John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Your husband must be crazy,” Garp says. “You look better to me than most women.”

“Oh, please stop it,” says Mrs. Ralph. “You must be sick.”

I must be, Garp agrees, but he says, “You should have confidence in your sexuality, believe me. And more important, you should develop confidence in yourself in other ways.”

“There never were any other ways,” Mrs. Ralph admits. “I was never so hot at anything but sex, and now I'm not so hot at sex either.”

“But you're going to school,” Garp, says, groping.

“I'm sure I don't know why ,” Mrs. Ralph says. “Or is that what you mean by developing confidence in other ways?” Garp squints hard, wishes for unconsciousness; when he hears the water bed sound like surf, he senses danger and opens his eyes. Mrs. Ralph has undressed, has spread herself out on the bed naked. The little waves are still lapping under her rough-tough body, which confronts Garp like a sturdy rowboat moored on choppy water. “Show me you've got a hard-on and you can go,” she says. “Show me your hard-on and I'll believe you like me.”

Garp tries to think of an erection; in order to do this, he shuts his eyes and thinks of someone else.

“You bastard,” says Mrs. Ralph, but Garp discovers he is already hard; it was not nearly so difficult as he imagined. Opening his eyes, he's forced to recognize that Mrs. Ralph is not without allure. He pulls down his track shorts and shows himself to her. The gesture itself makes him harder; he finds himself liking her damp, curly hair. But Mrs. Ralph seems neither disappointed nor impressed with the demonstration; she is resigned to being let down. She shrugs. She rolls over and turns her great round rump to Garp.

“Okay, so you can actually get it up,” she tells him. “Thank you. You can go home now.”

Garp feels like touching her. Sickened with embarrassment, Garp feels he could come by just looking at her. He blunders out the door, down the wretched staircase. Is the woman's self-abuse all over for this night? he wonders. Is Duncan safe?

He contemplates extending his vigil until the comforting light of dawn. Stepping on the fallen skillet and clanging it against the stove, he hears not even a sigh from Mrs. Ralph and only a moan from Bill. If the boys were to wake up and need anything, he fears Mrs. Ralph wouldn't hear them.

It's 3:30 A.M. in Mrs. Ralph's finally quiet house when Garp decides to clean the kitchen, to kill the time until dawn. Familiar with a housewife's tasks, Garp fills the sink and starts to wash the dishes.

When the phone rang, Garp knew it was Helen. It suddenly occurred to him—all the terrible things she could have on her mind.

“Hello,” Garp said.

“Would you tell me what's going on, please?” Helen asked. Garp knew she had been awake a long time. It was four o'clock in the morning.

“Nothing's going on, Helen,” Garp said. “There was a little trouble here, and I didn't want to leave Duncan.”

“Where is that woman?” Helen asked.

“In bed,” Garp admitted. “She passed out.”

“From what ?” Helen asked.

“She'd been drinking,” Garp said. “There was a young man here, with her, and she wanted me to get him to leave.”

“So then you were alone with her?” Helen asked.

“Not for long,” Garp said. “She fell asleep.”

“I don't imagine it would take very long,” Helen said, “with her.”

Garp let there be silence. He had not experienced Helen's jealousy for a while, but he had no trouble remembering its surprising sharpness.

“Nothing's going on, Helen,” Garp said.

“Tell me what you're doing, exactly, at this moment,” Helen said.

“I'm washing the dishes,” Garp told her. He heard her take a long, controlled breath.

“I wonder why you're still there,” Helen said.

“I didn't want to leave Duncan,” Garp told her.

“I think you should bring Duncan home,” Helen said. “Right now.”

“Helen,” Garp said. “I've been good.” It sounded defensive, even to Garp; also, he knew he hadn't been quite good enough. “Nothing has happened,” he added, feeling a little more sure of the truth of that.

“I won't ask you why you're washing her filthy dishes,” Helen said.

“To pass the time,” Garp said.

But in truth he had not examined what he was doing, until now, and it seemed pointless to him—waiting for dawn, as if accidents only happened when it was dark. “I'm waiting for Duncan to wake up,” he said, but as soon as he spoke he felt there was no sense to that either.

“Why not just wake him up?” Helen asked.

“I'm good at washing dishes,” Garp said, trying to introduce some levity.

“I know all the things you're good at,” Helen told him, a little too bitterly to pass as a joke.

“You'll make yourself sick, thinking like this,” Garp said. “Helen, really, please stop it. I haven't done anything wrong.” But Garp had a puritan's niggling memory of the hard-on Mrs. Ralph had given him.

“I've already made myself sick,” Helen said, but her voice softened. “Please come home now,” she told him.

“And leave Duncan?”

“For Christ's sake, wake him up!” she said. “Or carry him.”

“I'll be right home,” Garp told her. “Please don't worry, don't think what you're thinking. I'll tell you everything that happened. You'll probably love this story.” But he knew he would have trouble telling her all this story, and that he would have to think very carefully about the parts to leave out.

“I feel better,” Helen said. “I'll see you, soon. Please don't wash another dish.” Then she hung up and Garp reviewed the kitchen. He thought that his half hour of work hadn't made enough of a difference for Mrs. Ralph to notice that any effort to approach the debris had even been begun.

Garp sought Duncan's clothes among the many, forbidding clots of clothing flung about the living room. He knew Duncan's clothes but he couldn't spot them anywhere; then he remembered that Duncan, like a hamster, stored things in the bottom of his sleeping bag and crawled into the nest with them. Duncan weighed about eighty pounds, plus the bag, plus his junk, but Garp believed he could carry the child home; Duncan could retrieve his bicycle another day. At least, Garp decided, he would not wake Duncan up inside Ralph's house. There might be a scene; Duncan would be fussy about leaving. Mrs. Ralph might even wake up.

Then Garp thought of Mrs. Ralph. Furious at himself, he knew he wanted one last look; his sudden, recurring erection reminded him that he wanted to see her thick, crude body again. He moved quickly to the back staircase. He could have found her fetid room with his nose.

He looked straight at her crotch, her strangely twisted navel, her rather small nipples (for such big breasts). He should have looked first at her eyes; then he might have realized she was wide-awake and staring back at him.

“Dishes all done?” asked Mrs. Ralph. “Come to say good-bye?”

“I wanted to see if you were all right,” he told her.

“Bullshit,” she said. “You wanted another look.”

“Yes,” he confessed; he looked away. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” she said. “It's made my day.” Garp tried to smile.

“You're too “sorry” all the time,” Mrs. Ralph said. “What a sorry man you are. Except to your wife,” Mrs. Ralph said. “You never once said you were sorry to her .”

There was a phone beside the water bed. Garp felt he had never so badly misread a person's condition as he had misread Mrs. Ralph's. She was suddenly no drunker than Bill; or she had become miraculously undrunk, or she was enjoying that half hour of clarity between stupor and hangover—a half hour Garp had read about, but had always believed was a myth. Another illusion.