The World According to Garp

own or entirely Bonkers'. At the kitchen table, Jenny washed away a black scablike thing that was stuck to Garp. It fell off Garp's throat and landed on the table—it was the size of a silver dollar. They both stared at it.

“What is it?” Jenny asked.

“An ear,” Garp said. “Or part of one.”

On the white enamel table lay the black leathery remnant of an ear, curling slightly at the edges and cracked like an old, dry glove.

“I ran into Bonkers,” Garp said.

“An ear for an ear,” said Jenny Fields.

There was not a mark on Garp; the blood belonged solely to Bonkers.

When Jenny went back to her bedroom, Garp snuck Cushie into the tunnel that led to the main infirmary. For eighteen years he had learned the way. He took her to the wing farthest from his mother's apartment in the annex; it was over the main admittance room, near the rooms for surgery and anesthesia.

Thus sex for Garp would forever be associated with certain smells and sensations. The experience would remain secretive but relaxed: a final reward in harrowing times. The odor would stay in his mind as deeply personal and yet vaguely hospital. The surroundings would forever seem to be deserted. Sex for Garp would remain in his mind as a solitary act committed in an abandoned universe—sometime after it had rained. It was always an act of terrific optimism.

Cushie, of course, evoked for Garp many images of cannons. When the third condom of the three-pack was exhausted, she asked if that was all he had—if he'd bought only one package. A wrestler loves nothing so much as hard-earned exhaustion; Garp fell asleep to Cushie complaining.

“The first time you don't have any,” she was saying, “and now you ran out? It is lucky we're such old friends.”

It was still dark and far from dawn when Stewart Percy woke them. Fat Stew's voice violated the old infirmary like an unnamable disease. “Open up!” they heard him hollering, and they crept to the window to see.

On the green, green lawn, in his bathrobe and slippers—and with Bonkers leashed beside him—Cushie's father bleated at the windows of the infirmary annex. It was not long before Jenny appeared in the light.

“Are you ill?” she asked Stewart.

“I want my daughter!” Stewart yelled.

“Are you drunk?” Jenny asked.

“You let me in!” Stewart screamed.

“The doctor is out,” said Jenny Fields, “and I doubt there is anything I can treat you for.”

“Bitch!” Stewart bellowed. “Your bastard son has seduced my daughter! I know they're in there, in that fucking infirmary!”

It is a fucking infirmary now, Garp thought, delighting in the touch and scent of Cushie trembling beside him. In the cool air, through the dark window, they shivered in silence.

“You should see my dog!” Stewart screeched to Jenny. “Blood everywhere! The dog hiding under the hammock! Blood on the porch!” Stewart croaked. “What the hell did that bastard do to Bonkers?”

Garp felt Cushie flinch beside him when his mother spoke. What Jenny said must have made Cushie Percy remember her remark, thirteen years earlier. What Jenny Fields said was, “Garp bit Bonkie.” Then her light went out, and in the darkness cast over the infirmary and its annex only Fat Stew's breathing was audible with the runoff from the rain—washing over the Steering School, rinsing everything clean.

5. 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 “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 busv 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 farmily 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?”