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"In this dirty-minded world," Jenny wrote, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore--or fast on your way to becoming one or the other." The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life's story together--the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.
"I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone," she wrote. "That made me a sexual suspect." And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniforms for a century.
"Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one," Jenny wrote. "That made me a sexual suspect, too." Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.
But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.
"Do you know how to drive?" Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn't ever learned; there had never been a need. "Well, I don't know how, either," she told him. "And besides, I'm working; I can't stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself."
It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. "Hey, how about us?" one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. "We're all prep school stuff."
Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny cafe table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp's knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. "I just went to a dent-hisht," she explained to him. "Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don't know whether it's open or shut."
"Sort of half and half," Garp said to her. But he thought: Oh, what the hell. He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make him feel like a sexual suspect. Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him; though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.
Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers' checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.
It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the source of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp's opinion, "Bath clap." By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. "I caught a dose of Boo's goo," he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn't dare seek his mother's professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn't caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been less angry with him.
"You'd think Americans would know a little simple hygiene!" Charlotte said furiously. "You should think of your mother! I'd expect you to have better taste. People who give it away for free to someone they hardly know--well, they should make you suspicious, shouldn't they?" Once again, Garp had been caught without a condom.
Thus Garp winced his way to Charlotte's personal physician, a hearty man named Thalhammer who was missing his left thumb. "And I was once left-handed," Herr Doktor Thalhammer told Garp. "But everything is surmountable if we have energy. We can learn anything we can set our minds to!" he said, with firm good cheer; he demonstrated for Garp how he could write the prescription, with an enviable penmanship, with his right hand. It was a simple and painless cure. In Jenny's day, at good old Boston Mercy, they would have given Garp the Valentine treatment and he'd have learned, more emphatically, how not all rich kids are clean kids.
He didn't write Helen about this, either.
His spirits slumped; spring wore on, the city opened in many small ways--like buds. But Garp felt he had walked Vienna out. He could barely get his mother to stop writing long enough to eat dinner with him. When he sought out Charlotte, her colleagues told him she was sick; she hadn't worked for weeks. For three Saturdays, Garp did not see her at the Naschmarkt. When he stopped her colleagues one May evening on the Karntnerstrasse, he saw they were reluctant to discuss Charlotte. The whore whose forehead appeared to have been pockmarked by a peach pit merely told Garp that Charlotte was sicker than she first thought. The young girl, Garp's age, with the misshapen lip and the half-knowledge of English, tried to explain to him. "Her sex is sick," she said.
That was a curious way to put it, Garp thought. Garp was not surprised to hear that anyone's sex was sick, but when he smiled at the remark, the young whore who spoke English frowned at him and walked away.
"You don't understand," said the overlush prostitute with the pockmark. "Forget Charlotte."
It was mid-June, and Charlotte had still not come back, when Garp called Herr Doktor Thalhammer and asked where he could find her. "I doubt that she wants to see anybody," Thalhammer told him, "but human beings can adjust to almost anything."
* * *
--
Very near Grinzing and the Vienna Woods, out in the nineteenth district where the whores don't go, Vienna looks like a village imitation of itself; in these suburbs, many of the streets are still cobblestoned and trees grow along the sidewalks. Unfamiliar with this part of the city, Garp rode the No. 38 Strassenbahn too far out the Grinzinger Allee; he had to walk back to the corner of Billrothstrasse and Rudolfinergasse to the hospital.
The Rudolfinerhaus is a private hospital in a city of socialized medicine; its old stone walls are the same Maria Theresa yellow as the palace at Schonbrunn, or the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Its own gardens are enclosed in its own courtyard, and it costs as much as almost any hospital in the United States. The Rudolfinerhaus does not normally provide pajamas for its patients, for example, because its patients usually prefer their own nightclothes. The well-to-do Viennese treat themselves to the luxury of being sick there--and most foreigners who are afraid of socialized medicine end up there, where they are shocked at the prices.
In June, when Garp went there, the hospital struck him as full of pretty young mothers who'd just delivered babies. But it was also full of well-off people who'd come there to get seriously well again, and it was partially full of well-off people, like Charlotte, who'd come there to die.
Charlotte had a private room because, she said, there was no reason to save her money now. Garp knew she was dying as soon as he saw her. She had lost almost thirty pounds. Garp saw that she wore what was left of her rings on her index and middle fingers; her other fingers were so shrunken that her rings would slide off. Charlotte was the color of the dull ice on the brack
ish Steering River. She did not appear very surprised to see Garp, but she was so heavily anesthetized that Garp imagined Charlotte was fairly unsurprised in general. Garp had brought a basket of fruit; since they had shopped together, he knew what Charlotte liked to eat, but she had a tube down her throat for several hours each day and it left her throat too sore to swallow anything but liquid. Garp ate a few cherries while Charlotte enumerated the parts of her body that had been removed. Her sex parts, she thought, and much of her digestive tract, and something that had to do with the process of elimination. "Oh, and my breasts, I think," she said, the whites of her eyes very gray and her hands held above her chest where she flattered herself to imagine her breasts used to be. To Garp it appeared that they had not touched her breasts; under the sheet, there was still something there. But he later thought that Charlotte had been such a lovely woman that she could hold her body in such a way as to inspire the illusion of breasts.
"Thank God I've got money," Charlotte said. "Isn't this a Class A place?"
Garp nodded. The next day he brought a bottle of wine; the hospital was very relaxed about liquor and visitors; perhaps this was one of the luxuries one paid for. "Even if I got out," Charlotte said, "what could I do? They cut my purse out." She tried to drink some wine, then fell asleep. Garp asked a nurse's aide to explain what Charlotte meant by her "purse," though he thought he knew. The nurse's aide was Garp's age, nineteen or maybe younger, and she blushed and looked away from him when she translated the slang.
A purse was a prostitute's word for her vagina.
"Thank you," Garp said.
Once or twice when he visited Charlotte he encountered her two colleagues, who were shy and girlish with Garp in the daylight of Charlotte's sunny room. The young one who spoke English was named Wanga; she had cut her lip that way as a child when she tripped while running home from the store with a jar of mayonnaise. "We were on a picnic going," she explained, "but my whole family had me instead to the hospital to bring."
The ripper, sulkish woman with the peach pit pockmark on her forehead, and the breasts like two full pails, did not offer to explain her scar; she was the notorious "Tina," for whom nothing was too "funny."
