The World According To Garp (20 page)

“Then, when everyone seemed to have gone, I came into the W.C.,” Johanna said. “I left the light
off
. I was
very
quiet,” she told us. “Then I saw and heard the wheel.”

“The
wheel
?” Father asked.

“A wheel went by the door a few times,” Grandmother said. “it rolled by and came back and rolled by again.”

Father made his fingers roll like wheels alongside his head, he made a face at Mother. “Somebody needs a new set of wheels,” he whispered, but Mother looked crossly at him.

“I turned on the light,” Grandmother said, “and the wheel went away.”

“I told you there was a bike in the hall,” said Robo.

“Shut up, Robo,” Father said.

“No, it was not a bicycle,” Grandmother said. “There was only
one
wheel.”

Father was making his hands go crazy beside his head. “She’s got a wheel or two
missing
,” he hissed at my mother, but she cuffed him and knocked his glasses askew on his face.

“Then someone came and looked under the door,” Grandmother said, “and
that
is when I screamed.”

“Someone?” said Father.

“I saw his hands, a man’s hands—there was hair on his knuckles,” Grandmother said. “His hands were on the rug right outside the door. He must have been looking
up
at me.”

“No, Grandmother,” I said. “I think he was just standing out here on his hands.”

“Don’t be fresh,” my mother said.

“But we saw a man walking on his hands,” Robo said.

“You did
not
,” Father said.

“We
did
,” I said.

“We’re going to wake everyone up,” Mother cautioned us.

The toilet flushed and Grandmother shuffled out the door with only a little of her former dignity intact. She was wearing a gown over a gown over a gown; her neck was very long and her face was creamed white. Grandmother looked like a troubled goose. “He was evil and vile,” she said to us. “He knew terrible magic.”

“The man who looked at you?” Mother asked.

“That man who told my
dream
,” Grandmother said. Now a tear made its way through her furrows of face cream. “That was
my
dream,” she said, “and he told everyone. It is unspeakable that he even
knew
it,” she hissed to us. “
My
dream—of Charlemagne’s horses and soldiers—
I
am the only one who should know it. I had that dream before you were born,” she told Mother. “And that vile evil magic man told my dream as if it were
news
.

“I never even told your father all there was to that dream. I was never sure that it
was
a dream. And now there are men on their hands, and their knuckles are hairy, and there are magic wheels. I want the boys to sleep with
me
.”

So that was how Robo and I came to share the large family room, far away from the W.C., with Grandmother who lay on my mother’s and father’s pillows with her creamed face shining like the face of a wet ghost. Robo lay awake watching her. I do not think Johanna slept very well; I imagine she was dreaming her dream of death again, reliving the last winter of Charlemagne’s cold soldiers with their strange metal clothes covered with frost and their armor frozen shut.

When it was obvious that I had to go to the W.C., Robo’s round, bright eyes followed me to the door.

There was someone in the W.C. There was no light shining from under the door, but there was a unicycle parked against the wall outside. Its rider sat in the dark W.C.; the toilet was flushing over and over again—like a child, the unicyclist was not giving the tank time to refill.

I went closer to the gap under the W.C. door, but the occupant was not standing on his or her hands. I saw what were clearly feet, in almost the expected position, but the feet did not touch the floor; their soles tilted up to me—dark, bruise-colored pads. They were
huge
feet attached to short, furry shins. They were a
bear’s
feet, only there were no claws. A bear’s claws are not retractable, like a cat’s; if a bear had claws, you would see them. Here, then, was an imposter in a bear suit, or a declowed bear. A domestic bear, perhaps. At least—by its presence in the W.C.—a
housebroken
bear. For by its smell I could tell it was no man in a bear suit; it was all bear. It was real bear.

I backed into the door of Grandmother’s former room, behind which my father lurked, waiting for further disturbances. He snapped open the door and I fell inside, frightening us both. Mother sat up in bed and pulled the feather quilt over her head. “Got him!” Father cried, dropping down on me. The floor trembled; the bear’s unicycle slipped against the wall and fell into the door of the W.C., out of which the bear suddenly shambled, stumbling over its unicycle and lunging for its balance. Worriedly, it stared across the hall, through the open door, at Father sitting on my chest. It picked up the unicycle in its front paws. “
Grauf?
” said the bear. Father slammed the door.

Down the hall we heard a woman call, “Where are you, Duna?”

“
Harf!
” the bear said.

Father and I heard the woman come closer. She said, “Oh, Duna, practicing again? Always practicing! But it’s better in the daytime.” The bear said nothing. Father opened the door.

“Don’t let anyone else in,” Mother said, still under the featherbed.

In the hall a pretty, aging woman stood beside the bear, who now balanced in place on its unicycle, one huge paw on the woman’s shoulder. She wore a vivid red turban and a long wrap-around dress that resembled a curtain. Perched on her high bosom was a necklace strung with bear claws; her earrings touched the shoulder of her curtain-dress and her other, bare shoulder where my father and I stared at her fetching mole. “Good evening,” she said to Father. “I’m sorry if we’ve disturbed you. Duna is forbidden to practice at night—but he loves his work.”

The bear muttered, pedaling away from the woman. The bear had very good balance but he was careless; he brushed against the walls of the hall and touched the photographs of the speed-skating teams with his paws. The woman, bowing away from Father, went after the bear calling, “Duna, Duna,” and straightening the photographs as she followed him down the hall.

“Duna is the Hungarian word for the Danube,” Father told me. “That bear is named after our beloved
Donau
.” Sometimes it seemed to surprise my family that the Hungarians could love a river too.

“Is the bear a
real
bear?” Mother asked—still under the featherbed—but I left Father to explain it all to her. I knew that in the morning Herr Theobald would have much to explain, and I would hear everything reviewed at that time.

I went across the hall to the W.C. My task there was hurried by the bear’s lingering odor, and by my suspicion of bear hair on everything; it was only my suspicion, though, for the bear had left everything quite tidy—or at least neat for a bear.

“I saw the bear,” I whispered to Robo, back in our room, but Robo had crept into Grandmother’s bed and had fallen asleep beside her. Old Johanna was awake, however.

“I saw fewer and fewer soldiers,” she said. “The last time they came there were only nine of them. Everyone looked so hungry; they must have eaten the extra horses. It was so cold. Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren’t alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn’t even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time.

“The last time they came, the fountain was frozen. They used their swords and their long pikes to break the ice into chunks. They built a fire and melted the ice in a pot. They took bones from their saddlebags—bones of all kinds—and threw them in the soup. It must have been a very thin broth because the bones had long ago been gnawed clean. I don’t know what bones they were. Rabbits, I suppose, and maybe a deer or a wild boar. Maybe the extra horses. I do not choose to think,” said Grandmother, “that they were the bones of the missing soldiers.”

“Go to sleep, Grandmother,” I said.

“Don’t worry about the bear,” she said.

And
then
what? Garp wondered. What can happen next? He wasn’t altogether sure what
had
happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all—everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world? Garp knew he did not know enough, not yet. He trusted his instincts; they had brought him this far with “The Pension Grillparzer”; now he had to trust the instinct that told him not to go any further until he knew much more.

What made Garp older and wiser than his nineteen years, had nothing to do with his experience or with what he had learned. He had some instincts, some determination, better than average patience; he loved to work hard. Altogether, with the grammar Tinch had taught him, that was all. Only two facts impressed Garp: that his mother actually believed she could write a book and that the most meaningful relationship in his present life was with a whore. These facts contributed greatly to the young man’s developing sense of humor.

He put “The Pension Grillparzer”—as they say—aside. It will come, Garp thought. He knew he had to know more; all he could do was look at Vienna and learn. It was holding still for him. Life seemed to be holding still for him. He made a great many observations of Charlotte, too, and he noticed everything his mother did, but he was being too young. What I need is
vision
, he knew. An overall scheme of things, a vision all his own. It will come, he repeated to himself, as if he were training for another wrestling season—jumping rope, running laps on a smail track, lifting weights, something almost that mindless but that necessary.

Even Charlotte has a vision, he thought, he certainly knew that his mother had one. Garp had no parallel wisdom for the absolute clarity of the world according to Jenny Fields. But he knew it would take only time to imagine a world of his own—with a little help from the real world. The real world would soon cooperate.

WHEN
spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished “The Pension Grillparzer”; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues, Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a hiqher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly
began
the book that would make her famous.

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny wrote, “you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.” The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life’s story together—the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.

“I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,” she wrote. “That made me
A Sexual Suspect
.” And that gave her a title, too.
A Sexual Suspect
, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniform, for a century.

“Then I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to have to share my body or my life to have one,” Jenny wrote. “That made me
A Sexual Suspect
, too.” Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.

But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.

“Do you know how to drive?” Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn’t ever learned; there had never been a need. “Well, I don’t know how, either,” she told him. “And besides, I’m working; I can’t stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself.”

It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. “Hey, how about us?” one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. “We’re all prep school stuff.”

Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny café table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp’s knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. “I just went to a
denthisht
,” she explained to him. “Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don’t know whether it’s open or shut.”

“Sort of half and half,” Garp said to her. But he thought, “Oh, what the hell”. He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make
him
feel like
A Sexual Suspect
. Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him—though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.

Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers’ checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.

It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the
source
of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp’s opinion, “Bath clap.” By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. “I caught a dose of Boo’s goo,” he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn’t dare seek his mother’s professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn’t caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been
less
angry with him.