The World According to Garp

Garp decided he liked the suit so well that he wanted to wear it to the airport, with the pantlegs pinned up.

"Jesus," Helen said.

"I'm slightly embarrassed to be seen with you," John Wolf confessed, but he drove them to the airport. He was making absolutely certain that the Garps got out of the country.

"Oh, your book," he said to Garp, in the car. "I keep forgetting to get you a copy."

"I noticed," Garp said.

"I'll send you one," John Wolf said.

"I never even saw what went on the jacket," Garp said.

"A photograph of you, on the back," John Wolf said. "It's an old one--it's one you've seen, I'm sure."

"What's on the front?" Garp said.

"Well, the title," John Wolf said.

"Oh, really?" Garp said. "I thought maybe you decided to leave the title off."

"Just the title," John Wolf said, "over a kind of photograph."

"'A kind of photograph,'" Garp said. "What kind of photograph?"

"Maybe I have one in my briefcase," Wolf said. "I'll look, at the airport."

Wolf was being careful; he had already let it slip that he thought The World According to Bensenhaver was an "X-rated soap opera." Garp hadn't seemed bothered. "Mind you, it's awfully well written," Wolf had said, "but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow." Garp had sighed. "Life," Garp had said, "is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John," Garp had said.

In John Wolf's briefcase was a snip-out of the front cover of The World According to Bensenhaver, missing the back-jacket photograph of Garp and, of course, the jacket flaps. John Wolf planned to hand this snip-out to Garp just moments before they said good-bye. This snip-out of the front cover was sealed in an envelope; the envelope was sealed in another envelope. John Wolf felt pretty certain that Garp would not be able to undo the thing and look at it until he was safely seated in the plane.

When Garp got to Europe, John Wolf would send him the rest of the book jacket for The World According to Bensenhaver. Wolf felt certain that it would not make Garp quite angry enough to fly home.

"This is bigger than the other plane," Duncan said, at the window on the left-hand side, a little in front of the wing.

"It has to be bigger because it's going all the way across the ocean," Garp said.

"Please don't mention that again," Helen said. Across the aisle from Duncan and Garp, a stewardess was fashioning an intriguing sling for baby Jenny, who hung on the back of the seat in front of Helen like someone else's baby or a papoose.

"John Wolf said you were going to be rich and famous," Duncan told his father.

"Hm," Garp said. He was involved in the tedious process of opening the envelopes John Wolf had given him; he was having a hell of a time with them.

"Are you?" Duncan asked.

"I hope so," Garp said. At last he looked at the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver. He could not tell if it was the sudden, apparent weightlessness of the great airplane, leaving the ground, that gave him such a chill--or if it was the photograph.

Blown up in black and white, with grains as fat as flakes of snow, was a picture of an ambulance unloading at a hospital. The glum futility on the gray faces of the attendants expressed the fact that there was no need to hurry. The body under the sheet was small and completely covered. The photograph had the quick, fearful quality of the entrance marked EMERGENCY at any hospital. It was any hospital, and any ambulance--and any small body arriving too late.

A kind of wet finish glazed the photograph, which--with its grainy aspect, and the fact that this accident appeared to have happened on a rainy night--made it a picture out of any cheap newspaper; it was any catastrophe. It was any small death, anywhere, anytime. But of course it only reminded Garp of the gray despairing on all their faces when they were struck by the sight of Walt lying broken.

The cover of The World According to Bensenhaver, an X-rated soap opera, shouted a grim warning: this was a disaster story. The cover called for your cheap but immediate attention; it got it. The cover promised you a sudden, sickening sadness; Garp knew that the book would deliver it.

If he could have read the jacket-flap description of his novel and his life, at that time, he might very well have taken the next plane back to New York as soon as he landed in Europe. But he would have time to resign himself to this kind of advertising--just as John Wolf had planned. By the time Garp read the jacket flaps, he'd already have absorbed that horrible front-cover photograph.

Helen would never absorb it, and she never forgave John Wolf for it, either. Nor would she ever forgive him for the back-cover photograph of Garp. It was a picture, taken several years before the accident, of Garp with Duncan and Walt. Helen had taken the picture, and Garp had sent it to John Wolf instead of a Christmas card. Garp was on a dock in Maine. He was wearing nothing but a bathing suit and he looked in terrific physical shape. He was. Duncan stood behind him, his lean arm rested on his father's shoulder; Duncan also wore a bathing suit, he was very tan, with a white sailor's cap cocked jauntily on his head. He grinned into the camera, staring it down with his beautiful eyes.

Walt sat on Garp's lap. Walt was so fresh out of the water that he was as slick as a seal puppy; Garp was trying to wrap him warmly in a towel, and Walt was squirming. Wildly happy, his clownish, round face beamed at the camera--at his mother taking the picture.