by John Irving
But in Garp's dream, Garp could not wake the child from this one. Duncan looked stoically over his shoulder at his father, a silent and bravely doomed expression on his beautiful young face. Duncan was appearing very grown-up lately. Duncan's look was a secret between Duncan and Garp: that they both knew it was not a dream, and that Walt could not be helped.
"Wake me up!" Walt cried, but the long file of children was disappearing into the bomb shelter. Twisting in Duncan's grip (Walt came to about the height of Duncan's elbow), Walt looked back at his father. "I'm having a dream!" Walt screamed, as if to convince himself. Garp could do nothing; he said nothing; he made no attempt to follow them--down these last stairs. And the dropping plaster coated everything white. The bombs kept falling.
"You're having a dream!" Garp screamed after little Walt. "It's just a bad dream!" he cried, though he knew he was lying.
Then Helen would kick him and he'd wake up.
Perhaps Helen feared that Garp's run-amuck imagination would turn away from Walt and turn on her. Because if Garp had given half the worry to Helen that he seemed compelled to give to Walt, Garp might have realized that something was going on.
Helen thought she was in control of what was going on; she at least had controlled how it began (opening her office door, as usual, to the slouching Michael Milton, and bidding him enter her room). Once inside, she closed the door behind him and kissed him quickly on the mouth, holding his slim neck so that he couldn't even escape for breath, and grinding her knee between his legs; he kicked over the wastebasket and dropped his notebook.
"There's nothing more to discuss," Helen said, taking a breath. She raced her tongue across his upper lip; Helen was trying to decide if she liked his mustache. She decided she liked it; or, at least, she liked it for now. "We'll go to your apartment. Nowhere else," she told him.
"It's across the river," he said.
"I know where it is," she said. "Is it clean?"
"Of course," he said. "And it's got a great view of the river."
"I don't care about the view," Helen said. "I want it clean."
"It's pretty clean," he said. "I can clean it better."
"We can only use your car," she said.
"I don't have a car," he said.
"I know you don't," Helen said. "You'll have to get one."
He was smiling now; he'd been surprised, but now he was feeling sure of himself again. "Well, I don't have to get one now, do I?" he asked, nuzzling his mustache against her neck; he touched her breasts. Helen unattached herself from his embrace.
"Get one whenever you want," she said. "We'll never use mine, and I won't be seen walking with you all over town, or riding on the buses. If anyone knows about this, it's over. Do you understand?" She sat down at her desk, and he did not feel invited to walk around her desk to touch her; he sat in the chair her students usually sat in.
"Sure, I understand," he said.
"I love my husband and will never hurt him," Helen told him. Michael Milton knew better than to smile.
"I'll get a car, right away," he said.
"And clean your apartment, or have it cleaned," she said.
"Absolutely," he said. Now he dared to smile, a little. "What kind of car do you want me to get?" he asked her.
"I don't care about that," she told him. "Just get one that runs; get one that isn't in the garage all the time. And don't get one with bucket seats. Get one with a long seat in front." He looked more surprised and puzzled than ever, so she explained to him: "I want to be able to lie down, comfortably, across the front seat," she said. "I'll put my head in your lap so that no one will see me sitting up beside you. Do you understand?"
"Don't worry," he said, smiling again.
"It's a small town," Helen said. "No one must know."
"It's not that small a town," Michael Milton said, confidently.
"Every town is a small town," Helen said, "and this one is smaller than you think. Do you want me to tell you?"
"Tell me what?" he asked her.
"You're sleeping with Margie Tallworth," Helen said. "She's in my Comp. Lit. 205; she's a junior," Helen said. "And you see another very young undergraduate--she's in Dirkson's English 150; I think she's a freshman, but I don't know if you've slept with her. Not for lack of trying, if you haven't," Helen added. "To my knowledge you've not touched any of your fellow graduate students; not yet," Helen said. "But there's surely someone I've missed, or there has been."
Michael Milton was both sheepish and proud at the same time, and the usual command he held over his expressions escaped him so completely that Helen didn't like the expression she saw on his face and she looked away.
"That's how small this town, and every town, is," Helen said. "If you have me," she told him, "you can't have any of those others. I know what young girls notice, and I know how much they're inclined to say."
"Yes," Michael Milton said; he appeared ready to take notes.
Helen suddenly thought of something, and she looked momentarily startled. "You do have a driver's license?" she asked.
"Oh yes!" Michael Milton said. They both laughed, and Helen relaxed again; but when he came around her desk to kiss her, she shook her head and waved him back.
"And you won't ever touch me here," she said. "There will be nothing intimate in this office. I don't lock my door. I don't even like to have it shut. Please open it, now," she asked him, and he did as he was told.
He got a car, a huge Buick Roadmaster, the old kind of station wagon--with real wooden slats on the side. It was a 1951 Buick Dynaflow, heavy and shiny with pre-Korea chrome and real oak. It weighed 5,550 pounds, or almost three tons. It held seven quarts of oil and nineteen gallons of gasoline. Its original price was $2,850 but Michael Milton picked it up for less than six hundred dollars.
"It's a straight-eight cylinder, three-twenty cubic, power steering, with a single-throat Carter carb," the salesman told Michael. "It's not too badly rusted."
In fact, it was the dull, inconspicuous color of clotted blood, more than six feet wide and seventeen feet long. The front seat was so long and deep that Helen could lie across it, almost without having to bend her knees--or without having to put her head in Michael Milton's lap, though she did this anyway.
She did not put her head in his lap because she had to; she liked her view of the dashboard, and being close to the old smell of the maroon leather of the big, slick seat. She put her head in his lap because she liked feeling Michael's leg stiffen and relax, his thigh shifting just slightly between the brake and the accelerator. It was a quiet lap to put your head in because the car had no clutch; the driver needed to move just one leg, and just occasionally. Michael Milton thoughtfully carried his loose change in his left front pocket, so there were only the soft wales of his corduroy slacks, which made a faint impression on the skin of Helen's cheek--and sometimes his rising erection would touch her ear, or reach up into the hair on the back of her neck.
Sometimes she imagined taking him into her mouth while they drove across town in the big car with the gaping chrome grille like the mouth of a feeding fish--Buick Eight in script across the teeth. But that, Helen knew, would not be safe.
The first indication that the whole thing might not be safe was when Margie Tallworth dropped Helen's Comp. Lit. 205, without so much as a note of explanation concerning what she might not have liked about the course. Helen feared it was not the course that Margie hadn't liked, and she called the young Miss Tallworth into her office to ask her for an explanation.
Margie Tallworth, a junior, knew enough about school to know that no explanation was required; up to a certain point in any semester, a student was free to drop any course without the instructor's permission. "Do I have to have a reason?" the girl asked Helen, sullenly.
"No, you don't," Helen said. "But if you had a reason, I just wanted to hear it."
"I don't have to have a reason," Margie Tallworth said. She held Helen's gaze longer than most students could hold it; then she got up t
o leave. She was pretty and small and rather well dressed for a student, Helen thought. If there was any consistency to Michael Milton's former girl friend and his present taste, it appeared only that he liked women to wear nice clothes.
"Well, I'm sorry it didn't work out," Helen said, truthfully, as Margie was leaving; she was still fishing for what the girl might actually know.
She knew, Helen thought, and quickly accused Michael.
"You've blown it already," she told him coldly, because she could speak coldly to him--over the phone. "Just how did you drop Margie Tallworth?"
"Very gently," Michael Milton said, smugly. "But a drop is a drop, no matter how different the ways of doing it are." Helen did not appreciate it when he attempted to instruct her--except sexually; she indulged the boy that, and he seemed to need to be dominant there. That was different for her, and she didn't really mind. He was sometimes rough, but not ever dangerous, she thought; and if she firmly resisted something, he stopped. Once she had had to tell him, "No! I don't like that, I won't do that." But she had added, "Please," because she wasn't that sure of him. He had stopped; he had been forceful with her, but in another way--in a way that was all right with her. It was exciting that she couldn't trust him completely. But not trusting him to be silent was another matter; if she knew he had talked about her, that would be that.
"I didn't tell her anything," Michael insisted. "I said, 'Margie, it's all over,' or something like that. I didn't even tell her there was another woman, and I certainly said nothing about you."
"But she's probably heard you talk about me, before," Helen said. "Before this started, I mean."
"She never liked your course, anyway," Michael said. "We did talk about that once."
"She never liked the course?" Helen said. This truly surprised her.
"Well, she's not very bright," Michael said, impatiently.
"She'd better not know," Helen said. "I mean it: you better find out."
But he found out nothing. Margie Tallworth refused to speak to him. He tried to tell her, on the phone, that it was all because an old girl friend had come back to him--she had arrived from out of town; she'd had no place to stay; one thing had led to another. But Margie Tallworth had hung up on him before he could polish the story.
Helen smoked a little more. She watched Garp anxiously for a few days--and once she felt actual guilt, when she made love to Garp; she felt guilty that she had made love to him not because she wanted to but because she wanted to reassure him, if he had been thinking that anything was wrong.
He hadn't been thinking, not much. Or: he had thought, but only once, about the bruises on the small, tight backs of Helen's thighs; though he was strong, Garp was a very gentle man with his children and his wife. He also knew what fingermark bruises looked like because he was a wrestler. It was a day or so later that he noticed the same small fingermark bruises on the backs of Duncan's arms--just where Garp held him when Garp wrestled with the boy--and Garp concluded that he gripped the people he loved harder than he meant to. He concluded that the fingermarks on Helen were also his.
He was too vain a man to be easily jealous. And the name he had woken with--on his lips, one morning--had eluded him. There were no more papers by Michael Milton around the house, keeping Helen up at night. In fact, she was going to bed earlier and earlier; she needed her rest.
As for Helen, she developed a fondness for the bare, sharp shaft of the Volvo's stick shift; its bite at the end of the day, driving home from her office, felt good against the heel of her hand, and she often pressed against it until she felt it was only a hair away from the pressure necessary to break her skin. She could bring tears to her eyes, this way, and it made her feel clean again, when she arrived home--when the boys would wave and shout at her, from the window where the TV was; and when Garp would announce what dinner he had prepared for them all, when Helen walked into the kitchen.
Margie Tallworth's possible knowledge had frightened Helen, because although Helen had said to Michael--and to herself--that it would be over the instant anyone knew, Helen now knew that it would be more difficult to end than she had first imagined. She hugged Garp in his kitchen and hoped for Margie Tallworth's ignorance.
Margie Tallworth was ignorant, but she was not ignorant of Michael Milton's relationship with Helen. She was ignorant of many things but she knew about that. She was ignorant in that she thought her own shallow infatuation with Michael Milton had "surpassed," as she would say, "the sexual"; whereas, she assumed, Helen was merely amusing herself with Michael. In truth, Margie Tallworth had absolutely wallowed in, as she would say, "the sexual"; it is difficult, in fact, to know what else her relationship with Michael Milton had been about. But she was not altogether wrong in assuming that this was what Helen's relationship with Michael Milton was also about. Margie Tallworth was ignorant in that she assumed too much, too much of the time; but in this case she had assumed correctly.
Back when Michael Milton and Helen were actually talking about Michael's "work," Margie assumed--even then--that they were fucking. Margie Tallworth did not believe there was another kind of relationship that one could have with Michael Milton. In this one way, she was not ignorant. She may have known the kind of relationship Helen had with Michael before Helen knew it herself.
And through the one-way glass of the fourth-floor ladies' room, in the English and Literature Building, it was possible for Margie Tallworth to look through the tinted windshield of the three-ton Buick, gliding like the coffin of a king out of the parking lot. Margie could see Mrs. Garp's slender legs stretched along the long front seat. It was a peculiar way to ride in a car with other than the best of friends.
Margie knew their habits better than she understood her own; she took long walks, to try to forget Michael Milton, and to familiarize herself with the whereabouts of Helen's house. She was soon familiar with the habits of Helen's husband, too, because Garp's habits were much more constant than anyone's: he padded back and forth, from room to room, in the mornings; perhaps he was out of a job. That fitted Margie Tallworth's assumptions of the likely cuckold: a man who was out of work. At midday he burst out the door in track clothes and ran away; miles later, he returned and read his mail, which nearly always came when he was gone. Then he padded back and forth in the house again; he undressed, in pieces, on the way to the shower, and he was slow to dress when he was out of the shower. One thing did not fit her image of the cuckold: Garp had a good body. And why did he spend so much time in the kitchen? Margie Tallworth wondered if perhaps he was an unemployed cook.
Then his children came home and they broke Margie Tallworth's soft little heart. He looked quite nice when he played with his children, which also fitted Margie's assumptions of what a cuckold was like: someone who had witless good fun with his children while his wife was out getting planked. "Planked" was also a word that the wrestlers Garp knew used, and they had used it back at those blood-and-blue days at Steering, too. Someone was always bragging about planking a wet, split beaver.
So one day, when Garp burst out the door in his track clothes, Margie Tallworth waited only as long as it took him to run away; then she went up on the Garps' porch with a perfumed note, which she intended to drop in his mail. She had thought very carefully that he would have time to read the note and (hopefully) recover himself before his children came home. This was how she assumed such news was absorbed: suddenly! Then there was a reasonable period of recovery and one got ready to face the children. Here was another case of something Margie Tallworth was ignorant of.
The note itself had given her trouble because she was not good with words. And it was perfumed not by intention but simply because every piece of paper Margie Tallworth owned was perfumed; if she had thought about it, she would have realized perfume was inappropriate to this note, but that was another of the things she was ignorant of. Even her schoolwork was perfumed; when Helen had read Margie Tallworth's first essay for Comp. Lit. 205, she had cringed at its scent.
What Mar
gie's note to Garp said was:
Your Wife Is "Involved with" Michael Milton
Margie Tallworth would grow up to be the sort of person who said that someone "passed away" instead of died. Thus she sought delicacy with the words that Helen was "involved with" Michael Milton. And she had this sweetly smelling note in her hand, and she was poised on the Garps' porch with it, when it began to rain.
Nothing made Garp turn back from a run faster than rain. He hated getting his running shoes wet. He would run in the cold, and run in the snow, but when it rained, Garp ran home, swearing, and cooked for an hour in a foul-weather mood. Then he put on a poncho and caught the bus to the gym in time for wrestling practice. On the way, he picked up Walt from day care and took Walt to the gym with him; he called home when he got to the gym to see if Duncan was back from school. Sometimes he gave Duncan instructions, if the meal was still cooking, but usually he just cautioned Duncan about riding his bike and he quizzed him about emergency phone numbers: did Duncan know what to dial in case of fire, explosion, armed robbery, mayhem in the streets?
Then he wrestled, and after practice he popped Walt into the shower with himself; by the time he called home again, Helen was there to come pick them up.
Therefore, Garp did not like rain; although he enjoyed wrestling, rain complicated his simple plans. And Margie Tallworth was unprepared to see him suddenly panting and angry behind her on the porch.
"Aaahhh!" she cried; she clutched her scented note as tightly as if it were the main artery of an animal whose blood flow she wished she could stop.
"Hello," said Garp. She looked like a baby-sitter to him. He had trained himself off baby-sitters some time ago. He smiled at her with frank curiosity--that is all.
"Aaa," said Margie Tallworth; she couldn't speak. Garp looked at the crushed message in her hand; she shut her eyes and held the note out to him, as if she were putting her hand into a fire.