“Hey, don't mind my asking you a personal question,” the driver said. “Don't get sore, okay?”
“Okay,” said the deputy.
“Well,” the driver said. “What happened to the rubber?”
“What rubber?” asked the deputy; he might have had some questions concerning Bensenhaver's sanity, but the deputy had no doubt that, in this case, Bensenhaver had been right. In the world according to Bensenhaver, no trivial detail should make less of rape's outrage.
Hope Standish, at that moment, felt safe at last in Bensenhaver's world. She floated and dipped over the farmlands beside him, trying not to be sick. She was beginning to notice things about her body again—she could smell herself and feel every sore spot. She felt such disgust, but here was this cheerful policeman who sat there admiring her—his heart touched by her violent success.
“Are you married, Mr. Bensenhaver?” she asked him.
“Yes, Mrs. Standish,” he said. “I am.”
“You've been awfully nice,” Hope told him, “but I think I'm going to be sick now.”
“Oh, sure,” said Bensenhaver; he grabbed a waxy paper bag at his feet. It was the pilot's lunch bag; there were some uneaten french-fried potatoes at the bottom and the grease had turned the waxed paper translucent. Bensenhaver could see his own hand, through the french fries and through the bottom of the bag. “Here,” he said. “You go right ahead.”
She was already retching; she took the bag from him and turned her head away. The bag did not feel big enough to contain what vileness she was sure she held inside her. She felt Bensenhaver's hard, heavy hand on her back. With his other hand, he held a strand of her matted hair out of her way. “That's right,” he encouraged her, “keep it coming, get it all out and you'll feel much better.”
Hope recalled that whenever Nicky was being sick, she told him the same thing. She marveled how Bensenhaver could even turn her vomiting into a victory, but she did feel much better—the rhythmic heaving was as soothing to her as his calm, dry hands, holding her head and patting her back. When the bag ripped and spilled, Bensenhaver said, “Good riddance, Mrs. Standish! You don't need the bag. This is a National Guard helicopter. We'll let the National Guard clean it up! After all—what's the National Guard for?”
The pilot flew on, grimly, his expression never changing.
“What a day it's been for you, Mrs. Standish!” Bensenhaver went on. “Your husband is going to be so proud of you.” But Bensenhaver was thinking that he'd better make sure; he'd better have a talk with the man. It was Arden Bensenhaver's experience that husbands and other people did not always take a rape in the right way.
16. THE FIRST ASSASSIN
WHAT do you mean, “This is Chapter One"?” Garp's editor, John Wolf, wrote him. “How can there be any more of this? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?”
“It goes on,” Garp wrote back. “You'll see.”
“I don't want to see,” John Wolf told Garp on the phone. “Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you—and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he?”
But Garp not only insisted that The World According to Bensenhaver was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp's writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.
“Sell it?” John Wolf said.
“Yes, sell it,” Garp said. “Advance publicity for the novel.”
This had happened with Garp's first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that this chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity—should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a “small but serious” reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed—had won him respected supporters and a “small but serious” audience. Garp said he hated the reputation of “small but serious,” though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.
“I would rather be rich and wholly outside caring about what the idiots call “serious,"” he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside caring about that?
Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called “the rest of life.”
“What are you talking about?” John Wolf asked him.
Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver. She thought it had all its priorities in order—that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of lust. Actually, Jenny's fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf's criticism. Garp suspected his mother's literary judgment above all things.
“My God, look at her book,” he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp's new novel, not one word of it.
“Why does he suddenly want to be rich?” John Wolf asked Helen. “What's all this about?”
“I don't know,” Helen said. “I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us.”
“From what?” John Wolf said. “From whom?”
“You'll have to wait until you read the whole book,” Garp said to his editor. “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don't care if you like it; I want you to sell it.”
“I am not a vulgar publisher,” John Wolf said. “And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I'm sorry I have to remind you.” John Wolf's feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.
“Every business is a shitty business,” Garp repeated. “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it.”
“That's not the only way it works,” Wolf said, sadly. “No one knows what makes books sell.”
“I've heard that before,” Garp said.
“You have no call to speak to me like this,” John Wolf said. “I'm your friend.” Garp knew that was true, so he hung up the telephone and answered no mail and finished The World According to Bensenhaver two weeks before Helen delivered, with only Jenny's help, their third child—a daughter, who spared Helen and Garp the problem of having to agree upon a boy's name that in no way resembled the name of Walt. The daughter was named Jenny Garp, which was the name Jenny Fields would have had if she had gone about the business of having Garp in a more conventional way.
Jenny was delighted to have someone at least partially named after her. “But there's going to be some confusion,” she warned, “with two of us around.”
“I've always called you “Mom,"” Garp reminded her. He did not remind his mother that a fashion designer had already named a dress after her. It was popular in New York for about a year: a white nurse's uniform with a bright red heart sewn over the left breast. A JENNY FIELDS ORIGINAL, the heart said.