The World According to Garp

“But what?” Garp said. He laughed—that Helen could look so girlish at this late hour.

But Helen took her glasses off and showed him that other look again, that look he had first seen and couldn't place. Anxiously, she said, “Oh, I don't know. Young, maybe. He's just young, you know. Very bright, but young.”

Garp flipped a page, read half of another paragraph, gave the manuscript back to her. He shrugged. “It's all shit to me,” he said.

“No, it's not shit,” Helen said, seriously. Oh, Helen the judicious teacher, Garp thought, and announced he was going back to bed. “I'll be up in a little while,” Helen told him.

Then Garp saw himself in the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. That was where he finally identified that look he'd seen, strangely out of place, on Helen's face. It was a look Garp recognized because he'd seen it before—on his own face, from time to time, but never on Helen's. The look Garp recognized was guilty, and it puzzled him. He lay awake a long time but Helen did not come up to bed. In the morning Garp was surprised that although he'd only glanced at the graduate student's manuscript, the name of Michael Milton was the first thing to come to his mind. He looked cautiously at Helen, now lying awake beside him.

“Michael Milton,” Garp said quietly, not to her, but loud enough for her to hear. He watched her unresponding face. Either she was daydreaming, and far away, or she simply had not heard him. Or, he thought, the name of Michael Milton was already on her mind, so that when Garp uttered it, it was the name that she was already saying—to herself—and she had not noticed that Garp had spoken it.

Michael Milton, a third-year graduate student in comparative literature, had been a French major at Yale, where he graduated with indifferent distinction; he had earlier graduated from the Steering School, though he tended to play down his prep school years. Once he knew that you knew he had gone to Yale, he tended to play that down, too, but he never played down his Junior Year Abroad—in France. To listen to Michael Milton, you would not guess that he'd spent only a year in Europe because he managed to give you the impression that he'd lived in France all his young life. He was twenty-five.

Though he'd lived so briefly in Europe, it appeared that he'd bought all the clothes for his lifetime there: the tweed jackets had wide lapels and flared cuffs, and both the jackets and the slacks were cut to flatter the hips and the waist; they were the kind of clothes that even the Americans of Garp's days at Steering referred to as “Continental.” The collars of Michael Milton's shirts, which he wore open at the throat (always with two unbuttoned buttons), were floppy and wide with a kind of Renaissance flair: a manner betraying both carelessness and intense perfection.

He was as different from Garp as an ostrich is different from a seal. The body of Michael Milton was an elegant body, when dressed; unclothed, he resembled no animal so much as he resembled a heron. He was thin and tallish, with a slouch his tailored tweed jackets concealed. He had a body like coat hangers—the perfect body to hang clothes on. Stripped, he had barely a body at all.

He was Garp's opposite in almost every way, except that Michael Milton had in common with Garp a tremendous self-confidence; he shared with Garp the virtue, or the vice, of arrogance. Like Garp, he was aggressive in the way only someone who believes totally in himself can be aggressive. It had been these qualities, long ago, that had first attracted Helen to Garp.

Now here were the qualities, newly attired; they manifested themselves in a much different form, yet Helen recognized them. She was not usually attracted to rather dandified young men who dressed and spoke as if they had grown world-weary and wisely sad in Europe, when, in fact, they had spent most of their short lives in the back seats of cars in Connecticut. But, in her girlhood, Helen had not usually been attracted to wrestlers, either. Helen liked confident men, provided that their confidence was not absurdly misplaced.

What attracted Michael Milton to Helen was what attracted many men and few women to her. She was, in her thirties, an alluring woman not simply because she was beautiful but because she was perfect-looking. It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. This frightening but fetching look, in Helen's case, was not misleading. She was a very successful woman. She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

In the corridors surrounding the English Department, Helen was not used to being stared at at all; everyone looked when they could, but the looks were furtive. She was, therefore, unprepared for the long, frank look that young Michael Milton gave her one day. He simply stopped in the hall and watched her walking toward him. It was actually Helen who turned her eyes away from his; he turned and watched her walk away from him, down the hall. He said to someone beside him, loud enough for Helen to hear: “Does she teach here or go here? What's she do here, anyway?” Michael Milton asked.

In the second semester of that year, Helen taught a course in Narrative Point of View; it was a seminar for graduate students, and for a few advanced undergraduates. Helen was interested in the development and sophistication of narrative technique, with special attention to point of view, in the modern novel. In the first class she noticed the older-looking student with the thin, pale mustache and the nice shirt with the two buttons unbuttoned; she turned her eyes away from him and distributed a questionnaire. It asked, among other questions, why the students thought they were interested in this particular course. In answer to that question, a student named Michael Milton wrote: “Because, from the first time I saw you, I wanted to be your lover.”

After that class, alone in her office, Helen read that answer to her questionnaire. She thought she knew which one of the people in the class Michael Milton was; if she'd known it was someone else, some boy she hadn't even noticed, she would have shown the questionnaire to Garp. Garp might have said, “Show me the fucker!” Or: “Let's introduce him to Roberta Muldoon.” And they would both have laughed, and Garp would have teased her about leading her students on. Because the intentions of the boy, whoever he was, would have been aired between them, there would have been no possibility of actual connection; Helen knew that. When she didn't show the questionnaire to Garp, she felt already guilty—but she thought that if Michael Milton was who she thought he was, she would like to see this go a little further. At that moment, in her office, Helen honestly did not foresee it going more than a little further. What would have been the harm of a little?

If Harrison Fletcher had still been her colleague, she would have shown him the questionnaire. Regardless—whoever Michael Milton was, even if he was that disturbing- looking boy—she would have brought up the matter with Harrison. Harrison and Helen, in the past, had some secrets of this kind, which they kept from Garp and Alice; they were permanent but innocent secrets. Helen knew that sharing Michael Milton's interest in her with Harrison would have been another way to avoid any actual connection.

But she did not mention Michael Milton to Garp, and Harrison, of course, had left to seek his tenure elsewhere. The handwriting on the questionnaire was black, eighteenth-century calligraphy, the kind that can only be carved with a special pen; Michael Milton's written message looked more permanent than print, and Helen read it over and over again. She noted the other answers to the questionnaire: date of birth, years in school, previous courses in the Department of English or in comparative literature. She checked his transcript; his grades were good. She called two colleagues who'd had Michael Milton in courses last semester; she derived from them both that Michael Milton was a good student, aggressive and proud to the point of being vain. She gathered from both her colleagues, though they did not actually say so, that Michael Milton was both gifted and unlikable. She thought of the deliberately unbuttoned buttons on his shirt (she was sure, now, that it was he) and she imagined buttoning them up. She thought of that wispy mustache, a thin trace upon his lip. Garp would later comment on Michael Milton's mustache, saying that it was an insult to the world of hair and to the world of lips; Garp thought it was so much the merest imitation of a mustache that Michael Milton would do his face a favor to shave it off.

But Helen liked the strange little mustache on the lip of Michael Milton.

“You just don't like any mustaches,” Helen said to Garp.

“I don't like that mustache,” he said. “I've got nothing against mustaches, in general,” Garp insisted, though in truth Helen was right: Garp hated all mustaches, ever since his encounter with the Mustache Kid. The Mustache Kid had spoiled mustaches for Garp, forever.

Helen also liked the length of Michael Milton's sideburns, curly and blondish; Garp's sideburns were cropped level to his dark eyes, almost at the tops of his ears—although his hair was thick and shaggy, and always just long