John Irving - The World According to Garp

“That's silly,” Helen said.

“And needlessly expensive,” Roberta said.

“I have a lot of money now,” Garp said; his wry smile to John Wolf was not returned.

John Wolf volunteered to take Helen and the kids to the airport.

“One man with one arm, one man with one leg, two people who limped,” said Duncan, “and someone without any nose.”

“You should wait awhile and get a look at your father,” Roberta Muldoon said.

Garp thought of himself: a grieving ex-wrestler, in drag for his mother's memorial service. He kissed Helen and the children, and even John Wolf. “Don't worry about your dad,” Garp told Helen.

“And don't worry about Garp,” Roberta told Helen. “I'm going to disguise him so that everyone will leave him alone.”

“I wish you'd try to leave everyone alone,” Helen told Garp.

There was suddenly another woman in John Wolf's crowded office; no one had noticed her, but she had been trying to get John Wolf's attention. When she spoke, she spoke out in a single, clear moment of silence and everyone looked at her.

“Mr. Wolf?” the woman said. She was old and brown-black-gray, and her feet appeared to be killing her; she wore an electrical extension cord, wrapped twice around her thick waist.

“Yes, Jillsy?” John Wolf said, and Garp stared at the woman. It was Jillsy Sloper, of course; John Wolf should have known that writers remember names.

“I was wonderin',” Jillsy said, “if I could get off early this afternoon—if you'd say a word for me, because I want to go to that funeral.” She spoke with her chin down, a stiff mutter of bitten words—as few as possible. She did not like to open her mouth around strangers; also, she recognized Garp and she didn't want to be introduced to him—not ever.

“Yes, of course you can,” John Wolf said, quickly. He didn't want to introduce Jillsy Sloper to Garp any more than she wanted it.

“Just a minute,” Garp said. Jillsy Sloper and John Wolf froze. “Are you Jillsy Sloper?” Garp asked her.

“No!” John Wolf blurted. Garp glared at him.

“How do you do?” Jillsy said to Garp; she would not look at him.

“How do you do?” Garp said. He could see at a glance that this sorrowful woman had not , as John Wolf said, “loved” his book.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” Jillsy said.

“Thank you very much,” Garp said, but he could see—they all could see—that Jillsy Sloper was seething about something.

“She was worth two or three of you! ” Jillsy suddenly cried to Garp. There were tears in her muddy-yellow eyes. “She was worth four or five of your terrible books!” she crooned. “Lawd,” she muttered, leaving them all in John Wolf's office. “Lawd, Lawd!”

Another person with a limp, thought Duncan Garp, but he could see that his father did not want to hear about his body count.

At the first feminist funeral held in the city of New York, the mourners appeared unsure how to behave. This was perhaps the result of the gathering's being not in a church but in one of these enigmatic buildings of the city university system—an auditorium, old with the echo of speeches no one had listened to. The giant space was slightly seedy with the sense of past cheering—for rock bands, and for the occasional, well-known poet. But the space was also serious with the certain knowledge that large lectures had taken place there; it was a room in which hundreds of people had taken notes.

The name of the space was School of Nursing Hall—thus it was oddly appropriate as a place of tribute to Jenny Fields. It was hard to tell the difference between the mourners wearing their Jenny Fields Originals, with the little red hearts stitched over the breast, and the real nurses, forever white and unfashionable, who had other reasons to be in the environs of the nursing school but had paused to peek in on the ceremonies—either curious or genuinely sympathetic, or both.

There were many white uniforms among the enormous, milling, softly mumbling audience, and Garp immediately cursed Roberta. “I told you I could have dressed as a nurse,” Garp hissed. “I could have been a little less conspicuous.”

“I thought you'd be conspicuous as a nurse,” Roberta said. “I didn't know there'd be so many.”

“It's going to be a fucking national trend,” Garp muttered. “Just wait and see,” he said, but he said no more; he huddled small and garish beside Roberta, feeling that everyone was looking at him and somehow sensing his maleness—or at least, as Roberta had warned him, his hostility.

They sat dead-center in the massive auditorium, only three rows back from the stage and the speakers' platform; a sea of women had moved in and sat behind them—rows and rows of them—and farther back, at the wide-open rear of the hall (where there were no seats), the women who were less interested in seating themselves for the entire ritual, but who'd wanted to come pay their respects, filed slowly in one door and slowly out another. It was as if the larger, seated audience were the open casket of Jenny Fields that the slow-walking women had come to observe.

Garp, of course, felt that he was an open casket, and all the women were observing him—his pallor, his hue, his preposterous disguise.

Roberta had done this to him, perhaps to get even, with him for his bullying her into letting him come at all—or for his cruel crack concerning her chromosomes. Roberta had dressed Garp in a cheap turquoise jump suit, the color of Oren Rath's pickup truck. The jump suit had a gold zipper that ran from Garp's crotch to Garp's throat. Garp did not adequately fill the hips of the suit, but his breasts—or, rather, the falsies Roberta had fashioned for him—strained against the snap-flap pockets and twisted the vulnerable zipper askew.

“What a set you have!” Roberta had told him.

“You animal, Roberta,” Garp had hissed to her.

The shoulder straps of the huge, hideous bra dug into his shoulders. But whenever Garp felt that a woman was staring at him, perhaps doubting his sex, he would simply turn himself sideways to her and show off. Thus eliminating any possible doubt, or so he hoped.

He was less sure of the wig. A tousled whore's head of honey-blond hair, under which his own scalp itched.

A pretty green silk scarf was at his throat.

His dark face was powdered a sickly gray, but this concealed, Roberta said, his stubble of beard. His rather thin lips were cherry-colored, but he kept licking them and had smeared the lipstick at one corner of his mouth.

“You look like you've just been kissed,” Roberta reassured him.

Though Garp was cold, Roberta had not allowed him to wear his ski parka—it made his shoulders look too thick. And on Garp's feet was a towering pair of knee-high boots—a kind of cherry vinyl that matched, Roberta said, his lipstick. Garp had seen himself reflected in a storefront window and he'd told Roberta that he thought he looked like a teen-age prostitute.

“An aging teen-age prostitute,” Roberta had corrected him.

“A faggot parachutist,” Garp had said.

“No, you look like a woman, Garp,” Roberta had assured him. “Not a woman with especially good taste, but a woman.”

So Garp sat squirming in School of Nursing Hall. He twisted the itchy rope braids of his ridiculous purse, a scraggily hemp thing with an oriental design, barely big enough to hold his wallet. In her large, bursting shoulder bag, Roberta Muldoon had hidden Garp's real clothes—his other identity.

“This is Manda Horton-Jones,” Roberta whispered, indicating a thin, hawk-nosed woman speaking nasally and with her rodential head pointed down; she read a stiff, prepared speech.