The World According to Garp

The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator—where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed—marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.

After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced, Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.

For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbear-like and devious—only pretending to sleep—and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schцnbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.

His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schцnbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification—the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.

In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings—void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.

In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.

“When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer,” my second wife said to me, “I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place.”

“It's a long story,” I admitted.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, 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.

7. MORE LUST

And so she married him; she did what he asked. Helen thought it was a pretty good story for a start. Old Tinch liked it, too. “It is rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow,” Tinch told Garp. Tinch recommended that Garp send “The Pension Grillparzer” to Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp waited three months for this reply:

The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.

Garp was puzzled and he showed the rejection to Tinch. Tinch was also puzzled.

“I guess they're interested in n-n-newer fiction,” Tinch said.

“What's that?” Garp asked.

Tinch admitted he didn't really know. “The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess,” Tinch said. “But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think,” Tinch said.

“About itself?” Garp said.

“It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction,” Tinch told him.

Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.

Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story “only mildly interesting', the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:

I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for asking me, though.

Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awkward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches—and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.

Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job—an assistant professor at a women's college—when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer—even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.

Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp—who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure—a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.

The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.

“There's a nurse to see you,” his secretary said, rolling her eyes—as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.

“It's about me,” she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. “When can you read it?” It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ('In this dirty-minded world...'), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?

Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!—they would certainly publish this!—he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).

“Where can they go every night?” Jenny asked. “They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car.”

They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.

“They say they want children,” Ernie complained. “Helen should finish her education.”