by John Irving
This frustrated Garp. At bedtime his engines were almost cold. Lovemaking seemed to rev him up and rouse him to moods of marathon talk, eating, all-night reading, general prowling about. In this period he rarely tried to write, though he would sometimes write messages to himself about what he would write later.
But not this night. He instead pulled back the covers and watched Helen sleep; then he covered her again. He went to Walt's room and watched him. Duncan was sleeping at Mrs. Ralph's; when Garp shut his eyes he saw a glow on the suburban horizon, which he imagined was the dreaded house of Ralph--in flames.
Garp watched Walt, and this calmed him. Garp relished having such close scrutiny of the child; he lay beside Walt and smelled the boy's fresh breath, remembering when Duncan's breath had turned sour in his sleep in that grownup's way. It had been an unpleasant sensation for Garp, shortly after Duncan turned six, to smell that Duncan's breath was stale and faintly foul in his sleep. It was as if the process of decay, of slowly dying, was already begun in him. This was Garp's first awareness of the mortality of his son. There appeared with this odor the first discolorations and stains on Duncan's perfect teeth. Perhaps it was just that Duncan was Garp's firstborn child, but Garp worried more about Duncan than he worried about Walt--even though a five-year-old seems more prone (than a ten-year-old) to the usual childhood accidents. And what are they? Garp wondered. Being hit by cars? Choking to death on peanuts? Being stolen by strangers? Cancer, for example, was a stranger.
There was so much to worry about, when worrying about children, and Garp worried so much about everything; at times, especially in these throes of insomnia, Garp thought himself to be psychologically unfit for parenthood. Then he worried about that, too, and felt all the more anxious for his children. What if their most dangerous enemy turned out to be him?
He soon fell asleep beside Walt, but Garp was a fearful dreamer; he was not asleep for long. Soon he was moaning; his armpit hurt. He woke up suddenly, Walt's little fist was snagged in his armpit hair. Walt was moaning, too. Garp untangled himself from the whimpering child, who seemed to Garp to be suffering the same dream Garp had suffered--as if Garp's trembling body had communicated Garp's dream to Walt. But Walt was having his own nightmare.
It would not have occurred to Garp that his instructional story of the war dog, the teasing cat, and the inevitable killer truck could have been terrifying to Walt. But in his dream Walt saw the great abandoned army truck, more the size and shape of a tank, guns and inexplicable tools and evil-looking attachments all over it--the windshield was a slit no bigger than a letter slot. It was all black, of course.
The dog who was tied to the truck was the size of a pony, though leaner and much more cruel. He was loping, in slow motion, toward the end of the alley, his weak-looking chain spiraling behind him. The chain hardly looked strong enough to hold back the dog. At the end of the alley, with his legs all buttery and stumbling over himself, hopelessly clumsy and unable to flee, little Walt bumbled in circles, but he couldn't seem to get himself going--to get himself away from that terrible dog. When the chain snapped, the great truck lurched forward as if someone had started it, and the dog was on him. Walt grabbed the dog's fur, sweaty and coarse (his father's armpit), but somehow he lost his grip. The dog was at his throat but Walt was running again, into the street, where trucks like the abandoned army truck rolled heavily past, their massive rear wheels in rows stacked together like giant doughnuts on their sides. And because of the mere gun slits (for windshields) the drivers couldn't see, of course; they couldn't see little Walt.
Then his father kissed him and Walt's dream slipped away, for now. He was somewhere safe again; he could smell his father and feel his father's hands, and he heard his father say, "It's just a dream, Walt."
* * *
--
In Garp's dream, he and Duncan had been riding on an airplane. Duncan had to go to the bathroom. Garp pointed down the aisle; there were doors down there, a small kitchen, the pilot's cabin, the lavatory. Duncan wanted to be taken there, to be shown which door, but Garp was cross with him.
"You're ten years old, Duncan," Garp said. "You can read. Or ask the stewardess." Duncan crossed his knees and sulked. Garp shoved the child into the aisle. "Grow up, Duncan," he said. "It's one of those doors down there. Go on."
Moodily, the child walked down the aisle toward the doors. A stewardess smiled at him and rumpled his hair as he passed her, but Duncan, typically, would ask nothing. He got to the end of the aisle and glared back at Garp; Garp waved to him, impatiently. Duncan shrugged his shoulders, helplessly. Which door?
Exasperated, Garp stood up. "Try one!" he shouted down the aisle to Duncan, and people looked at Duncan standing there. Duncan was embarrassed and opened a door immediately--the one nearest him. He gave a quick, surprised, but uncritical look back to his father before he seemed to be drawn through the door he'd opened. The door slammed itself after Duncan. The stewardess screamed. The plane gave a little dip in altitude, then corrected itself. Everyone looked out the windows; some people fainted, some threw up. Garp ran down the aisle, but the pilot and another official-looking person prevented Garp from opening the door.
"It should always be kept locked, you stupid bitch!" the pilot shouted to the sobbing stewardess.
"I thought it was locked!" she wailed.
"Where's it go?" Garp cried. "God, where's it go?" He saw that nothing was written on any of the doors.
"I'm sorry, sir," the pilot said. "It couldn't be helped." But Garp shoved past him, he bent a plainclothesman against the back of a seat, he smacked the stewardess out of the aisle. When he opened the door, Garp saw that it went outside--into the rushing sky--and before he could cry aloud for Duncan, Garp was sucked through the open door and into the heavens, where he hurtled after his son.
11
MRS. RALPH
If Garp could have been granted one vast and naive wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both.
After Garp and Helen made love, and Helen fell asleep--after the dreams--Garp got dressed. When he sat on his bed to tie his track shoes, he sat on Helen's leg and woke her up. She reached out her hand to touch him, then felt his running shorts.
"Where are you going?" she asked him.
"To check on Duncan," he said. Helen stretched up on her elbows, she looked at her watch. It was after one in the morning and she knew Duncan was at Ralph's house.
"How are you going to check on Duncan?" she asked Garp.
"I don't know," Garp said.
* * *
--
Like a gunman hunting his victim, like the child molester the parent dreads, Garp stalks the sleeping spring suburbs, green and dark; the people snore and wish and dream, their lawn mowers at rest; it is too cool for their air conditioners to be running. A few windows are open, a few refrigerators are humming. There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
Garp moves lightly along the street; he wants to meet no one. His running shoes are loosely laced, his track shorts flap; he hasn't worn a jock because he hasn't planned to run. Though the spring air is cool, he wears no shirt. In the blackened houses an occasional dog snorfles as Garp passes by. Fresh from lovemaking, Garp imagines that his scent is as keen as a cut strawberry. He knows the dogs can smell him.
These are well-policed suburbs and for a moment Garp is apprehensive that he might be caught--in violation of some unwritten dress code, at least guilty of carrying no identification. He hurries, convinced he's coming to Duncan's aid, rescuing his son from the randy Mrs. Ralph.
A young woman on an
unlighted bicycle almost collides with him, her hair floating behind her, her knees bare and shiny, her breath striking Garp as a startling mixture of a fresh-cut lawn and cigarettes. Garp crouches--she cries out and wobbles her bike around him; she stands up on her pedals and pumps fast away from him, not looking back. Perhaps she thinks he is a would-be exhibitionist--there with his torso and legs bare, ready to drop his shorts. Garp thinks she is coming from some place she shouldn't have been; she is headed for trouble, he imagines. But, thinking of Duncan and Mrs. Ralph, Garp has trouble on his mind at this hour.
When Garp first sees Ralph's house, he believes it should be given the Light of the Block award; every window is glaring, the front door is open, the cancerous television is violently loud. Garp suspects Mrs. Ralph is having a party, but as he creeps closer--her lawn festooned with dog messes and mangled sports equipment--he feels the house is deserted. The television's lethal rays pulsate through the living room, clogged with piles of shoes and clothes; and crammed against the sagging couch are the casual bodies of Duncan and Ralph, half in their sleeping bags, asleep (of course), but looking as if the television has murdered them. In the sickly TV light their faces look drained of blood.
But where is Mrs. Ralph? Out for the evening? Gone to bed with all the lights on and the door open, leaving the boys to be bathed by the television? Garp wonders if she's remembered to shut the oven off. The living room is pockmarked with ashtrays; Garp fears for cigarettes still smoldering. He stays behind the hedges and slinks to the kitchen window, sniffing for gas.
There is a litter of dishes in the sink, a bottle of gin on the kitchen table, the sour smell of slashed limes. The cord to the overhead light, at one time too short, has been substantially lengthened by one sheer leg and hip of a woman's pair of panty hose--severed up the middle, the whereabouts of the other half unclear. The nylon foot, spotted with translucent stains of grease, dangles in the breeze above the gin. There is nothing burning that Garp can smell, unless there's a slow fire under the cat, who lies neatly on top of the stove, artfully spread between burners, its chin resting on the handle of a heavy skillet, its furry belly warmed by the pilot lights. Garp and the cat stare at each other. The cat blinks.
But Garp believes that Mrs. Ralph hasn't the necessary concentration to turn herself into a cat. Her home--her life--in utter disarray, the woman appears to have abandoned ship, or perhaps passed out upstairs. Is she in bed? Or in the bathtub, drowned? And where is the beast whose dangerous droppings have made a mine field out of the lawn?
Just then there is a thunderous approach down the back staircase of a heavy, falling body that bashes open the stairway entrance door to the kitchen, startling the cat into flight, skidding the greasy iron skillet to the floor. Mrs. Ralph sits bare-assed and wincing on the linoleum, a kimono-style robe wide open and roughly tugged above her thick waist, a miraculously unspilled drink in her hand. She looks at the drink, surprised, and sips it; her large, down-pointing breasts shine--they slouch across her freckled chest as she leans back on her elbows and burps. The cat, in a corner of the kitchen, yowls at her, complaining.
"Oh, shut up, Titsy," Mrs. Ralph says to the cat. But when she tries to get up, she groans and lies down flat on her back. Her pubic hair is wet and glistens at Garp; her belly, furrowed with stretch marks, looks as white and parboiled as if Mrs. Ralph has been underwater for a long time. "I'll get you out of here if it's the last thing I do," Mrs. Ralph tells the kitchen ceiling, though Garp assumes she's speaking to the cat. Perhaps she's broken an ankle and is too drunk to feel it, Garp thinks; perhaps she's broken her back.
Garp glides alongside the house to the open front door. He calls inside. "Anybody home?" he shouts. The cat bolts between his legs and is gone outside. Garp waits. He hears grunts from the kitchen--the strange sounds of flesh slipping.
"Well, as I live and breathe," says Mrs. Ralph, veering into the doorway, her robe of faded flowers more or less drawn together; somewhere, she's ditched her drink.
"I saw all the lights on and thought there might be trouble," Garp mumbles.
"You're too late," Mrs. Ralph tells him. "Both boys are dead. I should never have let them play with that bomb." She probes Garp's unchanging face for any signs of a sense of humor there, but she finds him rather humorless on this subject. "Okay, you want to see the bodies?" she asks. She pulls him toward her by the elastic waistband of his running shorts. Garp, aware he's not wearing a jock, stumbles quickly after his pants, bumping into Mrs. Ralph, who lets him go with a snap and wanders into the living room. Her odor confuses him--like vanilla spilled in the bottom of a deep, damp paper bag.
Mrs. Ralph seizes Duncan under his arms and with astonishing strength lifts him in his sleeping bag to the mountainous, lumpy couch; Garp helps her lift Ralph, who's heavier. They arrange the boys, foot to foot on the couch, tucking their sleeping bags around them and setting pillows under their heads. Garp turns off the TV and Mrs. Ralph stumbles through the room, killing lights, gathering ashtrays. They are like a married couple, cleaning up after a party. "Night-y night!" Mrs. Ralph whispers to the suddenly dark living room, as Garp trips over a hassock, groping his way toward the kitchen lights. "You can't go yet," Mrs. Ralph hisses to him. "You've got to help me get someone out of here." She takes his arm, drops an ashtray; her kimono opens wide. Garp, bending to pick up the ashtray, brushes one of her breasts with his hair. "I've got this lummox up in my bedroom," she tells Garp, "and he won't go. I can't make him leave."
"A lummox?" Garp says.
"He's a real oaf," says Mrs. Ralph, "a fucking wingding."
"A wingding?" Garp says.
"Yes, please make him go," she asks Garp. She pulls out the elastic waistband of his shorts again, and this time she takes an unconcealed look. "God, you don't wear too much, do you?" she asks him. "Aren't you cold?" She lays her hand flat on his bare stomach. "No, you're not," she says, shrugging.
Garp edges away from her. "Who is he?" Garp asks, fearing he might get involved in evicting Mrs. Ralph's former husband from the house.
"Come on, I'll show you," she whispers. She draws him up the back staircase through a narrow channel that passes between the piled laundry and enormous sacks of pet food. No wonder she fell down here, he thinks.
In Mrs. Ralph's bedroom Garp looks immediately at the sprawled black Labrador retriever on Mrs. Ralph's undulating water bed. The dog rolls listlessly on his side and thumps his tail. Mrs. Ralph mates with her dog, Garp thinks, and she can't get him out of her bed. "Come on, boy," Garp says. "Get out of here." The dog thumps his tail harder and pees a little.
"Not him," Mrs. Ralph says, giving Garp a terrific shove; he catches his balance on the bed, which sloshes. The great dog licks his face. Mrs. Ralph is pointing to an easy chair at the foot of the bed, but Garp first sees the young man reflected in Mrs. Ralph's dressing-table mirror. Sitting naked in the chair, he is combing out the blond end of his thin ponytail, which he holds over his shoulder and sprays with one of Mrs. Ralph's aerosol cans. His belly and thighs have the same slick buttered look that Garp saw on the flesh and fur of Mrs. Ralph, and his young cock is as lean and arched as the backbone of a whippet.
"Hey, how you doing?" the kid says to Garp.
"Fine, thank you," Garp says.
"Get rid of him," says Mrs. Ralph.
"I've been trying to get her to just relax, you know?" the kid asks Garp. "I'm trying to get her to just sort of go with it, you know?"
"Don't let him talk to you," Mrs. Ralph says. "He'll bore the shit out of you."
"Everyone's so tense," the kid tells Garp; he turns in the chair, leans back, and puts his feet on the water bed; the dog licks his long toes. Mrs. Ralph kicks his legs off the bed. "You see what I mean?" the kid asks Garp.
"She wants you to leave," Garp says.
"You her husband?" the kid asks.
"That's right," says Mrs. Ralph, "and he'll pull your scrawny little prick off if you don't get out of here."
"You better go," Garp te
lls him. "I'll help you find your clothes."
The kid shuts his eyes, appears to meditate. "He's really great at that shit," Mrs. Ralph tells Garp. "All this kid's good for is shutting his damn eyes."
"Where are your clothes?" Garp asks the boy. Perhaps he's seventeen or eighteen, Garp thinks. Maybe he's old enough for college, or a war. The boy dreams on and Garp gently shakes him by the shoulder.
"Don't touch me, man," the boy says, eyes still closed. There is something foolishly threatening in his voice that makes Garp draw back and look at Mrs. Ralph. She shrugs.
"That's what he said to me, too," she says. Like her smiles, Garp notices, Mrs. Ralph's shrugs are instinctual and sincere. Garp grabs the boy's ponytail and tugs it across his throat and around to the back of his neck; he snaps the boy's head into the cradle of his arm and holds him tightly there. The kid's eyes open.
"Get your clothes, okay?" Garp tells him.
"Don't touch me," the boy repeats.
"I am touching you," Garp says.
"Okay, okay," says the boy. Garp lets him get up. The boy is several inches taller than Garp, but easily ten pounds lighter. He looks for his clothes but Mrs. Ralph has already found the long purple caftan, absurdly heavy with brocade. The boy climbs into it like armor.
"It was nice balling you," he tells Mrs. Ralph, "but you should learn to relax more." Mrs. Ralph laughs so harshly that the dog stops wagging his tail.
"You should go back to day one," she tells the kid, "and learn everything all over again, from the beginning." She stretches out on the water bed beside the Labrador, who lolls his head across her stomach. "Oh, cut it out, Bill!" she tells the dog crossly.
"She's very unrelaxed," the kid informs Garp.
"You don't know shit about how to relax anybody," Mrs. Ralph says.
Garp steers the young man out of the room and down the treacherous back staircase, through the kitchen to the open front door.