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The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.

"If you don't slow down," Garp said, "I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me."

"Fucking weirdo," the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. "Fucking women," the cabby said.

"Fucking men," said Garp, feeling--with mixed feeling

s--that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.

At the airport they questioned Garp's American Express card and asked for further identification. Inevitably, they asked him about the initials T. S. The airline ticket-maker was clearly not in touch with the literary world--not to know who T. S. Garp was.

He told the ticket-maker that T. was for Tillie, S. was for Sarah.

"Tillie Sarah Garp?" the ticket-maker said. She was a young woman, and she clearly disapproved of Garp's oddly fetching but whorish appearance. "Nothing to check, and no carry-on luggage?" Garp was asked.

"No, nothing," he said.

"You have a coat?" the stewardess asked him, also giving him a condescending appraisal.

"No coat," Garp said. The stewardess gave a start at the deepness of his voice. "No bags and nothing to hang up," he said, smiling. He felt that all he had was breasts--these terrific knockers Roberta had made for him--and he walked slouched and stoop-shouldered to try to hold them back. There was no holding them back, though.

As soon as he chose a seat, some man chose to sit beside him. Garp looked out the window. Passengers were still hurrying to his plane. Among them, he saw a wraithlike, dirty blond-haired girl. She had no coat and no carry-on luggage, either. Just that oversized purse--big enough for a bomb. Thickly, Garp sensed the Under Toad--a wriggle at his hip. He looked toward the aisle, so that he would notice where the girl chose to sit, but he looked into the leering face of the man who'd taken the aisle seat beside him.

"Perhaps, when we're in the air," the man said, knowingly, "I could buy you a little drink?" His small, close-together eyes were riveted on the twisted zipper of Garp's straining turquoise jump suit.

Garp felt a peculiar kind of unfairness overwhelm him. He had not asked to have such an anatomy. He wished he could have spent a quiet time, just talking, with that wise and pleasant-looking woman, Sally Devlin, the failed gubernatorial candidate from New Hampshire. He would have told her that she was too good for the rotten job.

"That's some suit you got," said Garp's leering seat partner.

"Go stick it in your ear," Garp said. He was, after all, the son of a woman who'd slashed a masher at a movie in Boston--years ago, long ago.

The man struggled to get up, but he couldn't; his seat belt would not release him. He looked helplessly at Garp. Garp leaned over the man's trapped lap; Garp gagged on his own dose of perfume, which he remembered Roberta slathering over him. He got the seat-belt clasp to operate properly and released the man with a sharp snap. Then Garp growled a menacing whisper in the man's very red ear. "When we're in the air, cutie," he whispered to the frightened fellow, "go blow yourself in the bathroom."

But when the man deserted Garp's company, the aisle seat was vacant, inviting someone else. Garp glared challengingly at the empty seat, daring the next man on the make to sit there. The person who approached Garp shook his momentary confidence. She was very thin, her girlish hands bony and clutching her oversized purse. She didn't ask first; she just sat down. The Under Toad is a very young girl today, Garp thought. When she reached into her purse, Garp caught her wrist and pulled her hand out of the bag and into her lap. She was not strong, and in her hand there was no gun; there was not even a knife. Garp saw only a pad of paper and a pencil with the eraser bitten down to a nub.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. If she was not an assassin, he guessed he knew who or what she was. "Why is my life so full of people with impaired speech?" he wrote once. "Or is it only because I'm a writer that I notice all the damaged voices around me?"

The nonviolent waif on the airplane beside him wrote hastily and handed him a note.

"Yes, yes," he said, wearily. "You're an Ellen Jamesian." But the girl bit her lip and fiercely shook her head. She pushed the note into his hand.

My name is Ellen James,

the note informed Garp.

I am not an Ellen Jamesian.

"You're the Ellen James?" he asked her, though it was unnecessary and he knew it--just looking at her, he should have known. She was the right age; not so long ago she would have been that eleven-year-old child, raped and untongued. The dirty-saucer eyes were, up close, not dirty; they were simply bloodshot, perhaps insomniac. Her lower lip was ragged; it looked like the pencil eraser--bitten down.

She scribbled more.

I came from Illinois. My parents were killed in an auto accident, recently. I came East to meet your mother. I wrote her a letter and she actually answered me! She wrote me a wonderful reply. She invited me to come stay with her. She also told me to read all your books.

Garp turned these tiny pages of notepaper; he kept nodding; he kept smiling.

But your mother was killed!

From the big purse Ellen James pulled a brown bandanna into which she blew her nose.