“Milk. It keeps me big and strong.”
“Cute,” I said. “Real cute.”
He said that a woman—actually, what he said, in the man-child way he had, was “an old lady,” later explained to be the mother of one of his friends—would come to his house to make him food, which would be divided into storage containers labeled by the days of the week.
“This is the most pitiful thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
Also: I was clearly being worked over. I was getting this odd feeling that in our conversations he was following some sort of script, running the same record, the same loop, over and over.
“I have something even more pitiful for you,” he said, and offered that on the last dog walk of the evening he would often relieve himself outside with the Icky Brothers. He would go first, then the dogs would follow, right on the exact spot.
“You’re gross,” I said.
“You are correct.”
“Speaking of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” I said.
It was a couple of days later that a different David began to emerge.
“My moods swing from OK to fucked up completely,” he said.
“You’re never in a better mood than OK?”
“Rarely. Are you?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Almost always, I guess,” I cheerfully replied.
A pause.
“Should we start thinking about edits to your story?” I asked.
I’d suggested before that we get down to business, but David kept putting me off. Already, he’d taken up quite a lot of my time, and we’d done zero work. I was in fact editing other stories for the fiction issue, too. It was the biggest month I’d had so far at Esquire. It was the biggest month I’d had so far in my whole career.
“I would be willing to engage you,” David said.
15
When I bought a short story for the magazine, it was understood that the piece was, more or less, complete. Editorial suggestions, I learned quickly, should be conveyed to the author in a positive, cheery way, and the suggestions should be extremely specific. With an author, I might want to discuss the structure of a story, and I’d frequently suggest changes to titles and often wanted some sort of revision to the endings. I liked to work on paper. I’d do a line edit, in which I might query syntax, rhythm, transitions, timing, word choice, pacing, punctuation, character believability; perhaps I’d note that I sensed that something—a line of dialogue, a moment, a scene—was misplaced. I’d send a copy of the edited manuscript to the author. There would be two more rounds of edits, with fewer queries each time. After that, I’d proofread the various sets of galleys and proofs. I spent so much time on each piece that, as I saw it, any error in something I edited was no one’s fault but my own.
Acquiring a nonfiction piece on the basis of a proposal was a different beast entirely and always felt more like being a venture capitalist—it’s a big risk to take a flyer on a piece with an uncertain outcome, especially if you don’t know the writer. It was a gamble that could yield some big payoffs, but you’d also have to be prepared to receive some extremely unruly early drafts requiring lots of editorial work. But unlike the true venture capitalist, there’s no shared equity between writer and editor—the editor’s work should always be invisible and usually is (unless the editor in question is Gordon Lish).
It is true that there are some writers who do not work well with editors; in Nabokov’s haughty appraisal: “I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to ‘make suggestions’ which I countered with a thunderous ‘stet’!” I’d had a couple of those types so far in my brief career and would certainly have more. I’d work with plenty of high-flying writers who would insist that their agents intercept all editorial communication (the “there will be no eye contact with the Emperor Caligula” approach); one of the most famous and successful authors in the world responded to my queries with a note to his agent, which she (the agent) imprudently forwarded to me: “WHY is this person bothering me with this? Tell her the story is FINISHED.”
David said he didn’t really do email and wanted to go over the edits to “Adult World” on the phone. Although each writer certainly presents his or her own unique editorial situation, most fiction writers tend toward the avoidant personality type—no, correction: what you get more often than not with fiction writers is a self-canceling combination of avoidant and hustler—and most don’t want to talk to editors on the phone unless they have to.
David had another request.
“Would it be possible for you to give me your home number?” he asked.
“Why?”
“In case we need to work on edits over some weekend.”
“Why would we need to do that?” I asked.
Was I along for the ride? Yes, I guess you could say that I was. But I understood that these calls were intrusive, invasive, and inappropriate. And I also believed that he was quite odd, very pushy, and maybe even predatory. I had all of these thoughts. But he also held a certain appeal.
The editing process of “Adult World” consisted mostly of my wanting to talk through the agrammatical stuff in the piece and David’s assuring me that this agrammatical stuff—the weird syntax and the crazy abbreviations, etc.—was intentional. Hours were spent on the phone with the galleys in front of us, looking for “boners.” Mistakes, typos. Boners. That was David to a T—always, if you will excuse me, inserting his personality into everything. As the years went on, I would like to think I had somewhat more editorially to contribute, to his work and to everyone else’s, hopefully.
Although I did make a huge editorial mistake: I let David get his way and we ran “Adult World” as two separate unattached pieces, divided by other stories in the feature well (the format was ridiculously confusing). There was also the issue of the accompanying photo illustration to “Adult World”: a female model’s torso in a black satin teddy. A “merry widow,” as David had it. I’d never heard that term before. That merry widow kept David howling for years. I still didn’t understand how professionally infelicitous it usually was to share an illustration for a piece with an author before that piece shipped to the printer.
“You’re a total angel puff,” David said when the story closed. “I hope we can talk again sometime.”
The breathtakingly poignant thing about working at a print magazine: you’re always on to the next issue. All that effort, and then it ceases to exist. A blighted rose, a will-o’-the-wisp, an angel puff. (Or, to put it another, more Sondheim-y way, “Thanks a lot, and out with the garbage.”) I didn’t expect to talk to David again—wasn’t even thinking about it—unless I were to edit another story of his for the magazine.
But indeed, as Ernest Shackleton was to Antarctica, David Wallace was to phone conversation. (The protracted tête-à-têtes between the brothers Mario and Hal in Infinite Jest could only have been concocted by an author who knew a little something about the art of the well-tempered—which is not the same thing as good-tempered—conversation.) He kept calling.
Now, it is just a fact that most people—high, low; old, young—go through life on ego autopilot. Who, after all, really listens to anything anyone has to say? Real conversations ought to be built on a spirit of equality and reciprocity, but are most exchanges truly symbiotic? Who’s actually listening to anything? It’s like this: the other person talks, blah blah, and you sit back, thinking mainly about how to advance your own position when it’s your turn to speak again. Most people pretend more certainty than they have, but a guy who asked as many questions as David wasn’t someone who thought he had all the answers. Of course, given David’s experience résumé relative to mine, he had every right not to care too much about anything I had to say, but the guy really was the best active listener you could possibly imagine.
And it was now also clear that he was not someone it would behoove you to try to impress. And little did they know, those who did pretentiously try, that they were fated to become haple
ss victims of the DFW derision machine: “‘Dayyyvid. I assume you know who I am,’” he would drawl, pitilessly mimicking the desperate-to-impress individual. “He’s such a vain little twat.”
He asked what my salary was. I told him, and he countered with his teaching salary at Illinois State and also the amounts of his book advances and grants. It was weird for him not to be poor anymore, he said.
“But I’m not ‘rich,’ though! I wish people would stop thinking that I’m suddenly rich.”
(Seemed pretty rich to me then.)
He asked how many cups of coffee I drank a day. “I’m trying to figure out whether you fit the profile of an addictive personality.”
I had one cup of deli coffee at my desk in the morning.
“OK, you don’t.”
DAVID, LATER IN THE CONVERSATION: “What are you planning to get your mom for Mother’s Day?”
ME: “Flowers, probably, I don’t know. Perfume maybe. You?”
HIM: “A Batman mouse pad.”
There was one two-hour phone session one night, a couple of longer ones to follow.
“David, are you in the bathroom?”
“Goddammit. I was hoping you didn’t hear that.”
Said David, “I haven’t talked to anyone this much on the phone since high school.”
Had I ever gotten a B?
“Oh, yes,” I said, “and worse. Did you?”
Answer: “What? No!”
DFW: “If Freddie Mercury had wanted to pop my adolescent cherry, I would have let him.”
AM: (Say what?) “Are you gay, David?”
DFW (ORNERY): “Maybe slightly.”
AM: “OK, so if you’re gay, be gay.” I added, invoking the great acting teacher Sanford Meisner (though I didn’t know it): “Be who you really are.”
DFW: “‘Being who I really am’ would create more problems than it would solve.”
The previous night, at an Esquire party at a photography studio in the Meatpacking District, I had fainted. I told David this had happened and relayed how mortified I was about it.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked.
“Why would you ask that?”
A member of his family, he offered, had experienced some fainting spells during her recent pregnancy.
“I think you’re pregnant,” he said.
“I am definitely not,” I replied.
Not that it would have been any of his business if I had been, actually.
Later: “Hey, Adrienne, were you depressed in high school?”
Yes, I guess, mildly, and in college, too, but I knew that high school and college wouldn’t last forever. Sic transit, my friend. Sic transit. This too shall pass.
“Wow,” he said, “I wish I’d been that mature then.”
It was so depressing, he said, how he viewed most of his adult life as an effort to escape the misery of his late adolescence.
David and I learned we were both admirers of the stories “Hot Ice,” by Stuart Dybek, and “Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff; the latter, about a cynical book critic’s last moments, was, we both agreed, the greatest critic-revenge story ever. Indeed, it was a piece that gave David some cold comfort during the dark nights of his professional soul, which was to say whenever he made the mistake of reading his reviews. He was great on Hemingway (“there would be no Esquire without Hemingway,” he said) and, of course, C. S. Lewis. His interest in commercial fiction, now well known, was then baffling to me. Of course, I considered myself far too high minded ever to have read the world’s Clancys and Grishams (but I considered myself a populist, too); David would later send me a mass-market paperback copy of Red Dragon (“I just think Thomas Harris writes really good prose,” said David prosaically), a book from which he could, for better or worse, quote extended passages. I read it. Skillfully plotted, but constructed of sentences that vanished into airy nothingness the second after they’d been read. I had my literary requirements: I needed to be able to take some sort of pleasure in what I was reading; I wanted my own voluptuous little aesthetic experience.
THE WORLD HAD TURNED, SUDDENLY, INTO SPRING. TOM WOLFE’S NEW novel, A Man in Full, then with the title Red Dogs, was scheduled for publication in the fall. His publisher was selling the rights for a magazine excerpt, and on a call, the sub rights department indicated that it was expecting aggressive first-serial offers. “What number are you looking for?” I asked, as innocent as that cloudless April day. A million dollars was suggested as the starting bid. I did a colossal spit take with my Diet Coke.
Esquire had had about twenty legendary years with Wolfe, publishing, most famously, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . .),” a rollicking piece about custom-car and -motorcycle culture, and (at least) two great profiles: one about a stock car driver named Junior Johnson and the other about Robert Noyce, nicknamed the Mayor of Silicon Valley. Wolfe’s nonfiction had opened up for me, as it had for countless other writers, the flashy ways in which voice, comedy, and satire could be used in journalism, and I was fascinated by the way he used dialogue. Although I hated the way he punctuated . . . and that whole crazy onomatopoeia thing—OMG. A gimmick that has not aged well. And was he too status obsessed, too lacking in pathos, and, frankly, not all that deep? But Wolfe was venerated at Esquire—one of the few old-school writers held in the highest esteem. The sense was, however, that he didn’t want much to do with us. His work hadn’t appeared in Esquire since the mid-eighties.
Red Dogs/A Man in Full was embargoed (the pages couldn’t be reproduced or even discussed) in a highly theatrical—nay, dramaturgical—maneuver: the publisher summoned me, as well as editors from The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, into its offices to read the manuscript. On a glorious spring day, I was led into a drab little office at Farrar, Straus and Giroux where, on a desk, the mammoth manuscript of Red Dogs/A Man in Full awaited me. It was a very odd experience, to be alone with this manuscript (which had been produced on an old-timey manual typewriter) for one entire day: here I was, twenty-six years old, and casting judgment upon the grandest of the grand old names. One of the main messages in a bottle I’d send myself: in order to do my job, I would need to maintain a serene confidence in my own taste and judgment. I had to believe in myself, even if few others did. As such, I was convinced that the novel was not actually very good—old, stale, out of touch. It also wasn’t any fun. Wasn’t Tom Wolfe supposed to be fun? (And when the book was published, most critics were aligned with my assessment.)
Back at work, I was candid. We wanted Wolfe back in the magazine badly, though, so I offered a fraction of the figure the publisher had proposed (still an absurd amount of money) for an excerpt I’d pulled together. I was too distracted to do much else the afternoon I waited for word back from the publisher and agent. When my offer was, predictably, declined, I found that I was a lot more upset than I’d expected to be. (Something needs to be said about how highly emotional these editorial jobs are, about how an editor can experience the entire repertoire of human mental states in about ten minutes at her desk.) Rolling Stone—the magazine with which Wolfe had been most closely associated for the past decade (it had published excerpts of The Bonfire of the Vanities)—got the first serial, and frankly, if I’d been shrewder, I’d have seen that this was a foregone conclusion. There were plenty of complaints around the office about how we’d most certainly been used as a stalking horse to get RS’s offer up.
I’ve never looked at A Man in Full again, yet I will say that I can recall scenes from it more vividly from that one day with it than I can many other books I’d deemed, in my exalted way, to be of higher classes.
Also, that spring there was another Norman Mailer event in the cards for me: a party for his book The Time of Our Time, an anvilesque collection of his reported pieces.
The party was held at the Rainbow Room, the splendid art deco landmark restaurant on the sixty-fifth floor of 30
Rockefeller Plaza. So long ago does that world now feel that this party may as well have happened in the thirties. Wasn’t Bing Crosby on the record player, and weren’t there Dubonnet cocktails and elegant ladies swirling around in cream-colored silk charmeuse?
I’d already learned my lesson and didn’t attempt to speak with Mailer at the party, although I did somehow find myself talking to that twinkly old charmer George Plimpton, whom I’d never met before.
“Ah, the czarina!” Plimpton said, and kissed my hand.
Plimpton rattled off the subjects for a number of articles he’d written for Esquire. He mentioned a piece he’d done about Hugh Hefner.
“Now you know,” he said, “Hefner had been [pronounced like bean] in the mailroom at Esquire in the fifties.”
This was not quite accurate—Hefner had worked as a copywriter in the Esquire promotions department, but who’s going to go around correcting George Plimpton?
“I know,” I said.
An Esquire journalist, one of these guys who seemed to know everyone, led me over to meet the writer Bret Easton Ellis, who was standing by a long, high window. The sun was starting to set; the sky was rosy. The suave Esquire writer seemed to think that I should want to do an excerpt of Ellis’s forthcoming novel, Glamorama. (Everyone was always telling me whom and what I should publish.) Ellis and I had a short and perfectly reasonable conversation, yet I will again admit that I had a hard time with these events. I hated performing at them: making frigid small talk, pretending to be amazed with someone—usually a man—when I was not. Most of the people I encountered were always pleasant enough, but what was it about dealing with people who had, or believed they had, some sort of power? You always had to play along and enact a charade. You had to meet these people in their illusions of themselves and pretend to see them as they wished to be seen. You had to pretend that the mask was real.
When a young woman at the Mailer party, a writer, said to me, “You’re my hero,” I was not self-deluded enough to think that she meant this fatuous remark by even 0.3 percent. Of course nothing real was there. Let’s get to the truth: she wanted something from me. Multiple motives. There were always multiple motives. And since there were always multiple motives, everything often felt like a lie.
In the Land of Men Page 17