The World According to Garp

Helen smiled at him and nuzzled her cheek against his mouth. "My wild afternoon lover," she whispered. "You can always take me out to dinner that way, if you like."

He sat a long time with Little Squab Bones in the car outside her dark apartment. He had chosen the time well--the college was letting out; Cindy was leaving town. She was already upset at having to say good-bye to her favorite writer; he was, at least, the only writer she'd actually met.

"I'm sure you'll have a good year, next year, Cindy," he said. "And if you come back to see anyone, please stop and see us. Duncan will miss you." The girl stared into the cold lights of the dashboard, then looked over at Garp, miserably--tears and the whole flushed story on her face.

"I'll miss you," she whined.

"No, no," Garp said. "Don't miss me."

"I love you," she whispered, and let her slim head bump awkwardly against his shoulder.

"No, don't say that," he said, not touching her. Not yet.

The three-pack of condoms nestled patiently in his pocket, coiled like snakes.

In her musty apartment, he used only one of them. To his surprise, all her furniture had been moved out; they jammed her lumpy suitcases together and made an uncomfortable bed. He was careful not to stay a second more than necessary, lest Helen think he'd spent too long a time for even a literary good-bye.

A thick swollen stream ran through the women's college grounds and Garp discarded the remaining two prophylactics there, throwing them furtively out the window of his moving car--imagining that an alert campus cop might have seen him and would already be scrambling down the bank to retrieve the evidence: the rubbers plucked out of the current! The discovered weapon that leads back to the crime for which it was used.

But no one saw him, no one found him out. Even Helen, already asleep, would not have found the smell of sex peculiar; after all, only hours before, he had legitimately acquired the odor. Even so, Garp showered, and slipped cleanly into his own safe bed; he curled against Helen, who murmured some affection; instinctively, she thrust one long thigh over his hip. When he failed to respond, she forced her buttocks back against him. Garp's throat ached at her trust, and at his love for her. He felt fondly the slight swell of Helen's pregnancy.

Duncan was a healthy, bright child. Garp's first novel had at least made him what he said he wanted to be. Lust still troubled Garp's young life, but he was fortunate that his wife still lusted for him, and he for her. Now a second child would join their careful, orderly adventure. He felt Helen's belly anxiously--for a kick, a sign of life. Although he'd agreed with Helen that it would be nice to have a girl, Garp hoped for another boy.

Why? he thought. He recalled the girl in the park, his image of the tongueless Ellen James, his own mother's difficult decisions. He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate her. But he remembered the Karntnerstrasse whores, and Cushie Percy (who would die making a baby). And now--her scent still on him, or at least on his mind, although he had washed--the plundered Little Squab Bones. Cindy had cried under him, her back bent against a suitcase. A blue vein had pulsed at her temple, which was the translucent temple of a fair-skinned child. And though Cindy still had her tongue, she'd been unable to speak to him when he left her.

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.

8

SECOND CHILDREN, SECOND NOVELS, SECOND LOVE

It was a boy; their second son. Duncan's brother was called Walt--it was never Walter, and never the German Valt; he was simply a t at the end of a wall. Walt: like a beaver's tail smacking water, like a well-hit squash ball. He dropped into their lives and they had two boys.

Garp tried to write a second novel. Helen took her second job; she became an associate professor of English at the state university, in the town next-door to the women's college. Garp and his boys had a boys' gym to play in, and Helen had an occasional bright graduate student to relieve her of the monotony of younger people; she also had more, and more interesting, colleagues.

One of them was Harrison Fletcher; his field was the Victorian Novel, but Helen liked him for other reasons--among them: he was also married to a writer. Her name was Alice; she was also working on her second novel, although she'd never finished her first. When the Garps met her, they thought she could easily be mistaken for an Ellen Jamesian--she simply didn't talk. Harrison, whom Garp called Harry, had never been called Harry

before--but he liked Garp and he appeared to enjoy his new name as if it were a present Garp had given him. Helen would continue to call him Harrison, but to Garp he was Harry Fletcher. He was Garp's first friend, though Garp and Harrison both sensed that Harrison preferred Helen's company.

Neither Helen nor Garp knew what to make of Quiet Alice, as they called her. "She must be writing one hell of a book," Garp often said. "It's taken all her words away."

The Fletchers had one child, a daughter whose age put her awkwardly between Duncan and Walt; it was implied that they wanted another. But the book, Alice's second novel, came first; when it was over, they would have a second child, they said.

The couples had dinner together occasionally, but the Fletchers were strictly cookout people--which is to say, neither of them cooked--and Garp was in a period where he baked his own bread, he had a stockpot always simmering on the stove. Mostly, Helen and Harrison discussed books, teaching, and their colleagues; they ate lunch together at the university union, they conversed--at length--in the evening, on the phone. And Garp and Harry went to the football games, the basketball games, and the wrestling meets; three times a week they played squash, which was Harry's game--his only sport--but Garp could play even with him simply because Garp was a better athlete, in better shape from all his running. For the pleasure of these games, Garp suppressed his dislike of balls.

In the second year of this friendship, Harry told Garp that Alice liked to go to movies. "I don't," Harry admitted, "but if you do--and Helen said that you did--why not take Alice?"

Alice Fletcher giggled at movies, especially serious movies; she shook her head in disbelief at almost everything she saw. It took months for Garp to realize that Alice had something of an impediment or a nervous defect in her speech; perhaps it was psychological. At first Garp thought it was the popcorn.

"You have a speech problem, I think, Alice," he said, driving her home one night.

"Yeth," she said, nodding her head. Often it was a simple lisp; sometimes it was completely different. Occasionally, it wasn't there. Excitement seemed to aggravate it.

"How's the book coming?" he asked her.

"Good," she said. At one movie she had blurted out that she'd liked Procrastination.

"Do you want me to read any of your work?" Garp asked her.