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He sulked some more. She hated him, making her do this to him, but she wanted him and she knew she loved him, too.

"Please," she said. "Let's go to bed."

But now he saw his chance for a little cruelty--and/or a little truth--and his eyes shone at her brightly.

"Let's not say another word," she begged him. "Let's go to bed."

"You think 'The Pension Grillparzer' is the best thing I've written, don't you?" he asked her. He knew already what she thought of the second novel, and he knew that, despite Helen's fondness for Procrastination, a first novel is a first novel. Yes, she did think "Grillparzer" was his best.

"So far, yes," she said, softly. "You're a lovely writer, you know I think so."

"I guess I just haven't lived up to my potential," Garp said, nastily.

"You will," she said; the sympathy and her love for him were draining from her voice.

They stared at each other; Helen looked away. He started upstairs. "Are you coming to bed?" he asked. His back was to her; his intentions were hidden from her--his feelings for her, too: either hidden from her or buried in his infernal work.

"Not right now," she said.

He waited on the stairs. "Got something to read?" he asked.

"No, I'm through reading for a while," she said.

Garp went upstairs. When she came up to him, he was already asleep, which made her despair. If he'd had her on his mind at all, how could he have fallen asleep? But, actually, he'd had so much on his mind, he'd been confused; he had fallen asleep because he was bewildered. If he'd been able to focus his feelings on any one thing, he'd still have been awake when she came upstairs. They might have saved a lot of things, then.

As it was, she sat beside him on the bed and watched his face with more fondness than she thought she could stand. She saw he had a hard-on, as severe as if he had been waiting up for her, and she took him into her mouth and sucked him softly until he came.

He woke up, surprised, and he was very guilty-looking--when he appeared to realize where he was, and with whom. Helen, however, was not in the least guilty-looking; she looked only sad. Garp would think, later, that it was as if Helen had known he had been dreaming of Mrs. Ralph.

When he came back from the bathroom, she was asleep. She had quickly drifted off. Guiltless at last, Helen felt freed to have her dreams. Garp lay awake beside her, watching the astonishing innocence upon her face--until the children woke her.

13

WALT CATCHES COLD

When Walt caught colds, Garp slept badly. It was as if he were trying to breathe for the boy, and for himself. Garp would get up in the night to kiss and nuzzle the child; anyone seeing Garp would have thought that he could make Walt's cold go away by catching it himself.

"Oh, God," Helen said. "It's just a cold. Duncan had colds all winter when he was five." Nearing eleven, Duncan seemed to have outgrown colds; but Walt, at five, was fully in the throes of cold after cold--or it was one long cold that went away and came back. By the March mud season, Walt's resistance struck Garp as altogether gone; the child hacked himself and Garp awake each night with a wet, wrenching cough. Garp sometimes fell asleep listening to Walt's chest, and he would wake up, frightened, when he could no longer hear the thump of the boy's heart; but the child had merely pushed his father's heavy head off his chest so that he could roll over and sleep more comfortably.

Both the doctor and Helen told Garp, "it's just a cough."

But the imperfection in Walt's nightly breathing scared Garp right out of his sleep. He was usually awake, therefore, when Roberta called; the late-night anguish of the large and powerful Ms. Muldoon was no longer frightening to Garp--he had come to expect it--but Garp's own fretful sleeplessness made Helen short-tempered.

"If you were back at work, on a book, you'd be too tired to lie awake half the night," she said. It was his imagination that was keeping him up, Helen told him; one sign that he hadn't been writing enough, Garp knew, was when he had too much imagination left over for other things. For example, the onslaught of dreams: Garp now dreamed only of horrors happening to his children.

In a dream, there was one horror that took place while Garp was reading a pornographic magazine. He was just looking at the same picture, over and over again; the picture was very pornographic. The wrestlers on the university team, with whom Garp occasionally worked out, had a peculiar vocabulary for such pictures. This vocabulary, Garp noted, had not changed since his days at Steering, when the wrestlers on Garp's

team spoke of such pictures in the same fashion. What had changed was the increased availability of the pictures, but the names were the same.

The picture Garp looked at in the dream was considered among the highest in the rankings of pornographic pictures. Among pictures of naked women, there were names for how much you could see. If you could see the pubic hair, but not the sex parts, that was called a bush shot--or just a bush. If you could see the sex parts, which were sometimes partially hidden by the hair, that was a beaver; a beaver was better than just a bush; a beaver was the whole thing: the hair and the parts. If the parts were open, that was called a split beaver. And if the whole thing glistened, that was the best of all, in the world of pornography: that was a wet, split beaver. The wetness implied that the woman was not only naked and exposed and open, but she was also ready.

In his dream, Garp was looking at what the wrestlers called a wet, split beaver when he heard children crying. He did not know whose children they were, but Helen and his mother, Jenny Fields, were with them; they all came down the stairs and filed past him, where he struggled to hide from them what he'd been looking at. They had been upstairs and something terrible had awakened them; they were on their way farther downstairs--going to the basement as if the basement were a bomb shelter. And with that thought, Garp heard the dull crump of bombing--he noted the crumbling plaster, he saw the flickering lights--and he grasped the terror of what was approaching them. The children, two by two, marched whimpering after Helen and Jenny, who led them to the bomb shelter as soberly as nurses. If they looked at Garp at all, they regarded him with vague sadness and with scorn, as if he had let them all down and was powerless to help them now.

Perhaps he had been looking at the wet, split beaver instead of watching for enemy planes? This, true to the nature of dreams, was forever unclear: precisely why he felt so guilty, and why they looked at him as if they'd been so abused.

At the end of the line of children were Walt and Duncan, holding hands; the so-called buddy system, as it is employed at summer camps, appeared in Garp's dream to be the natural reaction to a disaster among children. Little Walt was crying, the way Garp had heard him cry when he was caught in the grip of a nightmare, unable to wake up. "I'm having a bad dream," he sniveled. He looked at his father and almost shouted to him, "I'm having a bad dream!"

But in Garp's dream, Garp could not wake the child from this one. Duncan looked stoically over his shoulder at his father, a silent and bravely doomed expression on his beautiful young face. Duncan was appearing very grown-up lately. Duncan's look was a secret between Duncan and Garp: that they both knew it was not a dream, and that Walt could not be helped.