The World According to Garp

Second Wind of the Cuckold was about two married couples who have an affair.

“Oh boy,” Helen said, when she first learned what the book was about.

“It's not about us,” Garp said. “It's not about any of that. It just uses that.”

“And you're always telling me,” Helen said, “that autobiographical fiction is the worst kind.”

“This isn't autobiographical,” Garp said. “You'll see.”

She didn't. Though the novel was not about Helen and Garp and Harry and Alice, it was about four people whose finally unequal and sexually striving relationship is a bust.

Each person in the foursome is physically handicapped. One of the men is blind. The other man has a stutter of such monstrous proportions that his dialogue is infuriatingly difficult to read. Jenny blasted Garp for taking a cheap shot at poor departed Mr. Tinch, but writers, Garp sadly knew, were just observers—good and ruthless imitators of human behavior. Garp had meant no offense to Tinch; he was just using one of Tinch's habits.

“I don't know how you could have done such a thing to Alice,” Helen despaired.

Helen meant the handicaps, especially the women's handicaps. One has muscle spasms in her right arm—her hand is always lashing out, striking wineglasses, flowerpots, children's faces, once nearly emasculating her husband (accidentally) with a pruning hook. Only her lover, the other woman's husband, is able to soothe this terrible, uncontrollable spasm—so that the woman is, for the first time in her life, the possessor of a flawless body, entirely intentional in its movement, truly ruled and contained by herself alone.

The other woman suffers unpredictable, unstoppable flatulence. The farter is married to the stutterer, the blind man is married to the dangerous right arm.

Nobody in the foursome, to Garp's credit, is a writer. ('We should be grateful for small favors?” Helen asked.) One of the couples is childless, and wants to be. The other couple is trying to have a child; this woman conceives, but her elation is tempered by everyone's anxiety concerning the identity of the natural father. Which one was it? The couples watch for tell-tale habits in the newborn child. Will it stutter, fart, lash out, or be blind? (Garp saw this as his ultimate comment—on his mother's behalf—on the subject of genes.)

It is to some degree an optimistic novel, if only because the friendship between the couples finally convinces them to break off their liaison. The childless couple later separates, disillusioned with each other, but not necessarily as a result of the experiment. The couple with the child succeeds as a couple; the child develops without a detectable flaw. The last scene in the novel is the chance meeting of the two women; they pass on an escalator in a department store at Christmas-time, the farter going up, the woman with the dangerous right arm going down. Both are laden with packages. At the moment they pass each other, the woman stricken with uncontrollable flatulence releases a keen, treble fart—the spastic stiff-arms an old man on the escalator in front of her, bowling him down the moving staircase, toppling a sea of people. But it's Christmas. The escalators are jam- packed and noisy; no one is hurt and everything, in season, is forgivable. The two women, moving apart on their mechanical conveyors, seem to serenely acknowledge each other's burdens; they grimly smile at each other.

“It's a comedy!” Garp cried out, over and over again. “No one got it. It's supposed to be very funny. What a film it would make!”

But no one even bought the paperback rights.

As could be seen by the fate of the man who could only walk on his hands, Garp had a thing about escalators.

Helen said that no one in the English Department ever spoke to her about Second Wind of the Cuckold; in the case of Procrastination, many of her well-meaning colleagues had at least attempted a discussion. Helen said that the book was an invasion of her privacy and she hoped the whole thing had been a kick that Garp would soon be off.

“Jesus, do they think it's you?” Garp asked her. “What the hell's the matter with your dumb colleagues, anyway? Do you fart in the halls over there? Does your shoulder drop out of socket in department meetings? Was poor Harry a stutterer in the classroom?” Garp yelled. “Am I blind?”

“Yes, you're blind,” Helen said. “You have your own terms for what's fiction, and what's fact, but do you think other people know your system? It's all your experience— somehow, however much you make up, even if it's only an imagined experience. People think it's me, they think it's you. And sometimes I think so, too.”

The blind man in the novel is a geologist. “Do they see me playing with rocks?” Garp hollered.

The flatulent woman does volunteer work in a hospital; she is a nurse's aide. “Do you see my mother complaining?” Garp asked. “Does she write me and point out that she never once farted in a hospital—only at home, and always under control?”

But Jenny Fields did complain to her son about Second Wind of the Cuckold. She told him he had chosen a disappointingly narrow subject of little universal importance. “She means sex,” Garp said. “This is classic. A lecture on what's universal by a woman who's never once felt sexual desire. And the Pope, who takes vows of chastity decides the issue of contraception for millions. The world is crazy!” Garp cried.

Jenny's newest colleague was a six-foot-four transsexual named Roberta Muldoon. Formerly Robert Muldoon, a standout tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles, Roberta's weight had dropped from 235 to 180 since her successful sex-change operation. The doses of estrogen had cut into her once-massive strength and some of her endurance; Garp guessed also that Robert Muldoon's former and famous “quick hands” weren't so quick anymore, but Roberta Muldoon was a formidable companion to Jenny Fields. Roberta worshiped Garp's mother. It had been Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect, that had given Robert Muldoon the courage to have the sex-change operation—one winter as he lay recovering from knee surgery in a Philadelphia hospital.

Jenny Fields was now supporting Roberta's case with the television networks, who, Roberta claimed, had secretly agreed not to hire her as a sports announcer for the football season. Roberta's knowledge of football had not decreased one drop since all the estrogen, Jenny was arguing; waves of support from the college campuses around the country had made the six-foot-four Roberta Muldoon a figure of striking controversy. Roberta was intelligent and articulate, and of course she knew her football; she'd have been an improvement on the usual morons who commented on the game.

Garp liked her. They talked about football together and they played squash. Roberta always took the first few games from Garp—she was more powerful than he was, and a better athlete—but her stamina was not quite up to his, and being the much bigger person in the court, she wore down. Roberta would also tire of her case against the television networks, but she would develop great endurance for other, more important things.

“You're certainly an improvement on the Ellen James Society, Roberta,” Garp would tell her. He enjoyed his mother's visits better when Jenny came with Roberta. And Roberta tossed a football for hours with Duncan. Roberta promised to take Duncan to an Eagles game, but Garp was anxious about that. Roberta was a target figure; she had made some people very angry. Garp imagined various assaults and bomb threats on Roberta—and Duncan disappearing in the vast and roaring football stadium in Philadelphia, where he would be defiled by a child molester.

It was the fanaticism of some of Roberta Muldoon's hate mail that gave Garp such an imagination, but when Jenny showed him some hate mail of her own, Garp was anxious about that, too. It was an aspect of the publicity of his mother's life that he had not considered: some people truly hated her. They wrote Jenny that they wished she had cancer. They wrote Roberta Muldoon that they hoped his or her parents were no longer living. One couple wrote Jenny Fields that they would like to artificially inseminate her, with elephant sperm—and blow her up from the inside. That note was signed: “A Legitimate Couple.”

One man wrote Roberta Muldoon that he had been an Eagles fan all his life, and even his grandparents had been born in Philadelphia, but now he was going to be a Giants or a Redskins fan, and drive to New York or Washington—'or even Baltimore, if necessary'—because Roberta had perverted the entire Eagles offensive line with his pansy ways.

One woman wrote Roberta Muldoon that she hoped Roberta would get gang-banged by the Oakland Raiders.