"She doesn't know any students," Garp said.
"She knows you," Harry told him. "And she's in love with you."
"What can we do?" Garp asked Helen. "He's trying to set me up with Alice so he'll feel better about what he's doing."
"At least he's been honest with her," Helen told Garp. There was one of those silences wherein a family can identify its separate, breathing parts in the night. Open doors off an upstairs hall: Duncan breathing lazily, an almost-eight-year-old with lots of time to live; Walt breathing those tentative two-year-old breaths, short and excited; Helen, even and cool. Garp held his breath. He knew she knew about the baby-sitters.
"Harry told you?" he asked.
"You might have told me before you told Alice," Helen said. "Who was the second one?"
"I forget her name," Garp admitted.
"I think it's shabby," Helen said. "It's really beneath me; it's beneath you. I hope you've outgrown it."
"Yes, I have," Garp said. He meant he had outgrown baby-sitters. But lust itself? Ah, well. Jenny Fields had fingered a problem at the heart of her son's heart.
"We've got to help the Fletchers," Helen said. "We're too fond of them to do nothing about this." Helen, Garp marveled, moved through their life together as if it were an essay she was structuring--with an introduction, a presentation of basic priorities, then the thesis.
"Harry thinks the student is special," Garp pointed out.
"Fucking men," Helen said. "You look after Alice. I'll show Harrison what's special."
So one night, after Garp had cooked an elegant Paprika Chicken and spatzle, Helen said to Garp, "Harrison and I will do the dishes. You take Alice home."
"Take her home?" Garp said. "Now?"
"Show him your novel," Helen said to Alice. "Show him everything you want. I'm going to show your husband what an asshole he is."
"Hey, come on," Harry said. "We're all friends, we all want to stay friends, right?"
"You simple son of a bitch," Helen told him. "You fuck a student and call her special--you insult your wife, you insult me. I'll show you what's special."
"Go easy, Helen," Garp said.
"Go with Alice
," Helen said. "And let Alice drive her own baby-sitter home."
"Hey, come on!" Harrison Fletcher said.
"Shuth up, Harrithon!" Alice said. She grabbed Garp's hand and stood up from the table.
"Fucking men," said Helen. Garp, as speechless as an Ellen Jamesian, took Alice home.
"I can take the baby-sitter home, Alice," he said.
"Jutht get back fatht," Alice said.
"Very fast, Alice," Garp said.
She made him read the first chapter of her novel aloud to her. "I want to hear it," she told him, "and I can't thay it mythelf." So Garp said it to her; it read, he was relieved to hear, beautifully. Alice wrote with such fluency and care that Garp could have sung her sentences, unselfconsciously, and they would have sounded fine.
"You have a lovely voice, Alice," he told her, and she cried. And they made love, of course, and despite what everyone knows about such things, it was special.
"Wasn't it?" asked Alice.
"Yes, it was," Garp admitted.