by John Irving
"Ralph?" said Garp. "Ralph isn't here." Duncan tipped his fine jaw up and rolled his eyes; it was a gesture Helen had, too, and Duncan had her same lovely throat.
"Ralph is at his house," Duncan said, "and I am at my house and I would like to go spend the night at Ralph's house--with Ralph."
"Not on a school night," Garp said.
"It's Friday," Duncan said. "Jesus."
"Don't swear, Duncan," Garp said. "When your mother comes home from work, you can ask her." He was stalling, he knew; Garp was suspicious of Ralph--worse, he was afraid for Duncan to spend the night at Ralph's house, although Duncan had done it before. Ralph was an older boy whom Garp distrusted; also, Garp didn't like Ralph's mother--she went out in the evening and left the boys alone (Duncan had admitted that). Helen had once referred to Ralph's mother as "slatternly," a word that had always intrigued Garp (and a look, in women, that had its appeal to him). Ralph's father didn't live at home, so the "slatternly" look of Ralph's mother was enhanced by her status as a woman alone.
"I can't wait for Mom to get home," Duncan said. "Ralph's mother says she has to know before supper, or I can't come over." Supper was Garp's responsibility and the idea of it distracted him; he wondered what time it was. Duncan seemed to come home from school at no special time.
"Why not ask Ralph to spend the night here?" Garp said. A familiar ploy. Ralph usually spent the night with Duncan, thus sparing Garp his anxiety about the carelessness of Mrs. Ralph (he could never remember Ralph's last name).
"Ralph always spends the night here," Duncan said. "I want to stay there." And do what? Garp wondered. Drink, smoke dope, torture the pets, spy on the sloppy lovemaking of Mrs. Ralph? But Garp knew that Duncan was ten years old and very sane--very careful. The two boys probably enjoyed being alone in a house where Garp wasn't smiling over them, asking them if there was anything they wanted.
"Why not call Mrs. Ralph and ask her if you can wait until your mother comes home before you say whether you'll come or not?" Garp asked.
"Jesus, 'Mrs. Ralph'!" Duncan groaned. "Mom is just going to say, 'It's all right with me. Ask your father.' That's what she always says."
Smart kid, Garp thought. He was trapped. Short of blurting out that he was terrified Mrs. Ralph would kill them all by burning them up in the night when her cigarette, with which she slept, set fire to her hair, Garp had nothing more he could say. "Okay, go ahead," he said, sulkily. He didn't even know if Ralph's mother smoked. He simply disliked her, on sight, and he suspected Ralph--for no better reason than that the child was older than Duncan and therefore, Garp imagined, capable of corrupting Duncan in terrible ways.
Garp suspected most people to whom his wife and children were drawn; he had an urgent need to protect the few people he loved from what he imagined "everyone else" was like. Poor Mrs. Ralph was not the only victim perhaps slandered by his paranoid assumptions. I should get out more, Garp thought. If I had a job, he thought--a thought he had every day, and rethought every day, since he wasn't writing.
There was almost no job in the world that appealed to Garp, and certainly nothing he was qualified for; he was qualified, he knew, for very little. He could write; when he was writing, he believed he wrote very well. But one reason he thought about getting a job was that he felt he needed to know more about other people; he wanted to get over his distrust of them. A job would at least force him to come into contact--and if he weren't forced to be with other people, Garp would stay home.
It was for his writing, in the beginning, that he had never taken the idea of a job seriously. Now it was for his writing that he was thinking he needed a job. I am running out of people I can imagine, he thought, but perhaps it was really that there had never been many people he liked; and he hadn't written anything he liked in too many years.
"I'm going now!" Duncan called to him, and Garp stopped dreaming. The boy was wearing a bright orange rucksack on his back; a yellow sleeping bag was rolled and tied under the pack. Garp had chosen them both, for visibility.
"I'll give you a ride," Garp said, but Duncan rolled his eyes again.
"Mom has the car, Dad," he said, "and she's still at work."
Of course; Garp grinned foolishly. Then he saw that Duncan was going to take his bicycle and he called out the door to him. "Why don't you walk, Duncan?"
"Why?" Duncan said, exasperated.
So your spine won't be severed when a car driven by a crazed teenager, or a drunken man suffering a heart attack, swipes you off the street, Garp thought--and your wonderful, warm chest is cracked against the curbstone, your special skull split open when you land on the sidewalk, and some asshole wraps you in an old rug as if you were somebody's pet discovered in the gutter. Then the dolts from the suburbs come out and guess who owns it ("That green and white house on the corner of Elm and Dodge, I think"). Then someone drives you home, rings the bell and says to me, "Uh, sorry"; and pointing to the spillage in the bloody back seat, asks, "Is it yours?" But all Garp said was, "Oh, go ahead, Duncan, take the bike. Just be careful!"
He watched Duncan cross the street, pedal up the next block, look before he turned (Good boy; note the careful hand signal--but perhaps this is only for my benefit). It was a safe suburb of a small, safe city; comfortable green plots, one-family houses--mostly university families, with an occasional big house broken into apartments for graduate students. Ralph's mother, for example, appeared certain to be a graduate student forever, though she had a whole house to herself--and although she was older than Garp. Her former husband taught one of the sciences and presumably paid her tuition. Garp remembered that Helen had been told the man was living with a student.
Mrs. Ralph is probably a perfectly good person, Garp thought; she has a child, and she no doubt loves him. She is no doubt serious about wanting to do something with her life. If she were just more careful! Garp thought. You must be careful; people didn't realize. It's so easy to blow everything, he thought.
"Hello!" someone said, or he thought someone said. He looked around, but whoever had spoken to him was gone--or was never there. He realized he was barefoot (his feet were cold; it was an early spring day), standing on the sidewalk in front of his house, a phone book in his hand. He would have liked to go on imagining M. Neff and the business of marriage counseling, but he knew it was late--he had to prepare the evening meal and he hadn't even been shopping. A block away he could hear the hum of the engines that powered the big freezers in the supermarket (that was why they had moved into this neighborhood--so that Garp could walk to the store and shop while Helen took the car to work. Also, they were nearer to a park for him to run in). There were fans on the back of the supermarket and Garp could hear them sucking the still air out of the aisles and blowing faint food smells over the block. Garp liked it. He had a cook's heart.
He spent his day writing (or trying to write), running, and cooking. He got up early and fixed breakfast for himself and the children; nobody was home for lunch and Garp never ate that meal; he fixed dinner for his family every night. It was a ritual he loved, but the ambition of his cooking was controlled by how good a day he'd had writing, and how good a run he'd had. If the writing went poorly, he took it out on himself with a long, hard run; or, sometimes, a bad day with his writing would exhaust him so much that he could barely run a mile; then he tried to save the day with a splendid meal.
Helen could never tell what sort of day Garp had experienced by what he cooked for them; something special might mean a celebration, or it might mean that the food was the only thing that had gone well, that the cooking was the only labor keeping Garp from despair. "If you are careful," Garp wrote, "if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane."
Helen brought certain touches to the house, too, but Garp took no responsibilities for these: plants, for example; either Helen remembered them, or they died. When Garp saw that one appeared to be drooping, or was the slightest bit pale, he would whisk it out of the house and into the trash. Days later, Helen might ask, "Where is the red arronzo?"
"That foul thing," Garp would remark. "It had some disease. I saw worms on it. I caught it dropping its little spines all over the floor."
Thus Garp functioned at housekeeping.
In the house Garp found his yellow running shoes and put them on. He put the phone book away in a cabinet where he kept the heavy cooking gear (he stashed phone books all over the house--then would tear the house down to find the one he wanted). He put some olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; he chopped an onion while he waited for the oil to get hot. It was late to be starting supper; he hadn't even gone shopping. A standard tomato sauce, a little pasta, a fresh green salad, a loaf of his good bread. That way he could go to the market after he started the sauce and he'd only need to shop for greens. He hurried the chopping (now some fresh basil) but it was important not to throw anything into the skillet until the oil was just right, very hot but not smoking. There are some things about cooking, like writing, that you don't hurry, Garp knew, and he never hurried them.
When the phone rang, it made him so angry that he threw a handful of onions into the skillet and burned himself with the spattering oil. "Shit!" he cried; he kicked the cabinet beside the stove, snapping the little hinge on the cabinet door; a phone book slid out and he stared at it. He put all the onions and the fresh basil into the oil and lowered the flame. He ran his hand under cold water, and, reaching off-balance, wincing at the pain of the burn, he picked up the phone in his other hand.
(Those fakers, Garp thought. What qualifications could there be for marriage counseling? No doubt, he thought, it is one more thing that those simplistic shrinks claim expertise in.)
"You caught me right in the fucking middle of something," he snapped to the phone; he eyed the onions wilting in the hot oil. There was no one who could be calling whom he feared he might offend; this was one of several advantages of being unemployed. His editor, John Wolf, would only remark that Garp's manner of answering the phone simply confirmed his notion of Garp's vulgarity. Helen was used to how he answered the phone; and if the call were for Helen, her friends and colleagues already pictured Garp as rather bearish. If it were Ernie Holm, Garp would experience a momentary twinge; the coach always apologized too much, which embarrassed Garp. If it were his mother, Garp knew, she would holler back at him, "Another lie! You're never in the middle of anything. You live on the fringes." (Garp hoped it wasn't Jenny.) At the moment, there was no other woman who would have called him. Only if it were the day-care center, reporting an accident to little Walt; only if it were Duncan, calling to say that the zipper on his sleeping bag was broken, or that he'd just broken his leg, would Garp feel guilty for his bullying voice. One's children certainly have a right to catch one in the middle of something--they usually do.
"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 day-care 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 u
se 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 morals 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.