The World According to Garp

12. IT HAPPENS TO HELEN

LATE-NIGHT phone calls—those burglar alarms in the heart—would frighten Garp all his life. Who is it that I love? Garp's heart would cry, at the first ring—who's been blasted by a truck, who's drowned in the beer or lies side-swiped by an elephant in the terrible darkness?

Garp feared the receiving of such after-midnight calls, but he once made one—unknowingly—himself. It had been one evening when Jenny was visiting them; his mother had let it slip how Cushie Percy had ruptured in childbirth. Garp had not heard of it, and although he occasionally joked with Helen about his old passion for Cushie—and Helen teased him about her—the news of Cushie dead was nearly crippling to Garp. Cushman Percy had been so active—there had been such a hot juiciness about her—it seemed impossible. News of an accident to Alice Fletcher could not have upset him more; he felt more prepared for something happening to her. Sadly, he knew, things would always be happening to Quiet Alice.

Garp wandered into the kitchen and without really noticing the time, or remembering when he opened another beer, he discovered that he had dialed the Percys' number; the phone was ringing. Slowly, Garp could imagine the long way back from sleep that Fat Stew had to travel before he could answer the phone.

“God, who are you calling?” Helen asked, coming into the kitchen. “It's quarter of two!”

Before Garp could hang up, Stewart Percy answered the phone.

“Yes?” Fat Stew asked, worriedly, and Garp could imagine frail and brainless Midge sitting up in bed beside him, as nervous as a cornered hen.

“I'm sorry I woke you,” Garp said. “I didn't realize it was so late.” Helen shook her head and walked abruptly out of the kitchen. Jenny appeared in the kitchen doorway; on her face was the kind of critical look only a mother can give a son. That is a look with more disappointment in it than the usual anger.

“Who the hell is this?” Stewart Percy said.

“This is Garp, sir,” Garp said, a little boy again, apologizing for his genes.

“Holy shit,” said Fat Stew. “What do you want?”

Jenny had neglected to tell Garp that Cushie Percy had died months ago; Garp thought he was offering condolences on a fresh disaster. Thus he faltered.

“I'm sorry, very sorry,” Garp said.

“You said so, you said so,” Stewart said.

“I just heard about it,” Garp said, “and I wanted to tell you and Mrs. Percy how truly sorry I was. I may not have demonstrated it, to you, sir, but I was really very fond of—”

“You little swine!” said Stewart Percy. “You mother humper, you Jap ball of shit!” He hung up the phone.

Even Garp was unprepared for this much loathing. But he misunderstood the situation. It would be years before he realized the circumstances of his phone call. Poor Pooh Percy, batty Bainbridge, would one day explain it to Jenny. When Garp called, Cushie had been dead for so long that Stewart did not realize Garp was commiserating with him on Cushie's loss. When Garp called, it was the midnight of the dark day when the black beast, Bonkers, had finally expired. Stewart Percy thought that Garp's call was a cruel joke—false condolences for the dog Garp had always hated.

And now, when Garp's phone rang, Garp was conscious of Helen's grip emerging instinctively from her sleep. When he picked up the phone, Helen had his leg clamped fast between her knees—as if she were holding tight to the life and safety that his body was to her. Garp's mind ran through the odds. Walt was home asleep. And so was Duncan; he was not at Ralph's.

Helen thought: It is my father; it's his heart. Sometimes she thought: They've finally found and identified my mother. In a morgue.

And Garp thought: They have murdered Mom. Or they are holding her for ransom—men who will accept nothing less than the public rape of forty virgins before releasing the famous feminist, unharmed. And they'll also demand the lives of my children, and so forth.

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.

But she did not mention Michael Milton to Garp, and Harrison, of course, had left to seek his tenure elsewhere. The handwriting on the questionnaire was black, eighteenth-century calligraphy, the kind that can only be carved with a special pen; Michael Milton's written message looked more permanent than print, and Helen read it over and over again. She noted the other answers to the questionnaire: date of birth, years in school, previous courses in the Department of English or in comparative literature. She checked his transcript; his grades were good. She called two colleagues who'd had Michael Milton in courses last semester; she derived from them both that Michael Milton was a good student, aggressive and proud to the point of being vain. She gathered from both her colleagues, though they did not actually say so, that Michael Milton was both gifted and unlikable. She thought of the deliberately unbuttoned buttons on his shirt (she was sure, now, that it was he) and she imagined buttoning them up. She thought of that wispy mustache, a thin trace upon his lip. Garp would later comment on Michael Milton's mustache, saying that it was an insult to the world of hair and to the world of lips; Garp thought it was so much the merest imitation of a mustache that Michael Milton would do his face a favor to shave it off.

But Helen liked the strange little mustache on the lip of Michael Milton.

“You just don't like any mustaches,” Helen said to Garp.

“I don't like that mustache,” he said. “I've got nothing against mustaches, in general,” Garp insisted, though in truth Helen was right: Garp hated all mustaches, ever since his encounter with the Mustache Kid. The Mustache Kid had spoiled mustaches for Garp, forever.

Helen also liked the length of Michael Milton's sideburns, curly and blondish; Garp's sideburns were cropped level to his dark eyes, almost at the tops of his ears—although his hair was thick and shaggy, and always just long enough to cover the ear that Bonkers ate.

Helen also noticed that her husband's eccentricities were beginning to bother her. Perhaps she just noticed them more, now that he was so fitfully involved in his writing slump; when he was writing, perhaps he had less time to devote to his eccentricities? Whatever the reason, she found them irksome. His driveway trick, for example, infuriated her; it was even contradictory. For someone who fussed and worried so much about the safety of the children—about reckless drivers, about leaking gas, and so forth—Garp had a way of entering their driveway and garage, after dark, that terrified Helen.

The driveway turned sharply uphill off a long downhill road. When Garp knew the children were in bed, asleep, he would cut the engine and the lights and coast up the black driveway; he would gather enough momentum from leaving the downhill road to roll over the lip at the top of the driveway and down into their dark garage. He said he did it so that the engine and the headlights would not wake up the children. But he had to start the car to turn it around to drive the baby-sitter home, anyway; Helen said his trick was simply for a thrill—it was puerile and dangerous. He was always running over toys left in the blackened driveway, and crashing into bicycles not moved far enough to the rear of the garage.

Once a baby-sitter had complained to Helen that she hated coasting down the driveway with the engine and the headlights out (another trick: he would pop the clutch and snap on the lights just before they reached the road).

Am I the one who's restless? Helen wondered. She had not thought of herself as restless until she thought of Garp's restlessness. And for how long had she really been irritated by Garp's routines and habits? She didn't know. She only knew that she noticed she was irritated by them almost from the moment she read Michael Milton's questionnaire.

Helen was driving to her office, wondering what she would say to the rude and conceited boy, when the gear knob of the Volvo's stick shift came off in her hand—the exposed shaft scratched her wrist. She swore as she pulled the car over and examined the damage to herself and to the gearshift.

The knob had been falling off for weeks, the screw threads were stripped, and Garp had several times attempted to make the knob stay on the stick-shift shaft with tape. Helen had complained about this half-assed method of repair, but Garp never claimed to be handy and the care of the car was one of Helen's domestic responsibilities.

This division of labor, though largely agreed upon, was sometimes confusing. Although Garp was the home maker among them, Helen did the ironing ("because,” Garp said, “it's you who cares about pressed clothes"), and Helen got the car serviced ("because,” Garp said, “you're the one who drives it every day; you know best when something has to be fixed"). Helen accepted the ironing, but she felt that Garp should deal with the car. She did not like accepting a ride in the service truck from the garage to her office—sitting in the greasy cab with some young mechanic who paid less than adequate attention to his driving. The garage where the car was fixed was a friendly enough place to Helen, but she resented having to be there at all; and the comedy of who would drive her to work after she dropped off the car had finally worn thin. “Who's free to take Mrs. Garp to the university?” the boss mechanic would cry into the dank and oily darkness of the vehicle pits. And three or four boys, eager but begrimed, would drop their wrenches and their needle-nosed pliers, would lug and heave themselves out of the pits, would bolt forward and volunteer to share—for a brief, heady moment—that tight cab aclank with auto parts, which would take the slender Professor Garp to work.

Garp pointed out to Helen that when he took the car, the volunteers were slow to appear; he frequently waited in the garage for an hour, finally coaxing some laggard to drive him home. His morning's work thus shot, he decided the Volvo was Helen's chore.

They had both procrastinated about the gearshift knob. “If you just call to order a new one,” Helen told him, “I'll drive there and let them screw it on while I wait. But I don't want to leave the car for a day while they fart around trying to fix this one.” She had tossed the knob to him, but he'd carried it out to the car and had taped it, precariously, back on the shaft.

Somehow, she thought, it always fell off when she was driving; but, of course, she drove the car more than he did.

“Damn,” she said, and drove to her office with the ugly gearshift uncovered. It hurt her hand every time she had to shift the car, and her scratched wrist bled a little on the fresh skirt of her suit. She parked the car and carried the gear knob with her, across the parking lot, toward her office building. She contemplated throwing it down a storm sewer, but it had little numbers printed on it; in her office she could call the garage and tell them what the little numbers were. Then she could throw it away, wherever she liked; or, she thought, I can mail it to Garp.

It was in this mood, beset with trivia, that Helen encountered the smug young man slouched in the hall by her office door with the top two buttons of his nice shirt unbuttoned. The shoulders of his tweed jacket were, she noticed, slightly padded; his hair was a bit too lank, and too long, and one end of his mustache—as thin as a knife—drooped too far down at the corner of his mouth. She was not sure if she wanted to love this young man or groom him.

“You're up early,” she told him, handing him the gearshift knob so that she could unlock her office door.

“Have you hurt yourself?” he asked. “You're bleeding.” Helen would think later that it was as if he had a nose for blood, because the slight scratch on her wrist had almost stopped bleeding.

“Are you going to be a doctor?” she asked him, letting him inside her office.

“I was going to be,” he said.

“What stopped you?” she asked, still not looking at him, but moving about her desk, straightening what was straight already; and adjusting the venetian blind, which had been left exactly as she wanted it. She took her glasses off, so that when she looked at him he was soft and fuzzy.

“Organic chemistry stopped me,” he said. “I dropped the course. And besides, I wanted to live in France.”

“Oh, you've lived in France?” Helen asked him, knowing that's what she was supposed to ask him, knowing it was one of the things he thought was special about himself, and he didn't hesitate to slip it in. He had even slipped it in the questionnaire. He was very shallow, she saw right away; she hoped he was the slightest bit intelligent, but she felt curiously relieved by his shallowness—as if this made him less dangerous to her, and left her a little freer.

They talked about France, which was fun for Helen, because she talked about France as well as Michael Milton talked about it, and she had never been to Europe. She also told him that she thought he had a poor reason for taking her course.

“A poor reason?” he pressed her, smiling.

“First of all,” Helen said, “it's a totally unrealistic expectation to have for the course.”

“Oh, you already have a lover?” Michael Milton asked her, still smiling.

Somehow he was so frivolous that he didn't insult her; she didn't snap at him that it was enough to have a husband, that it was none of his business, or that she was out of his league. She said, instead, that for what he wanted he should at least have registered for independent study. He said he'd be glad to switch courses. She said she never took on any new independent study students in the second semester.

She knew she had not entirely discouraged him, but she had not been exactly encouraging, either. Michael Milton talked to her, seriously, for an hour—about the subject of her course in narration. He discussed Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Jacob's Room very impressively, though he was not so good on To the Lighthouse and Helen knew he only pretended to have read Mrs. Dalloway. When he left, she was forced to agree with her two colleagues who'd evaluated Michael Milton previously: he was glib, he was smug, he was facile, and all that was unlikable; but he had a certain brittle smartness, however shiny and thin it was—and it was also, somehow, unlikable. What her colleagues had overlooked was his audacious smile and his way of wearing clothes as if he were defiantly undressed. But Helen's colleagues were men; they could not have been expected to define the precise audacity of Michael Milton's smile the way Helen could define it. Helen recognized it as a smile that said to her: I already know you, and I know everything you like. It was an infuriating smile, but it tempted her; she wanted to wipe it off his face. One way of wiping it off, Helen knew, would be to show Michael Milton that he didn't know her—or what she really liked—at all.

She also knew that not too many ways of showing him were open to her.

When she first shifted the Volvo, driving home, the point of the uncovered stick-shift shaft dug sharply into the heel of her hand. She knew exactly where Michael Milton had left the gear knob—on the window ledge above the wastebasket, where the janitor would find it and probably throw it away. It looked as if it ought to be thrown away, but Helen remembered that she had not phoned in the little numbers to the car garage. That would mean that she, or Garp, would have to call the car garage and try to order a new knob without the goddamn numbers—giving the year and model of the car, and so forth, and inevitably ending up with a knob that wasn't right.

But Helen decided she was not going back to her office, and she had enough on her mind already without trying to remember to call the janitor and tell him not to throw away the knob. Besides, it might already be too late.

And anyway, Helen thought, it's not just my fault. It's Garp's fault, too. Or, she thought, it's really nobody's fault. It's just one of those things.

But she did not quite feel guiltless; not yet. When Michael Milton gave her his papers to read—his old papers, from his other courses—she accepted them and read them, because at least this was an allowable, still-innocent subject for them to discuss: his work. When he grew bolder, and more attached to her, and he showed her even his creative work, his short stories and pathetic poems about France, Helen still felt that their long conversations were guided by the critical, constructive relationship between a student and a teacher.

It was all right to have lunch together; they had his work to talk about. Perhaps both of them knew that the work was not so special. For Michael Milton, any topic of conversation that justified his being with Helen was all right. For Helen, she was still anxious about the obvious conclusion—when he simply ran out of work; when they had consumed all the papers he'd had time to write; when they'd mentioned every book they had in common. Then Helen knew they would need a new subject. She also knew that this was only her problem—that Michael Milton already knew what the inevitable subject between them was. She knew he was smugly and irritatingly waiting for her to make up her mind; she occasionally wondered if he would be bold enough to raise his original answer to her questionnaire again, but she didn't think so. Perhaps both of them knew that he wouldn't have to—that the next move was hers. He would show her how grown-up he was by being patient. Helen wanted, above all, to surprise him.

But among these feelings that were new to her, there was one she disliked; she was most unused to feeling guilty—for Helen Holm always felt right about everything she did, and she needed to feel guiltless about this, too. She felt close to achieving this guilt-free state of mind, but she did not quite have it; not yet.

It would be Garp who provided her with the necessary feeling. Perhaps he sensed he had competition; Garp got started as a writer out of a sense of competition, and he finally broke out of his writing slump with a similar, competitive surge.

Helen, he knew, was reading someone else. It did not occur to Garp that she might be contemplating more than literature, but he saw with a typical writer's jealousy that someone else's words were keeping her up at night. Garp had first courted Helen with “The Pension Griliparzer.” Some instinct told him to court her again.

If that had been an acceptable motive to get a young writer started, it was a dubious motive for his writing now—especially after he'd been stopped for so long. He might have been in a necessary phase, rethinking everything, letting the well refill, preparing a book for the future with a proper period of silence. Somehow the new story he wrote for Helen reflected the forced and unnatural circumstances of its conception. The story was written less out of any real reaction to the viscera of life than it was written to relieve the anxieties of the writer.

It was possibly a necessary exercise for a writer who had not written in too long, but Helen did not care for the urgency with which Garp shoved the story at her. “I finally finished something,” he said. It was after dinner; the children were asleep; Helen wanted to go to bed with him—she wanted long and reassuring lovemaking, because she had come to the end of what Michael Milton had written; there was nothing more for her to read, or for them to talk about. She knew she should not show the slightest disappointment in the manuscript Garp gave her, but her tiredness overwhelmed her and she stared at it, crouching between dirty dishes.

“I'll do the dishes alone,” Garp offered, clearing the way to his story for her. Her heart sank; she had read too much. Sex, or at least romance, was the subject she had at last come to; Garp had better provide it or Michael Milton would.

“I want to be loved,” Helen told Garp; he was gathering up the dishes like a waiter who was confident of a large tip. He laughed at her.

“Read the story, Helen,” he said. “Then we'll get laid.”

She resented his priorities. There could be no comparison between Garp's writing and the student work of Michael Milton; though gifted among students, Michael Milton, Helen knew, would only be a student of writing all his life. The issue was not writing. The issue is me, Helen thought; I want someone paying attention to me. Garp's manner of courtship was suddenly offensive to her. The subject being courted was somehow Garp's writing. That is not the subject between us, Helen thought. Because of Michael Milton, Helen was way ahead of Garp at considering the spoken and unspoken subjects between people. “If people only told each other what was on their minds,” wrote Jenny Fields—a naпve but forgivable lapse; both Garp and Jenny knew how difficult it was for people to do that.

Garp cautiously washed the dishes, waiting for Helen to read his story. Instinctively—the trained teacher—Helen took out her red pencil and began. That is not how she should read my story, Garp thought; I'm not one of her students. But he went on quietly washing the dishes. He saw there was no stopping her.

Vigilance

by T. S. Garp

Running my five miles a day, I frequently encounter some smart-mouthed motorist who will pull alongside me and ask (from the safety of the driver's seat), “What are you in training for?”

Deep and regular breathing is the secret; I am rarely out of breath; I never pant or gasp when I respond. “I am staying in shape to chase cars,” I say.

At this point the responses of the motorists vary; there are degrees of stupidity as there are degrees of everything else. Of course, they never realize that I don't mean them—I'm not staying in shape to chose their cars; not out on the open road, at least. I let them go out there, though I sometimes believe that I could catch them. And I do not run on the open road, as some motorists believe, to attract attention.

In my neighborhood there is no place to run. One must leave the suburbs to be even a middle-distance runner. Where I live there are four-way stop signs at every intersection; the blocks are short, and those tight-angle corners are hard on the balls of the feet. Also, the sidewalks are threatened by dogs, festooned with the playthings of children, intermittently splashed with lawn sprinklers. And just when there's some running room, there's an elderly person taking up the whole sidewalk, precarious on crutches or armed with quacking cones. With good conscience one does not yell “Track!” to such a person. Even passing the aged at a safe distance, but with my usual speed, seems to alarm them; and it's not my intention to cause heart attacks.

So it's the open road for training, but it's the suburbs I'm in training for. In my condition I am more than a match for a car caught speeding in my neighborhood. Provided they make an even half-hearted halt at the stop signs, they cannot hit over fifty before they have to brake for the next intersection. I always catch up to them. I can travel across lawns, over porches, through swing sets and the children's wading pools; I can burst through hedges, or hurdle them. And since my engine is quiet—and steady, and always in tune—I can hear if other cars are coming; I don't have to stop at the stop signs.

In the end I run them down, I wave them over; they always stop. Although I am clearly in impressive car-chasing condition, that is not what intimidates the speeders. No, they are almost always intimidated by my parenthood, because they are almost always young. Yes, my parenthood is what sobers them, almost every time. I begin simply. “Did you see my children back there?” I ask them, loudly and anxiously. Veteran speeders, upon being asked such a question, are immediately frightened that they have run over my children. They are instantly defensive.

“I have two young children,” I tell them. The drama is deliberate in my voice—which, with this sentence, I allow to tremble a little. It is as if I am holding back tears, or unspeakable rage, or both. Perhaps they think I am hunting a kidnapper, or that I suspect them of being child molesters.

“What happened?” they invariably ask.

“You didn't see my children, did you?” I repeat. “A little boy pulling a little girl in a red wagon?” This is, of course, a fiction. I have two boys, and they're not so little; they have no wagon. They may have been watching television at the time, or riding their bikes in the park—where it's safe, where there are no cars.

“No,” the bewildered speeder says. “I saw children, some children. But I don't think I saw those children. Why?”

“Because you almost killed them,” I say.

“But I didn't see them!” the speeder protests.

“You were driving too fast to see them!” I, say. This is sprung on them as if it were proof of their guilt; I always pronounce this sentence as if it were hard evidence. And they're never sure. I've rehearsed this part so well. The sweat from my hard sprint, by now, drips off my mustache and the point of my chin, streaking the driver's-side door. They know only a father who genuinely fears for his children would run so hard, would stare like such a maniac, would wear such a cruel mustache.

“I'm sorry,” they usually say.

“This is a neighborhood full of children,” I always tell them. “You have other places you can drive fast, don't you? Please, for the children's sake, don't speed here anymore.” My voice, now, is never nasty; it is always beseeching. But they see that a restrained fanatic resides behind my honest, watering eyes.

Usually it's just a young kid. Those kids have a need to dribble a little oil; they want to race the frantic pace of the music on their radios. And I don't expect to change their ways. I only hope they'll do it somewhere else. I concede that the open road is theirs; when I train there, I keep my place. I run in the stuff of the soft shoulder, in the hot sand and gravel, in the beer-bottle glass—among the mangled cats, the maimed birds, the mashed condoms. But in my neighborhood, the car is not king; not yet.

Usually they learn.

After my five-mile run I do fifty-five push-ups, then five hundred-yard dashes, followed by fifty-five situps, followed by fifty-five neck bridges. It's not that I care so much for the number five; it's simply that strenuous and mindless exertion is easier if one doesn't have to keep track of too many different numbers. After my shower (about five o'clock), through the late afternoon, and in the course of the evening, I allow myself five beers.

I do not chase cars at night. Children should not be playing outside at night—in my neighborhood, or in any other neighborhood. At night, I believe, the car is king of the whole modern world. Even the suburbs.

At night, in fact, I rarely leave my house, or allow the members of my family to venture out. But once I went to investigate an obvious accident—the darkness suddenly streaked with headlights pointing straight up and exploding; the silence pierced with a metal screaming and the shriek of ground glass. Only half a block away, in the dark and perfect middle of my street, a Land Rover lay upsidedown and bleeding its oil and gas in a puddle so deep and still I could see the moon in it. The only sound: the ping of heat in the hot pipes and the dead engine. The Land Rover looked like a tank tumbled by a land mine. Great juts and tears in the pavement revealed that the auto had rolled over and over before coming to rest here.

The driver's-side door could be opened only slightly, but enough to miraculously turn on the door light. There in the lit cab, still behind the steering wheel—still upside-down and still alive—was a fat man. He looked unharmed. The top of his head rested gingerly on the ceiling of the cab, which of course was now the floor, but the man seemed only dimly sensitive to this change in his perspective. He looked puzzled, chiefly, by the presence of a large brown bowling ball that sat alongside his head, like another head; he was, in fact, cheek to cheek with this bowling ball, which he perhaps felt touching him as he might have felt the presence of a lover's severed head—formerly resting on his shoulder.

“is that you, Roger?” the man asked. I couldn't tell whether he was addressing me or the bowling ball.

“It is not Roger,” I said, answering for us both.

“That Roger is a moron,” the man explained. “We crossed our balls.”

That the fat man was referring to a bizarre sexual experience seemed unlikely. I assumed that the fat man referred to bowling.

“This is Roger's ball,” he explained, indicating the brown globe against his cheek. “I should have known it wasn't my ball because it wouldn't fit in my bag. My ball will fit in anyone's bag, but Roger's ball is really strange. I was trying to fit it in my bag when the Land Rover went off the bridge.”

Although I knew there was no bridge in my entire neighborhood, I tried to visualize the occurrence. But I was distracted by the gurgle of spilling gasoline, like beer down a thirsty man's throat.

“You should get out,” I told the upside-down bowler.

“I'll wait for Roger,” he replied. “Roger will be right along.”

And sure enough, along come another Land Rover, as if they were a separated twosome from a column of an army on the move. Roger's Land Rover come along with its headlights out and did not stop in time; it plowed into the fat bowler's Land Rover and together, like coupled boxcars, they jarred each other another tough ten yards down the street.

It appeared that Roger was a moron, but I merely asked him the expected question: “Is that you, Roger?”

“Yup,” said the man, whose throbbing Land Rover was dark and creaking; little fragments of its windshield and headlights and grille dropped to the street like noisy confetti.

“That could only be Roger!” groaned the fat bowler, still upside-down—and still alive—in his lit cab. I saw that his nose bled slightly; it appeared that the bowling ball had bashed him.

“You moron, Roger!” he called out. “You've got my ball!”

“Well, someone's got my ball, then,” Roger replied.

“I've got your ball, you moron,” the fat bowler declared.

“Well, that's not the answer to everything,” Roger said. “You've got my Land Rover.” Roger lit a cigarette in the blackened cab; he did not appear interested in climbing out of the wreck.

“You should set up flares,” I suggested to him, “and that fat man should get out of your Land Rover. There's gasoline everywhere. I don't think you should smoke.” But Roger only continued smoking and ignoring me in the cavelike silence of the second Land Rover, and the fat bowler again cried out—as if he were having a dream that was starting over, at the beginning—"Is that you, Roger?”

I went back to my house and called the police. In the daytime, in my neighborhood, I would never have tolerated such mayhem, but people who go bowling in each other's Land Rovers are not the usual suburban speeders, and I decided they were legitimately lost.

“Hello, Police?” I said.

I have learned what you can and what you can't expect of the police. I know that they do not really support the notion of citizen arrest; when I have reported speeders to them, the results have been disappointing. They don't seem interested in learning the details. I am told there are people whom the police are interested in apprehending, but I believe the police are basically sympathetic to speeders; and they do not appreciate citizens who make arrests for them.

I reported the whereabouts of the bowlers' accident, and when the police asked, as they always ask, who was calling, I told them, “Roger.”

That, I knew—knowing the police—would be interesting. The police are always more interested in bothering the person who reports the crime than they are interested in bothering the criminals. And sure enough, when they arrived, they went straight after Roger. I could see them all arguing under the streetlamps, but I could catch only snatches of their conversation.

“He's Roger,” the fat bowler kept saying. “He's Roger through and through.”

“I'm not the Roger who called you fuckers,” Roger told the police.

“That's true,” the fat bowler declared. “This Roger wouldn't call the police for anything.”

And after a while they began to call out into our dark suburb for another Roger. “Is there another Roger here?” one policeman called.

“Roger!” screamed the fat bowler, but my dark house and the dark houses of my neighbors were appropriately silent. In daylight, I knew, they would all be gone. Only their oil slicks and their broken glass would remain.

Relieved—and, as always, pleased with the destruction of automotive vehicles—I watched until almost dawn, when the hulking, coupled Land Rovers were finally separated and towed away. They were like two exhausted rhinos caught fornicating in the suburbs. Roger and the fat bowler stood arguing, and swinging their bowling balls, until the streetlamps in our block were extinguished; then, as if on signal, the bowlers shook hands and departed in different directions—on foot, and as if they knew where they were going.

The police came interrogating in the morning, still concerned with the possibility of another Roger. But they learned nothing from me—just as they learn nothing, apparently, whenever I report a speeder to them. “Well, if it happens again,” they tell me, “be sure to let us know.”

Fortunately, I have rarely needed the police; I am usually effective with first offenders. Only once have I had to stop the same driver—and him, only twice. He was an arrogant young man in a blood-red plumber's truck. Lurid-yellow lettering advertised on the cab that the plumber handled Roto-Rootering needs and all plumbing services:

O. FECTEAU, OWNER and HEAD PLUMBER

With two-time offenders I come more quickly to the point.

“I'm calling the cops,” I told the young man. “And I'm calling your boss, old O. Fecteau; I should have called him the lost time.”

“I'm my own boss,” the young man said. “It's my plumbing business. Fuck off.”

And I realized I was facing O. Fecteau himself—a runty but successful youth, unimpressed with standard authority.

“There are children in this neighborhood,” I said. “Two of them are mine.”

“Yeah, you already told me,” the plumber said; he revved his engine as if he were clearing his throat. There was a hint of menace in his expression, like the trace of pubic beard he was growing on his young chin. I rested my hands on the door—one on the handle, one on the rolled-down window.

“Please don't speed here,” I said.

“Yeah, I'll try,” said O. Fecteau. I might have let it go at that, but the plumber lit a cigarette and smiled at me. I thought I saw on his punk's face the leer of the world.

“If I catch you driving like that again,” I said, “I'll stick your Roto-Rooter up your ass.”

We stared at each other, O. Fecteau and I. Then the plumber gunned his engine and popped his clutch; I had to leap back to the curb. In the gutter I saw a little metal dump truck, a child's toy; the front wheels were missing. I snatched it up and ran after O. Fecteau. Five blocks later I was close enough to throw the dump truck, which struck the plumber's cab; it made a good noise but it bounced off harmlessly. Even so, O. Fecteau slammed on his brakes; about five long pipes were flipped out of the pickup part of the truck, and one of those metal drawers sprang open, disgorging a screwdriver and several spools of heavy wire. The plumber jumped down from his cab, banging the door after himself; he had a Stillson wrench in his hand. You could tell he was sensitive about collecting dents on his blood-red truck. I grabbed one of the fallen pipes: It was about five feet long and I quickly smashed the truck's left taillight with it. For some time now, things have just been coming naturally to me in fives. For example, the circumference, in inches, of my chest (expanded): fiftyfive.

“Your taillight's broken,” I pointed out to the plumber. “You shouldn't be driving around that way.”

“I'm going to call the cops on you, you crazy bastard!” said O. Fecteau.

“This is a citizen arrest,” I said. “You broke the speed limit, you're endangering the lives of my children. We'll go see the cops together.” And I poked the long pipe under the truck's rear license plate and folded the plate like a letter.

“You touch my truck again,” the plumber said, “and you're in trouble.” But the pipe felt as light in my hands as a badminton rocket; I swung it easily and shattered the other taillight.

“You're already in trouble,” I pointed out to O. Fecteau. “You ever drive in this neighborhood again, you better stay in first gear and use your flasher.” First, I knew (swinging the pipe), he would need to repair his flasher.

There was an elderly woman, just then, who came out of her house to observe the commotion. She recognized me immediately. I catch up to a lot of people at her corner. “Oh, good for you!” she called. I smiled to her and she tattered toward me, stopping and peering into her well-groomed lawn where the toy dump truck arrested her attention. She seized it, with obvious distaste, and carried it over to me. I put the toy and the pieces of broken glass and plastic from the taillights and the flasher into the back of the pickup. It is a clean neighborhood; I despise litter. On the open road, in training, I see nothing but litter. I put the other pipes in back, too, and with the long pipe I still held (like a warrior's javelin) I nudged the screwdriver and the spools of wire that had fallen by the curb. O. Fecteau gathered them up and returned them to the metal drawer. He is probably a better plumber than a driver, I thought; the Stillson wrench looked very comfortable in his hand.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the old woman told O. Fecteau. The plumber glared at her.

“He's one of the worst ones,” I told her.

“Imagine that,” the old lady said. “And you're a big boy,” she told the plumber. “You should know better.”

O. Fecteau edged back to the cab, looking as if he would hurl his wrench at me, then leap into his truck and back over the old biddy.

“Drive carefully,” I told him. When he was safely in the cab, I slid the long pipe into the pickup. Then I took the old woman's arm and helped her along the sidewalk.

When the truck tore away from the curb, with that stink of scorched rubber and a noise as raw as bones leaving their sockets, I felt the old lady tremble through the frail point of her elbow; something of her fear passed into me, and I realized how risky it was to make anyone as angry as I had made O. Fecteau. I could hear him, maybe five blocks away, driving furiously fast, and I prayed for all the dogs and cats and children who might be near the street. Surely, I thought, modern life is about five times as difficult as life used to be.

I should stop this crusade against speeders, I thought. I go too far with them, but they make me so angry—with their carelessness, their dangerous, sloppy way of life, which I view as so directly threatening to my own life and the lives of my children. I have always hated cars, and hated people who drove them stupidly. I feel such anger toward people who take such risks with other people's lives. Let them race their cars—but in the desert! We would not allow an outdoor rifle range in the suburbs! Let them jump out of airplanes, if they want—but over the ocean! Not where my children live.

“What would this neighborhood be like without you?” the old woman wondered aloud. I can never remember her name. Without me, I thought, this neighborhood would probably be peaceful. Perhaps deadlier, but peaceful. “They all drive so fast,” the old lady said. “If it weren't for you, I sometimes think they'd be having their smashups right in my living room.” But I felt embarrassed that I shared such anxiety with eighty-year-olds—that my fears are more like their nervous, senile worries than they are the normal anxieties of people my own young middle age.

What an incredibly dull life I have! I thought, aiming the old woman toward her front door, steering her over the cracks in the sidewalk.

Then the plumber came back. I thought the old woman was going to die in my arms.

The plumber drove over the curb and hurtled past us, over the old woman's lawn, flattening a whiplike young tree and nearly rolling over when he wheeled the truck into a U-turn that uprooted a sizable hedge and tore divots from the ground the size of fivepound steaks. Then down to the sidewalk the truck fled—an explosion of tools flying free of the pickup as the rear wheels jounced over the curb. O. Fecteau was off up the street, once more terrorizing my neighborhood; I saw the violent plumber jump the curb again at the corner of Dodge and Furlong—where he grazed the back of a parked car, springing open the car's trunk on impact and leaving it flapping.

Helping the shaken old lady inside, I called the police—and my wife, to tell her to keep the children indoors. The plumber was berserk. This is how I help the neighborhood, I thought: I drive mad men madder.

The old woman sat in a paisley chair in her cluttered living room, as carefully as a plant. When O. Fecteau returned—this time driving within inches of the living room bay window, and through the gravel beds for the baby trees, his horn blaring—the old woman never moved. I stood at the door, awaiting the ultimate assault, but I thought it wiser not to show myself. I knew that if O. Fecteau saw me, he would attempt to drive in the house.

By the time the police arrived, the plumber had rolled his truck in an attempt to avoid a station wagon at the intersection of Cold Hill and North Lane. He had broken his collarbone and was sitting upright in the cab, though the truck lay on its side; he wasn't able to climb out the door above his head, or he hadn't tried. O. Fecteau appeared calm; he was listening to his radio.

Since that time, I have tried to provoke the offending drivers less; if I sense them taking offense at my stopping them and presuming to criticize their vile habits, I simply tell them I am informing the police and quickly leave.

That O. Fecteau turned out to have a long history of violent over-reactions to social situations did not allow me to forgive myself. “Look, it's all the better you got that plumber off the road,” my wife told me—and she usually criticizes my meddlesomeness in the behavior of others. But I could only think that I had driven a workingman off his rocker, and that during his outburst, if O. Fecteau had killed a child, whose fault would it have been? Partly mine, I think.

In modern times, in my opinion, either everything is a moral question or there are no more moral questions. Nowadays, there are no compromises or there are only compromises. Never influenced, I keep my vigil. There is no letting up.

Don't say anything, Helen told herself. Go kiss him and rub against him; get him upstairs as fast as you can, and talk about the damn story later. Much later, she warned herself. But she knew he wouldn't let her.

The dishes were done and he sat across the table from her.

She tried her nicest smile and told him, “I want to go to bed with you.”

“You don't like it?” he asked.

“Let's talk in bed,” she said.

“Goddamn it, Helen,” he said. “It's the first thing I've finished in a long time. I want to know what you think of it.”

She bit her lip and took her glasses off; she had not made a single mark with her red pencil. “I love you,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” he said, impatiently. “I love you, too, but we can fuck anytime. What about the story?” And she finally relaxed; she felt he had released her, somehow. I tried, she thought; she felt hugely relieved.

“Fuck the story,” she said. “No, I don't like it. And I don't want to talk about it, either. You don't care to regard what I want, obviously. You're like a little boy at the dinner table—you serve yourself first.”

“You don't like it?” Garp said.

“Oh, it's not bad,” she said, “it's just not much of anything. It's a trifle, it's a little ditty. If you're warming up to something, I'd like to see what it is—when you get to it. But this is nothing, you must know that. It's a toss-off, isn't it? You can do tricks like this with your left hand, can't you?”

“It's funny, isn't it?” Garp asked.

“Oh, it's funny,” she said, “but it's funny like jokes are funny. It's all one-liners. I mean, what is it? A self-parody? You're not old enough, and you haven't written enough, to start mocking yourself. It's self-serving, it's self-justifying; and it's not about anything except yourself, really. It's cute.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Garp. “Cute?"

“You're always talking about people who write well but don't have anything to say,” Helen said. “Well, what do you call this? It's no “Grillparzer,” certainly; it isn't worth a fifth of what “Grillparzer” is worth. It isn't worth a tenth of that story,” Helen said.

“"The Pension Grillparzer” is the first big thing I wrote,” Garp said. “This is completely different; it's another kind of fiction altogether.”

“Yes, one is about something and one is about nothing,” Helen said. “One is about people and one is about only you. One has mystery and precision, and one has only wit.” When Helen's critical faculties were engaged, they were difficult to disengage.

“It's not fair to compare them,” Garp said. “I know this is smaller.”

“Then let's not talk anymore about it,” Helen said.

Garp sulked for a minute.

“You didn't like the Second Wind of the Cuckold, either,” he said, “and I don't suppose you'll like the next one any better.”

“What next one?” Helen asked him. “Are you writing another novel?”

He sulked some more. She hated him, making her do this to him, but she wanted him and she knew she loved him, too.

“Please,” she said. “Let's go to bed.”

But now he saw his chance for a little cruelty—and/or a little truth—and his eyes shone at her brightly.

“Let's not say another word,” she begged him. “Let's go to bed.”

“You think “The Pension Grillparzer” is the best thing I've written, don't you?” he asked her. He knew already what she thought of the second novel, and he knew that, despite Helen's fondness for Procrastination, a first novel is a first novel. Yes, she did think “Grillparzer” was his best.

“So far, yes,” she said, softly. “You're a lovely writer, you know I think so.”

“I guess I just haven't lived up to my potential,” Garp said, nastily.

“You will,” she said; the sympathy and her love for him were draining from her voice.

They stared at each other; Helen looked away. He started upstairs. “Are you coming to bed?” he asked. His back was to her; his intentions were hidden from her—his feelings for her, too: either hidden from her or buried in his infernal work.

“Not right now,” she said.

He waited on the stairs. “Got something to read?” he asked.

“No, I'm through reading for a while,” she said.

Garp, went upstairs. When she came up to him, he was already asleep, which made her despair. If he'd had her on his mind at all, how could he have fallen asleep? But, actually, he'd had so much on his mind, he'd been confused; he had fallen asleep because he was bewildered. If he'd been able to focus his feelings on any one thing, he'd still have been awake when she came upstairs. They might have saved a lot of things, then.

As it was, she sat beside him on the bed and watched his face with more fondness than she thought she could stand. She saw he had a hard-on, as severe as if he had been waiting up for her, and she took him into her mouth and sucked him softly until he came.

He woke up, surprised, and he was very guilty-looking—when he appeared to realize where he was, and with whom. Helen, however, was not in the least guilty-looking; she looked only sad. Garp would think, later, that it was as if Helen had known he had been dreaming of Mrs. Ralph.

When he came back from the bathroom, she was asleep. She had quickly drifted off. Guiltless at last, Helen felt freed to have her dreams. Garp lay awake beside her, watching the astonishing innocence upon her face—until the children woke her.