The World According to Garp

WHEN Walt caught colds, Garp slept badly. It was as if he were trying to breathe for the boy, and for himself. Garp would get up in the night to kiss and nuzzle the child; anyone seeing Garp would have thought that he could make Walt's cold go away by catching it himself.

“Oh, God,” Helen said. “It's just a cold. Duncan had colds all winter when he was five.” Nearing eleven, Duncan seemed to have outgrown colds; but Walt, at five, was fully in the throes of cold after cold—or it was one long cold that went away and came back. By the March mud season, Walt's resistance struck Garp as altogether gone; the child hacked himself and Garp awake each night with a wet, wrenching cough. Garp sometimes fell asleep listening to Walt's chest, and he would wake up, frightened, when he could no longer hear the thump of the boy's heart; but the child had merely pushed his father's heavy head off his chest so that he could roll over and sleep more comfortably.

Both the doctor and Helen told Garp, “It's just a cough.”

But the imperfection in Walt's nightly breathing scared Garp right out of his sleep. He was usually awake, therefore, when Roberta called; the late-night anguish of the large and powerful Ms. Muldoon was no longer frightening to Garp—he had come to expect it—but Garp's own fretful sleeplessness made Helen short- tempered.

“If you were back at work, on a book, you'd be too tired to lie awake half the night,” she said. It was his imagination that was keeping him up, Helen told him; one sign that he hadn't been writing enough, Garp knew, was when he had too much imagination left over for other things. For example, the onslaught of dreams: Garp now dreamed only of horrors happening to his children.

In a dream, there was one horror that took place while Garp was reading a pornographic magazine. He was just looking at the same picture, over and over again; the picture was very pornographic. The wrestlers on the university team, with whom Garp occasionally worked out, had a peculiar vocabulary for such pictures. This vocabulary, Garp noted, had not changed since his days at Steering, when the wrestlers on Garp's team spoke of such pictures in the same fashion. What had changed was the increased availability of the pictures, but the names were the same.

The picture Garp looked at in the dream was considered among the highest in the rankings of pornographic pictures. Among pictures of naked women, there were names for how much you could see. If you could see the pubic hair, but not the sex parts, that was called a bush shot—or just a bush. If you could see the sex parts, which were sometimes partially hidden by the hair, that was a beaver; a beaver was better than just a bush; a beaver was the whole thing: the hair and the parts. If the parts were open, that was called a split beaver. And if the whole thing glistened, that was the best of all, in the world of pornography: that was a wet, split beaver. The wetness implied that the woman was not only naked and exposed and open, but she was also ready.

In his dream, Garp was looking at what the wrestlers called a wet, split beaver when he heard children crying. He did not know whose children they were, but Helen and his mother, Jenny Fields, were with them; they all came down the stairs and filed past him, where he struggled to hide from them what he'd been looking at. They had been upstairs and something terrible had awakened them; they were on their way farther downstairs—going to the basement as if the basement were a bomb shelter. And with that thought, Garp heard the dull crump of bombing—he noted the crumbling plaster, he saw the flickering lights—and he grasped the terror of what was approaching them. The children, two by two, marched whimpering after Helen and Jenny, who led them to the bomb shelter as soberly as nurses. If they looked at Garp at all, they regarded him with vague sadness and with scorn, as if he had let them all down and was powerless to help them now.

Perhaps he had been looking at the wet, split beaver instead of watching for enemy planes? This, true to the nature of dreams, was forever unclear: precisely why he felt so guilty, and why they looked at him as if they'd been so abused.

At the end of the line of children were Walt and Duncan, holding hands; the so-called buddy system, as it is employed at summer camps, appeared in Garp's dream to be the natural reaction to a disaster among children. Little Walt was crying, the way Garp had heard him cry when he was caught in the grip of a nightmare, unable to wake up. “I'm having a bad dream,” he sniveled. He looked at his father and almost shouted to him, “I'm having a bad dream!”

But in Garp's dream, Garp could not wake the child from this one. Duncan looked stoically over his shoulder at his father, a silent and bravely doomed expression on his beautiful young face. Duncan was appearing very grown-up lately. Duncan's look was a secret between Duncan and Garp: that they both knew it was not a dream, and that Walt could not be helped.

“Wake me up!” Walt cried, but the long file of children was disappearing into the bomb shelter. Twisting in Duncan's grip (Walt came to about the height of Duncan's elbow), Walt looked back at his father. “I'm having a dream!” Walt screamed, as if to convince himself. Garp could do nothing; he said nothing; he made no attempt to follow them—down these last stairs. And the dropping plaster coated everything white. The bombs kept falling.

“You're having a dream!” Garp screamed after little Walt. “It's just a bad dream!” he cried, though he knew he was lying.

Then Helen would kick him and he'd wake up.

Perhaps Helen feared that Garp's run-amuck imagination would turn away from Walt and turn on her. Because if Garp had given half the worry to Helen that he seemed compelled to give to Walt, Garp might have realized that something was going on.

Helen thought she was in control of what was going on; she at least had controlled how it began (opening her office door, as usual, to the slouching Michael Milton, and bidding him enter her room). Once inside, she closed the door behind him and kissed him quickly on the mouth, holding his slim neck so that he couldn't even escape for breath, and grinding her knee between his legs; he kicked over the wastebasket and dropped his notebook.

“There's nothing more to discuss,” Helen said, taking a breath. She raced her tongue across his upper lip; Helen was trying to decide if she liked his mustache. She decided she liked it; or, at least, she liked it for now. “We'll go to your apartment. Nowhere else,” she told him.

“It's across the river,” he said.

“I know where it is,” she said. “Is it clean?”

“Of course,” he said. “And it's got a great view of the river.”

“I don't care about the view,” Helen said. “I want it clean.”

“It's pretty clean,” he said. “I can clean it better.”

“We can only use your car,” she said.

“I don't have a car,” he said.

“I know you don't,” Helen said. “You'll have to get one.”

He was smiling now; he'd been surprised, but now he was feeling sure of himself again. “Well, I don't have to get one now, do I?” he asked, nuzzling his mustache against her neck; he touched her breasts. Helen unattached herself from his embrace.

“Get one whenever you want,” she said. “We'll never use mine, and I won't be seen walking with you all over town, or riding on the buses. If anyone knows about this, it's over. Do you understand?” She sat down at her desk, and he did not feel invited to walk around her desk to touch her; he sat in the chair her students usually sat in.

“Sure, I understand,” he said.

“I love my husband and will never hurt him,” Helen told him. Michael Milton knew better than to smile.

“I'll get a car, right away,” he said.

“And clean your apartment, or have it cleaned,” she said.

“Absolutely,” he said. Now he dared to smile, a little. “What kind of car do you want me to get?” he asked her.

“I don't care about that,” she told him. “Just get one that runs; get one that isn't in the garage all the time. And don't get one with bucket seats. Get one with a long seat in front.” He looked more surprised and puzzled than ever, so she explained to him: “I want to be able to lie down, comfortably, across the front seat,” she said. “I'll put my head in your lap so that no one will see me sitting up beside you. Do you understand?”

“Don't worry,” he said, smiling again.