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"You read it?" John Wolf said.
"Lawd!" Jillsy screamed. "You'd think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me," Jillsy said, "that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to--of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?" Jillsy asked.
"I'm not sure," said John Wolf, who sat bewildered at his desk. "You didn't like the book."
"Like it?" Jillsy cawed. "There's nothin' to like about it," she said.
"But you read it," John Wolf said. "Why'd you read it?"
"Lawd," Jillsy said, as if she were so
rry for John Wolf--that he was so hopelessly stupid. "I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you're makin'," she said; she shook her head. "I sometimes wonder why you're the one who's makin' the books and I'm the one who's cleanin' the bathrooms. Except I'd rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them," Jillsy said. "Lawd, Lawd."
"If you hated it, why'd you read it, Jillsy?" John Wolf asked her.
"Same reason I read anythin' for," Jillsy said. "To find out what happens."
John Wolf stared at her.
"Most books you know nothin's gonna happen," Jillsy said. "Lawd, you know that. Other books," she said, "you know just what's gonna happen, so you don't have to read them, either. But this book," Jillsy said, "this book's so sick you know somethin's gonna happen, but you can't imagine what. You got to be sick yourself to imagine what happens in this book," Jillsy said.
"So you read it to find out?" John Wolf said.
"There surely ain't no other reason to read a book, is there?" Jillsy Sloper said. She put the manuscript heavily (for it was large) on John Wolf's desk and hitched up the long extension cord (for the vacuum cleaner) which Jillsy wore on Mondays like a belt around her broad middle. "When it's a book," she said, pointing to the manuscript, "I'd be happy if I could have a copy of my own. If it's okay," she added.
"You want a copy?" John Wolf asked.
"If it's no trouble," Jillsy said.
"Now that you know what happens," John Wolf said, "what would you want to read it again for?"
"Well," Jillsy said. She looked confused; John Wolf had never seen Jillsy Sloper look confused before--only sleepy. "Well, I might lend it," she said. "There might be someone I know who needs to be reminded what men in this world is like," she said.
"Would you ever read it again yourself?" John Wolf asked.
"Well," Jillsy said. "Not all of it, I imagine. At least not all at once, or not right away." Again, she looked confused. "Well," she said, sheepishly, "I guess I mean there's parts of it I wouldn't mind readin' again."
"Why?" John Wolf asked.
"Lawd," Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. "It feels so true," she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night.
"It feels so true," John Wolf repeated.
"Lawd, don't you know it is?" Jillsy asked him. "If you don't know when a book's true," Jillsy sang to him, "we really ought to trade jobs." She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. "I do wonder, Mr. Wolf," she said, sweetly, "if you'd know when a bathroom was clean." She went over and peered in his wastebasket. "Or when a wastebasket was empty," she said. "A book feels true when it feels true," she said to him, impatiently. "A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.' Then you know it's true," Jillsy said.
Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.
* * *
--
Months later, when The World According to Bensenhaver was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it in memory of Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: "that cheap capitalizing," as he called it, "on one's autobiographical accidents--to try to hook the reader into thinking you're a more serious writer than you are." And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, "the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields." Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn't dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn't old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.
The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.
"Not to me," John Wolf said. "Not this one."
"I wasn't thinking of you," Garp lied.
