The World According to Garp

9. THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

IN the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when be discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions.

Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber? Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the long list of names in the Yellow Pages, it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.

There was the Christian Counseling Center and the Community Pastoral Counseling Service; Garp imagined hearty ministers with their dry, fleshy hands constantly rubbing together. They spoke round, moist sentences, like soap bubbles, saying things like, “We have no illusions that the Church can be of very much assistance to individual problems, such as your own. Individuals must seek individual solutions, they must retain their individuality; however, it is our experience that many people have identified their own special individuality in the church.”

There sat the baffled couple who had hoped to discuss the simultaneous orgasm—myth or reality?

Garp noticed that members of the clergy went in for counseling; there was a Lutheran Social Service, there was a Reverend Dwayne Kuntz (who was “certified") and a Louise Nagle who was an “All Souls Minister” associated with something called the United States Bureau of Marriage and Family Counselors (who had “certified” her). Garp took a pencil and drew little zeroes beside the names of the marriage counselors with religious affiliations. They would all offer fairly optimistic counsel, Garp believed.

He was less sure of the point of view of the counselors with more “scientific” training; he was less sure of the training, too. One was a “certified clinical psychologist,” another simply followed his name with “M.A., Clinical"; Garp knew that these things could mean anything, and that they could also mean nothing. A graduate student in sociology, a former business major. One said “B.S."—perhaps in Botany. One was a Ph.D.—in marriage? One was a “Doctor"—but a medical doctor or a Doctor of Philosophy? At marriage counseling, who would be better? One specialized in “group therapy"; someone, perhaps less ambitious, promised only “psychological evaluation.”

Garp selected two favorites. The first was Dr. O. Rothrock—"self-esteem workshop; bank cards accepted.”

The second was M. Neff—"by appointment only.” There was just a phone number after M. Neff's name. No qualifications, or supreme arrogance? Perhaps both. If I needed anybody, Garp thought, I would try M. Neff first. Dr. O. Rothrock with his bank cards and his self-esteem workshop was clearly a charlatan. But M. Neff was serious: M. Neff had a vision, Garp could tell.

Garp wandered a bit past Marriage in the Yellow Pages. He came to Masonry, Maternity Apparel, and Mat Refinishing (only one listing, an out-of-town, Steering phone number: Garp's father-in-law, Ernie Holm, refinished wrestling mats as a slightly profitable hobby. Garp hadn't been thinking about his old coach, he passed over Mat Refinishing to Mattresses without recognizing Ernie's name). Then came Mausoleums and Meat Cutting Equipment—"See Saws.” That was enough. The world was too complicated. Garp wandered back to Marriage.

Then Duncan came home from school. Garp's older son was now ten years old; he was a tall boy with Helen Garp's bony, delicate face and her oval yellow-brown eyes. Helen had skin of a light-oak color and Duncan had her wonderful skin, too. From Garp he had gotten his nervousness, his stubbornness, his moods of black self-pity.

“Dad?” he said. “Can I spend the night at Ralph's? It's very important.”

“What?” Garp said. “No. When?”

“Have you been reading the phone book again?” Duncan asked his father. Whenever Garp read a phone book, Duncan knew, it was like trying to wake him up from a nap. He read the phone book often, for names. Garp got the names of his characters out of the phone book, when his writing was stuck, he read the phone book for more names; he revised the names of his characters over and over again. When Garp traveled, the first thing he looked for in the motel room was the phone book, he usually stole it.

“Dad?” Duncan said—he assumed his father was in his phone book trance, living the lives of his fictional people. Garp had actually forgotten that he had nonfictional business with the phone book today; he had forgotten about the lumber and was thinking only about the audacity of M. Neff and what it would be like to be a marriage counselor. “Dad!” Duncan said. “If I don't call Ralph back before supper, his mother won't let me come over.”

“Ralph?” said Garp. “Ralph isn't here.” Duncan tipped his fine jaw up and rolled his eyes; it was a gesture Helen had, too, and Duncan had her same lovely throat.

“Ralph is at his house,” Duncan said, “and I am at my house and I would like to go spend the night at Ralph's house—with Ralph.”

“Not on a school night,” Garp said.

“It's Friday,” Duncan said. “Jesus.”

“Don't swear, Duncan,” Garp said. “When your mother comes home from work, you can ask her.” He was stalling, he knew; Garp was suspicious of Ralph—worse, he was afraid for Duncan to spend the night at Ralph's house, although Duncan had done it before. Ralph was an older boy whom Garp distrusted; also, Garp didn't like Ralph's mother—she went out in the evening and left the boys alone (Duncan had admitted that). Helen had once referred to Ralph's mother as “slatternly,” a word that had always intrigued Garp (and a look, in women, that had its appeal to him). Ralph's father didn't live at home, so the “slatternly” look of Ralph's mother was enhanced by her status as a woman alone.

“I can't wait for Mom to get home,” Duncan said. “Ralph's mother says she has to know before supper, or I can't come over.” Supper was Garp's responsibility and the idea of it distracted him; he wondered what time it was. Duncan seemed to come home from school at no special time. “Why not ask Ralph to spend the night here?” Garp said. A familiar ploy. Ralph usually spent the night with Duncan, thus sparing Garp his anxiety about the carelessness of Mrs. Ralph (he could never remember Ralph's last name).

“Ralph always spends the night here,” Duncan said. “I want to stay there.” And do what? Garp wondered. Drink, smoke dope, torture the pets, spy on the sloppy lovemaking of Mrs. Ralph? But Garp knew that Duncan was ten years old and very sane—very careful. The two boys probably enjoyed being alone in a house where Garp wasn't smiling over them, asking them if there was anything they wanted.

“Why not call Mrs. Ralph and ask her if you can wait until your mother comes home before you say whether you'll come or not?” Garp asked.

“Jesus, “Mrs. Ralph"!” Duncan groaned. “Mom is just going to say, “It's all right with me. Ask your father.” That's what she always says.”

Smart kid, Garp thought. He was trapped. Short of blurting out that he was terrified Mrs. Ralph would kill them all by burning them up in the night when her cigarette, with which she slept, set fire to her hair, Garp had nothing more he could say. “Okay, go ahead,” he said, sulkily. He didn't even know if Ralph's mother smoked. He simply disliked her, on sight, and he suspected Ralph—for no better reason than that the child was older than Duncan and therefore, Garp imagined, capable of corrupting Duncan in terrible ways.

Garp suspected most people to whom his wife and children were drawn; he had an urgent need to protect the few people he loved from what he imagined “everyone else” was like. Poor Mrs. Ralph was not the only victim perhaps slandered by his paranoid assumptions. I should get out more, Garp thought. If I had a job, he thought—a thought he had every day, and rethought every day, since he wasn't writing.

There was almost no job in the world that appealed to Garp, and certainly nothing he was qualified for; he was qualified, he knew, for very little. He could write; when he was writing, he believed he wrote very well. But one reason he thought about getting a job was that he felt he needed to know more about other people; he wanted to get over his distrust of them. A job would at least force him to come into contact—and if he weren't forced to be with other people, Garp would stay home.

It was for his writing, in the beginning, that he had never taken the idea of a job seriously. Now it was for his writing that he was thinking he needed a job. I am running out of people I can imagine, he thought, but perhaps it was really that there had never been many people he liked; and he hadn't written anything he liked in too many years.

“I'm going now!” Duncan called to him, and Garp stopped dreaming. The boy was wearing a bright orange rucksack on his back; a yellow sleeping bag was rolled and tied under the pack. Garp had chosen them both, for visibility.

“I'll give you a ride,” Garp said, but Duncan rolled his eyes again.

“Mom has the car, Dad,” he said, “and she's still at work.”

Of course; Garp grinned foolishly. Then he saw that Duncan was going to take his bicycle and he called out the door to him. “Why don't you walk, Duncan?”

“Why?” Duncan said, exasperated.

So your spine won't be severed when a car driven by a crazed teenager, or a drunken man suffering a heart attack, swipes you off the street, Garp thought—and your wonderful, warm chest is cracked against the curbstone, your special skull split open when you land on the sidewalk, and some asshole wraps you in an old rug as if you were somebody's pet discovered in the gutter. Then the dolts from the suburbs come out and guess who owns it ("That green and white house on the corner of Elm and Dodge, I think"). Then someone drives you home, rings the bell and says to me, “Uh, sorry"; and pointing to the spillage in the bloody back seat, asks, “Is it yours?” But all Garp said was, “Oh, go ahead, Duncan, take the bike. Just be careful!”

He watched Duncan cross the street, pedal up the next block, look before he turned (Good boy; note the careful hand signal—but perhaps this is only for my benefit). It was a safe suburb of a small, safe city; comfortable green plots, one-family houses—mostly university families, with an occasional big house broken into apartments for graduate students. Ralph's mother, for example, appeared certain to be a graduate student forever, though she had a whole house to herself—and although she was older than Garp. Her former husband taught one of the sciences and presumably paid her tuition. Garp remembered that Helen had been told the man was living with a student.

Mrs. Ralph is probably a perfectly good person, Garp thought; she has a child, and she no doubt loves him. She is no doubt serious about wanting to do something with her life. If she were just more careful! Garp thought. You must be careful; people didn't realize. It's so easy to blow everything, he thought.

“Hello!” someone said, or he thought someone said. He looked around, but whoever had spoken to him was gone—or was never there. He realized he was barefoot (his feet were cold; it was an early spring day), standing on the sidewalk in front of his house, a phone book in his hand. He would have liked to go on imagining M. Neff and the business of marriage counseling, but he knew it was late—he had to prepare the evening meal and he hadn't even been shopping. A block away he could hear the hum of the engines that powered the big freezers in the supermarket (that was why they had moved into this neighborhood—so that Garp could walk to the store and shop while Helen took the car to work. Also, they were nearer to a park for him to run in). There were fans on the back of the supermarket and Garp could hear them sucking the still air out of the aisles and blowing faint food smells over the block. Garp liked it. He had a cook's heart.

He spent his day writing (or trying to write), running, and cooking. He got up early and fixed breakfast for himself and the children; nobody was home for lunch and Garp never ate that meal; he fixed dinner for his family every night. It was a ritual he loved, but the ambition of his cooking was controlled by how good a day he'd had writing, and how good a run he'd had. If the writing went poorly, he took it out on himself with a long, hard run; or, sometimes, a bad day with his writing would exhaust him so much that he could barely run a mile; then he tried to save the day with a splendid meal.

Helen could never tell what sort of day Garp had experienced by what he cooked for them; something special might mean a celebration, or it might mean that the food was the only thing that had gone well, that the cooking was the only labor keeping Garp from despair. “If you are careful,” Garp wrote, “if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”

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.

He raced down the street after the sound of the car. Sometimes, if the car was going really fast, Garp would need three or four stop signs to catch up to it. Once he sprinted five blocks and was so out of breath when he caught up to the offending car that the driver was sure there'd been a murder in the neighborhood and Garp was either trying to report it or had done it himself.

Most drivers were impressed with Garp, and even if they swore about him later, they were polite and apologetic to his face, assuring him they would not speed in the neighborhood again. It was clear to them that Garp was in good physical shape. Most of them were high school kids who were easily embarrassed—caught hot-rodding around with their girl friends, or leaving little smoking-rubber stains in front of their girl friends' houses. Garp was not such a fool as to imagine that he changed their ways; all he hoped to do was make them speed somewhere else.

The present offender turned out to be a woman (Garp saw her earrings glinting, and the bracelets on her arm, as he ran up to her from behind). She was just ready to pull away from a stop sign when Garp rapped the wooden spoon on her window, startling her. The spoon, dribbling tomato sauce, looked at a glance as if it had been dipped in blood.

Garp waited for her to roll down her window, and was already phrasing his opening remarks ("I'm sorry I startled you, but I wanted to ask you a personal favor...") when he recognized that the woman was Ralph's mother—the notorious Mrs. Ralph. Duncan and Ralph were not with her; she was alone, and it was obvious that she had been crying.

“Yes, what is it?” she said. Garp couldn't tell if she recognized him as Duncan's father, or not.

“I'm sorry I startled you,” Garp began. He stopped. What else could he say to her? Smeary-faced, fresh from a fight with her ex-husband or a lover, the poor woman looked to be suffering her approaching middle-age like the flu; her body looked rumpled with misery, her eyes were red and vague. “I'm sorry,” Garp mumbled; he was sorry for her whole life. How could he tell her that all he wanted was for her to slow down?

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I'm Duncan's father,” Garp said.

“I know you are,” she said. “I'm Ralph's mother.”

“I know,” he said; he smiled.

“Duncan's father meets Ralph's mother,” she said, caustically. Then she burst into tears. Her face flopped forward and struck the horn. She sat up straight, suddenly hitting Garp's hand, resting on her rolled-down window; his fingers opened and he dropped the longhandled spoon into her lap. They both stared at it; the tomato sauce produced a stain on her wrinkled beige dress.

“You must think I'm a rotten mother,” Mrs. Ralph said. Garp, ever-conscious of safety, reached across her knees and turned off the ignition. He decided to leave the spoon in her lap. It was Garp's curse to be unable to conceal his feelings from people, even from strangers; if he thought contemptuous thoughts about you, somehow you knew.

“I don't know anything about what kind of mother you are,” Garp told her. “I think Ralph's a nice boy.”

“He can be a real shit,” she said.

“Perhaps you'd rather Duncan not stay with you tonight?” Garp asked—Garp hoped. To Garp, she didn't appear to know that Duncan was spending the night with Ralph. She looked at the spoon in her lap. “It's tomato sauce,” Garp said. To his surprise, Mrs. Ralph picked up the spoon and licked it.

“You're a cook?” she asked.

“Yes, I like to cook,” Garp said.

“It's very good,” Mrs. Ralph told him, handing him his spoon. “I should have gotten one like you—some muscular little prick who likes to cook.”

Garp counted in his head to five: then he said, “I'd be glad to go pick up the boys. They could spend the night with us, if you'd like to be alone.”

“Alone!” she cried. “I'm usually alone. I like having the boys with me. And they like it, too,” she said. “Do you know why?” Mrs. Ralph looked at him wickedly.

“Why?” Garp said.

“They like to watch me take a bath,” she said. “There's a crack in the door. Isn't it sweet that Ralph likes to show off his old mother to his friends?”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“You don't approve, do you, Mr. Garp?” she asked him. “You don't approve of me at all.”

“I'm sorry you're so unhappy,” Garp said. On the seat beside her in her messy car was a paperback of Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband: Garp remembered that Mrs. Ralph was going to school. “What are you majoring in?” he asked her, stupidly. He recalled she was a never-ending graduate student; her problem was probably a thesis that wouldn't come.

Mrs. Ralph shook her head. “You really keep your nose clean, don't you?” she asked Garp. “How long have you been married?”

“Almost eleven years,” Garp said. Mrs. Ralph looked more or less indifferent; Mrs. Ralph had been married for twelve.

“Your kid's safe with me,” she said, as if she were suddenly irritated with him, and as if she were reading his mind with utter accuracy. “Don't worry, I'm quite harmless—with children,” she added. “And I don't smoke in bed.”

“I'm sure it's good for the boys to watch you take a bath,” Garp told her, then felt immediately embarrassed for saying it, though it was one of the few things he'd told her that he meant.

“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't seem to do much good for my husband, and he watched me for years.” She looked up at Garp, whose mouth hurt from all his forced smiles. Just touch her cheek, or pat her hand, he thought; at least say something. But Garp was clumsy at being kind, and he didn't flirt.

“Well, husbands are funny,” he mumbled. Garp the marriage counselor, full of advice. “I don't think many of them know what they want.”

Mrs. Ralph laughed bitterly. “My husband found a nineteen-year-old cunt,” she said. “He seems to want her.”

“I'm sorry,” Garp told her. The marriage counselor is the I'm-sorry man, like a doctor with bad luck—the one who gets to diagnose all the terminal cases.

“You're a writer,” Mrs. Ralph said to him, accusingly; she waved her copy of The Eternal Husband at him. “What do you think of this?”

“It's a wonderful story,” Garp said. It was fortunately a book he remembered—neatly complicated, full of perverse and human contradiction.

“I think it's a sick story,” Mrs. Ralph told him. “I'd like to know what's so special about Dostoevsky.”

“Well,” Garp said, “his characters are so complex, psychologically and emotionally; and the situations are so ambiguous.”

“His women are less than objects,” Mrs. Ralph said, “they don't even have any shape. They're just ideas that men talk about and play with.” She threw the book out the window at Garp; it hit his chest and fell by the curb. She clenched her fists in her lap, staring at the stain on her dress, which marked her crotch with a tomato-sauce bull's-eye. “Boy, that's me all over,” she said, staring at the spot.

“I'm sorry,” Garp said again. “It may leave a permanent stain.”

“Everything leaves a stain!” Mrs. Ralph cried out. A laughter so witless escaped her that it frightened Garp. He didn't say anything and she said to him, “I'll bet you think that all I need is a good lay.”

To be fair, Garp rarely thought this of people, but when Mrs. Ralph mentioned it, he did think that, in her case, this oversimple solution might apply.

“And I'll bet you think I'd let you do it,” she said, glaring at him. Garp, in fact, did think so.

“No, I don't think you would,” he said.

“Yes, you think I would love to,” Mrs. Ralph said.

Garp hung his head. “No,” he said.

“Well, in your case,” she said, “I just might.” He looked at her and she gave him an evil grin. “It might make you a little less smug,” she told him.

“You don't know me well enough to talk to me like this,” Garp said.

“I know that you're smug,” Mrs. Ralph said. “You think you're so superior.” True, Garp knew; he was superior. He would make a lousy marriage counselor, he now knew.

“Please drive carefully,” Garp said; he pushed himself away from her car. “If there's anything I can do, please call.”

“Like if I need a good lover?” Mrs. Ralph asked him, nastily.

“No, not that,” Garp said.

“Why did you stop me?” she asked him.

“Because I thought you were driving too fast,” he said.

“I think you're a pompous fart,” she told him.

“I think you're an irresponsible slob,” Garp told her. She cried out as if she were stabbed.

“Look, I'm sorry,” he said (again), “but I'll just come pick up Duncan.”

“No, please,” she said. “I can look after him, I really want to. He'll be all right—I'll look after him like he was my own!” This didn't truly comfort Garp. “I'm not that much of a slob—with kids,” she added; she managed an alarmingly attractive smile.

“I'm sorry,” Garp said—his litany.

“So am I,” said Mrs. Ralph. As if the matter were resolved between them, she started her car and drove past the stop sign and through the intersection without looking. She drove away—slowly, but more or less in the middle of the road—and Garp waved his wooden spoon after her.

Then he picked up The Eternal Husband and walked home.