"I don't doubt that you're quite serious," she told him. "And right now I have more to read than I need to know."
She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.
While Garp put the finishing touches on his much shorter story, Jenny Fields plotted her next move. In her restlessness she had bought an American news magazine at a large Vienna newsstand; in it she had read that a courageous New York editor at a well-known publishing house had just rejected the manuscript submitted by an infamous former member of the government who had been convicted of stealing government money. The book was a thinly disguised "fiction" of the criminal's own sordid, petty, political dealings. "It was a lousy novel," the editor was quoted as saying. "The man can't write. Why should he make any money off his crummy life?" The book, of course, would be published elsewhere, and it would eventually make its despicable author and its publisher lots of money. "Sometimes I feel it is my responsibility to say no," the editor was quoted as saying, "even if I know people do want to read this slop." The slop, eventually, would be treated to several serious reviews, just as if it were a serious book, but Jenny was greatly impressed with the editor who had said no and she clipped the article out of the news magazine. She drew a circle around the editor's name--a plain name, almost like an actor's name, or the name of an animal in a children's book: John Wolf. There was a picture of John Wolf in the magazine; he looked like a man who took care of himself, and he was very well dressed; he looked like any number of people who work and live in New York--where good business and good sense suggest that you'd better take care of yourself and dress as well as you can--but to Jenny Fields he looked like an angel. He was going to be her publisher, she was sure. She was convinced that her life was not "crummy," and that John Wolf would believe she deserved to make money off it.
Garp had other ambitions for "The Pension Grillparzer." It would never make him much money; it would first appear in a "serious" magazine where almost no one would read it. Years later, when he was better known, it would be published in a more attentive way, and several appreciative things would be written about it, but in his lifetime "The Pension Grillparzer" wouldn't make Garp enough money to buy a good car. Garp, however, expected more than money or transportation from "The Pension Grillparzer." Very simply, he expected to get Helen Holm to live with him--even marry him.
When he finished "The Pension Grillparzer," he announced to his mother that he wanted to go home and see Helen; he would send her a copy of the story and she could have read it by the time he arrived back in the United States. Poor Helen, Jenny thought; Jenny knew that Helen had a lot to read. Jenny also worried how Garp referred to Steering as "home"; but she had reasons of her own for wanting to see Helen, and Ernie Holm would not mind their company for a few days. There was always the parental mansion at Dog's Head Harbor--if Garp and Jenny needed a place to recover, or to make their plans.
Garp and Jenny were such singularly obsessed people that they did not pause to wonder why they had seen so little of Europe, and now they were leaving. Jenny packed her nursing uniforms. There remained, in Garp's mind, only the favors that Charlotte had left up to Tina's devising.
Garp's imagination of these favors had sustained him during the writing of "The Pension Grillparzer," but as he would learn all his life, the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar. His imagination sustained him when he was writing; now that he wasn't writing, he wanted Tina. He went to look for her on the Karntnerstrasse, but the mayonnaise-jar whore, who spoke English, told him that Tina had moved from the first district.
"So goes it," Wanga said. "Forget Tina."
Garp found that he could forget her; lust, as his mother called it, was tricky that way. And time, he discovered, had softened his dislike of Wanga's mayonnaise-jar lip; suddenly, he liked it. And so he had her, twice, and as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
Garp and Jenny had spent fifteen months in Vienna. It was September. Garp and Helen were only nineteen, and Helen would be going back to college very soon. The plane flew from Vienna to Frankfurt. The slight tingling (that was Wanga) quietly left Garp's flesh. When Garp thought of Charlotte, he imagined that Charlotte had been happy. After all, she had never had to leave the first district.
The plane flew from Frankfurt to London; Garp reread "The Pension Grillparzer" and hoped that Helen would not turn him down. From London to New York, Jenny read her son's story. In terms of what she'd spent more than a year doing, Garp's story struck Jenny as rather unreal. But her taste for literature was never keen and she marveled at her son's imagination. Later she would say that "The Pension Grillparzer" was just the sort of story she'd expect a boy without a proper family to make up.
Maybe so. Helen would later say that it is in the conclusion of "The Pension Grillparzer" that we can glimpse what the world according to Garp would be like.
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER (CONCLUSION)
In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.
"Men walking about on their hands," said Father.
"Men looking under the door of the W.C.," said Grandmother.
"That man," I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts--the dream man and the Hungarian singer.
"He does it for his living," Herr Theobald told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.
"Make him stop that," Father said. "We know he can do it."
"But did you know that he can't do it any other way?" the dream man asked suddenly. "Did you know his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all." The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.
"Please sit down," Mother said.
"It is perfectly all right to be crippled," Grandmother said, boldly. "But you are evil," she told the dream man. "You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream," she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.
"He is a little evil, I know," Theobald admitted. "But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows."
"I was just trying to straighten you out," the dream man told Grandmother. "I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream."
"Stop it," Grandmother said.
"Well, you ought to know," said the dream man.
"No, be quiet, please," Herr Theobald told him.
"I am from the Tourist Bureau," Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Oh my God shit!" He
rr Theobald said.