O. FECTEAU, OWNER & HEAD PLUMBER
With two-time offenders I come more quickly to the point.
"I'm calling the cops," I told the young man. "And I'm calling your boss, old O. Fecteau; I should have called him the last time."
"I'm my own boss," the young man said. "It's my plumbing business. Fuck off."
And I realized I was facing O. Fecteau himself--a runty but successful youth, unimpressed with standard authority.
"There are children in this neighborhood," I said. "Two of them are mine."
"Yeah, you already told me," the plumber said; he revved his engine as if he were clearing his throat. There was a hint of menace in his expression, like the trace of pubic beard he was growing on his young chin. I rested my hands on the door--one on the handle, one on the rolled-down window.
"Please don't speed here," I said.
"Yeah, I'll try," said O. Fecteau. I might have let it go at that, but the plumber lit a cigarette and smiled at me. I thought I saw on his punk's face the leer of the world.
"If I catch you driving like that again," I said, "I'll stick your Roto-Rooter up your ass."
We stared at each other, O. Fecteau and I. Then the plumber gunned his engine and popped his clutch; I had to leap back to the curb. In the gutter I saw a little metal dump truck, a child's toy; the front wheels were missing. I snatched it up and ran after O. Fecteau. Five blocks later I was close enough to throw the dump truck, which struck the plumber's cab; it made a good noise but it bounced off harmlessly. Even so, O. Fecteau slammed on his brakes; about five long pipes were flipped out of the pickup part of the truck, and one of those metal drawers sprang open, disgorging a screwdriver and several spools of heavy wire. The plumber jumped down from his cab, banging the door after himself; he had a Stillson wrench in his hand. You could tell he was sensitive about collecting dents on his blood-red truck. I grabbed one of the fallen pipes. It was about five feet long and I quickly smashed the truck's left taillight with it. For some time now, things have just been coming naturally to me in fives. For example, the circumference, in inches, of my chest (expanded): fifty-five.
"Your taillight's broken," I pointed out to the plumber. "You shouldn't be driving around that way."
"I'm going to call the cops on you, you crazy bastard!" said O. Fecteau.
"This is a citizen arrest," I said. "You broke the speed limit, you're endangering the lives of my children. We'll go see the cops together." And I poked the long pipe under the truck's rear license plate and folded the plate like a letter.
"You touch my truck again," the plumber said, "and you're in trouble." But the pipe felt as light in my hands as a badminton racket; I swung it easily and shattered the other taillight.
"You're already in trouble," I pointed out to O. Fecteau. "You ever drive in this neighborhood again, you better stay in first gear and use your flasher." First, I knew (swinging the pipe), he would need to repair his flasher.
There was an elderly woman, just then, who came out of her house to observe the commotion. She recognized me immediately. I catch up to a lot of people at her corner. "Oh, good for you!" she called. I smiled to her and she tottered toward me, stopping and peering into her well-groomed lawn where the toy dump truck arrested her attention. She seized it, with obvious distaste, and carried it over to me. I put the toy and the pieces of broken glass and plastic from the taillights and the flasher into the back of the pickup. It is a clean neighborhood; I despise litter. On the open road, in training, I see nothing but litter. I put the other pipes in back, too, and with the long pipe I still held (like a warrior's javelin) I nudged the screwdriver and the spools of wire that had fallen by the curb. O. Fecteau gathered them up and returned them to the metal drawer. He is probably a better plumber than a driver, I thought; the Stillson wrench looked very comfortable in his hand.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," the old woman told O. Fecteau. The plumber glared at her.
"He's one of the worst ones," I told her.
"Imagine that," the old lady said. "And you're a big boy," she told the plumber. "You should know better."
O. Fecteau edged back to the cab, looking as if he would hurl his wrench at me, then leap into his truck and back over the old biddy.
"Drive carefully," I told him. When he was safely in the cab, I slid the long pipe into the pickup. Then I took the old woman's arm and helped her along the sidewalk.
When the truck tore away from the curb, with that stink of scorched rubber and a noise as raw as bones leaving their sockets, I felt the old lady tremble through the frail point of her elbow; something of her fear passed into me, and I realized how risky it was to make anyone as angry as I had made O. Fecteau. I could hear him, maybe five blocks away, driving furiously fast, and I prayed for all the dogs and cats and children who might be near the street. Surely, I thought, modern life is about five times as difficult as life used to be.
I should stop this crusade against speeders, I thought. I go too far with them, but they make me so angry--with their carelessness, their dangerous, sloppy way of life, which I view as so directly threatening to my own life and the lives of my children. I have always hated cars, and hated people who drove them stupidly. I feel such anger toward people who take such risks with other people's lives. Let them race their cars--but in the desert! We would not allow an outdoor rifle range in the suburbs! Let them jump out of airplanes, if they want--but over the ocean! Not where my children live.
"What would this neighborhood be like without you?" the old woman wondered aloud. I can never remember her name. Without me, I thought, this neighborhood would probably be peaceful. Perhaps deadlier, but peaceful. "They all drive so fast," the old lady said. "If it weren't for you, I sometimes think they'd be having their smashups right in my living room." But I felt embarrassed that I shared such anxiety with eighty-year-olds--that my fears are more like their nervous, senile worries than they are the normal anxieties of people my own young middle age.
What an incredibly dull life I have! I thought, aiming the old woman toward her front door, steering her over the cracks in the sidewalk.
Then the plumber came back. I thought the old woman was going to die in my arms. The plumber drove over the curb and hurtled past us, over the old woman's lawn, flattening a whiplike young tree and nearly rolling over when he wheeled the truck into a U-turn that uprooted a sizable hedge and tore divots from the ground the size of five-pound steaks. Then down to the sidewalk the truck fled--an explosion of tools flying free of the pickup as the rear wheels jounced over the curb. O. Fecteau was off up the street, once more terrorizing my neighborhood; I saw the violent plumber jump the curb again at the corner of Dodge and Furlong--where he grazed the back of a parked car, springing open the car's trunk on impact and leaving it flapping.
Helping the shaken old lady inside, I called the police--and my wife, to tell her to keep the children indoors. The plumber was berserk. This is how I help the neighborhood, I thought: I drive mad men madder.
The old woman sat in a paisley chair in her cluttered living room, as carefully as a plant. When O. Fecteau returned--this time driving within inches of the living room bay window, and through the gravel beds for the baby trees, his horn blaring--the old woman never moved. I stood at the door, awaiting the ultimate assault, but I thought it wiser not to show myself. I knew that if O. Fecteau saw me, he would attempt to drive in the house.
By the time the police arrived, the plumber had rolled his truck in an attempt to avoid a station wagon at the intersection of Cold Hill and North Lane. He had broken his collarbone and was sitting upright in the cab, though the truck lay on its side; he wasn't able to climb out the door above his head, or he hadn't tried. O. Fecteau appeared calm; he was listening to his radio.
Since that time, I have tried to provoke the offending drivers less; if I sense them taking offense at my stopping them and presuming to criticize their vile habits, I simply tell them I am informing the police and quickly leave.
That O. Fecteau turned out to have a long history of violent overreactions to social situations did not allow me to forgive myself. "Look, it's all the better you got that plumber off the road," my wife told me--and she usually criticizes my meddlesomeness in the behavior of others. But I could only think that I had driven a workingman off his rocker, and that during his outburst, if O. Fecteau had killed a child, whose fault would it have been? Partly mine, I think.
In modern times, in my opinion, either everything is a moral question or there are no more moral questions. Nowadays, there are no compromises or there are only compromises. Never influenced, I keep my vigil. There is no letting up.
Don't say anything, Helen told herself. Go kiss him and rub against him; get him upstairs as fast as you can, and talk about the damn story later. Much later, she warned herself. But she knew he wouldn't let her.
The dishes were done and he sat across the table from her.
She tried her nicest smile and told him, "I want to go to bed with you."
"You don't like it?" he asked.
"Let's talk in bed," she said.
"Goddamn it, Helen," he said. "It's the first thing I've finished in a long time. I want to know what you think of it."
She bit her lip and took her glasses off; she had not made a single mark with her red pencil. "I love you," she said.
"Yes, yes," he said, impatiently. "I love you, too, but we can fuck anytime. What about the story?" And she finally relaxed; she felt he had released her, somehow. I tried, she thought; she felt hugely relieved.
"Fuck the story," she said. "No, I don't like it. And I don't want to talk about it, either. You don't care to regard what I want, obviously. You're like a little boy at the dinner table--you serve yourself first."
"You don't like it?" Garp said.
"Oh, it's not bad," she said, "it's just not much of anything. It's a trifle, it's a little ditty. If you're warming up to something, I'd like to see what it is--when you get to it. But this is nothing, you must know that. It's a toss-off, isn't it? You can do tricks like this with your left hand, can't you?"
"It's funny, isn't it?" Garp asked.
"Oh, it's funny," she said, "but it's funny like jokes are funny. It's all one-liners. I mean, what is it? A self-parody? You're not old enough, and you haven't written enough, to start mocking yourself. It's self-serving, it's self-justifying; and it's not about anything except yourself, really. It's cute."
"Son of a bitch," said Garp. "Cute?"
"You're always talking about people who write well but don't have anything to say," Helen said. "Well, what do you call this? It's no 'Grillparzer,' certainly; it isn't worth a fifth of what 'Grillparzer' is worth. It isn't worth a tenth of that story," Helen said.
"'The Pension Grillparzer' is the first big thing I wrote," Garp said. "This is completely different; it's another kind of fiction altogether."
"Yes, one is about something and one is about nothing," Helen said. "One is about people and one is about only you. One has mystery and precision, and one has only wit." When Helen's critical faculties were engaged, they were difficult to disengage.
"It's not fair to compare them," Garp said. "I know this is smaller."
"Then let's not talk anymore about it," Helen said.
Garp sulked for a minute.
"You didn't like Second Wind of the Cuckold, either," he said, "and I don't suppose you'll like the next one any better."
"What next one?" Helen asked him. "Are you writing another novel?"
He sulked some more. She hated him, making her do this to him, but she wanted him and she knew she loved him, too.
"Please," she said. "Let's go to bed."
But now he saw his chance for a little cruelty--and/or a little truth--and his eyes shone at her brightly.
"Let's not say another word," she begged him. "Let's go to bed."
"You think 'The Pension Grillparzer' is the best thing I've written, don't you?" he asked her. He knew already what she thought of the second novel, and he knew that, despite Helen's fondness for Procrastination, a first novel is a first novel. Yes, she did think "Grillparzer" was his best.
"So far, yes," she said, softly. "You're a lovely writer, you know I think so."
"I guess I just haven't lived up to my potential," Garp said, nastily.
"You will," she said; the sympathy and her love for him were draining from her voice.
They stared at each other; Helen looked away. He started upstairs. "Are you coming to bed?" he asked. His back was to her; his intentions were hidden from her--his feelings for her, too: either hidden from her or buried in his infernal work.
"Not right now," she said.
He waited on the stairs. "Got something to read?" he asked.
"No, I'm through reading for a while," she said.
Garp went upstairs. When she came up to him, he was already asleep, which made her despair. If he'd had her on his mind at all, how could he have fallen asleep? But, actually, he'd had so much on his mind, he'd been confused; he had fallen asleep because he was bewildered. If he'd been able to focus his feelings on any one thing, he'd still have been awake when she came upstairs. They might have saved a lot of things, then.
As it was, she sat beside him on the bed and watched his face with more fondness than she thought she could stand. She saw he had a hard-on, as severe as if he had been waiting up for her, and she took him into her mouth and sucked him softly until he came.
He woke up, surprised, and he was very guilty-looking--when he appeared to realize where he was, and with whom. Helen, however, was not in the least guilty-looking; she looked only sad. Garp would think, later, that it was as if Helen had known he had been dreaming of Mrs. Ralph.
When he came back from the bathroom, she was asleep. She had quickly drifted off. Guiltless at last, Helen felt freed to have her dreams. Garp lay awake beside her, watching the astonishing innocence upon her face--until the children woke her.
13
WALT CATCHES COLD
When Walt caught colds, Garp slept badly. It was as if he were trying to breathe for the boy, and for himself. Garp would get up in the night to kiss and nuzzle the child; anyone seeing Garp would have thought that he could make Walt's cold go away by catching it himself.
"Oh, God," Helen said. "It's just a cold. Duncan had colds all winter when he was five." Nearing eleven, Duncan seemed to have outgrown colds; but Walt, at five, was fully in the throes of cold after cold--or it was one long cold that went away and came back. By the March mud season, Walt's resistance struck Garp as altogether gone; the child hacked himself and Garp awake each night with a wet, wrenching cough. Garp sometimes fell asleep listening to Walt's chest, and he would wake up, frightened, when he could no longer hear the thump of the boy's heart; but the child had merely pushed his father's heavy head off his chest so that he could roll over and sleep more comfortably.
Both the doctor and Helen told Garp, "it's just a cough."
But the imperfection in Walt's nightly breathing scared Garp right out of his sleep. He was usually awake, therefore, when Roberta called; the late-night anguish of the large and powerful Ms. Muldoon was no longer frightening to Garp--he had come to expect it--but Garp's own fretful sleeplessness made Helen short-tempered.
"If you were back at work, on a book, you'd be too tired to lie awake half the night," she said. It was his imagination that was keeping him up, Helen told him; one sign that he hadn't been writing enough, Garp knew, was when he had too much imagination left over for other things. For example, the onslaught of dreams: Garp now dreamed only of horrors happening to his children.
In a dream, there was one horror that took place while Garp was reading a pornographic magazine. He was just looking at the same picture, over and over again; the picture was very pornographic. The wrestlers on the university team, with whom Garp occasionally worked out, had a peculiar vocabulary for such pictures. This vocabulary, Garp noted, had not changed since his days at Steering, when the wrestlers on Garp's
team spoke of such pictures in the same fashion. What had changed was the increased availability of the pictures, but the names were the same.
The picture Garp looked at in the dream was considered among the highest in the rankings of pornographic pictures. Among pictures of naked women, there were names for how much you could see. If you could see the pubic hair, but not the sex parts, that was called a bush shot--or just a bush. If you could see the sex parts, which were sometimes partially hidden by the hair, that was a beaver; a beaver was better than just a bush; a beaver was the whole thing: the hair and the parts. If the parts were open, that was called a split beaver. And if the whole thing glistened, that was the best of all, in the world of pornography: that was a wet, split beaver. The wetness implied that the woman was not only naked and exposed and open, but she was also ready.
In his dream, Garp was looking at what the wrestlers called a wet, split beaver when he heard children crying. He did not know whose children they were, but Helen and his mother, Jenny Fields, were with them; they all came down the stairs and filed past him, where he struggled to hide from them what he'd been looking at. They had been upstairs and something terrible had awakened them; they were on their way farther downstairs--going to the basement as if the basement were a bomb shelter. And with that thought, Garp heard the dull crump of bombing--he noted the crumbling plaster, he saw the flickering lights--and he grasped the terror of what was approaching them. The children, two by two, marched whimpering after Helen and Jenny, who led them to the bomb shelter as soberly as nurses. If they looked at Garp at all, they regarded him with vague sadness and with scorn, as if he had let them all down and was powerless to help them now.
Perhaps he had been looking at the wet, split beaver instead of watching for enemy planes? This, true to the nature of dreams, was forever unclear: precisely why he felt so guilty, and why they looked at him as if they'd been so abused.
At the end of the line of children were Walt and Duncan, holding hands; the so-called buddy system, as it is employed at summer camps, appeared in Garp's dream to be the natural reaction to a disaster among children. Little Walt was crying, the way Garp had heard him cry when he was caught in the grip of a nightmare, unable to wake up. "I'm having a bad dream," he sniveled. He looked at his father and almost shouted to him, "I'm having a bad dream!"