The World According to Garp by John Irving
Garp dreamed of other prostitutes; he had visited two or three of them in Vienna--but he had never paid the first-district prices. The next evening, after an early supper at the Schwindgasse, Garp went to see the woman with the mink muff streaked with light.
Her working name was Charlotte. She was not surprised to see him. Charlotte was old enough to know when she'd successfully hooked someone, although she never did tell Garp exactly how old she was. She had taken very fine care of herself, and only when she was completely undressed was her age apparent anywhere except in the veins on her long hands. There were stretch marks on her belly and her breasts, but she told Garp that the child had died a long time ago. She did not mind if Garp touched the Cesarean scar.
After he had seen Charlotte four times at the fixed first-district rate, he happened to run into her at the Naschmarkt on a Saturday morning. She was buying fruit. Her hair was probably a little dirty; she'd covered it with a scarf and wore it like a young girl's--with bangs and two short braids. The bangs were slightly greasy against her forehead, which seemed paler in the daylight. She had no makeup on and wore a pair of American jeans and tennis sneakers and a long coat-style sweater with a high roll collar. Garp would not have recognized her if he hadn't seen her hands clutching the fruit; she had all her rings on.
At first she wouldn't answer him when he spoke to her, but he had already told her that he did all the shopping, and the cooking, for himself and his mother, and she found this amusing. After her irritation at meeting a customer in her off-duty hours, she seemed good-humored. It did not become clear to Garp, for a while, that he was the same age as Charlotte's child would have been. Charlotte took some vicarious interest in the way Garp was living with his mother.
"How's your mother's writing coming?" Charlotte would ask him.
"She's still pounding away," Garp would say. "I don't think she's solved the lust problem yet."
But only to a point did Charlotte allow Garp to joke about his mother.
Garp was insecure enough about himself with Charlotte that he never told her he was trying to write, too; he knew she would think he was too young. Sometimes, he thought so, too. And his story wasn't ready to tell someone about. The most he had done was change the title. He now called it "The Pension Grillparzer," and that title was the first thing about it that solidly pleased him. It helped him to focus. Now he had a place in mind, just one place where almost everything that was important was going to happen. This helped him to think in a more focused way about his characters, too--about the family of classifiers, about the other residents of one small, sad pension somewhere (it would have to be small and sad, and in Vienna, to be named after Franz Grillparzer). Those "other residents" would include a kind of circus; not a very good kind, either, he imagined, but a circus with no other place to stay. No other place would have them.
In the world of ratings, the whole thing would be a kind of C experience. This kind of imagining got Garp started, slowly, in what he thought was a real direction; he was right about that, but it was too new to write it down--or even to write about it. Anyway, the more he wrote to Helen the less he wrote in other, important ways; and he couldn't discuss this with his mother: imagination was not her greatest strength. Of course, he'd have felt foolish discussing any of this with Charlotte.
Garp often met Charlotte at the Naschmarkt on Saturdays. They shopped and sometimes they ate lunch together in a Serbian place not far from the Stadtpark. On these occasions Charlotte paid for herself. At one such lunch Garp confessed to her that the first-district rate was hard for him to pay regularly without admitting to his mother where this steady flow of money was going. Charlotte was angry at him for bringing up business when she wasn't working. She would have been angrier if he'd admitted that he was seeing less of her, professionally, because the sixth-district prices of someone whom he met at the corner of Karl Schweighofergasse and Mariahilfer were much easier to conceal from Jenny.
Charlotte had a low opinion of her colleagues who operated out of the first district. She'd once told Garp she was planning to retire at the first sign that her first-district appeal was slipping. She would never do business in the outer districts. She had a lot of money saved, she told him, and she was going to move to Munich (where nobody knew she was a whore) and marry a young doctor who could take care of her, in every way, until she died; it was unnecessary for her to explain to Garp that she had always appealed to younger men, but Garp thoroughly resented her assumption that doctors were--in the long run--desirable. It may be this early exposure to the desirability of doctors that caused Garp, in his literary career, often to people his novels and stories with such unlikable characters from the medical profession. If so, it didn't occur to him until later. There is no doctor in "The Pension Grillparzer." In the beginning there is very little about death, either, although that is the subject the story would come to. In the beginning Garp had only a dream of death, but it was a whale of a dream and he gave it to the oldest person alive in his story: a grandmother. Garp guessed this meant that she would be the first to die.
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER
My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau. It was my mother's idea that our family travel with him when he went on the road as a Tourist Bureau spy. My mother and brother and I would accompany him on his secretive missions to uncover the discourtesy, the dust, the badly cooked food, the shortcuts taken by Austria's restaurants and hotels and pensions. We were instructed to create difficulties whenever we could, never to order exactly what was on the menu, to imitate a foreigner's odd requests--the hours we would like to have our baths, the need for aspirin and directions to the zoo. We were instructed to be civilized but troublesome; and when the visit was over, we reported to my father in the car.
My mother would say, "The hairdresser is always closed in the morning. But they make suitable recommendations outside. I guess it's all right, provided they don't claim to have a hairdresser actually in the hotel."
"Well, they do claim it," my father would say. He'd note this in a giant pad.
I was always the driver. I said, "The car is parked off the street, but someone put fourteen kilometers on the gauge between the time we handed it over to the doorman and picked it up at the hotel garage."
"That is a matter to report directly to the management," my father said, jotting it down.
"The toilet leaked," I said.
"I couldn't open the door to the W.C.," said my brother, Robo.
"Robo," Mother said, "you always have trouble with doors."
"Was that supposed to be Class C?" I asked.
"I'm afraid not," Father said. "It is still listed as Class B." We drove for a short while in silence; our most serious judgment concerned changing a hotel's or a pension's rating. We did not suggest reclassification frivolously.
"I think this calls for a letter to the management," Mother suggested. "Not too nice a letter, but not a really rough one. Just state the facts."
"Yes, I rather liked him," Father said. He always made a point of getting to meet the managers.
"Don't forget the business of them driving our car," I said. "That's really unforgivable."
"And the eggs were bad," said Robo; he was not yet ten and his judgments were not considered seriously.
We became a far harsher team of evaluators when my grandfather died and we inherited grandmother--my mother's mother, who thereafter accompanied us on our travels. A regal dame, Johanna was accustomed to Class A travel, and my father's duties more frequently called for investigations of Class B and Class C lodgings. They were the places, the B and C hotels (and the pensions), that most interested the tourists. At restaurants we did a little better. People who couldn't afford the classy places to sleep were still interested in the best places to eat.
"I shall not have dubious food tested on me," Johanna told us. "This strange employment may give you all glee about having free vacations, but I can see there is a terrible price paid: the anxiety of not knowing what sort of qua
"Johanna, the Ambassador is not under investigation," Father said.
"I should think not," Johanna said. "I suppose we're not even headed toward a Class A place?"
"Well, it's a B trip," my father admitted. "For the most part."
"I trust," Grandmother said, "that you mean there is one A place en route?"
"No," Father admitted. "There is one C place."
"It's okay," Robo said. "There are fights in Class C."
"I should imagine so," Johanna said.
"It's a Class C pension, very small," Father said, as if the size of the place forgave it.
"And they're applying for a B," said Mother.
"But there have been some complaints," I added.
"I'm sure there have," Johanna said.
"And animals," I added. My mother gave me a look.
"Animals?" said Johanna.
"Animals," I admitted.
"A suspicion of animals," my mother corrected me.
"Yes, be fair," Father said.
"Oh, wonderful!" Grandmother said. "A suspicion of animals. Their hair on the rugs? Their terrible waste in the corners! Did you know that my asthma reacts, severely, to any room in which there has recently been a cat?"
"The complaint was not about cats," I said. My mother elbowed me sharply.
"Dogs?" Johanna said. "Rabid dogs! Biting you on the way to the bathroom."
"No," I said. "Not dogs."
"Bears!" Robo cried.
But my mother said, "We don't know for sure about the bear, Robo."
"This isn't serious," Johanna said.
"Of course it's not serious!" Father said. "How could there be bears in a pension?"
"There was a letter saying so," I said. "Of course, the Tourist Bureau assumed it was a crank complaint. But then there was another sighting--and a second letter claiming there had been a bear."
My father used the rear-view mirror to scowl at me, but I thought that if we were all supposed to be in on the investigation, it would be wise to have Grandmother on her toes.
"It's probably not a real bear," Robo said, with obvious disappointment.
"A man in a bear suit!" Johanna cried. "What unheard-of perversion is that? A beast of a man sneaking about in disguise! Up to what? It's a man in a bear suit, I know it is," she said. "I want to go to that one first. If there's going to be a Class C experience on this trip, let's get it over with as soon as possible."
"But we haven't got reservations for tonight," Mother said.
"Yes, we might as well give them a chance to be at their best," Father said. Although he never revealed to his victims that he worked for the Tourist Bureau, Father believed that reservations were simply a decent way of allowing the personnel to be as prepared as they could be.
"I'm sure we don't need to make a reservation in a place frequented by men who disguise themselves as animals," Johanna said. "I'm sure there is always a vacancy there. I'm sure the guests are regularly dying in their beds--of fright, or else of whatever unspeakable injury the madman in the foul bear suit does to them."
"It's probably a real bear," Robo said, hopefully--for in the turn the conversation was taking, Robo certainly saw that a real bear would be preferable to Grandmother's imagined ghoul. Robo had no fear, I think, of a real bear.
I drove us as inconspicuously as possible to the dark, dwarfed corner of Planken and Seilergasse. We were looking for the Class C pension that wanted to be a B.
"No place to park," I said to Father, who was already making note of that in his pad.
I double-parked and we sat in the car and peered up at the Pension Grillparzer; it rose only four slender stories between a pastry shop and a Tabak Trafik.
"See?" Father said. "No bears."
"No men, I hope," said Grandmother.
"They come at night," Robo said, looking cautiously up and down the street.
We went inside to meet the manager, a Herr Theobald, who instantly put Johanna on her guard. "Three generations traveling together!" he cried. "Like the old days," he added, especially to Grandmother, "before all these divorces and the young people wanting apartments by themselves. This is a family pension! I just wish you had made a reservation--so I could put you more closely together."
"We're not accustomed to sleeping in the same room," Grandmother told him.
"Of course not!" Theobald cried. "I just meant that I wished your rooms could be closer together." This worried Grandmother, clearly.
"How far apart must we be put?" she asked.
"Well, I've only two rooms left," he said. "And only one of them is large enough for the two boys to share with their parents."
"And my room is how far from theirs?" Johanna asked coolly.
"You're right across from the W.C.!" Theobald told her, as if this were a plus.
But as we were shown to our rooms, Grandmother staying with Father--contemptuously to the rear of our procession--I heard her mutter, "This is not how I conceived of my retirement. Across the hall from a W.C., listening to all the visitors."
"Not one of these rooms is the same," Theobald told us. "The furniture is all from my family." We could believe it. The one large room Robo and I were to share with my parents was a hall-sized museum of knickknacks, every dresser with a different style of knob. On the other hand, the sink had brass faucets and the headboard of the bed was carved. I could see my father balancing things up for future notation in the giant pad.
"You may do that later," Johanna informed him. "Where do I stay?"
As a family, we dutifully followed Theobald and my grandmother down the long, twining hall, my father counting the paces to the W.C. The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow. Along the walls were old photographs of speed-skating teams--on their feet the strange blades curled up at the tips like court jesters' shoes or the runners of ancient sleds.
Robo, running far ahead, announced his discovery of the W.C.
Grandmother's room was full of china, polished wood, and the hint of mold. The drapes were damp. The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine--it was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread.
Grandmother said nothing, and when Theobald reeled out of the room like a wounded man who's been told he'll live, Grandmother asked my father, "On what basis can the Pension Grillparzer hope to get a B?"
"Quite decidedly C," Father said.
"Born C, and will die C," I said.
"I would say, myself," Grandmother told us, "that it was E or F."
* * *
--
In the dim tearoom a man without a tie sang a Hungarian song. "It does not mean he's Hungarian," Father reassured Johanna, but she was skeptical.
"I'd say the odds are not in his favor," she suggested. She would not have tea or coffee. Robo ate a little cake, which he claimed to like. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us--in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.
"He's a great guest," Herr Theobald whispered to my father; he indicated the singer. "He knows songs from all over."
"From Hungary, at least," Grandmother said, but she smiled.
A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on
"Pardon me?" said Grandmother.
"I said that I tell dreams," the man informed her.
"You tell dreams," Grandmother said. "Meaning, you have them?"
"Have them and tell them," he said mysteriously. The singer stopped singing.
"Any dream you want to know," said the singer. "He can tell it."
"I'm quite sure I don't want to know any," Grandmother said. She viewed with displeasure the ascot of dark hair bursting out at the open throat of the singer's shirt. She would not regard the man who "told" dreams at all.
"I can see you are a lady," the dream man told Grandmother. "You don't respond to just every dream that comes along."
"Certainly not," said Grandmother. She shot my father one of her how-could-you-have-let-this-happen-to-me? looks.
"But I know one," said the dream man; he shut his eyes. The singer slipped a chair forward and we suddenly realized he was sitting very close to us. Robo, though he was much too old for it, sat in Father's lap. "In a great castle," the dream man began, "a woman lay beside her husband. She was wide awake, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She woke up without the slightest idea of what had awakened her, and she felt as alert as if she'd been up for hours. It was also clear to her, without a look, a word, or a touch, that her husband was wide awake too--and just as suddenly."
"I hope this is suitable for the child to hear, ha ha," Herr Theobald said, but no one even looked at him. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and stared at them--her knees together, her heels tucked under her straight-backed chair. My mother held my father's hand.
I sat next to the dream man, whose jacket smelled like a zoo. He said, "The woman and her husband lay awake listening for sounds in the castle, which they were only renting and did not know intimately. They listened for sounds in the courtyard, which they never bothered to lock. The village people always took walks by the castle; the village children were allowed to swing on the great courtyard door. What had woken them?"
"Bears?" said Robo, but Father touched his fingertips to Robo's mouth.