The World According to Garp

"Don't you want to see Vienna again?" Helen asked Garp.

"Ah, just imagine, the scene of your old crimes!" John Wolf said heartily.

"Old crimes?" Garp mumbled. "I don't know."

"Please, Dad," Duncan said. Garp was a sucker to what Duncan wanted; he agreed.

Helen cheered up and even took a glance at the galleys of The World According to Bensenhaver, though it was a quick, nervous glance, and she had no intention of doing any real reading therein. The first thing she saw was the dedication.

For Jillsy Sloper

"Who in God's name is Jillsy Sloper?" she asked Garp.

"I don't know, really," Garp said; Helen frowned at him. "No, really," he said. "It's some girl friend of John's; he said she loved the book--couldn't put it down. Wolf took it as a kind of omen, I guess; it was his suggestion, anyway," Garp said. "And I thought it was nice."

"Hm," said Helen; she put the galleys aside.

They both imagined John Wolf's girl friend in silence. John Wolf had been divorced before they met him; though the Garps had gotten to meet some of Wolf's grownup children, they had never met his first and only wife. There had been a conservative number of girl friends, all smart and sleekly attractive women--all younger than John Wolf. Some working girls, in the publishing business, but mostly young women with divorces of their own, and money--always money, or always the look of money. Garp remembered most of them by how nicely they smelled, and how their lipstick tasted--and the high-gloss, touchable quality of their clothes.

Neither Garp nor Helen could ever have imagined Jillsy Sloper, the offspring of a white person and a quadroon--which made Jillsy an octoroon, or one-eighth Negro. Her skin was a sallow brown, like a lightly stained pine board. Her hair was straight and short and waxy-black, beginning to gray at her bangs, which were coarsely chopped above her shining, wrinkled forehead. She was short, with long arms, and her ring finger was missing from her left hand. By the deep scar on her right cheek, one could imagine that the ring finger had been cut off in the same battle, by the same weapon--perhaps during a bad marriage, for she had certainly had a bad marriage. Which she never spoke of.

She was about forty-five and looked sixty. She had the trunk of a Labrador retriever about to have puppies, and she shuffled whenever and wherever she walked because her feet killed her. In a few years she would so long ignore the lump she could feel in her own breast, which no one else ever felt, that she would die needlessly of cancer.

She had an unlisted phone number (as John Wolf discovered) only because her former husband threatened to kill her every few months, and she tired of hearing from him; the reason she had a phone at all was that her children needed a place to call collect so that they could ask her to send them money.

But Helen and Garp, when they imagined Jillsy Sloper, did not for a moment see anyone approximating this sad, hardworking octoroon.

"John Wolf seems to be doing everything for this book except writing it," Helen said.

"I wish he had written it," Garp suddenly said. Garp had reread the book, and he felt full of doubt. In "The Pension Grillparzer," Garp thought, there was a certainty concerning how the world behaved. In The World According to Bensenhaver, Garp had felt less certain--an indication he was getting older, of course; but artists, he knew, should also get better.

* * *

--

With baby Jenny and one-eyed Duncan, Garp and Helen left for Europe out of a cool New England August; most transatlantic travelers were headed the other way.

"Why not wait until after Thanksgiving?" Ernie Holm asked them. But The World According to Bensenhaver would be published in October. John Wolf had received various responses to the uncorrected proofs he circulated through the summer; they had all been enthusiastic responses--enthusiastically praising the book, or enthusiastically condemning it.

He'd had difficulty keeping Garp from seeing the advance copies of the actual book--the book jacket, for example. But Garp's own enthusiasm for the book was so sporadic, and generally low, that John Wolf had been able to stall him.

Garp was now excited about the trip, and he was talking about other books he was going to write. ("A good sign," John Wolf told Helen.)

Jenny and Roberta drove the Garps to Boston, where they took a plane to New York. "Don't worry about the airplane," Jenny said. "It won't fall."

"Jesus, Mom," Garp said. "What do you know about airplanes? They fall all the time."

"Keep your arms in constant motion, like wings," Roberta told Duncan.

"Don't scare him, Roberta," Helen said.

"I'm not scared," Duncan said.

"If your father keeps talking, you can't fall," Jenny said.

"If he keeps talking," Helen said, "we'll ne

ver land." They could see that Garp was all wound up.