by John Irving
To Garp, Roberta's subject was the ticklish detail of sex reassignment, because Garp seemed interested and Roberta knew that Garp probably liked hearing about a problem so thoroughly removed from his own.
"I always knew I should have been a girl," she told Garp. "I dreamed about having love made to me, by a man, but in the dreams I was always a woman; I was never a man having love made to me by another man." There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta's references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine. There was even a bitchiness about Roberta, when she complained of the other troubled women who came to get well at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny Fields. "That damn lesbian crowd," Roberta said to Garp. "They're trying to make your mother into something she isn't."
"I sometimes think that's what Mom is for," Garp teased Roberta. "She makes people happy by letting them think she is something she isn't."
"Well, they tried to confuse me," Roberta said. "When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. 'Be gay,' they said. 'If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,' they told me. They were all cowards," Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.
Roberta's vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother's house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance--yet most of them he'd met seemed especially intolerant of each other. It was a kind of infighting that made no sense to Garp and he marveled at his mother sorting them all out, keeping them happy and out of each other's hair. Robert Muldoon, Garp knew, had spent several months in drag before his actual operation. He'd go off in the morning dressed as Robert Muldoon; he went out shopping for women's clothes, and almost no one knew that he paid for his sex change with the banquet fees he collected for the speeches he gave to boys' clubs and men's clubs. In the evenings, at Dog's Head Harbor, Robert Muldoon would model his new clothes for Jenny and the critical women who shared her house. When the estrogen hormones began to enlarge his breasts and shift the former tight end's shape around, Robert gave up the banquet circuit and marched forth from the Dog's Head Harbor house in mannish women's suits and rather conservative wigs; he tried being Roberta long before he had the surgery. Clinically, now, Roberta had the same genitalia and urological equipment as most other women.
"But of course I can't conceive," she told Garp. "I don't ovulate and I don't menstruate." Neither do millions of other women, Jenny Fields had reassured her. "When I came home from the hospital," Roberta said to Garp, "do you know what else your mother told me?"
Garp shook his head; "home" to Roberta, Garp knew, was Dog's Head Harbor.
"She told me I was less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew," Roberta said. "I really needed that," she said, "because I had to use this horrible dilator all the time so that my vagina wouldn't close; I felt like a machine."
Good old mom,
Garp scribbled.
"There's such sympathy for people, in what you write," Roberta told him, suddenly. "But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life," she said. It was the same thing Jenny had always accused him of.
But now, he felt, he had more. With his jaw wired shut, with his wife with her arm in a sling all day--and Duncan with only half his pretty face intact--Garp felt more generous toward the other wretches who wandered into Dog's Head Harbor.
It was a summer town. Out of season, the bleached shingled house with its porches and garrets was the only occupied mansion along the gray-green dunes and the white beach at the end of Ocean Lane. An occasional dog sniffed through the bone-colored driftwood, and retired people, living some miles inland, in their former summer houses, occasionally strolled the shore, scrutinizing the shells. In summer there were lots of dogs and children and mothers' helpers all over the beach, and always a bright boat or two in the harbor. But when the Garps moved in with Jenny, the shoreline seemed abandoned. The beach, littered with the debris washed in with the high tides of winter, was deserted. The Atlantic Ocean, through April and through May, was the livid color of a bruise--was the color of the bridge of Helen's nose.
Visitors to the town, in the off-season, were quickly spotted as lost women in search of the famous nurse, Jenny Fields. In summer, these women often spent a whole day in Dog's Head Harbor trying to find someone who knew where Jenny lived. But the permanent residents of Dog's Head Harbor all knew: "The last house at the end of Ocean Lane," they told the damaged girls and women who asked for directions. "It's as big as a hotel, honey. You can't miss it."
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 h
e 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 that 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 runnin
g 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?"