John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Old Pontius Pilate, washing his hands,” Helen said to Garp.

“What do you want to do with it?” Garp asked John Wolf.

“ Me? ” John Wolf said. “It means nothing to me. But I'm sure it's publishable. I mean, it's very well written.”

“That's not why it's publishable,” Garp said, “and you know it.”

“Well, no,” John Wolf said. “But its also nice that it's well said.”

Ellen told John Wolf she wanted it published. Helen tried to talk her out of it. Garp refused to get involved.

“You are involved,” Helen told him, “and by saying nothing, you know you'll get what you want: that painful attack published. That's what you want.”

So Garp spoke to Ellen James. He tried to be enthusiastic in his reasoning to her—why she shouldn't publicly say all those things. These women were sick, sad, confused, tortured, abused by others, and now self-abused—but what point was there in criticizing them? Everyone would forget them in another five years. They'll hand out their notes and people will say, “What's an Ellen Jamesian? You mean you can't talk? You got no tongue?”

Ellen looked sullen and determined.

I won't forget them!

she wrote Garp.

Not in 5 years, not in 50 years will I ever forget them; I will remember them the way I remember my tongue.

Garp admired how the girl liked to use the good old semicolon. He said softly, “I think it's better not to publish this, Ellen.”

Will you be angry with me if I do?

she asked.

He admitted he would not be angry.

And Helen?

“Helen will only be angry with me ,” Garp said.

“You make people too angry,” Helen told him, in bed. “You get them all wound up. You inflame . You should lay off. You should do your own work, Garp. Just your own work. You used to say politics were stupid, and they meant nothing to you. You were right. They are stupid, they do mean nothing. You're doing this because it's easier than sitting down and making something up, from scratch. And you know it. You're building bookshelves all over the house, and finishing floors, and fucking around in the garden , for Christ's sake.

“Did I marry a handyman? Did I ever expect you to be a crusader?

“You should be writing the books and letting other people make the shelves. And you know I'm right, Garp.

“You're right,” he said.

He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau.”

Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: “The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest.” What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.

In the wrestling room, he worked out three straight days with the heavyweight. To punish himself?

“More fucking around in the garden, so to speak,” said Helen.

Then he announced he had a mission, a trip to make for the Fields Foundation. To North Mountain, New Hampshire. To determine if a Fields Foundation Fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen said. “More bookshelves. More politics. More crusades. That's the kind of thing people do who can't write.”

But he was gone; he was out of the house when John Wolf called to say that a very well read and much seen magazine was going to publish “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” by Ellen James.

John Wolf's voice over the phone had the cold, unseen, quick flick of the tongue of old You-Know-Who—the Under Toad, that's who, Helen thought. But she didn't know why; not yet.

She told Ellen James the news. Helen forgave Ellen, immediately, and even allowed herself to be excited with her. They took a drive to the shore with Duncan and little Jenny. They bought lobsters—Ellen's favorite—and enough scallops for Garp, who was not crazy about lobster.

Champagne!

Ellen wrote in the car.

Does champagne go with lobster and scallops?

“Of course,” Helen said. “It can .” They bought champagne. They stopped at Dog's Head Harbor and invited Roberta to dinner. “When will Dad be back?” Duncan asked.

“I don't know where North Mountain, New Hampshire, is ,” Helen said, “but he said he'd be back in time to eat with us.”

That's what he told me, too, said Ellen James.

NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON in North Mountain, New Hampshire, was really the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name was Harriet.

“Are you Nanette?” Garp asked her timidly, from the outside steps, frosted with salt and crunchy with melting slush.

“There ain't no Nanette,” she told him. “I'm Harriet Truckenmiller.” Behind her, in the dark kitchen, a large dog strained and snarled; Mrs. Truckenmiller kept the dog from getting to Garp by thrusting her long hip back against the lunging beast. Her pale, scarred ankle wedged open the kitchen door. Her slippers were blue; in her long robe, her figure was lost, but Garp could see she was tall—and that she had been taking a bath.

“Uh, do you do men's hair?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“But would you?” Garp asked her. “I don't trust barbers.”

Harriet Truckenmiller looked suspiciously at Garp's black knit ski hat, which was pulled down over his ears and concealed all his hair but the thick tufts that touched his shoulders from the back of his short neck.

“I can't see your hair,” she said. He took the stocking hat off, his hair wild with static electricity and tangled in the cold wind.

“I don't want just a haircut,” Garp said, neutrally, eyeing the woman's sad, drawn face and the soft wrinkles beside her gray eyes. Her own hair, a washed-out blond, was in curlers.

“You don't have no appointment,” Harriet Truckenmiller said.

The woman was no whore, he could plainly see. She was tired and frightened of him.

“What exactly do you want done to your hair, anyway?” she asked him.

“Just a trim,” Garp mumbled, “but I like a slight curl in it.”

“A curl?” said Harriet Truckenmiller, trying to imagine this from Garp's crown of very straight hair. “Like a permanent, you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, running his hand sheepishly through the snarls. “Whatever you can do with it, you know?”

Harriet Truckemniller shrugged. “I have to get dressed,” she said. The dog, devious and strong, thrust most of his stout body between her legs and jammed his broad, grimacing face into the opening between the storm and the main door. Garp tensed for the attack, but Harriet Truckenmiller brought her big knee up sharply and staggered the animal with a blow to its muzzle. She twisted her hand into the loose skin of its neck; the dog moaned and melted into the kitchen behind her.

The frozen yard, Garp saw, was a mosaic of the dog's huge turds captured in ice. There were also three cars in the yard; Garp, doubted if any of them ran. There was a woodpile, but no one had stacked it. There was a TV antenna, which at one time might have been on the roof; now it leaned against the beige aluminum siding of the house, its wires running like a spider web out a cracked window.

Mrs. Truckenmiller stepped back and opened the door for Garp. In the kitchen he felt his eyes dry from the heat of the wood stove; the room smelled of baking cookies and hair rinse—in fact, the kitchen seemed divided between the functions of a kitchen and the paraphernalia of Harriet's business. A pink sink with a shampoo hose; cans of stewed tomatoes; a three-way mirror framed with stage lights; a wooden rack with spices and meat tenderizer; the rows of ointments, lotions, and goo. And a steel stool over which a hair dryer hung suspended from a steel rod—like an original invention of an electric chair.