IN THE CITY WHERE MARCUS AURELIUS DIED

When Jenny took Garp to Europe, Garp was better prepared for the solitary confinement of a writer's life than most eighteen-year-olds. He was already thriving in a world of his own imagination; after all, he had been brought up by a woman who thought that solitary confinement was a perfectly natural way to live. It would be years before Garp noticed that he didn't have any friends, and this oddity never struck Jenny Fields as odd. In his distant and polite fashion, Ernie Holm was the first friend Jenny Fields ever had.

Before Jenny and Garp found an apartment, they lived in more than a dozen pensions all over Vienna. It was Mr. Tinch's idea that this would be the ideal way for them to choose the part of the city they liked best: they would live in all the districts and decide for themselves. But short-term life in a pension must have been more pleasant for Tinch in the summer of 1913; when Jenny and Garp came to Vienna, it was 1961; they quickly tired of lugging their typewriters from pension to pension. It was this experience, however, that gave Garp the material for his first major short story, "The Pension Grillparzer." Garp hadn't even known what a pension was before he came to Vienna, but he quickly discovered that a pension had somewhat less to offer than a hotel; it was always smaller, and never elegant; it sometimes offered breakfast, and sometimes not. A pension was sometimes a bargain and sometimes a mistake. Jenny and Garp found pensions that were clean and comfortable and friendly, but they were often seedy.

Jenny and Garp wasted little time deciding that they wanted to live within or near the Ringstrasse, the great round street that circles the heart of the old city; it was the part of the city where almost everything was, and where Jenny could manage a little better without speaking any German--it was the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan part of Vienna, if there really is such a part of Vienna.

It was fun for Garp to be in charge of his mother; three years of Steering German made Garp their leader, and he clearly enjoyed being Jenny's boss.

"Have the schnitzel, Mom," he would tell her.

"I thought this Kalbsnieren sounded interesting," Jenny said.

"Veal kidney, Mom," Garp said. "Do you like kidney?"

"I don't know," Jenny admitted. "Probably not."

When they finally moved into a place of their own, Garp took over the shopping. Jenny had spent eighteen years eating in the Steering dining halls; she had never learned how to cook, and now she couldn't read the directions. It was in Vienna that Garp learned how he loved to cook, but the first thing he claimed to like about Europe was the W.C.--the water closet. In his time spent in pensions, Garp discovered that a water closet was a tiny room with nothing but a toilet in it; it was the first thing about Europe that made sense to Garp. He wrote Helen that "it is the wisest system--to urinate and move your bowels in one place, and to brush your teeth in another." The W.C., of course, would also feature prominently in Garp's story, "The Pension Grillparzer," but Garp would not write that story, or anything else, for a while.

Although he was unusually self-disciplined for an eighteen-year-old, there were simply too many things to see; together with those things he was suddenly responsible for, Garp was very busy and for months the only satisfying writing he did was to Helen. He was too excited with his new territory to develop the necessary routine for writing, although he tried.

He tried to write a story about a family; all he knew when he began was that the family had an interesting life and the members were all close to each other. That was not enough to know.

* * *

--

Jenny and Garp moved into a cream-colored, high-ceilinged apartment on the second floor of an old building on the Schwindgasse, a little street in the fourth district. They were right around the corner from the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, the Schwarzenbergplatz, and the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Garp eventually went to all the art museums in the city, but Jenny never went to any except the Upper Belvedere. Garp explained to her that the Upper Belvedere contained only the nineteenth-and twentieth-century paintings, but Jenny said that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were enough for her. Garp explained that she could at least walk through the gardens to the Lower Belvedere and see the baroque collection, but Jenny shook her head; she had taken several art history courses at Steering--she'd had enough education, she said.

"And the Brueghels, Mom!" Garp said. "You just take the Strassenbahn up the Ring and get off at Mariahilferstrasse. The big museum across from the streetcar stop is the Kunsthistorisches."

"But I can walk to the Belvedere," Jenny said. "Why take a streetcar?"

She could also walk to the Karlskirche, and there were some interesting-looking embassy buildings a short distance up Argentinierstrasse. The Bulgarian Embassy was right across the street from their apartment on the Schwindgasse. Jenny said she liked staying in her own neighborhood. There was a coffeehouse a block away and she sometimes went there and read the newspapers in English. She never went out to eat anywhere unless Garp took her; and unless he cooked for her in their apartment, she didn't eat anything at home. She was completely taken with the idea of writing something--more taken, at this phase, than Garp.

"I don't have time to be a tourist at this point in my life," she told her son. "But you go ahead, soak up the culture. That's what you should be doing."

"Absorb, ab-ab-absorb," Tinch had told them. That seemed to Jenny to be just what Garp should do; for herself, she found she'd already absorbed enough to have plenty to say. Jenny Fields was forty-one. She imagined that the interesting part of her life was behind her; all she wanted to do was write about it.

Garp gave her a piece of paper to carry with her. It had her address written on it, in case she got lost: Schwindgasse 15/2, Wien IV. Garp had to teach her how to pronounce her address--a tedious lesson. "Schwindgassefunfzehnzwei!" Jenny spat.

"Again," Garp said. "Do you want to stay lost when you get lost?"

Garp investigated the city by day and found places to take Jenny to at night, and in the late afternoons when she was through her writing; they would have a beer, or a glass of wine, and Garp would describe his whole day to her. Jenny listened politely. Wine or beer made her sleepy. Usually they ate a nice dinner somewhere and Garp escorted Jenny home on the Strassenbahn; he took special pride in never using taxis, because he had learned the streetcar system so thoroughly. Sometimes he went to the open markets in the morning and came home early and cooked all afternoon. Jenny never complained; it didn't matter to her whether they ate in or out.

"This is a Gumpoldskirchner," Garp would say, explaining the wine. "It goes very well with the Schweinebraten."

"What funny words," Jenny remarked.

In a typical evaluation of Jenny's prose style, Garp later wrote: "My mother had such a struggle with her English, it's no wonder she never bothered to learn Ge

rman."

* * *

--

Although Jenny Fields sat every day at her typewriter, she did not know how to write. Although she was--physically--writing, she did not enjoy reading over what she'd written. Before long, she tried to remember the good things she'd read and what made them different from her own first-draft attempt. She'd simply begun at the beginning. "I was born," and so forth. "My parents wanted me to stay at Wellesley; however..." And, of course: "I decided I wanted a child of my own and eventually got one in the following manner...." But Jenny had read enough good stories to know that hers didn't sound like the good stories in her memory. She wondered what could be wrong, and she frequently sent Garp on errands to the few bookstores that sold books in English. She wanted to look more closely at how books began; she had quickly produced over three hundred typed pages, yet she felt that her book never really started.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net