The World According to Garp

"No, no, Mom," Garp said, "that's for the usual." Jenny thought. Was twenty dollars a lot for the usual? She didn't know.

"Tell her we'll give her ten," Jenny said, but the whore looked doubtful--as if talk, for her, might be more difficult than the "usual." Her indecision was influenced by more than price, however; she didn't trust Garp and Jenny. She asked the young whore who spoke English if they were British or American. Americans, she was told; this seemed to relieve her, slightly.

"The British are often perverse," she told Garp, simply. "Americans are usually ordinary."

"We just want to talk with you," Garp insisted, but he could see that the prostitute firmly imagined some mother-and-son act of monstrous oddity.

"Two hundred and fifty schillings," the lady with the mink muff finally agreed. "And you buy my coffee."

So they went to the place all the whores went to get warm, a tiny bar with miniature tables; the phone rang all the time but only a few men lurked sullenly by the coat rack, looking the women over. There was some rule that the women could not be approached when they were in this bar; the bar was a kind of home base, a time-out zone.

"Ask her how old she is," Jenny said to Garp; but when he asked her, the woman softly shut her eyes and shook her head. "Okay," said Jenny, "ask her why she thinks men like her." Garp rolled his eyes. "Well, you do like her?" Jenny asked him. Garp said he did. "Well, what is it about her that you want?" Jenny asked him. "I don't mean just her sex parts, I mean is there something else that's satisfying? Something to imagine, something to think about, some kind of aura?" Jenny asked.

"Why don't you pay me two hundred and fifty schillings and not ask her any questions, Mom," Garp said tiredly.

"Don't be fresh," Jenny said. "I want to know if it degrades her to feel wanted in that way--and then to be had in that way, I suppose--or whether she thinks it only degrades the men?" Garp struggled to translate this. The woman appeared to think very seriously about it; or else she didn't understand the question, or Garp's German.

"I don't know," she finally said.

"I have other questions," Jenny said.

For an hour, it continued. Then the whore said she had to get back to work. Jenny seemed neither satisfied nor disappointed by the interview's lack of concrete results; she just seemed insatiably curious. Garp had never wanted anyone as much as he wanted the woman.

"Do you want her?"

Jenny asked him, so suddenly that he couldn't lie. "I mean, after all this--and looking at her, and talking with her--do you really want to have sex with her, too?"

"Of course, Mom," Garp said, miserably. Jenny looked no closer to understanding lust than she was before dinner. She looked puzzled and surprised at her son.

"All right," she said. She handed him the 250 schillings that they owed the woman, and another 500 schillings. "You do what you want to do," she told him, "or what you have to do, I guess. But please take me home first."

The whore had watched the money change hands; she had an eye for recognizing the correct amount. "Look," she said to Garp, and touched his hand with her fingers, as cold as her rings. "It's all right with me if your mother wants to buy me for you, but she can't come along with us. I will not have her watch us, absolutely not. I'm still a Catholic, believe it or not," she said, "and if you want anything funny like that, you'll have to ask Tina."

Garp wondered who Tina was; he gave a shudder at the thought that nothing must be too "funny" for her. "I'm going to take my mother home," Garp told the beautiful woman. "And I won't be back to see you." But she smiled at him and he thought his erection would burst through his pocket of loose schillings and worthless groschen. Just one of her perfect teeth--but it was a big front upper tooth--was all gold.

In the taxi (that Garp agreed to take home) Garp explained to his mother the Viennese system of prostitution. Jenny was not surprised to hear that prostitution was legal; she was surprised to learn that it was illegal in so many other places. "Why shouldn't it be legal?" she asked. "Why can't a woman use her body the way she wants to? If someone wants to pay for it, it's just one more crummy deal. Is twenty dollars a lot of money for it?"

"No, that's pretty good," Garp said. "At least, it's a very low price for the good-looking ones."

Jenny slapped him. "You know all about it!" she said. Then she said she was sorry--she had never struck him before, she just didn't understand this fucking lust, lust, lust! at all.

At the Schwindgasse apartment, Garp made a point of not going out; in fact, he was in his own bed and asleep before Jenny, who paced through her manuscript pages in her wild room. A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

Garp dreamed of other prostitutes; he had visited two or three of them in Vienna--but he had never paid the first-district prices. The next evening, after an early supper at the Schwindgasse, Garp went to see the woman with the mink muff streaked with light.

Her working name was Charlotte. She was not surprised to see him. Charlotte was old enough to know when she'd successfully hooked someone, although she never did tell Garp exactly how old she was. She had taken very fine care of herself, and only when she was completely undressed was her age apparent anywhere except in the veins on her long hands. There were stretch marks on her belly and her breasts, but she told Garp that the child had died a long time ago. She did not mind if Garp touched the Cesarean scar.

After he had seen Charlotte four times at the fixed first-district rate, he happened to run into her at the Naschmarkt on a Saturday morning. She was buying fruit. Her hair was probably a little dirty; she'd covered it with a scarf and wore it like a young girl's--with bangs and two short braids. The bangs were slightly greasy against her forehead, which seemed paler in the daylight. She had no makeup on and wore a pair of American jeans and tennis sneakers and a long coat-style sweater with a high roll collar. Garp would not have recognized her if he hadn't seen her hands clutching the fruit; she had all her rings on.

At first she wouldn't answer him when he spoke to her, but he had already told her that he did all the shopping, and the cooking, for himself and his mother, and she found this amusing. After her irritation at meeting a customer in her off-duty hours, she seemed good-humored. It did not become clear to Garp, for a while, that he was the same age as Charlotte's child would have been. Charlotte took some vicarious interest in the way Garp was living with his mother.

"How's your mother's writing coming?" Charlotte would ask him.

"She's still pounding away," Garp would say. "I don't think she's solved the lust problem yet."

But only to a point did Charlotte allow Garp to joke about his mother.

Garp was insecure enough about himself with Charlotte that he never told her he was trying to write, too; he knew she would think he was too young. Sometimes, he thought so, too. And his story wasn't ready to tell someone about. The most he had done was change the title. He now called it "The Pension Grillparzer," and that title was the first thing about it that solidly pleased him. It helped him to focus. Now he had a place in mind, just one place where almost everything that was important was going to happen. This helped him to think in a more focused way about his characters, too--about the family of classifiers, about the other residents of one small, sad pension somewhere (it would have to be small and sad, and in Vienna, to be named after Franz Grillparzer). Those "other residents" would include a kind of circus; not a very good kind, either, he imagined, but a circus with no other place to stay. No other place would have them.