A skittish young guy—thin as a dime and wearing a beanie—who worked on the show kept darting in and out of the greenroom. He’d stand with his chin cupped in hand as he watched the monitor, mesmerized by Dave, and then he’d scurry out of the room. He’d come right back, though, would watch Dave for a few more seconds, and dash off again. This sequence was repeated several times.
“Whoa,” the guy said appreciatively, considering the TV on one of his stops. “Check out the soul patch on that dude.”
Ed Koch, in his chair, scowled briefly at Dave on the TV. Unimpressed, he went back to staring abstractly into space.
“Funking them out!” the bro exclaimed to the monitor. “Funking them out! Yeah, man: that dude is funking them out.”
It was of interest to me to see how people could sense where the power, or charisma, or star quality, or whatever it was, was. People wanted in on it, wanted to grab a little of it for themselves. Guys—and, indeed, they were always inevitably guys—did tend to accumulate around Dave. I’d been observing this phenomenon as it happened right in front of me. After work, sometimes I’d get something to eat with him at one of the diners close to the Esquire office (Howard Johnson’s was one), and it often seemed that young dudes would just start showing up at the table. These chaps were always of a rather specific and narrow demographic, but yet: Who were they? Whence did they come? How did they know Dave? Who told them to meet up at the HoJo? We shall never know the answer. Dave was then a fairly new NYC arrival. He was known, in a nerdy, cultish way, as the impresario of Might, yet this was all before McSweeney’s or Dave’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a gleam in anyone’s eye. Anyone except for the Eggersian eye, of course.
Dave once made the remark to me, by the way, that in restaurants he never wanted to sit with his back to the door; he surmised that this probably had to do with his need to always be on guard in case of invaders or assailants. And still to this day, when I’m happily facing a restaurant wall, I find myself thinking again about how I have absolutely no inner Viking.
14
I had been spending my professional life, at Esquire and GQ both, reading fiction by men about men. The sub-subjects: The Land of Marriage. A middle-aged man coming to terms with something. Extramarital affairs. Hotel rooms. Adult life as unwinnable game. A man trying, and failing, to be a man—whatever that thing was. A wife. A waif. Oh, God, the mothers. How many trailer parks were there upon the greensward? There sure were a lot of trains. Why were there so many prostitutes? And why were so many of the women dead? Rarely did any children appear in the stuff I read, and when they did, they tended to serve as devices for the teaching of moral lessons—touching ones, usually. And the women—voluble, irrational, rarely all that smart, but, with any luck, sexy, sexy, sexy—functioned as instruments to male enlightenment. Oh, if I had a dime for each time I read the sentence “She made me feel alive . . .” (to which my private stock response was always “And you made her feel dead”).
Occasionally, I’d find myself reading some crazy stream-of-consciousness story (although usually without the consciousness), and I would come to note some regional peculiarities such as the appearance of John Denver in a great number of the stories submitted by writers in the Aspen, Colorado, area (in later years John Denver, RIP, was replaced by the ghost of John Denver), but mostly we were still in a post-Carver moment then: the stories were hammer-and-nail stories and their authors were trying to build solid realist houses.
I had been at Esquire for six months, and I knew that I wasn’t too interested in anything I regarded as workshoppy, meat-and-potatoes fiction. I’d read a story submission that I fervently wanted to publish: “Adult World,” by David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest had come out two years before, and David was largely regarded as the young novelist to top, but he was not yet the most influential American writer since Carver . . . and then, eventually, since Hemingway. I had done no wooing of David—his agent came to the office for meetings and hand-delivered a copy of the story (that’s some good agenting: never happens)—but it was exactly the kind of fiction I had promised I would deliver. “Adult World” had beauty and strangeness; it wounded, it stabbed, and, like all true works of art, there was something ineffable about it. I argued for the story—in a memo and in person—and we took it. “Adult World” would be the centerpiece of the July 1998 fiction issue.
“MS. MILLER?” DAVID FOSTER WALLACE BEGAN ON THE PHONE, NOT entirely as politesse but as a provocation. This was my interpretation, at least.
It was late winter 1998, and Monica Lewinsky was the only “news” of that season—and of that year. Two years before, Esquire published David’s essay about the tennis player Michael Joyce. David had written the Joyce story for Details, but Details had killed it. David would tell me that Details didn’t believe his piece conformed to house style. So, Esquire to the rescue! Though David would remark to me that Esquire, a magazine he then deemed low prestige and high cynicism, was the absolute last place he’d wanted it to run. (He did end up having a good experience with the editor who worked on the piece, however.)
In my time at the magazine, I had learned another important lesson: no editor ever went broke by underestimating the number of grudges collected by your average writer (not that David Foster Wallace was your average writer). Writers work their grudges over and over like cows with their cud, and maybe that’s the right thing to do.
The only purpose of David’s call then was to relate that he had sent in a disk, a “homemade DOS disk” (I supposed that meant a floppy disk) with “Adult World” on it. I told him that there was no way in the world my office could read one of those things. Floppy disks were, like Linear B and Evel Knievel–branded bikes, things of the past.
David mentioned something to the effect that the codes on the disk had to be “displayed” rather than “functionalized.”
I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about (still don’t).
“Ask a techie or a techette to help you.”
We set up a time to talk again, a week later, after the disk had arrived. My big fear, not that I mentioned it to the author, was that I would have to actually retype “Adult World.” We’re in pre-scanning days here, and if a writer couldn’t email a copy of his or her story or get me a technologically relevant disk of it, the piece would have to be typed. And that typist would be I. And I had indeed keyed in pieces by some technophobic old-timers (Updike was one), duct-taped to my chair, anesthetizing myself by listening to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. I could imagine no bigger nightmare than trying to format the labyrinthine structure of “Adult World.”
The story is narrated from the close third-person perspective of a naive young wife who is concerned about her sex life with her husband. It has two parts: the first is, or seems to be, a fairly straightforward story of marital sexual dysfunction, but the second part abstracts out into a densely structured, formally outrageous outline (meta-outline?) plotting the young wife’s epiphany (she realizes that her husband, a shifty Wallace grotesque, is a secret compulsive masturbator [thereafter known in the story as “S.C.M.”]) and her subsequent process of self-analysis. (He would tell me that he’d used an ex-girlfriend’s voice, presented through indirect discourse, for the young wife. This did not seem a promising disclosure on a number of levels.)
It did occur to me that I might have asked my readers/interns/assistants to type the story if it came to that, but asking people to do stuff for me was just not my style, never would be. (Also, I was a bit of a control freak.)
I relented and made a call to the IT guys—“you are not going to believe this, but some author sent in a floppy disk”—and a goateed techie came to my office. Somehow he got the thing to work. On the appointed day, at the appointed hour, I called David with the info, being mindful that his time zone was one hour earlier than the East Coast one. David lived in Bloomington, Illinois, then, teaching at Illinois State, and enjoyed reminding people of the central time zo
ne issue—his folksy chomping-on-a-toothpick shtick was always a useful personal and professional strategy, and also a bulwark against whatever spell he was casting. (He was, he knew, much harder to observe when he was wearing a mask.)
I told him that they were able to read the disk.
“Yes, I told you they would. I’m absolutely shocked that you bought this story. I just about fell off my chair when my agent told me,” David said.
Yeah, we’d already gone over that.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he continued.
These were subtle insults to Esquire, to be sure. My interpretation: he didn’t believe that Esquire was smart enough to appreciate his work. But I wasn’t intimidated. A printout of a piece of writing is a great equalizer: one writer’s manuscript looks like any other writer’s manuscript. So if I’d been asked then if I found editing a piece like “Adult World” intimidating, I would have said that it was a piece of writing like any other piece of writing. It was a puzzle to solve, and I was going to solve it.
I needed to know a bit more about the kind of imagination that could produce a story like this. Question for him: I wanted to know how he’d come to the decision to fragment the second part of the story out into that crazy outline.
“Here’s the thing,” David said, “I don’t want to be manipulative. I don’t want to write thrillers. I generally hate epiphanies in fiction, and I really hate epiphanies when they’re dramatized in scene, so what I tried to do with this one was write something urgent but formally strange.” He added that he wanted to do something weird and fractured but also something redemptive and moving. I didn’t know it yet, but these were all Wallace buzzwords.
He remarked that the young wife’s maturation was meant to be an emotional gut punch for the reader. Yet it seemed to me that the female character’s coming of age was being treated comically—mockingly, in fact. I’d soon learn that there wasn’t too much that annoyed David more than being told that his fiction was funny (which it was). That was a real DFW bugbear.
I didn’t know this guy at all, but I could tell he was a tricky one. It seemed to me that keeping things pleasant and unobjectionable was probably going to be a good defense with him.
“It’s interesting that you would want to rock the boat on something as marginalized as magazine short fiction,” David continued, rocking the boat himself. David, I would also learn, was a gold-medal boat-rocker, an absolute virtuoso of the art. “Tell me why you wanted to publish it.”
Jesus. He was testing me. He was actually testing me. Again, I loved the story—even if it did assert that marriage was at best an accommodation, more likely a sham, and that true intimacy within it was impossible.
“Well, I’m going to be pretty surprised if I open the magazine and it’s actually in there,” he declared.
“Adult World,” he said, came out of the reporting he had recently done for his Premiere article about the porn industry, “Neither Adult nor Entertainment” (later republished as “Big Red Son”). He reiterated that he never expected this treacherous, twitchy (a favorite Wallace word), experimental, and, frankly, X-rated short story to be published in a magazine that, as he put it, needling me already, smelled good.
“But you have to be cruelly savvy within the pragmatics of what you’re doing, I suppose,” he added.
David was incorrect to suggest that there was anything at all cruelly savvy about anything I did. Whatever the opposite of “cruelly savvy” was—that was me. He’d figure that out eventually. The few times I have tried to be professionally strategic, the outcome could only have been compared to Gore Vidal’s assessment of Dawn Powell and that great comic novelist’s “many unsuccessful attempts to sell out to commercialism.”
But Esquire wasn’t cruelly savvy in those days, either. Maybe it never was, not in that era. What it was was weird, and idiosyncratic, and, it must be said, somewhat uneven. But the fallibility, in my opinion then, gave it heart.
Granger was publishing stuff that no other magazine would have had the nerve to touch—“Adult World”: great example. At the same time, I should add that the magazine’s editorial decisions those days did, frankly, seem so odd, so unsafe, that everyone working at Esquire was half expecting we’d go belly-up any second. What was unknown was whether we’d go down with the ship or if we’d each get deep-sixed individually. A highly contentious, yet ultimately prescient (though still invasive), recent article by one of the magazine’s best writers suggesting that Kevin Spacey was gay did nothing to fill us with any confidence about our Esquire-related futures.
David explained that he wanted “Adult World” to be treated as two unattached pieces—not run back-to-back, but instead separated by other stories in the magazine. His argument was that the division would be “less hard on the reader’s central nervous system”; otherwise, he said, if the two sections of “Adult World” were to run adjacent to each other, the format change between (I) and (II) would look, for reasons best left to his own understanding, “gratuitous”—“a heavy slapping of the reader in the face with the change of format.”
He also wanted to use two separate titles: “Adult World (I)” and “Adult World (II).”
I said that I’d see what I could do.
(Maybe. This sounded like a horrible idea.)
“Thank you,” said David, and made a rude comment about the glossy magazine “syndrome of subscription blanks.” Could I talk to someone “upstairs” about that? (Was he joking?) And would I like to know the first thing he did whenever he got a magazine in the mail? (No, not particularly.) He ripped out the subscription cards.
“Do you always display this much of an attitude with your editors?” I asked.
I was amused—somewhat, but only somewhat. He was giving me a hard time, and he seemed to be enjoying the little performance. But I needed him to understand that he would treat me with equality.
“You want to know the first thing most writers say to me?” I asked.
“No,” David said. “What?”
“Thank you.”
“I’m making a mental note that any attempt to intimidate you backfires.”
“You know, John Updike said thank you.”
That was true. But Updike had also complained to Rust in a letter about how his author photo had been handled by the magazine (it had been completely my fault). I neglected to mention this to David.
“Um, O-K: thank you,” David said. “How old are you?”
“Come on,” I said. “Twenty-six.” I shouldn’t have told him, though.
“I’m thirty-six, a whole decade older than you,” David said. “How tall are you?”
I told him: six feet. (I’m five-eleven, but I say six feet when I sense that power needs to be asserted.)
He said he was six-two. He said he weighed 210 pounds.
The weight seemed about right. The height, however, did not.
“You’re not that tall,” I said.
He assured me he actually was.
“I met you. You’re not that tall,” I reiterated.
(He was not that tall.)
“No,” he said. “I am.”
I told him that our meeting of sorts had occurred at his Infinite Jest party two years before.
“Yes, I remember,” he said. “What you saw that night was just my being a spaz. I probably looked a lot shorter than I really am. I can at least guarantee that that night was more of a Boschian nightmare for me than it was for you.”
I just had to mention that shirt he wore the night of the party.
That shirt was a relic from high school, so the story to me went, and seemed, in his view, to grow tighter throughout the evening.
David said, “I just kept thinking, I’ve gotten so fat. I am not going to get laid at my own book publication party.”
Why was he telling me this? Mildly odd, that. All my interactions with the grander of the writers with whom I’d worked so far at Esquire had been cordial (best case) or so distant as to be no
nexistent. Examples: I did speak with Updike about his story “Oliver’s Evolution” (the last piece he would publish in Esquire), but let us just say that he did not seem to want to have a deep editorial exchange. I’d had one very brief (and very awkward) call with Garrison Keillor, and I never had any direct contact at all with my man Martin Amis—his extremely short commissioned piece was faxed by an intermediary and that was that. None of the old guys wanted to engage me.
David continued, going into far more detail than anyone could ever have possibly needed about his pitiful attempt to “get laid” (he said that again) the night of the Infinite Jest party. He said he asked about six different women up to his hotel room, and when he finally found one who assented (“the seventh,” said he), the situation ended up being thwarted by, weirdly, a young man I knew.
“Wait,” I said. “I just went out on a couple of dates with him.”
In truth, they were more like non-dates, and while this guy’s account and David’s never quite matched up (you can bet I asked the guy about it), it did seem certain that he, a tall blond scenester, had shown up at David’s hotel room and prevented whatever was going to happen from happening. The subterfuge of a pizza delivery may or may not have been involved, but that depended on whom you believed.
“Please tell him I wish him a violent death,” said David, and added that he’d even worn his “good” pair of underwear that night—“the ones with red rocket ships on them.”
I thought: Very bizarre.
Did he actually think that it was a “positive” for me, a new female professional contact, to know that he had spent the evening of his greatest literary triumph—the greatest literary triumph any writer could imagine or hope for—debasing himself?
But you know what? Maybe I was the problem here. Maybe I wasn’t conveying any sense of gravitas. And maybe I was the one with boundary issues. Perhaps David, to the extent that he was giving “me” any thought at all, believed that I, a young female men’s magazine editor, was raunchy and unembarrassable, a gal who knew how to knock back a few cold ones with the fellas.
In the Land of Men Page 15