John Irving - The World According to Garp

“That's awful, Mom,” Garp admitted. The phrase “consumed with lust” was what Jenny meant by “doing a Grillparzer.”

“But that's what it was ,” Jenny said. “It was lust, all right.”

“It's better to say he was thick with lust,” Garp suggested.

“Yuck,” Jenny said. Another Grillparzer. It was the lust she didn't care for, in general. They discussed lust, as best they could. Garp confessed his lust for Cushie Percy and rendered a suitably tame version of the consummation scene. Jenny did not like it. “And Helen?” Jenny asked. “Do you feel that for Helen?”

Garp admitted he did.

“How terrible,” Jenny said. She did not understand the feeling and did not see how Garp could ever associate it with pleasure, much less with affection.

“"All that is body is as coursing waters,"” Garp said lamely, quoting Marcus Aurelius; his mother just shook her head. They ate dinner in a very red restaurant in the vicinity of Blutgasse. “Blood Street,” Garp translated for her, happily.

“Stop translating everything,” Jenny told him. “I don't want to know everything.” She thought the decor of the restaurant was too red and the food was too expensive. The service was slow and they started for home too late. It was very cold and the gay lights of the Kдrntnerstrasse did little to warm them.

“Let's get a taxi,” Jenny said. But Garp insisted that in another five blocks they could take a streetcar just as easily. “You and your damn Strassenbahns,” Jenny said.

It was clear that the subject of “lust” had spoiled their evening.

The first district glittered with Christmas gaudiness; between the towering spires of Saint Stephen's and the massive bulk of the opera house lay seven blocks of shops and bars and hotels; in those seven blocks, they could have been anywhere in the world at wintertime. “Some night we've got to go to the opera, Mom,” Garp suggested. They had been in Vienna for six months without going to the opera, but Jenny did not like to stay up late at night.

“Go by yourself,” Jenny said. She saw, ahead of them, three women standing in long fur coats: one of them had a matching fur muff and she held the muff in front of her face and breathed into it to warm her hands. She was quite elegant to look at, although there was something of the tinsel of Christmas about the other two women with her. Jenny envied the woman her muff. “That's what I want,” Jenny announced. “Where can I get one of those?” She pointed to the women ahead of them but Garp didn't know what she meant.

The women, he knew, were whores.

When the whores saw Jenny coming up the street with Garp, they were puzzled at the relationship. They saw a handsome boy with a plain but handsome woman who was old enough to be his mother, but Jenny hooked Garp's arm rather formally when she walked with him, and there was something like tension and confusion in the conversation Garp and Jenny were having—which made the whores think Jenny could not have been Garp's mother. Then Jenny pointed at them and they were angry—they thought Jenny was another whore who was working their territory and had snagged a boy who looked well-off and not sinister—a pretty boy who might have paid them .

In Vienna, prostitution is legal and complexly controlled. There is something like a union; there are medical certificates, periodical checkups, identification cards. Only the best-looking prostitutes are allowed to work the posh streets in the first district. In the outlying districts the prostitutes are uglier or older, or both; they are also cheaper, of course. District by district, their prices are supposed to be fixed. When the whores saw Jenny they stepped out on the sidewalk to block Jenny's and Garp's way. They had quickly decided that Jenny was not quite up to the standard of a first-district prostitute, and that she was probably working independently—which is illegal—or had stepped out of her assigned district to try to pull a little more money; that would get her in a lot of trouble with the other prostitutes.

In truth, Jenny would not have been mistaken for a prostitute by most neople, but it is hard to say exactly what she looked like. She had dressed as a nurse for so many years that she did not really know how to dress in Vienna; she tended to overdress when she went out with Garp, perhaps in compensation for the old bathrobe in which she wrote. She had no experience in buying clothes for herself, and in a foreign city all the clothes looked slightly different to her. With no particular taste in mind, she simply bought the more expensive things: after all, she did have money and she did not have the patience or the interest for any comparative shopping. As a consequence, she looked new and shiny in her clothes, and beside Garp she did not look as if she came from the same family. Garp's constant dress, at Steering, had been a jacket and tie and comfortable pants—a kind of sloppy city standard uniform that made him anonymous almost anywhere.

“Would you ask that woman where she got that muff?” Jenny said to Garp. To her surprise, the women blocked the sidewalk to meet them.

“They're whores , Mom,” Garp whispered to her.

Jenny Fields froze. The woman with the muff spoke sharply to her. Jenny didn't understand a word, of course, she stared at Garp for a translation. The woman spoke a stream of things to Jenny, who never took her eyes off her son.

“My mother wanted to ask you where you got your pretty muff.” Garp said in his slow German.

“Oh, they're foreigners ,” said one.

“God, it's his mother ,” said another.

The woman with the muff stared at Jenny, who now stared at the woman's muff. One of the whores was a young girl with her hair piled very high and sprinkled with little gold and silver stars; she also had a green star tattoo on one cheek and a scar, which pulled her upper lip only slightly out of line—so that, for a moment, you didn't know what was wrong with her face, only that something was wrong. There was nothing at all wrong with her body, though: she was tall and lean and very hard to look at, though Jenny now found herself staring at her.

“Ask her how old she is,” Jenny said to Garp.

“ Ich bin eighteen,” the girl said. “I know good English.”

“That's how old my son is,” Jenny said, nudging Garp. She did not understand that the they had mistaken her for one of them; when Garp told her, later, she was furious—but only at herself. “It's my clothes!” she cried. “I don't know how to dress!” And from that moment on, Jenny Fields would never dress as anything but a nurse: she put her uniform back on and wore it everywhere—as if she were forever on duty, though she would never be a nurse again.

“May I see your muff?” Jenny asked the woman who had one. Jenny had assumed that they all spoke English, but only the young girl knew the language. Garp translated and the woman reluctantly removed her muff—a scent of perfume emerging from the warm nest where her long hands, sparkling with rings, had been clutched together.

The third whore had a pockmark on her forehead, like an impression made with a peach pit. Aside from this flaw, and a small fat mouth like the mouth of an overweight child, she was standardly ripe—in her twenties, Garp guessed; she probably had an enormous bosom, but under her black fur coat it was hard to be sure.

The woman with the muff, Garp thought, was beautiful. She had a long, potentially sad face. Her body, Garp imagined, was serene. Her mouth was very calm. Only her eyes and her bare hands in the cold night let Garp see that she was his mother's age, at least. Maybe she was older. “It was a gift,” she said to Garp, about the muff. “It came with the coat.” They were a silver-blond fur, very sleek.