John Irving - The World According to Garp

Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon's mouth!

It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen warned. “More bookshelves.”

But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, “the radical self-damage” of the Ellen Jamesians—"the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name.” He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, “For whom? Who is serious who doesn't already know the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you've done this for them —not for Ellen, either. You've done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You've done it to get to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them—or why they did what they did. They were a fashion , a stupid fashion, but you couldn't just let them pass by. Why? ”

But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been right —at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone—even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

“But they started it,” Garp insisted.

Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn't tell—he started it,

said Ellen James.

“Okay,” Garp said. “Okay, okay.” The girl's sad truth hurt him. Hadn't he only wanted to defend her?

The Steering wrestling team whipped Bath Academy in the season's final dual meet and finished 9-2, with a second-place team trophy in the New England tournament and one individual champion, a 167-pounder whom Garp had personally done the most work with. But the season was over; Garp, the retired writer, once more had too much time on his hands.

He saw a lot of Roberta. They played endless games of squash; between them, they broke four rackets in three months and the little finger on Garp's left hand. Garp had an unmindful backswing that accounted for nine stitches across the bridge of Roberta's nose; Roberta hadn't had any stitches since her Eagle days and she complained about them bitterly. On a cross-court charge, Roberta's long knee gave Garp a groin injury that had him hobbling for a week.

“Honestly, you two,” Helen told them. “Why don't you just go off and have a torrid affair. It would be safer .”

But they were the best of friends, and if ever such urges occurred—for either Garp or Roberta—they were quickly made into a joke. Also, Roberta's love life was at last coolly organized; like a born woman, she valued her privacy. And she enjoyed the directorship of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta reserved her sexual self for not infrequent but never excessive flings upon the city of New York, where she kept a calm number of lovers on edge for her sudden visits and trysts. “It's the only way I can manage it,” she told Garp.

“It's a good enough way, Roberta,” Garp said. “Not everyone is so fortunate—to have this separation of power.”

And so they played more squash, and when the weather warmed, they ran on the curvy roads that stretched from Steering to the sea. On one road, Dog's Head Harbor was a flat six miles from Steering; they often ran from one mansion to the other. When Roberta did her business in New York, Garp ran alone.

He was alone, nearing the halfway point to Dog's Head Harbor—where he would turn around and run back to Steering—when the dirty-white Saab passed him, appeared to slow down, then sped ahead of him and out of sight. That was the only thing strange about it. Garp ran on the left-hand side of the road so that he could see the cars approaching closest to him; the Saab had passed him on the right, in its proper lane—nothing funny about it.

Garp was thinking about a reading he had promised to give at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta had talked him into reading to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their invited guests; he was, after all, the chief trustee—and Roberta frequently organized small concerts and poetry readings, and so forth—but Garp was leery of it. He disliked readings—and especially now, to women; his put-down of the Ellen Jamesians had left so many women feeling raw. Most serious women, of course, agreed with him, but most of them were also intelligent enough to recognize a kind of personal vindictiveness in his criticisms of the Ellen Jamesians, which was stronger than logic. They sensed a kind of killer instinct in him—basically male and basically intolerant. He was, as Helen said, too intolerant of the intolerant. Most women surely thought Garp had written the truth about the Ellen Jamesians, but was it necessary to have been so rough? In his own wrestling terminology, perhaps Garp was guilty of unnecessary roughness. It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now, even to mixed audiences—at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable—he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

And Roberta had advised him not to read a sex scene; not that the Fields Foundation fellows were essentially hostile, but they were wary, Roberta said. “You have lots of other scenes to read,” Roberta said, “besides sex.” Neither of them mentioned the possibility that he might have anything new to read. And it was mainly for this reason—that he had nothing new to read—that Garp had grown increasingly unhappy about giving readings, anywhere.

Garp topped the slight hill by a farm for black Angus cattle—the only hill between Steering and the sea—and passed the two-mile mark on his run. He saw the blue-black noses of the beasts pointed at him, like double-barreled guns over a low stone wall. Garp always spoke to the cattle; he mooed at them.

The dirty-white Saab was now approaching him, and Garp moved into the dust of the soft shoulder. One of the black Angus mooed back at Garp; two shied away from the stone wall. Garp had his eyes on them. The Saab was not going very fast—did not appear reckless. There seemed no reason to keep an eye on it.

It was only his memory that saved him. Writers have very selective memories, and fortunately, for Garp, he had chosen to remember how the dirty-white Saab had slowed—when it first passed him, going the other way—and how the driver's head appeared to be lining him up in the rear-view mirror.

Garp looked away from the Angus and saw the silent Saab, engine cut, coasting straight at him in the soft shoulder, a trail of dust spurning behind its quiet white shape and over the intent, hunched head of the driver. The driver, aiming the Saab at Garp, was the closest visual image Garp would ever have of what a ball turret gunner who was at work looked like.

Garp took two bounds to the stone wall and vaulted it, not seeing the single line of electric fencing above the wall. He felt the tingle in his thigh as he grazed the wire, but he cleared the fence, and the wall, and landed in the wet green stubble of the field, chewed and pockmarked by the herd of Angus.

He lay hugging the wet ground, he heard the croak of the vile-tasting Under Toad in his dry throat—he heard the explosion of hooves as the Angus thundered away from him. He heard the rock-and-metal meeting of the dirty-white Saab with the stone wall. Two boulders, the size of his head, bounced lazily beside him. One wild-eyed Angus bull stood his ground, but the Saab's horn was stuck; perhaps the steady blare kept the bull from charging.