The World According to Garp

“It's a small town,” Helen said. “No one must know.”

“It's not that small a town,” Michael Milton said, confidently.

“Every town is a small town,” Helen said, “and this one is smaller than you think. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Tell me what?” he asked her.

“You're sleeping with Margie Tallworth,” Helen said. “She's in my Comp. Lit. 205; she's a junior,” Helen said. “And you see another very young undergraduate—she's in Dirkson's English 150; I think she's a freshman, but I don't know if you've slept with her. Not for lack of trying, if you haven't,” Helen added. “To my knowledge you've not touched any of your fellow graduate students; not yet,” Helen said. “But there's surely someone I've missed, or there has been.”

Michael Milton was both sheepish and proud at the same time, and the usual command he held over his expressions escaped him so completely that Helen didn't like the expression she saw on his face and she looked away.

“That's how small this town, and every town, is,” Helen said. “If you have me,” she told him, “you can't have any of those others. I know what young girls notice, and I know how much they're inclined to say.”

“Yes,” Michael Milton said; he appeared ready to take notes.

Helen suddenly thought of something, and she looked momentarily startled. “You do have a driver's license?” she asked.

“Oh yes!” Michael Milton said. They both laughed, and Helen relaxed again; but when he came around her desk to kiss her, she shook her head and waved him back.

“And you won't ever touch me here,” she said. “There will be nothing intimate in this office. I don't lock my door. I don't even like to have it shut. Please open it, now,” she asked him, and he did as he was told.

He got a car, a huge Buick Roadmaster, the old kind of station wagon—with real wooden slats on the side. It was a 1951 Buick Dynaflow, heavy and shiny with pre-Korea chrome and real oak. It weighed 5,550 pounds, or almost three tons. It held seven quarts of oil and nineteen gallons of gasoline. Its original price was $2,850 but Michael Milton picked it up for less than six hundred dollars.

“It's a straight-eight cylinder, three-twenty cubic, power steering, with a single-throat Carter carb,” the salesman told Michael. “It's not too badly rusted.”

In fact, it was the dull, inconspicuous color of clotted blood, more than six feet wide and seventeen feet long. The front seat was so long and deep that Helen could lie across it, almost without having to bend her knees—or without having to put her head in Michael Milton's lap, though she did this anyway.

She did not put her head in his lap because she had to; she liked her view of the dashboard, and being close to the old smell of the maroon leather of the big, slick seat. She put her head in his lap because she liked feeling Michael's leg stiffen and relax, his thigh shifting just slightly between the brake and the accelerator. It was a quiet lap to put your head in because the car had no clutch; the driver needed to move just one leg, and just occasionally. Michael Milton thoughtfully carried his loose change in his left front pocket, so there were only the soft wales of his corduroy slacks, which made a faint impression on the skin of Helen's cheek—and sometimes his rising erection would touch her ear, or reach up into the hair on the back of her neck.

Sometimes she imagined taking him into her mouth while they drove across town in the big car with the gaping chrome grille like the mouth of a feeding fish—Buick Eight in script across the teeth. But that, Helen knew, would not be safe.

The first indication that the whole thing might not be safe was when Margie Tallworth dropped Helen's Comp. Lit. 205, without so much as a note of explanation concerning what she might not have liked about the course. Helen feared it was not the course that Margie hadn't liked, and she called the young Miss Tallworth into her office to ask her for an explanation.

Margie Tallworth, a junior, knew enough about school to know that no explanation was required; up to a certain point in any semester, a student was free to drop any course without the instructor's permission. “Do I have to have a reason?” the girl asked Helen, sullenly.

“No, you don't,” Helen said. “But if you had a reason, I just wanted to hear it.”

“I don't have to have a reason,” Margie Tallworth said. She held Helen's gaze longer than most students could hold it; then she got up to leave. She was pretty and small and rather well dressed for a student, Helen thought. If there was any consistency to Michael Milton's former girl friend and his present taste, it appeared only that he liked women to wear nice clothes.

“Well, I'm sorry it didn't work out,” Helen said, truthfully, as Margie was leaving; she was still fishing for what the girl might actually know.

She knew, Helen thought, and quickly accused Michael.

“You've blown it already,” she told him coldly, because she could speak coldly to him—over the phone. “Just how did you drop Margie Tallworth?”

“Very gently,” Michael Milton said, smugly. “But a drop is a drop, no matter how different the ways of doing it are.” Helen did not appreciate it when he attempted to instruct her—except sexually; she indulged the boy that, and he seemed to need to be dominant there. That was different for her, and she didn't really mind. He was sometimes rough, but not ever dangerous, she thought; and if she firmly resisted something, he stopped. Once she had had to tell him, “No! I don't like that, I won't do that.” But she had added, “Please,” because she wasn't that sure of him. He had stopped; he had been forceful with her, but in another way—in a way that was all right with her. It was exciting that she couldn't trust him completely. But not trusting him to be silent was another matter; if she knew he had talked about her, that would be that.

“I didn't tell her anything,” Michael insisted. “I said, “Margie, it's all over,” or something like that. I didn't even tell her there was another woman, and I certainly said nothing about you.”

“But she's probably heard you talk about me, before,” Helen said. “Before this started, I mean.”

“She never liked your course, anyway,” Michael said. “We did talk about that once.”

“She never liked the course?” Helen said. This truly surprised her.

“Well, she's not very bright,” Michael said, impatiently.

“She'd better not know,” Helen said. “I mean it: you better find out.”

But he found out nothing. Margie Tallworth refused to speak to him. He tried to tell her, on the phone, that it was all because an old girl friend had come back to him—she had arrived from out of town; she'd had no place to stay; one thing had led to another. But Margie Tallworth had hung up on him before he could polish the story.

Helen smoked a little more. She watched Garp anxiously for a few days—and once she felt actual guilt, when she made love to Garp; she felt guilty that she had made love to him not because she wanted to but because she wanted to reassure him, if he had been thinking that anything was wrong.

He hadn't been thinking, not much. Or: he had thought, but only once, about the bruises on the small, tight backs of Helen's thighs; though he was strong, Garp was a very gentle man with his children and his wife. He also knew what fingermark bruises looked like because he was a wrestler. It was a day or so later that he noticed the same small fingermark bruises on the backs of Duncan's arms—just where Garp held him when Garp wrestled with the boy—and Garp concluded that he gripped the people he loved harder than he meant to. He concluded that the fingermarks on Helen were also his.

He was too vain a man to be easily jealous. And the name he had woken with—on his lips, one morning—had eluded him. There were no more papers by Michael Milton around the house, keeping Helen up at night. In fact, she was going to bed earlier and earlier; she needed her rest.

As for Helen, she developed a fondness for the bare, sharp shaft of the Volvo's stick shift; its bite at the end of the day, driving home from her office, felt good against the heel of her hand, and she often pressed against it until she felt it was only a hair away from the pressure necessary to break her skin. She could bring tears to her eyes, this way, and it made her feel clean again, when she arrived home—when the boys would wave and shout at her, from the window where the TV was; and when Garp would announce what dinner he had prepared for them all, when Helen walked into the kitchen.

Margie Tallworth's possible knowledge had frightened Helen, because although Helen had said to Michael— and to herself—that it would be over the instant anyone knew, Helen now knew that it would be more difficult to