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Tinch admitted he didn't really know. "The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess," Tinch said. "But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think," Tinch said.
"About itself?" Garp said.
"It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction," Tinch told him.
Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.
Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story "only mildly interesting"; the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:
I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form.
Thanks for asking me, though.
Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awk
ward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches--and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.
Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job--an assistant professor at a women's college--when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer--even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.
Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp--who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure--a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.
The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.
"There's a nurse to see you," his secretary said, rolling her eyes--as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.
"It's about me," she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. "When can you read it?" It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ("In this dirty-minded world..."), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?
Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!--they would certainly publish this!--he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).
"Where can they go every night?" Jenny asked. "They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car."
They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.
"They say they want children," Ernie complained. "Helen should finish her education."
"Garp will never finish a book, with children," Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.
"They're both hard workers," Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.
"They'll have to be," Jenny said.
"I don't know why they can't just live together," Ernie said. "And if it works out, then let them get married; then let them have a baby."
"I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else," said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.
"Well, you like Garp living with you," he reminded her, "and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school."
"It's lust," Jenny said, ominously. "The world is sick with lust."
Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. "Do you want a beer?" he asked Jenny.
"No, thank you," Jenny said.
"They're good kids," Ernie reminded her.
"But lust gets them all, in the end," said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.
It was the "lust" chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need--his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.
