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What an incredibly dull life I have! I thought, aiming the old woman toward her front door, steering her over the cracks in the sidewalk.

Then the plumber came back. I thought the old woman was going to die in my arms. The plumber drove over the curb and hurtled past us, over the old woman's lawn, flattening a whiplike young tree and nearly rolling over when he wheeled the truck into a U-turn that uprooted a sizable hedge and tore divots from the ground the size of five-pound steaks. Then down to the sidewalk the truck fled--an explosion of tools flying free of the pickup as the rear wheels jounced over the curb. O. Fecteau was off up the street, once more terrorizing my neighborhood; I saw the violent plumber jump the curb again at the corner of Dodge and Furlong--where he grazed the back of a parked car, springing open the car's trunk on impact and leaving it flapping.

Helping the shaken old lady inside, I called the police--and my wife, to tell her to keep the children indoors. The plumber was berserk. This is how I help the neighborhood, I thought: I drive mad men madder.

The old woman sat in a paisley chair in her cluttered living room, as carefully as a plant. When O. Fecteau returned--this time driving within inches of the living room bay window, and through the gravel beds for the baby trees, his horn blaring--the old woman never moved. I stood at the door, awaiting the ultimate assault, but I thought it wiser not to show myself. I knew that if O. Fecteau saw me, he would attempt to drive in the house.

By the time the police arrived, the plumber had rolled his truck in an attempt to avoid a station wagon at the intersection of Cold Hill and North Lane. He had broken his collarbone and was sitting upright in the cab, though the truck lay on its side; he wasn't able to climb out the door above his head, or he hadn't tried. O. Fecteau appeared calm; he was listening to his radio.

Since that time, I have tried to provoke the offending drivers less; if I sense them taking offense at my stopping them and presuming to criticize their vile habits, I simply tell them I am informing the police and quickly leave.

That O. Fecteau turned out to have a long history of violent overreactions to social situations did not allow me to forgive myself. "Look, it's all the better you got that plumber off the road," my wife told me--and she usually criticizes my meddlesomeness in the behavior of others. But I could only think that I had driven a workingman off his rocker, and that during his outburst, if O. Fecteau had killed a child, whose fault would it have been? Partly mine, I think.

In modern times, in my opinion, either everything is a moral question or there are no more moral questions. Nowadays, there are no compromises or there are only compromises. Never influenced, I keep my vigil. There is no letting up.

Don't say anything, Helen told herself. Go kiss him and rub against him; get him upstairs as fast as you can, and talk about the damn story later. Much later, she warned herself. But she knew he wouldn't let her.

The dishes were done and he sat across the table from her.

She tried her nicest smile and told him, "I want to go to bed with you."

"You don't like it?" he asked.

"Let's talk in bed," she said.

"Goddamn it, Helen," he said. "It's the first thing I've finished in a long time. I want to know what you think of it."

She bit her lip and took her glasses off; she had not made a single mark with her red pencil. "I love you," she said.

"Yes, yes," he said, impatiently. "I love you, too, but we can fuck anytime. What about the story?" And she finally relaxed; she felt he had released her, somehow. I tried, she thought; she felt hugely relieved.

"Fuck the story," she said. "No, I don't like it. And I don't want to talk about it, either. You don't care to regard what I want, obviously. You're like a little boy at the dinner table--you serve yourself first."

"You don't like it?" Garp said.

"Oh, it's not bad," she said, "it's just not much of anything. It's a trifle, it's a little ditty. If you're warming up to something, I'd like to see what it is--when you get to it. But this is nothing, you must know that. It's a toss-off, isn't it? You can do tricks like this with your left hand, can't you?"

"It's funny, isn't it?" Garp asked.

"Oh, it's funny," she said, "but it's funny like jokes are funny. It's all one-liners. I mean, what is it? A self-parody? You're not old enough, and you haven't written enough, to start mocking yourself. It's self-serving, it's self-justifying; and it's not about anything except yourself, really. It's cute."

"Son of a bitch," said Garp. "Cute?"

"You're always talking about people who write well but don't have anything to say," Helen said. "Well, what do you call this? It's no 'Grillparzer,' certainly; it isn't worth a fifth of what 'Grillparzer' is worth. It isn't worth a tenth of that story," Helen said.

"'The Pension Grillparzer' is the first big thing I wrote," Garp said. "This is completely different; it's another kind of fiction altogether."

"Yes, one is about something and one is about nothing," Helen said. "One is about people and one is about only you. One has mystery and precision, and one has only wit." When Helen's critical faculties were engaged, they were difficult to disengage.

"It's not fair to compare them," Garp said. "I know this is smaller."

"Then let's not talk anymore about it," Helen said.

Garp sulked for a minute.

"You didn't like Second Wind of the Cuckold, either," he said, "and I don't suppose you'll like the next one any better."

"What next one?" Helen asked him. "Are you writing another novel?"