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Helen was driving to her office, wondering what she would say to the rude and conceited boy, when the gear knob of the Volvo's stick shift came off in her hand--the exposed shaft scratched her wrist. She swore as she pulled the car over and examined the damage to herself and to the gearshift.
The knob had been falling off for weeks, the screw threads were stripped, and Garp had several times attempted to make the knob stay on the stick-shift shaft with tape. Helen had complained about this half-assed method of repair, but Garp never claimed to be handy and the care of the car was one of Helen's domestic responsibilities.
This division of labor, though largely agreed upon, was sometimes confusing. Although Garp was the homemaker among them, Helen did the ironing ("because," Garp said, "it's you who cares about pressed clothes"), and Helen got the car serviced ("because," Garp said, "you're the one who drives it every day; you know best when something has to be fixed"). Helen accepted the ironing, but she felt that Garp should deal with the car. She did not like accepting a ride in the service truck from the garage to her office--sitting in the greasy cab with some young mechanic who paid less than adequate attention to his driving. The garage where the car was fixed was a friendly enough place to Helen, but she resented having to be there at all; and the comedy of who would drive her to work after she dropped off the car had finally worn thin. "Who's free to take Mrs. Garp to the university?" the boss mechanic would cry into the dank and oily darkness of the vehicle pits. And three or four boys, eager but begrimed, would drop their wrenches and their needle-nosed pliers, would lug and heave themselves out of the pits, would bolt forward and volunteer to share--for a brief, heady moment--that tight cab aclank with auto parts, which would take the slender Professor Garp to work.
Garp pointed out to Helen that when he took the car, the volunteers were slow to appear; he frequently waited in the garage for an hour, finally coaxing some laggard to drive him home. His morning's work thus shot, he decided the Volvo was Helen's chore.
They had both procrastinated about the gearshift knob. "If you just call to order a new one," Helen told him, "I'll drive there and let them screw it on while I wait. But I don't want to leave the car for a day while they fart around trying to fix this one." She had tossed the knob to him, but he'd carried it out to the car and had taped it, precariously, back on the shaft.
Somehow, she thought, it always fell off when she was driving; but, of course, she drove the car more than he did.
"Damn," she said, and drove to her office with the bare, ugly gearshift uncovered. It hurt her hand every time she had to shift the car, and her scratched wrist bled a little on the fresh skirt of her suit. She parked the car and carried the gear knob with her, across the parking lot, toward her office building. She contemplated throwing it down a storm sewer, but it had little numbers printed on it; in her office she could call the garage and tell them what the little numbers were. Then she could throw it away, wherever she liked; or, she thought, I can mail it to Garp.
It was in this mood, beset with trivia, that Helen encountered the smug young man slouched in the hall by her office door with the top two buttons of his nice shirt unbuttoned. The shoulders of his tweed jacket were, she noticed, slightly padded; his hair was a bit too lank, and too long, and one end of his mustache--as thin as a knife--drooped too far down at the corner of his mouth. She was not sure if she wanted to love this young man or groom him.
"You're up early," she told him, handing him the gearshift knob so that she could unlock her office door.
"Have you hurt yourself?" he asked. "You're bleeding." Helen would think later that it was as if he had a nose for blood, because the slight scratch on her wrist had almost stopped bleeding.
"Are you going to be a doctor?" she asked him, letting him inside her office.
"I was going to be," he said.
"What stopped you?" she asked, still not looking at him, but moving about her desk, straightening what was straight already; and adjusting the venetian blind, which had been left exactly as she wanted it. She took her glasses off, so that when she looked at him he was soft and fuzzy.
"Organic chemistry stopped me," he said. "I dropped the course. And besides, I wanted to live in France."
"Oh, you've lived in France?" Helen asked him, knowing that's what she was sup
posed to ask him, knowing it was one of the things he thought was special about himself, and he didn't hesitate to slip it in. He had even slipped it in the questionnaire. He was very shallow, she saw right away; she hoped he was the slightest bit intelligent, but she felt curiously relieved by his shallowness--as if this made him less dangerous to her, and left her a little freer.
They talked about France, which was fun for Helen, because she talked about France as well as Michael Milton talked about it, and she had never been to Europe. She also told him that she thought he had a poor reason for taking her course.
"A poor reason?" he pressed her, smiling.
"First of all," Helen said, "it's a totally unrealistic expectation to have for the course."
"Oh, you already have a lover?" Michael Milton asked her, still smiling.
Somehow he was so frivolous that he didn't insult her; she didn't snap at him that it was enough to have a husband, that it was none of his business, or that she was out of his league. She said, instead, that for what he wanted he should at least have registered for independent study. He said he'd be glad to switch courses. She said she never took on any new independent study students in the second semester.
She knew she had not entirely discouraged him, but she had not been exactly encouraging, either. Michael Milton talked to her, seriously, for an hour--about the subject of her course in narration. He discussed Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Jacob's Room very impressively, though he was not so good on To the Lighthouse and Helen knew he only pretended to have read Mrs. Dalloway. When he left, she was forced to agree with her two colleagues who'd evaluated Michael Milton previously: he was glib, he was smug, he was facile, and all that was unlikable; but he had a certain brittle smartness, however shiny and thin it was--and it was also, somehow, unlikable. What her colleagues had overlooked was his audacious smile and his way of wearing clothes as if he were defiantly undressed. But Helen's colleagues were men; they could not have been expected to define the precise audacity of Michael Milton's smile the way Helen could define it. Helen recognized it as a smile that said to her: I already know you, and I know everything you like. It was an infuriating smile, but it tempted her; she wanted to wipe it off his face. One way of wiping it off, Helen knew, would be to show Michael Milton that he didn't know her--or what she really liked--at all.
She also knew that not too many ways of showing him were open to her.
When she first shifted the Volvo, driving home, the point of the uncovered stick-shift shaft dug sharply into the heel of her hand. She knew exactly where Michael Milton had left the gear knob--on the window ledge above the wastebasket, where the janitor would find it and probably throw it away. It looked as if it ought to be thrown away, but Helen remembered that she had not phoned in the little numbers to the car garage. That would mean that she, or Garp, would have to call the car garage and try to order a new knob without the goddamn numbers--giving the year and model of the car, and so forth, and inevitably ending up with a knob that wasn't right.
But Helen decided she was not going back to her office, and she had enough on her mind already without trying to remember to call the janitor and tell him not to throw away the knob. Besides, it might already be too late.
And anyway, Helen thought, it's not just my fault. It's Garp's fault, too. Or, she thought, it's really nobody's fault. It's just one of those things.
* * *
--
But she did not quite feel guiltless; not yet. When Michael Milton gave her his papers to read--his old papers, from his other courses--she accepted them and read them, because at least this was an allowable, still-innocent subject for them to discuss: his work. When he grew bolder, and more attached to her, and he showed her even his creative work, his short stories and pathetic poems about France, Helen still felt that their long conversations were guided by the critical, constructive relationship between a student and a teacher.
