The World According To Garp (39 page)

It was Roberta Muldoon on the phone, and that only convinced Garp that the victim was Jenny Fields. But the victim was Roberta.

“He’s left me,” Roberta said, her huge voice swollen with tears. “He’s thrown me over.
Me!
Can you believe it?”

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said.

“Oh, I never knew what
shits
men were until I became a woman,” Roberta said.

“It’s Roberta,” Garp whispered to Helen, so that she could relax. “Her lover’s flown the coop.” Helen sighed, released Garp’s leg, rolled over.

“You don’t even care, do you?” Roberta asked Garp, testily. “Please, Roberta,” Garp said.

“I’m sorry,” Roberta said. “But I thought it was too late to call your mother.” Garp found this logic astonishing, since he knew that Jenny stayed up later than he did; but he also liked Roberta, very much, and she had certainly had a hard time.

“He said I wasn’t
enough
of a woman, that I confused him, sexually—that I was confused sexually!” Roberta cried. “Oh, God, that
prick
. All he wanted was the novelty of it. He was just showing off for his friends.”

“I’ll bet you could have taken him, Roberta,” Garp said. “Why didn’t you beat the shit out of him?”

“You don’t understand,” Roberta said. “I don’t
feel
like beating the shit out of anyone, anymore. I’m a
woman
!”…

“Don’t women ever feel like beating the shit out of someone?” Garp asked. Helen reached over to him and pulled his cock.

“I don’t know
what
women feel like,” Roberta wailed. “I don’t know what they’re
supposed
to feel like, anyway. I just know what
I
feel like.”

“What’s that?” Garp asked, knowing she wanted to tell him.

“I feel like beating the shit out of him
now
,” Roberta confessed, “but when he was dumping all over me, I just sat there and took it. I even cried. I’ve been crying all day!” she cried, “and he even called me up and told me that if I was
still
crying I was faking myself.”

“The hell with him,” Garp said.

“All he wanted was a great big lay,” Roberta said. “Why are men like that?”

“Well,” Garp said.

“Oh, I know
you’re
not,” Roberta said. “I’m not even attractive to you, probably.”

“Of course you’re attractive, Roberta,” Garp said.

“But not to
you
,” Roberta said. “Don’t lie. I’m not sexually attractive, am I?”

“Not really to
me
,” Garp confessed, “but to lots of
other
men, yes. Of course you are.”

“Well, you’re a good friend, that’s more important,” Roberta said. “You’re not really sexually attractive to me, either.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” Garp said.

“You’re too short,” Roberta said. “I like
longer
-looking people—I mean, sexually. Don’t be hurt.”

“I’m not hurt,” Garp said. “Don’t
you
be, either.”

“Of course not,” Roberta said.

“Why not call me in the morning,” Garp suggested. “You’ll feel better.”

“I won’t,” Roberta said, sulkily. “I’ll feel
worse
. And I’ll feel ashamed that I called you.”

“Why not talk to your doctor?” Garp said. “The urologist? The fellow who did your operation—he’s your friend, isn’t he?”

“I think he wants to fuck me,” Roberta said, seriously. “I think that’s all he
ever
wanted to do to me. I think he recommended this whole operation just because he wanted to seduce me, but he wanted to make me a woman first. They’re notorious for that—a friend was telling me.”

“A
crazy
friend, Roberta,” Garp said. “
Who’s
notorious for that?”

“Urologists,” Roberta said. “Oh, I don’t know—isn’t urology a little creepy to you?” It was, but Garp didn’t want to upset Roberta any further.

“Call Mom,” he heard himself say. “
She’ll
cheer you up, she’ll think of something.”

“Oh, she
is
wonderful,” Roberta sobbed. “She always
does
think of something, but I feel I’ve used her for so much.”

“She loves to help, Roberta,” Garp said, and knew it was, at least, the truth. Jenny Fields was full of sympathy and patience, and Garp only wanted to sleep. “A good game of squash might help, Roberta,” Garp suggested, weakly. “Why not come over for a few days and we’ll really hit the ball around.” Helen rolled into him, frowned at him, and bit his nipple; Helen liked Roberta, but in the early phase of her sex reassignment Roberta could talk only about herself.

“I just feel so
drained
,” Roberta said. “No energy, no nothing. I don’t even know if I could play.”

“Well, you should
try
, Roberta,” Garp said. “You should make yourself do something.” Helen, exasperated with him, rolled away from him.

But Helen was affectionate with Garp when he answered these late-night calls; she said they frightened her and she didn’t want to be the one to find out what the calls were about. It was strange, therefore, that when Roberta Muldoon called a second time, a few weeks later,
Helen
was the one who answered the phone. It surprised Garp because the phone was on his side of the bed and Helen had to reach over him to pick it up; in fact, this time, she lunged across him and whispered quickly to the phone, “Yes, what is it?” When she heard it was Roberta, she passed the phone quickly to Garp; it was not as if she’d been trying to let him sleep.

And when Roberta called a third time, Garp felt an absence when he picked up the phone. Something was missing. “Oh, hello, Roberta,” Garp said. It was Helen’s usual grip on his leg: it wasn’t there.
Helen
wasn’t there, he noticed. He talked reassuringly to Roberta, felt the cold side of his unshared bed, and noted the time was 2 A.M.—Roberta’s favorite hour. When Roberta finally hung up, Garp went downstairs to look for Helen, finding her all alone on the living-room couch, sitting up with a glass of wine and a manuscript in her lap.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, but there was a look on her face—it was a look Garp couldn’t immediately place. Although he thought he recognized that look, he also thought he had never seen that look on Helen.

“Reading papers?” he asked; she nodded, but there was only one manuscript in front of her. Garp picked it up.

“It’s just student work,” she said, reaching for it.

The student’s name was Michael Milton. Garp read a paragraph of the paper. “It sounds like a story,” Garp said. “I didn’t know you assigned
fiction
writing to your students.”

“I don’t,” Helen said, “but they sometimes show me what they do, anyway.”

Garp read another paragraph. He thought that the writer’s style was self-conscious and forced, but there were no errors on the page; it was, at least, competent writing.

“He’s one of my graduate students,” Helen said. “He’s very bright, but…” She shrugged, but her gesture had the sudden mock casualness of an embarrassed child.

“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.