"Right in the middle of what, darling?" Helen asked him. "Right in the middle of whom? I hope she's nice."
Helen's voice on the phone had a quality of sexual teasing in it; this always surprised Garp--how she sounded--because Helen was not like that, she was not even flirtatious. Though he found her, privately, very arousing, there was nothing of the sexy come-on about her dress or her habits in the outer world. Yet on the telephone she sounded bawdy to him, and always had.
"I've burned myself," he said, dramatically. "The oil is too hot and the onions are scorching. What the fuck is it?"
"My poor man," she said, still teasing him. "You didn't leave any message with Pam." Pam was the English Department secretary; Garp struggled to think what message he was supposed to have left with her. "Are you burned badly?" Helen asked him.
"No." He sulked. "What message?"
"The two-by-fours," said Helen. Lumber, Garp remembered. He was going to call the lumberyards to price some two-by-fours cut to size; Helen would pick them up on her way home from school. He remembered now that the marriage counseling had distracted him from the lumberyards.
"I forgot," he said. Helen, he knew, would have an alternative plan; she had known this much before she even made the phone call.
"Call them now," Helen said, "and I'll call you back when I get to the day-care center. Then I'll go pick up the two-by-fours with Walt. He likes lumberyards." Walt was now five; Garp's second son was in this day-care or preschool place--whatever it was, its aura of general irresponsibility gave Garp some of his most exciting nightmares.
"Well, all right," Garp said. "I'll start calling now." He was worried about his tomato sauce, and he hated hanging up on a conversation with Helen when he was in a state so clearly preoccupied and dull. "I've found an interesting job," he told her, relishing her silence. But she wasn't silent long.
"You're a writer, darling," Helen told him. "You have an interesting job." Sometimes it panicked Garp that Helen seemed to want him to stay at home and "just write"--because that made the domestic situation the most comfortable for her. But it was comfortable for him, too; it was what he thought he wanted.
"The onions need stirring," he said, cutting her off. "And my burn hurts," he added.
"I'll try to call back when you're in the middle of something," Helen said, brightly teasing him, that vampish laughter barely contained in her saucy voice; it both aroused him and made him furious.
He stirred the onions and mashed half a dozen tomatoes into the hot oil; then he added pepper, salt, oregano. He called only the lumberyard whose address was closest to Walt's day-care center; Helen was too meticulous about some things--comparing the prices of everything, though he admired her for it. Wood was wood, Garp reasoned; the best place to have the damn two-by-fours cut to size was the nearest place.
A marriage counselor! Garp thought again, dissolving a tablespoon of tomato paste in a cup of warm water and adding this to his sauce. Why are all the serious jobs done by quacks? What could be more serious than marriage counseling? Yet he imagined a marriage counselor was somewhat lower on a scale of trust than a chiropractor. In the way that many doctors scorned chiropractors, would psychiatrists sneer at marriage counselors? There was no one Garp tended to sneer at as much as he sneered at psychiatrists--those dangerous simplifiers, those thieves of a person's complexity. To Garp, psychiatrists were the despicable end of all those who couldn't clean up their own messes.
The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist's objective was to clear the head; it was Garp's opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to u
se the mess--to make the messy things work for you. "That's easy for a writer to say," Helen had told him. "Artists can 'use' a mess; most people can't, and they just don't want messes. I know I don't. What a psychiatrist you'd be! What would you do if a poor man who had no use for his mess came to you, and he just wanted his mess to go away? I suppose you'd advise him to write about it?" Garp remembered this conversation about psychiatry and it made him glum; he knew he oversimplified the things that made him angry, but he was convinced that psychiatry oversimplified everything.
When the phone rang, he said, "The lumberyard off Springfield Avenue. That's close to you."
"I know where it is," Helen said. "Is that the only place you called?"
"Wood is wood," Garp said. "Two-by-fours are two-by-fours. Go to Springfield Avenue and they'll have them ready."
"What interesting job have you found?" Helen asked him; he knew she would have been thinking about it.
"Marriage counseling," Garp said; his tomato sauce bubbled--the kitchen filled with its rich fumes. Helen maintained a respectful silence on her end of the phone. Garp knew she would find it difficult to ask, this time, what qualifications he thought he had for such a thing.
"You're a writer," she told him.
"Perfect qualifications for the job," Garp said. "Years spent pondering the morals of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love," Garp droned on, "the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion."
"So write about it," Helen said. "What more do you want?" She knew perfectly well what was coming next.
"Art doesn't help anyone," Garp said. "People can't really use it: they can't eat it, it won't shelter or clothe them--and if they're sick, it won't make them well." This, Helen knew, was Garp's thesis on the basic uselessness of art; he rejected the idea that art was of any social value whatsoever--that it could be, that it should be. The two things mustn't be confused, he thought: there was art, and there was helping people. Here he was, fumbling at both--his mother's son, after all. But, true to his thesis, he saw art and social responsibility as two distinct acts. The messes came when certain jerks attempted to combine these fields. Garp would be irritated all his life by his belief that literature was a luxury item; he desired for it to be more basic--yet he hated it, when it was.
"I'll go get the two-by-fours now," Helen said.
"And if the peculiarities of my art weren't qualification enough," Garp said, "I have, as you know, been married myself." He paused. "I've had children." He paused again. "I've had a variety of marriage-related experiences--we both have."
"Springfield Avenue?" Helen said. "I'll be home soon."
"I have more than enough experience for the job," he insisted. "I've known financial dependency, I've experienced infidelity."
"Good for you," Helen said. She hung up.