"Did I marry a handyman? Did I ever expect you to be a crusader?
"You should be writing the books and letting other people make the shelves. And you know I'm right, Garp."
"You're right," he said.
He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of "The Pension Grillparzer."
"My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau."
Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: "The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest." What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.
In the wrestling room, he worked out three straight days with the heavyweight. To punish himself?
"More fucking around in the garden, so to speak," said Helen.
Then he announced he had a mission, a trip to make for the Fields Foundation. To North Mountain, New Hampshire. To determine if a Fields Foundation Fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller.
"More fucking around in the garden," Helen said. "More bookshelves. More politics. More crusades. That's the kind of thing people do who can't write."
But he was gone; he was out of the house when John Wolf called to say that a very well read and much seen magazine was going to publish "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," by Ellen James.
John Wolf's voice over the phone had the cold, unseen, quick flick of the tongue of old You-Know-Who--the Under Toad, that's who, Helen thought. But she didn't know why; not yet.
She told Ellen James the news. Helen forgave Ellen, immediately, and even allowed herself to be excited with her. They took a drive to the shore with Duncan and little Jenny. They bought lobsters--Ellen's favorite--and enough scallops for Garp, who was not crazy about lobster.
Champagne!
Ellen wrote in the car.
Does champagne go with lobster and scallops?
"Of course," Helen said. "It can." They bought champagne. They stopped at Dog's Head Harbor and invited Roberta to dinner.
"When will Dad be back?" Duncan asked.
"I don't know where North Mountain, New Hampshire, is," Helen said, "but he said he'd be back in time to eat with us."
That's what he told me, too,
said Ellen James
.
* * *
--
Nanette's Beauty Salon in North Mountain, New Hampshire, was really the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name was Harriet.
"Are you Nanette?" Garp asked her timidly, from the outside steps, frosted with salt and crunchy with melting slush.
"There ain't no Nanette," she told him. "I'm Harriet Truckenmiller." Behind her, in the dark kitchen, a large dog strained and snarled; Mrs. Truckenmiller kept the dog from getting to Garp by thrusting her long hip back against the lunging beast. Her pale, scarred ankle wedged open the kitchen door. Her slippers were blue; in her long robe, her figure was lost, but Garp could see she was tall--and that she had been taking a bath.
"Uh, do you do men's hair?" he asked her.
"No," she said.
"But would you?" Garp asked her. "I don't trust barbers."