The World According to Garp

he would learn all his life, the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar. His imagination sustained him when he was writing; now that he wasn't writing, he wanted Tina. He went to look for her on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but the mayonnaise-jar whore, who spoke English, told him that Tina had moved from the first district.

“So goes it,” Wanga said. “Forget Tina.”

Garp found that he could forget her; lust, as his mother called it, was tricky that way. And time, he discovered, had softened his dislike of Wanga's mayonnaise-jar lip, suddenly, he liked it. And so he had her, twice, and as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Garp and Jenny had spent fifteen months in Vienna. It was September. Garp and Helen were only nineteen, and Helen would be going back to college very soon. The plane flew from Vienna to Frankfurt. The slight tingling (that was Wanga) quietly left Garp's flesh. When Garp thought of Charlotte, he imagined that Charlotte had been happy. After all, she had never had to leave the first district.

The plane flew from Frankfurt to London, Garp reread “The Pension Grillparzer” and hoped that Helen would not turn him down. From London to New York, Jenny read her son's story. In terms of what she'd spent more than a year doing, Garp's story struck Jenny as rather unreal. But her taste for literature was never keen and she marveled at her son's imagination. Later she would say that “The Pension Grillparzer” was just the sort of story she'd expect a boy without a proper family to make up.

Maybe so. Helen would later say that it is in the conclusion of “The Pension Grillparzer” that we can glimpse what the world according to Garp would be like.

The Pension Grillparzer [Conclusion]

In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.

“Men walking about on their hands,” said Father.

“Men looking under the floor of the W.C.,” said Grandmother.

“That man,” I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts—the dream man and the Hungarian singer.

“He does it for his living,” Herr Theobold told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.

“Make him stop that,” Father said. “We know he can do it.”

“But did you know that he can't do it any other way?” the dream man asked suddenly. “Did you know his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all.” The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.

“Please sit down,” Mother said.

“It is perfectly all right to be crippled,” Grandmother said, boldly. “But you are evil,” she told the dream man. “You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream,” she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.

“He is a little evil, I know,” Theobald admitted. “But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows.”

“I was just trying to straighten you out,” the dream man told Grandmother. “I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream.”

“Stop it,” Grandmother said.

“Well, you ought to know,” said the dream man.

“No, be quiet, please,” Herr Theobald told him.

“I am from the Tourist Bureau,” Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Oh my God shit!” Herr Theobald said.

“It's not Theobald's fault,” said the singer. “It's our fault. He's nice to put up with us, though it costs him his reputation.”

“They married my sister,” Theobald told us. “They are family, you see. What can I do?”

“They married your sister?” Mother said.

“Well, she married me first,” said the dream man.

“And then she heard me sing!” the singer said.

“She's never been married to the other one,” Theobald said, and everyone looked apologetically toward the man who could only walk on his hands.

Theobald said, “They were once a circus act, but politics got them in trouble.”

“We were the best in Hungary,” said the singer. “You ever hear of the Circus Szolnok?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” Father said, seriously.

“We played in Miskolc, in Szeged, in Debrecen,” said the dream man.

“Twice in Szeged,” the singer said.

“We would have made it to Budapest if it hadn't been for the Russians,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“Yes, it was the Russians who removed his shinbones!” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” the singer said. “He was born without shinbones. But it's true that we couldn't get along with the Russians.”

“They tried to jail the bear,” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” Theobald said.

“We rescued his sister from them,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“So of course I must put them up,” said Herr Theobald, “and they work as hard as they can. But who's interested in their act in this country? It's a Hungarian thing. There's no tradition of bears on unicycles here,” Theobald told us. “And the damn dreams mean nothing to us Viennese.”

“Tell the truth,” said the dream man. “It is because I have told the wrong dreams. We worked a nightclub on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but then we got banned.”

“You should never have told that dream,” the singer said gravely.

“Well, it was your wife's responsibility, too!” the dream man said.

“She was your wife, then,” the singer said.

“Please stop it,” Theobald begged.

“We get to do the balls for children's diseases,” the dream man said. “And some of the state hospitals— especially at Christmas.”

“If you would only do more with the bear,” Herr Theobald advised them.

“Speak to your sister about that,” said the singer. “It's her bear—she's trained him, she's let him get lazy and sloppy and full of bad habits.”

“He is the only one of you who never makes fun of me,” said the man who could only walk on his hands.

“I would like to leave all this,” Grandmother said. “This is, for me, an awful experience.”

“Please, dear lady,” Herr Theobold said, “we only wanted to show you that we meant no offense. These are hard times. I need the B rating to attract more tourists, and I can't—in my heart—throw out the Circus Szolnok.”

“In his heart, my ass!” said the dream man. “He's afraid of his sister. He wouldn't dream of throwing us out.”

“If he dreamed it, you would know it!” cried the man on his hands.

“I am afraid of the bear,” Herr Theobald said. “It does everything she tells it to do.”

“Say “he', not “it',” said the man on his hands. “He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well—and very few teeth, either.”

“The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating,” Herr Theobald admitted. “He is quite old, and he's messy.”

Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: “A depressed bear and an unemployed circus.