“I feel like beating the shit out of him now,” Roberta confessed, “but when he was dumping all over me, I just sat there and took it. I even cried. I've been crying all day!” she cried, “and he even called me up and told me that if I was still crying I was faking myself.”
“The hell with him,” Garp said.
“All he wanted was a great big lay,” Roberta said. “Why are men like that?”
“Well,” Garp said.
“Oh, I know you're not,” Roberta said. “I'm not even attractive to you, probably.”
“Of course you're attractive, Roberta,” Garp said.
“But not to you,” Roberta said. “Don't lie. I'm not sexually attractive, am I?”
“Not really to me,” Garp confessed, “but to lots of other men, yes. Of course you are.”
“Well, you're a good friend, that's more important,” Roberta said. “You're not really sexually attractive to me, either.”
“That's perfectly all right,” Garp said.
“You're too short,” Roberta said. “I like longer-looking people—I mean, sexually. Don't be hurt.”
“I'm not hurt,” Garp said. “Don't you be, either.”
“Of course not,” Roberta said.
“Why not call me in the morning,” Garp suggested. “You'll feel better.”
“I won't,” Roberta said, sulkily. “I'll feel worse. And I'll feel ashamed that I called you.”
“Why not talk to your doctor?” Garp said. “The urologist? The fellow who did your operation—he's your friend, isn't he?”
“I think he wants to fuck me,” Roberta said, seriously. “I think that's all he ever wanted to do to me. I think he recommended this whole operation just because he wanted to seduce me, but he wanted to make me a woman first. They're notorious for that—a friend was telling me.”
“A crazy friend, Roberta,” Garp said. “Who's notorious for that?”
“Urologists,” Roberta said. “Oh, I don't know—isn't urology a little creepy to you?” It was, but Garp didn't want to upset Roberta any further.
“Call Mom,” he heard himself say. “She'll cheer you up, she'll think of something.”
“Oh, she is wonderful,” Roberta sobbed. “She always does think of something, but I feel I've used her for so much.”
“She loves to help, Roberta,” Garp said, and knew it was, at least, the truth. Jenny Fields was full of sympathy and patience, and Garp only wanted to sleep. “A good game of squash might help, Roberta,” Garp suggested, weakly. “Why not come over for a few days and we'll really hit the ball around.” Helen rolled into him, frowned at him, and bit his nipple; Helen liked Roberta, but in the early phase of her sex reassignment Roberta could talk only about herself.
“I just feel so drained,” Roberta said. “No energy, no nothing. I don't even know if I could play.”
“Well, you should try, Roberta,” Garp said. “You should make yourself do something.” Helen, exasperated with him, rolled away from him.
But Helen was affectionate with Garp when he answered these late-night calls; she said they frightened her and she didn't want to be the one to find out what the calls were about. It was strange, therefore, that when Roberta Muldoon called a second time, a few weeks later, Helen was the one who answered the phone. It surprised Garp because the phone was on his side of the bed and Helen had to reach over him to pick it up; in fact, this time, she lunged across him and whispered quickly to the phone, “Yes, what is it?” When she heard it was Roberta, she passed the phone quickly to Garp; it was not as if she'd been trying to let him sleep.
And when Roberta called a third time, Garp felt an absence when he picked up the phone. Something was missing. “Oh, hello, Roberta,” Garp said. It was Helen's usual grip on his leg: it wasn't there. Helen wasn't there, he noticed. He talked reassuringly to Roberta, felt the cold side of his unshared bed, and noted the time was 2 A.M.—Roberta's favorite hour. When Roberta finally hung up, Garp went downstairs to look for Helen, finding her all alone on the living-room couch, sitting up with a glass of wine and a manuscript in her lap.
“Couldn't sleep,” she said, but there was a look on her face—it was a look Garp couldn't immediately place. Although he thought he recognized that look, he also thought he had never seen that look on Helen.
“Reading papers?” he asked; she nodded, but there was only one manuscript in front of her. Garp picked it up.
“It's just student work,” she said, reaching for it.
The student's name was Michael Milton. Garp read a paragraph of the paper. “It sounds like a story,” Garp said. “I didn't know you assigned fiction writing to your students.”
“I don't,” Helen said, “but they sometimes show me what they do, anyway.”
Garp read another paragraph. He thought that the writer's style was self-conscious and forced, but there were no errors on the page; it was, at least, competent writing.
“He's one of my graduate students,” Helen said. “He's very bright, but...” She shrugged, but her gesture had the sudden mock casualness of an embarrassed child.
“But what?” Garp said. He laughed—that Helen could look so girlish at this late hour.
But Helen took her glasses off and showed him that other look again, that look he had first seen and couldn't place. Anxiously, she said, “Oh, I don't know. Young, maybe. He's just young, you know. Very bright, but young.”
Garp flipped a page, read half of another paragraph, gave the manuscript back to her. He shrugged. “It's all shit to me,” he said.
“No, it's not shit,” Helen said, seriously. Oh, Helen the judicious teacher, Garp thought, and announced he was going back to bed. “I'll be up in a little while,” Helen told him.
Then Garp saw himself in the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. That was where he finally identified that look he'd seen, strangely out of place, on Helen's face. It was a look Garp recognized because he'd seen it before—on his own face, from time to time, but never on Helen's. The look Garp recognized was guilty, and it puzzled him. He lay awake a long time but Helen did not come up to bed. In the morning Garp was surprised that although he'd only glanced at the graduate student's manuscript, the name of Michael Milton was the first thing to come to his mind. He looked cautiously at Helen, now lying awake beside him.
“Michael Milton,” Garp said quietly, not to her, but loud enough for her to hear. He watched her unresponding face. Either she was daydreaming, and far away, or she simply had not heard him. Or, he thought, the name of Michael Milton was already on her mind, so that when Garp uttered it, it was the name that she was already saying—to herself—and she had not noticed that Garp had spoken it.
Michael Milton, a third-year graduate student in comparative literature, had been a French major at Yale, where he graduated with indifferent distinction; he had earlier graduated from the Steering School, though he tended to play down his prep school years. Once he knew that you knew he had gone to Yale, he tended to play that down, too, but he never played down his Junior Year Abroad—in France. To listen to Michael Milton, you would not guess that he'd spent only a year in Europe because he managed to give you the impression that he'd lived in France all his young life. He was twenty-five.
Though he'd lived so briefly in Europe, it appeared that he'd bought all the clothes for his lifetime there: the tweed jackets had wide lapels and flared cuffs, and both the jackets and the slacks were cut to flatter the hips and the waist; they were the kind of clothes that even the Americans of Garp's days at Steering referred to as “Continental.” The collars of Michael Milton's shirts, which he wore open at the throat (always with two unbuttoned buttons), were floppy and wide with a kind of Renaissance flair: a manner betraying both carelessness and intense perfection.