The World According to Garp

into reading to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their invited guests; he was, after all, the chief trustee—and Roberta frequently organized small concerts and poetry readings, and so forth—but Garp was leery of it. He disliked readings—and especially now, to women; his put-down of the Ellen Jamesians had left so many women feeling raw. Most serious women, of course, agreed with him, but most of them were also intelligent enough to recognize a kind of personal vindictiveness in his criticisms of the Ellen Jamesians, which was stronger than logic. They sensed a kind of killer instinct in him—basically male and basically intolerant. He was, as Helen said, too intolerant of the intolerant. Most women surely thought Garp had written the truth about the Ellen Jamesians, but was it necessary to have been so rough? In his own wrestling terminology, perhaps Garp was guilty of unnecessary roughness. It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now, even to mixed audiences—at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable—he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

And Roberta had advised him not to read a sex scene; not that the Fields Foundation fellows were essentially hostile, but they were wary, Roberta said. “You have lots of other scenes to read,” Roberta said, “besides sex.” Neither of them mentioned the possibility that he might have anything new to read. And it was mainly for this reason—that he had nothing new to read—that Garp had grown increasingly unhappy about giving readings, anywhere.

Garp topped the slight hill by a farm for black Angus cattle—the only hill between Steering and the sea—and passed the two-mile mark on his run. He saw the blue-black noses of the beasts pointed at him, like double- barreled guns over a low stone wall. Garp always spoke to the cattle; he mooed at them.

The dirty-white Saab was now approaching him, and Garp moved into the dust of the soft shoulder. One of the black Angus mooed back at Garp; two shied away from the stone wall. Garp had his eyes on them. The Saab was not going very fast—did not appear reckless. There seemed no reason to keep an eye on it.

It was only his memory that saved him. Writers have very selective memories, and fortunately, for Garp, he had chosen to remember how the dirty-white Saab had slowed—when it first passed him, going the other way—and how the driver's head appeared to be lining him up in the rear-view mirror.

Garp looked away from the Angus and saw the silent Saab, engine cut, coasting straight at him in the soft shoulder, a trail of dust spurning behind its quiet white shape and over the intent, hunched head of the driver. The driver, aiming the Saab at Garp, was the closest visual image Garp would ever have of what a ball turret gunner who was at work looked like.

Garp took two bounds to the stone wall and vaulted it, not seeing the single line of electric fencing above the wall. He felt the tingle in his thigh as he grazed the wire, but he cleared the fence, and the wall, and landed in the wet green stubble of the field, chewed and pockmarked by the herd of Angus.

He lay hugging the wet ground, he heard the croak of the vile-tasting Under Toad in his dry throat—he heard the explosion of hooves as the Angus thundered away from him. He heard the rock-and-metal meeting of the dirty-white Saab with the stone wall. Two boulders, the size of his head, bounced lazily beside him. One wild-eyed Angus bull stood his ground, but the Saab's horn was stuck; perhaps the steady blare kept the bull from charging.

Garp knew he was alive; the blood in his mouth was only because he had bitten his lip. He moved along the wall to the point of impact, where the bashed Saab was imbedded. Its driver had lost more than her tongue.

She was in her forties. The Saab's engine had driven her knees up around the mangled steering column. She had no rings on her hands, which were short-fingered and reddened by the rough winter, or winters, she had known. The Saab's door post on the driver's side, or else the windshield's frame, had struck her face and dented one temple and one cheek. This left her face a little lopsided. Her brown, blood-matted hair was ruffled by the warm summer wind, which blew through the hole where the windshield had been.

Garp knew she was dead because he looked in her eyes. He knew she was an Ellen Jamesian because he looked in her mouth. He also looked in her purse. There was only the predictable note pad and pencil. There were lots of used and new notes, too. One of them said:

Hi! My name is...

and so forth. Another one said:

You asked for this.

Garp imagined that this was the note she had intended to stick under the bloody waistband of his running shorts when she left him dead and mangled by the side of the road.

Another note was almost lyrical; it was the one the newspapers would love to use, and reuse.

I have never been raped, and I have never wanted to be. I have never been with a man, and I have never wanted to be, either. My whole life's meaning has been to share the suffering of Ellen James.

Oh boy, Garp thought, but he left that note to be discovered with her other things. He was not the sort of writer, or the sort of man, who concealed important messages—even if the messages were insane.

He had aggravated his old groin injury by vaulting the stone wall and the electric fence, but he was able to jog back toward town until a yogurt truck picked him up; Garp and the yogurt driver went to tell the police together.

By the time the yogurt driver passed the scene of the accident, on his way to discover Garp, the black Angus had escaped through the rent in the stone wall and were milling around the dirty-white Saab like large, beastly mourners surrounding this fragile angel killed in a foreign car.

Maybe that was the Under Toad I felt, Helen thought, lying awake beside the soundly sleeping Garp. She hugged his warm body; she nestled in the smell of her own rich sex all over him. Maybe that dead Ellen Jamesian was the Under Toad, and now she's gone, thought Helen; she squeezed Garp so hard that he woke up.

“What is it?” he asked. But, wordless as Ellen James, Helen hugged his hips; her teeth chattered against his chest and he hugged her until she stopped shivering.

A “spokesperson” for the Ellen Jamesians remarked that this was an isolated act of violence, not sanctioned by the society of Ellen Jamesians but obviously provoked by the “typically male, aggressive, rapist personality of T. S. Garp.” They were not taking responsibility for this “isolated act,” the Jamesians declared, but they were not surprised or especially sorry about it, either.

Roberta told Garp that, under the circumstances, if he didn't feel like reading to a group of women, she would understand. But Garp read to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their assorted guests at Dog's Head Harbor—a crowd of less than one hundred people, cozily comfortable in the sun room of Jenny's estate. He read them “The Pension Grillparzer,” which he introduced by saying, “This is the first and best thing I ever wrote, and I don't even know how I thought it up. I think it is about death, which I didn't even know very much about when I wrote it. I know more about death now, and I'm not writing a word. There are eleven major characters in this story and seven of them die; one of them goes mad; one of them runs away with another woman. I'm not going to give away what happens to the other two characters, but you can see that the odds for surviving this story aren't great.”

Then he read to them. Some of them laughed; four of them cried; there were lots of sneezes and coughs, perhaps because of the ocean dampness; nobody left and everyone applauded. An older woman in the back, by the piano, slept soundly through the entire story, but even she applauded at the end; she woke up to the applause and joined in it, happily.

The event seemed to charge Garp. Duncan had attended the reading—it was his favorite among his father's works (actually one of the few things his father had written that Duncan had been allowed to read). Duncan was a talented young artist and he had more than fifty drawings of the characters and situations in his father's story, which he revealed to Garp after Garp drove them both home. Some of the drawings were fresh and unpretentious; all of them were thrilling to Garp. The old bear's withered flanks engulfing the absurd unicycle; the grandmother's matchstick ankles appearing frail and exposed under the W.C. door. The evil mischief in the dream man's excited eyes! The floozy beauty of Herr Theobald's sister ('...as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her—as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification'). And the brave optimism of the man who could only walk on his hands.

“How long have you been doing this?” Garp asked Duncan; he could have wept, he felt so proud.

It charged him, very much. He proposed to John Wolf a special edition, a book of “The Pension Grillparzer,” illustrated by Duncan. “The story's good enough to be a book all by itself,” Garp wrote