The World According to Garp

rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team's strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath—sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering's first family—when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.

Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen's bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine's editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.

Thus the Ellen Jamesians had that to get their teeth into: Ellen James, poor child, had been brainwashed into her antifeminist stance by the male villain, Garp. The betrayer of his mother! The smirking capitalizer on women's-movement politics! In the various letters, Garp's relationship with Ellen James was referred to as “seductive,” “slimy,” and “underhanded.”

I'm sorry!

Ellen wrote.

“It's okay, it's okay. Nothing's your fault,” Garp assured her.

I'm not an antifeminist!

“Of course you're not,” Garp told her.

They make everything so black and white.

“Of course they do,” said Garp.

That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them—or else you're their enemy.

“Yes, yes,” Garp said.

I wish I could talk.

And then she dissolved, crying on Garp's shoulder, her wordless, angry blubber rousing Helen from the far-off reading room of the great house, driving Duncan from the darkroom, and waking baby Jenny from her nap.

So, foolishly, Garp decided to take them on, these grown-up crazies, these devout fanatics who—even when their chosen symbol rejected them—insisted they knew more about Ellen James than Ellen James knew about herself.

“Ellen James is not a symbol,” Garp wrote. “She is a rape victim who was raped and dismembered before she was old enough to make up her own mind about sex and men.” Thus he began; he went on and on. And, of course, they published it—liking any fuel to any fire. It was also the first published piece of anything by T. S. Garp since the famous novel, The World According to Bensenhaver.

Actually, it was the second. In a little magazine, shortly after Jenny's death, Garp published his first and only poem. It was a strange poem; it was about condoms.

Garp felt his life was marred by condoms—man's device to spare himself and others the consequences of his lust. Our lifetime, Garp felt, was stalked by condoms—condoms in the parking lots in the early mornings, condoms discovered by children in the playing sand of the beaches, condoms used for messages (one to his mother, on the door knob of their tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex). Condoms unflushed down the dormitory toilets of the Steering School. Condoms lying slick and cocky in public urinals. Once a condom delivered with the Sunday paper. Once a condom in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. And once a condom on the stick-shift shaft of the old Volvo; someone had used the car overnight, but not for driving.

Condoms found Garp the way ants found sugar. He traveled miles, he changed continents, and there—in the bidet of the otherwise spotless but unfamiliar hotel room...there—in the back seat of the taxi, like the removed eye of a large fish ...there—eyeing him, from the bottom of his shoe, where he picked it up, somewhere. From everywhere condoms came to him and vilely surprised him.

Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon's mouth!

It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen warned. “More bookshelves.”

But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, “the radical self-damage” of the Ellen Jamesians—'the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name.” He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, “For whom? Who is serious who doesn't already know the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you've done this for them—not for Ellen, either. You've done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You've done it to get to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them— or why they did what they did. They were a fashion, a stupid fashion, but you couldn't just let them pass by. Why?”

But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been right—at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone—even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

“But they started it,” Garp insisted.

Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn't tell—he started it,

said Ellen James.

“Okay,” Garp said. “Okay, okay.” The girl's sad truth hurt him. Hadn't he only wanted to defend her?

The Steering wrestling team whipped Bath Academy in the season's final dual meet and finished 9-2, with a second-place team trophy in the New England tournament and one individual champion, a 167-pounder whom Garp had personally done the most work with. But the season was over; Garp, the retired writer, once more had too much time on his hands.

He saw a lot of Roberta. They played endless games of squash; between them, they broke four rackets in three months and the little finger on Garp's left hand. Garp had an unmindful backswing that accounted for nine stitches across the bridge of Roberta's nose; Roberta hadn't had any stitches since her Eagle days and she complained about them bitterly. On a cross-court charge, Roberta's long knee gave Garp a groin injury that had him hobbling for a week.

“Honestly, you two,” Helen told them. “Why don't you just go off and have a torrid affair. It would be safer.”

But they were the best of friends, and if ever such urges occurred—for either Garp or Roberta—they were quickly made into a joke. Also, Roberta's love life was at last coolly organized; like a born woman, she valued her privacy. And she enjoyed the directorship of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta reserved her sexual self for not infrequent but never excessive flings upon the city of New York, where she kept a calm number of lovers on edge for her sudden visits and trysts. “It's the only way I can manage it,” she told Garp.

“It's a good enough way, Roberta,” Garp said. “Not everyone is so fortunate—to have this separation of power.”

And so they played more squash, and when the weather warmed, they ran on the curvy roads that stretched from Steering to the sea. On one road, Dog's Head Harbor was a flat six miles from Steering; they often ran from one mansion to the other. When Roberta did her business in New York, Garp ran alone.

He was alone, nearing the halfway point to Dog's Head Harbor—where he would turn around and run back to Steering—when the dirty-white Saab passed him, appeared to slow down, then sped ahead of him and out of sight. That was the only thing strange about it. Garp ran on the left-hand side of the road so that he could see the cars approaching closest to him; the Saab had passed him on the right, in its proper lane—nothing funny about it.

Garp was thinking about a reading he had promised to give at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta had talked him