whisked clean, the bed stripped back, the windows wide open. When he asked for her, there was a nurse in charge of the floor whom he didn't recognize--an iron-gray maiden who kept shaking her head. "Fraulein Charlotte," Garp said. "She was Herr Doktor Thalhammer's patient."
"He has lots of patients," said the iron-gray maiden. She was consulting a list, but Garp did not know Charlotte's real name. Finally, he could think of no other way to identify her.
"The whore," he said. "She was a whore." The gray woman regarded him coolly; if Garp could detect no satisfaction in her expression, he could detect no sympathy either.
"The prostitute is dead," the old nurse said. Perhaps Garp only imagined that he heard a little triumph in her voice.
"One day, meine Frau," he said to her, "you will be dead, too."
And that, he thought--leaving the Rudolfinerhaus--was a properly Viennese thing to say. Take that, you old gray city, you dead bitch, he thought.
He went to his first opera that night; to his surprise, it was in Italian, and since he understood none of it, he took the whole performance to be a kind of religious service. He walked in the night to the lit spires of Saint Stephen's; the south tower of the cathedral, he read on some plaque, was started in the middle of the fourteenth century and completed in 1439. Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin. "In the life of a man," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "his time is but a moment...his fortune dark...."
In this mood Garp walked home on the Karntnerstrasse, where he met the notorious Tina. Her deep pockmark, harboring the neon of the city lights, was a greenish blue.
"Guten Abend, Herr Garp," she said. "Guess what?"
Tina explained that Charlotte had bought Garp a favor. The favor was that Garp could have Tina and Wanga for free; he could have them one at a time or both together, Tina explained. Together, Tina thought, was more interesting--and quicker. But perhaps Garp did not like both of them. Garp admitted that Wanga did not appeal to him; she was too close to his own age, and though he would never say this if she were here and her feelings could be hurt, he did not care for the way the mayonnaise jar had pulled her lip askew.
"Then you can have me twice," Tina said, cheerfully. "Once now, and once," she added, "after you've had a long time to catch your breath. Forget Charlotte," Tina said. Death happened to everyone, Tine explained. Even so, Garp politely declined the offer.
"Well, it's here," Tina said. "When you want it." She reached out and frankly cupped him in her warm palm; her big hand was an ample codpiece for him, but Garp only smiled and bowed to her--as the Viennese do--and walked home to his mother.
He enjoyed his slight pain. He took pleasure in this silly self-denial--and more pleasure in his imagination of Tina, he suspected, than he ever could have derived from her vaguely gross flesh. The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.
What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. "All that is body is as coursing waters," Garp remembered, "all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors." It was July when Garp went back to work on "The Pension Grillparzer." His mother was finishing up the manuscript that would s
oon change both their lives.
It was August when Jenny finished her book and announced that she was ready to travel, to at last see something of Europe--maybe Greece? she suggested. "Let's take the train somewhere," she said. "I always wanted to take the Orient Express. Where's it go?"
"From Paris to Istanbul, I think," Garp said. "But you take it, Mom. I've got too much work to do."
Tit for tat, Jenny had to admit. She was so sick of A Sexual Suspect that she couldn't even proofread it one more time. She didn't even know what to do with it, now; did one just go to New York and hand over one's life story to a stranger? She wanted Garp to read it, but she saw that Garp was at last engrossed in a task of his own; she felt she shouldn't bother him. Besides, she was unsure; a large part of her life story was his life story, too--she thought the story might upset him.
Garp worked through August on the conclusion of his short story, "The Pension Grillparzer." Helen, exasperated, wrote to Jenny. "Is Garp dead?" she asked. "Kindly send details." That Helen Holm is a bright girl, Jenny thought. Helen got more of an answer than she counted on. Jenny sent her a copy of the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect with a note explaining that this was what she'd been doing all year, and now Garp was writing something, too. Jenny said she would appreciate Helen's candid opinion of the manuscript. Perhaps, said Jenny, some of Helen's college teachers would know what one did with a finished book?
Garp relaxed, when he wasn't writing, by going to the zoo; it was a part of the great grounds and gardens surrounding the Schonbrunn Palace. It appeared to Garp that many of the buildings in the zoo were war ruins, three-quarters destroyed; they had been partially restored to house the animals. This gave Garp the eerie impression that the zoo still existed in Vienna's war period; it also interested him in the period. To fall asleep at night he took to reading some very specific, historical accounts of Vienna during the Nazi and the Russian occupations. This was not unrelated to the death themes that haunted his writing of "The Pension Grillparzer." Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the homes the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family--there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. He felt the holes from the machine-gun fire in the stone walls of the lobby of the apartment on the Schwindgasse.