If Garp could have been granted one vast and naive wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both.
After Garp and Helen made love, and Helen fell asleep--after the dreams--Garp got dressed. When he sat on his bed to tie his track shoes, he sat on Helen's leg and woke her up. She reached out her hand to touch him, then felt his running shorts.
"Where are you going?" she asked him.
"To check on Duncan," he said. Helen stretched up on her elbows, she looked at her watch. It was after one in the morning and she knew Duncan was at Ralph's house.
"How are you going to check on Duncan?" she asked Garp.
"I don't know," Garp said.
* * *
--
Like a gunman hunting his victim, like the child molester the parent dreads, Garp stalks the sleeping spring suburbs, green and dark; the people snore and wish and dream, their lawn mowers at rest; it is too cool for their air conditioners to be running. A few windows are open, a few refrigerators are humming. There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
Garp moves lightly along the street; he wants to meet no one. His running shoes are loosely laced, his track shorts flap; he hasn't worn a jock because he hasn't planned to run. Though the spring air is cool, he wears no shirt. In the blackened houses an occasional dog snorfles as Garp passes by. Fresh from lovemaking, Garp imagines that his scent is as keen as a cut strawberry. He knows the dogs can smell him.
These are well-policed suburbs and for a moment Garp is apprehensive that he might be caught--in violation of some unwritten dress code, at least guilty of carrying no identification. He hurries, convinced he's coming to Duncan's aid, rescuing his son from the randy Mrs. Ralph.
A young woman on an
unlighted bicycle almost collides with him, her hair floating behind her, her knees bare and shiny, her breath striking Garp as a startling mixture of a fresh-cut lawn and cigarettes. Garp crouches--she cries out and wobbles her bike around him; she stands up on her pedals and pumps fast away from him, not looking back. Perhaps she thinks he is a would-be exhibitionist--there with his torso and legs bare, ready to drop his shorts. Garp thinks she is coming from some place she shouldn't have been; she is headed for trouble, he imagines. But, thinking of Duncan and Mrs. Ralph, Garp has trouble on his mind at this hour.
When Garp first sees Ralph's house, he believes it should be given the Light of the Block award; every window is glaring, the front door is open, the cancerous television is violently loud. Garp suspects Mrs. Ralph is having a party, but as he creeps closer--her lawn festooned with dog messes and mangled sports equipment--he feels the house is deserted. The television's lethal rays pulsate through the living room, clogged with piles of shoes and clothes; and crammed against the sagging couch are the casual bodies of Duncan and Ralph, half in their sleeping bags, asleep (of course), but looking as if the television has murdered them. In the sickly TV light their faces look drained of blood.
But where is Mrs. Ralph? Out for the evening? Gone to bed with all the lights on and the door open, leaving the boys to be bathed by the television? Garp wonders if she's remembered to shut the oven off. The living room is pockmarked with ashtrays; Garp fears for cigarettes still smoldering. He stays behind the hedges and slinks to the kitchen window, sniffing for gas.
There is a litter of dishes in the sink, a bottle of gin on the kitchen table, the sour smell of slashed limes. The cord to the overhead light, at one time too short, has been substantially lengthened by one sheer leg and hip of a woman's pair of panty hose--severed up the middle, the whereabouts of the other half unclear. The nylon foot, spotted with translucent stains of grease, dangles in the breeze above the gin. There is nothing burning that Garp can smell, unless there's a slow fire under the cat, who lies neatly on top of the stove, artfully spread between burners, its chin resting on the handle of a heavy skillet, its furry belly warmed by the pilot lights. Garp and the cat stare at each other. The cat blinks.
But Garp believes that Mrs. Ralph hasn't the necessary concentration to turn herself into a cat. Her home--her life--in utter disarray, the woman appears to have abandoned ship, or perhaps passed out upstairs. Is she in bed? Or in the bathtub, drowned? And where is the beast whose dangerous droppings have made a mine field out of the lawn?
Just then there is a thunderous approach down the back staircase of a heavy, falling body that bashes open the stairway entrance door to the kitchen, startling the cat into flight, skidding the greasy iron skillet to the floor. Mrs. Ralph sits bare-assed and wincing on the linoleum, a kimono-style robe wide open and roughly tugged above her thick waist, a miraculously unspilled drink in her hand. She looks at the drink, surprised, and sips it; her large, down-pointing breasts shine--they slouch across her freckled chest as she leans back on her elbows and burps. The cat, in a corner of the kitchen, yowls at her, complaining.
"Oh, shut up, Titsy," Mrs. Ralph says to the cat. But when she tries to get up, she groans and lies down flat on her back. Her pubic hair is wet and glistens at Garp; her belly, furrowed with stretch marks, looks as white and parboiled as if Mrs. Ralph has been underwater for a long time. "I'll get you out of here if it's the last thing I do," Mrs. Ralph tells the kitchen ceiling, though Garp assumes she's speaking to the cat. Perhaps she's broken an ankle and is too drunk to feel it, Garp thinks; perhaps she's broken her back.
Garp glides alongside the house to the open front door. He calls inside. "Anybody home?" he shouts. The cat bolts between his legs and is gone outside. Garp waits. He hears grunts from the kitchen--the strange sounds of flesh slipping.
"Well, as I live and breathe," says Mrs. Ralph, veering into the doorway, her robe of faded flowers more or less drawn together; somewhere, she's ditched her drink.
"I saw all the lights on and thought there might be trouble," Garp mumbles.
"You're too late," Mrs. Ralph tells him. "Both boys are dead. I should never have let them play with that bomb." She probes Garp's unchanging face for any signs of a sense of humor there, but she finds him rather humorless on this subject. "Okay, you want to see the bodies?" she asks. She pulls him toward her by the elastic waistband of his running shorts. Garp, aware he's not wearing a jock, stumbles quickly after his pants, bumping into Mrs. Ralph, who lets him go with a snap and wanders into the living room. Her odor confuses him--like vanilla spilled in the bottom of a deep, damp paper bag.
Mrs. Ralph seizes Duncan under his arms and with astonishing strength lifts him in his sleeping bag to the mountainous, lumpy couch; Garp helps her lift Ralph, who's heavier. They arrange the boys, foot to foot on the couch, tucking their sleeping bags around them and setting pillows under their heads. Garp turns off the TV and Mrs. Ralph stumbles through the room, killing lights, gathering ashtrays. They are like a married couple, cleaning up after a party. "Night-y night!" Mrs. Ralph whispers to the suddenly dark living room, as Garp trips over a hassock, groping his way toward the kitchen lights. "You can't go yet," Mrs. Ralph hisses to him. "You've got to help me get someone out of here." She takes his arm, drops an ashtray; her kimono opens wide. Garp, bending to pick up the ashtray, brushes one of her breasts with his hair. "I've got this lummox up in my bedroom," she tells Garp, "and he won't go. I can't make him leave."
"A lummox?" Garp says.
"He's a real oaf," says Mrs. Ralph, "a fucking wingding."
"A wingding?" Garp says.
"Yes, please make him go," she asks Garp. She pulls out the elastic waistband of his shorts again, and this time she takes an unconcealed look. "God, you don't wear too much, do you?" she asks him. "Aren't you cold?" She lays her hand flat on his bare stomach. "No, you're not," she says, shrugging.
Garp edges away from her. "Who is he?" Garp asks, fearing he might get involved in evicting Mrs. Ralph's former husband from the house.
"Come on, I'll show you," she whispers. She draws him up the back staircase through a narrow channel that passes between the piled laundry and enormous sacks of pet food. No wonder she fell down here, he thinks.