The World According To Garp (32 page)

He went into the house and looked for a pair of shoes. About the only shoes be owned were running shoes—many pairs. They were in different phases of being broken in. Garp and his children wore clean but rumpled clothes; Helen was a smart dresser, and although Garp did her laundry, he refused to iron anything. Helen did her own ironing, and an occasional shirt for Garp—ironing was the only task of conventional housewifery that Garp rejected. The cooking, the kids, the basic laundry, the cleaning up—he did them. The cooking, expertly; the kids, a little tensely but conscientiously; the cleaning up, a little compulsively. He swore at errant clothes, dishes, and toys, but he left nothing lie; he was a maniac for picking things up. Some mornings, before he sat down to write, he raced over the house with a vacuum cleaner, or he cleaned the oven. The house never looked untidy, was never dirty, but there was always a certain haste to the neatness of it. Garp threw a lot of things away and the house was always missing things. For months at a time he would allow most of the light bulbs to burn out, unreplaced, until Helen would realize that they were living in almost total darkness, huddled around the two lamps that worked. Or when he remembered the lights, he forgot the soap and the toothpaste.

Helen brought certain touches to the house, too, but Garp took no responsibilities for these: plants, for example; either Helen remembered them, or they died. When Garp saw that one appeared to be drooping, or was the slightest bit pale, he would whisk it out of the house and into the trash. Days later, Helen might ask, “Where is the red arronzo?”

“That foul thing,” Garp would remark. “It had some disease. I saw worms on it. I caught it dropping its little spines all over the floor.”

Thus Garp functioned at housekeeping.

In the house Garp found his yellow running shoes and put them on. He put the phone book away in a cabinet where he kept the heavy cooking gear (he stashed phone books all over the house—then would tear the house down to find the one he wanted). He put some olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; he chopped an onion while he waited for the oil to get hot. It was late to be starting supper; he hadn’t even gone shopping. A standard tomato sauce, a little pasta, a fresh green salad, a loaf of his good bread. That way he could go to the market after he started the sauce and he’d only need to shop for greens. He hurried the chopping (now some fresh basil) but it was important not to throw anything into the skillet until the oil was just right, very hot but not smoking. There are some things about cooking, like writing, that you don’t hurry, Garp knew, and he never hurried them.

When the phone rang, it made him so angry that he threw a handful of onions into the skillet and burned himself with the spattering oil. “Shit!” he cried; he kicked the cabinet beside the stove, snapping the little hinge on the cabinet door; a phone book slid out and he stared at it. He put all the onions and the fresh basil into the oil and lowered the flame. He ran his hand under cold water, and, reaching off-balance, wincing at the pain of the burn, he picked up the phone in his other hand.

(Those fakers, Garp thought. What qualifications
could
there be for marriage counseling? No doubt, he thought, it is one more thing that those simplistic shrinks claim expertise in.)

“You caught me right in the fucking middle of something,” he snapped to the phone; he eyed the onions wilting in the hot oil. There was no one who could be calling whom he feared he might offend; this was one of several advantages of being unemployed. His editor, John Wolf, would only remark that Garp’s manner of answering the phone simply confirmed his notion of Garp’s vulgarity. Helen was used to how he answered the phone; and if the call were for Helen, her friends and colleagues already pictured Garp as rather bearish. If it were Ernie Holm, Garp would experience a momentary twinge; the coach always apologized too much, which embarrassed Garp. If it were his mother, Garp knew, she would holler back at him, “Another lie! You’re
never
in the middle of anything. You live on the fringes.” (Garp hoped it
wasn’t
Jenny.) At the moment, there was no other woman who would have called him. Only if it were the daycare center, reporting an accident to little Walt; only if it were Duncan, calling to say that the zipper on his sleeping bag was broken, or that he’d just broken his leg, would Garp feel guilty for his bullying voice. One’s children certainly have a right to catch one in the middle of something—they usually do.

“Right in the middle of
what
, darling?” Helen asked him. “Right in the middle of
whom
? I hope she’s nice.”

Helen’s voice on the phone had a quality of sexual teasing in it; this always surprised Garp—how she sounded—because Helen was not like that, she was not even flirtatious. Though he found her, privately, very arousing, there was nothing of the sexy come-on about her dress or her habits in the outer world. Yet on the telephone she sounded bawdy to him, and always had.

“I’ve burned myself,” he said, dramatically. “The oil is too hot and the onions are scorching. What the fuck is it?”

“My poor man,” she said, still teasing him. “You didn’t leave any message with Pam.” Pam was the English Department secretary. Garp struggled to think what message he was supposed to have left with her. “Are you burned badly?” Helen asked him.

“No.” He sulked. “
What
message?”

“The two-by-fours,” said Helen. Lumber, Garp remembered. He was going to call the lumberyards to price some two-by-fours cut to size, Helen would pick them up on her way home from school. He remembered now that the marriage counseling had distracted him from the lumberyards.

“I forgot,” he said. Helen, he knew, would have an alternative plan; she had known this much before she even made the phone call.

“Call them now,” Helen said, “and I’ll call you back when I get to the day-care center. Then I’ll go pick up the two-by-fours with Walt. He likes lumberyards.” Walt was now five; Garp’s second son was in this daycare or preschool place—whatever it was, its aura of general irresponsibility gave Garp some of his most exciting nightmares.

“Well, all right,” Garp said. “I’ll start calling now.” He was worried about his tomato sauce, and he hated hanging up on a conversation with Helen when he was in a state so clearly preoccupied and dull. “I’ve found an interesting job,” he told her, relishing her silence. But she wasn’t silent long.

“You’re a writer, darling,” Helen told him. “You
have
an interesting job.” Sometimes it panicked Garp that Helen seemed to want him to stay at home and “just write”—because that made the domestic situation the most comfortable for her. But it was comfortable for him, too; it was what he thought he wanted.

“The onions need stirring,” he said, cutting her off. “And my burn hurts,” he added.

“I’ll try to call back when you’re in the middle of something,” Helen said, brightly teasing him, that vampish laughter barely contained in her saucy voice; it both aroused him and made him furious.

He stirred the onions and mashed half a dozen tomatoes into the hot oil; then he added pepper, salt, oregano. He called only the lumberyard whose address was closest to Walt’s day-care center; Helen was too meticulous about some things—comparing the prices of everything, though he admired her for it. Wood was wood, Garp reasoned; the best place to have the damn two-by-fours cut to size was the nearest place.

A
marriage
counselor! Garp thought again, dissolving a tablespoon of tomato paste in a cup of warm water and adding this to his sauce. Why are all the serious jobs done by quacks? What could be more serious than marriage counseling? Yet he imagined a marriage counselor was somewhat lower on a scale of trust than a chiropractor. In the way that many doctors scorned chiropractors, would psychiatrists sneer at marriage counselors? There was no one Garp tended to sneer at as much as he sneered at psychiatrists—those dangerous simplifiers, those thieves of a person’s complexity. To Garp, psychiatrists were the despicable end of all those who couldn’t clean up their own messes.

The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist’s objective was to clear the head; it was Garp’s opinion that this was usually accomplished (
when
it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to
use
the mess—to make the messy things work for you. “That’s easy for a
writer
to say,” Helen had told him. “Artists
can
“use” a mess; most people can’t, and they just don’t want messes. I know
I
don’t. What a psychiatrist you’d be! What would you do if a poor man who had no use for his mess came to you, and he just wanted his mess to go away? I suppose you’d advise him to
write
about it?” Garp remembered this conversation about psychiatry and it made him glum; he knew he oversimplified the things that made him angry, but he was convinced that psychiatry oversimplified everything.

When the phone rang, he said, “The lumberyard off Springfield Avenue. That’s close to you.”

“I know where it is,” Helen said “Is that the only place you called?”

“Wood is wood,” Garp said. “Two-by-fours are two-by-fours. Go to Springfield Avenue and they’ll have them ready.”

“
What
interesting job have you found?” Helen asked him; he knew she would have been thinking about it.

“Marriage counseling,” Garp said; his tomato sauce bubbled—the kitchen filled with its rich fumes. Helen maintained a respectful silence on her end of the phone. Garp knew she would find it difficult to ask, this time, what qualifications he thought he had for such a thing.

“You’re a writer,” she told him.

“Perfect qualifications for the job,” Garp said. “Years spent pondering the morass of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love,” Garp droned on, “the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion.”

“So
write
about it,” Helen said. “What more do you want?” She knew perfectly well what was coming next.

“Art doesn’t help anyone,” Garp said. “People can’t really use it: they can’t eat it, it won’t shelter or clothe them—and if they’re sick, it won’t make them well.” This, Helen knew, was Garp’s thesis on the basic uselessness of art; he rejected the idea that art was of any social value whatsoever—that it could be, that it should be. The two things mustn’t be confused, he thought: there was art, and there was helping people. Here he was, fumbling at both—his mother’s son, after all. But, true to his thesis, he saw art and social responsibility as two distinct acts. The messes came when certain jerks attempted to combine these fields. Garp would be irritated all his life by his belief that literature was a luxury item; he desired for it to be more basic—yet he hated it, when it was.

“I’ll go get the two-by-fours now,” Helen said.

“And if the peculiarities of my art weren’t qualification enough,” Garp said, “I have, as you know, been married myself.” He paused. “I’ve had children.” He paused again. “I’ve had a variety of marriage-related experiences—we both have.”

“Springfield Avenue?” Helen said. “I’ll be home soon.”

“I have more than enough experience for the job,” he insisted. “I’ve known financial dependency, I’ve experienced infidelity.”

“Good for you,” Helen said. She hung up.

But Garp thought: Maybe marriage counseling is a charlatan field even if a genuine and qualified person is giving the advice. He replaced the phone on the hook. He knew he could advertise himself in the Yellow Pages most successfully—even without lying.

MARRIAGE
PHILOSOPHY

and
FAMILY
ADVICE

T. S.
GARP

author of
Procrastination

and
Second Wind of the Cuckold

Why add that they were novels? They sounded, Garp realized, like marriage-counsel manuals.

But would he see his poor patients at home or in an office?

Garp took a green pepper and propped it in the center of the gas burner; he turned up the flame and the pepper began to burn. When it was black all over, Garp would let it cool, then scrape off all the charred skin. Inside would be a roasted pepper, very sweet, and he would slice it and let it marinate in oil and vinegar and a little marjoram. That would be his dressing for the salad. But the main reason he liked to make dressing this way was that the roasting pepper made the kitchen smell so good.

He turned the pepper with a pair of tongs. When the pepper was charred, Garp snatched it up with the tongs and flipped it into the sink. The pepper hissed at him. “Talk all you want to,” Garp told it. “You don’t have much time left.”

He was distracted. Usually he liked to stop thinking about other things while he cooked—in fact, he forced himself to. But he was suffering a crisis of confidence about marriage counseling.

“You’re suffering a crisis of confidence about your
writing
,” Helen told him, walking into the kitchen with even more than her usual authority—the freshly cut two-by-fours slung over and under her arm like matching shotguns.

Walt said, “Daddy burned something.”

“It was a pepper and Daddy
meant
to,” Garp said. “Every time you can’t write you do something stupid,” Helen said. “Though I’ll confess this is a better idea for a diversion than your last diversion.”

Garp had expected her to be ready, but he was surprised that she was so ready. What Helen called his last “diversion” from his stalled writing had been a baby-sitter.

Garp drove a wooden spoon deep into his tomato sauce. He flinched as some fool took the corner by the house with a roaring downshift and a squeal of tires that cut through Garp with the sound of a struck cat. He looked instinctively for Walt, who was right there—safe in the kitchen.

Helen said, “Where’s Duncan?” She moved to the door but Garp cut in front of her.

“Duncan went to Ralph’s,” he said; he was not worried,
this
time, that the speeding car meant Duncan had been hit, but it was Garp’s habit to chase down speeding cars. He had properly bullied every fast driver in the neighborhood. The streets around Garp’s house were cut in squares, bordered every block by stop signs; Garp could usually catch up to a car, on foot, provided that the car obeyed the stop signs.