When I arrived at work the following morning, there was a voice-mail message from David, left in the middle of the night. He was wondering how the party had gone. David’s line, when you were invited to return a phone call from him: “Call me any time. I’m in and out all day.”
When we spoke, I mentioned that I had witnessed the following scene at the party the previous night: TV’s own Tony Danza approached Mailer and Muhammad Ali (frail and seated in an armchair—the diminishment from Parkinson’s was tough to see), got into a low crouch, and put up his fists. I died a little death when Mailer, age seventy-five, countered with an approximation of the same crouch, fists also raised.
“I don’t know how you do your job,” David said. “It’s just like high school, and I hated high school. I would not have been able to handle your job at your age.”
There were plenty of things I couldn’t handle about my job, but they weren’t the ones David was thinking about then. The main thing: I’d believed that if I got this job, or even if I got any sort of power, that I wouldn’t be scared anymore. I had been hoping that power was the way to undo fear. But then you learn: the fear is here to stay. The fear was always there, except when I was at my desk, with a manuscript in front of me and a pen in hand.
The following Saturday morning, David called me at home at eight A.M. I was quite surprised to hear from him then and also, may I say, rather freaked out: Had he no sense of propriety?
At one point during the call, he seemed to think he heard me speaking to someone else in my apartment.
“Big night, huh?” he asked with unexpected sting.
And of course I lived alone, in my tiny West Village studio apartment, the one small space in the world I had to myself.
I explained to David that I was talking to my pet rabbit.
(I mean obviously.)
“Wait,” David said, softening. “What?”
I related the story about how the rabbit came into my life: she had been a model bunny, purchased by a member of the Esquire art department to photograph for the artwork accompanying a fantastic short story I’d edited by the writer Elizabeth McCracken. Turned out: rabbits can’t be returned to the pet stores on the Upper West Side from which they’d been purchased. No one else at work displayed any interest in adopting the bunny, so I decided to keep her in my office—for as long as I could get away with it.
“Aw,” David said.
The rabbit-in-the-office experiment lasted three, four days, tops. The dream ended the moment Granger’s excellent assistant (Fran was one of the few staffers who remained from the ancien régime)—a genuine “dame,” in the classic Sinatraian sense of the term—declared, in the hard-boiled, hilarious way she had, in the direction of the editorial department’s cubicles, “That thing has bugs.” So the rabbit came home with me, living a cage-free, if not overly hygienic, lifestyle on Waverly Place. (A few years later, when I mentioned to the brilliant McCracken that thanks to her story, I’d acquired a rabbit, she said, “I hate to think of any animal in a cage.” I was pleased to offer the reply: “Oh, she’s not in a cage.”) I loved that little rabbit a lot. Her name was Lulu.
“Aw,” said David.
He got onto a riff about that ur-bunny novel, Watership Down. He could give me his copy of it but warned that I would make fun of his marginal notes of “wow!” and “neat!” I was promised a cycle of already-written DFW rabbit poems narrated from a canine perspective—“Rabbit Songs,” as he called them, and an homage of sorts to John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, an important influence on Infinite Jest. Jocularly, he recited a bit:
“We like rabbits / yes, we do / we like to break their heads in two!”
From my end, I was charmed by my sardonic, alarmingly quick-witted, and . . . peculiar new friend. I got a kick out of him, as we say in Ohio (or at least as my mother says). Which was exactly his intention, of course. Yes, I sensed that he was a person with poor impulse control and even poorer boundary issues, and without a doubt his sense of entitlement was extreme. And was it possible that this was just what he did—entertain ladies with his torrent of words? And was my number simply the one he happened to have in front of him?
Plus, and more to the point, didn’t David Foster Wallace, this Tasmanian devil of energy and ideas, have anything better to do? Here was a man so varyingly engaged and multidisciplinary, so supernaturally productive—how did he even have the time? For Christ’s sake, I didn’t have the time. Again, “Adult World” wasn’t actually the only story in the July 1998 issue. Did he have any awareness of that? Yes, of course he did, because I’d told him about some of the other pieces I was working on. I had even gone so far as to mention the header for the section: “RANDOM ACTS OF FICTION.” (Dave Eggers came up with that one.)
“There is nothing ‘random’ about my fiction,” David had said. And then he’d added a malicious little “I can’t speak for your other authors, though.”
“So why are you calling me?” I asked him at home one night. “What’s this all about?”
I mean, I wasn’t much of a conversationalist anyway. I didn’t get it. Was he just bored?
“Because you’re blood in the water for a shark,” David said, with menace. And less menacingly, more charmingly (which is to say even more menacingly), “Also because talking to you is so incredibly fun. We should sit down in person someday with a pot of coffee and talk about all this stuff we’ve been talking about.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
On an afternoon in May, after three months of phone calls, a message awaited on my office voice mail:
“Hey, Adrienne. It’s Dave Wallace. I believe it would be more fruitful to meet in person. If you happen to call me back—I hope this is not too presumptuous—it will be easier to talk in person. Thank you.”
After letting him sweat it out for an hour or two, I returned the call.
“I’m sorry I left you that howlingly lonely message,” he said.
“Oh, please.”
“I didn’t think you’d call me back.”
“Oh, please.”
He was coming to New York.
I actually wished he weren’t, because even then I knew that this was a possible collision course—one that could very well end with twisted metal and broken glass, flames of woe, flames of wrath.
“We should go to a restaurant that serves fish that tastes like the underside of a dock!” he said.
I was getting my first glimmerings: to know David Wallace was to be involved in a constant process of interpretation.
16
The first engagement was to play tennis at the East River Park. It was a Sunday morning in the early summer. I had located my high school tennis racquet in my one and only closet, and know this: the racquet had rainbow-colored strings, a tennis fashion fad in the late eighties, and it was great. So I was set to go and trying as hard as possible to ignore one small issue. I’m terrible at tennis, just terrible.
David and I spoke on the phone before I left to meet him at his hotel.
“Would you mind picking up something for me to eat?” he asked plaintively. “I’m starving.” His order consisted of a plain bagel (untoasted; no butter, no cream cheese—“as is,” as the bagel shops say), a Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, and a bottle of water.
I must say that the food request peeved me, mildly, and in the taxi on the way to the hotel, I had a whole dialogue with myself about it. “Why can’t he leave the hotel and get his own food?”; “He thinks women are there to serve him, does he?”; “He drinks Diet Coke for breakfast?”
The answer to at least one of those last two questions was a resounding yes.
David was sitting in an armchair in the hotel lobby. I went toward him, grinning (my peevishness had passed) and waving frantically. He saw me and stood. No freaking way he was six-two. He was in a state of great dishevelment, wearing an ensemble of T-shirt and cargo shorts and, in violation of all possible flag codes, an American-flag bandanna. He gave a quick leonine stare to
my racquet and extended an arm straight, as if a semaphore signal. We shook hands. (Several years later, the last time I saw him, he held his arm out to me in the exact same way, as if we were strangers. Maybe we were.) The first thing you thought about him was that he was a warm person with a gentle manner. The second thing was that he was dreadfully ill at ease. But David’s discomfort and clumsiness upon first acquaintance only made him more endearing.
He gathered his things—he had a canvas bag with a lot of stuff in it, and he had his tennis racquet, too—and we got a taxi. As we slid into the back seat, we were met with a scent: high, stinging, tough-to-ignore BO.
David gave an audible sniff. “Is that me?” he asked, smelling one armpit, then the other.
“It’s definitely not me,” I said.
We each cracked our windows.
“You actually buckled your seat belt?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He buckled his, too. We each scooted as far away from the other as we could get.
Shy understands shy, so I started chattering away—my preferred mode when I am with someone even more socially challenged than I. It’s so embarrassing to recall this now, but I told David about my tenth-grade crush on a particular Scandinavian tennis player (I didn’t like tennis, but I definitely did like this guy and the concept of Scandinavia—I’ve always been pro-Continental, I guess you could say; always tilting toward Europe), whose picture I had taped up on the inside of my locker door at school. Don’t ask me why I thought David needed to know this. High school didn’t seem so long ago then. It wasn’t so long ago. I had graduated only eight years before.
“He’s supposed to be really dumb,” David said.
“Yeah, but he’s pretty cute, though,” I said, trying to keep it light, always trying to keep it light.
“When I did that tennis piece, they made fun of him on the tour for being so stupid.” That tennis piece was the one about Michael Joyce that had run in Esquire.
David regarded me with hard eyes.
“Do you have a thing for older men?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“You may have daddy issues.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“You certainly have questionable taste in tennis players,” he said with the smallest of smiles on the long, handsome DFW face. “But at least it wasn’t Agassi, I guess.” He volunteered his own celebrity crush: Calista Flockhart. “Her eyes are as big as plates.”
When we arrived at the courts, there was a snag in the plan. No one told me that you had to reserve one in advance. For someone whose motto is “Measure twice, cut once” (for my eighteenth birthday, my best friend Michelle gave me a This Old House mug—the Bob Vila years—with this handy axiom on it), this was an atypical oversight. You can be sure that I did a lot of apologizing to David. He was fine about it, though, and my secret was that I was more than fine about it, because my mistake meant that we wouldn’t actually have to play tennis. (“You’re not ‘bad,’ necessarily,” David would say later when we did knock the ball around. “You just seem like someone who hasn’t played for a long time.” And he would indeed mock, mercilessly, my racquet of the many-colored strings.)
We decided to sit on the grass outside the court and chat. We had a view of the East River and the Williamsburg Bridge. It was one of the first very warm days of the year and the sky was a high cloudless blue. But did David even notice? How much interest did he even take in aesthetic pleasures? David was Augustinian, self-punitive in tendency: his was a fallen, decadent picture of the world, a humanity that needed to be redeemed. That redemption did not, and would not, come easily, however.
“It’s so pretty today,” I said.
“I couldn’t live in New York,” he said. “I would feel as if I were living on some bombed-out, postapocalyptic Blade Runner–ish movie set.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad. New York is great, actually.”
“Well, I don’t know how anyone can live here.” He said that he would find it odious to be just another writer in New York, jockeying for status along with everyone else. “At home, people are like, ‘Duh, you write books? What are those?’ No one there understands what I do for a living.”
He noted that Bloomington was cheap, the people were nice, he didn’t have to lock his front door, and he could exist undercover there. This was a very different assessment of his town from the one he would give me four years later, weeks before he moved to California: “I fucking hate everything about this place.”
“You could make some new friends in New York,” I said. “Most people aren’t actually writers, you know.”
Although, given the jobs I had, it actually did seem as if most people in New York were writers. Most people everywhere seemed to be writers, and the thing they seemed to like to do more than anything else was submit their work to me at Esquire.
“I don’t need any new friends,” he said. “I know enough people.”
We picked at dandelions and crabgrass. We talked about our families. When I was in the middle of a very poor description of the kind of statistics my father did, David interrupted and said, “Yes, like W. Edwards Deming,” citing the guru of whatever type of statistics this was. I found it impressive that David was able to extract a pearl from the sludge I’d given him to work with.
When I told David that I had no siblings, his response—traditionalist, conservative (this was David, too, a big part of him; he wasn’t much of a radical, except artistically)—was “Why? Was this your parents’ choice?” He did an impression of his mother, a writing professor, performing the Eudora Welty story “Why I Live at the P.O.” and told me about some of the tricks he’d stolen from her when he taught his own writing classes. They were excellent tricks, they really were.
I asked him where he’d gone to high school.
A pause.
He would always seem surprised whenever I signaled that I didn’t know such-and-such biographical detail about him—annoyingly, David was, in fact, a celebrity, a reality I always kept forgetting. (He never forgot, though.) At this point, I think he’d assumed I’d read whatever those articles were about him, but I hadn’t read them and never would; all the data I had about David always came from David—and that was plenty.
“I went to a really shitty public school in Urbana, Illinois,” he said.
Hey, I had a friend from college who’d graduated from his high school—did David know him?
He did not.
“Remember, I’m much older than you.”
“You don’t seem that much older.”
“I’m very immature.”
He said that he probably would have been better off in boarding school, but his parents couldn’t have afforded it. He was contemplating going to his twentieth high school reunion, but all his friends knew he wasn’t very reliable, so no one would be surprised if he didn’t show. Actually, they’d be surprised if he did.
“What was your favorite book when you were a little girl?” he asked.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, obviously.
“Why did you like it?”
“Because it’s fancy.”
“How old were you when you read it?”
I wasn’t sure, but I took a stab at an answer. At that age, David said, amusingly and calibratedly underselling, all he’d done was memorize every possible fact there was to memorize about dinosaurs.
“Your sunglasses make you look like a superhero villain,” David said. “May I ask you to take them off? I’d like to be able to see your eyes.”
“But I always wear sunglasses outside during the day,” I commonsensically explained, and kept the shades on.
David rooted around in the plastic bag of food I had brought, had a little complaint about the brand of water (Evian), proclaiming it “too velvety,” but drank it anyway. He dug into his canvas bag and showed me his battered address book, turning to the page with my very own name on it. “Look,” he said. “That’s you.”
He offered me the book, and I flipped through the many, many names, addresses, and numbers, all written in the spooky, spidery DFW hand. I noted that David seemed to know everyone—or at least seemed to have everyone’s contact information.
What else was in his bag? He wanted to show me. Let’s see—there was a secondary “head hankie,” a white one, in case he perspired through the American-flag one he had on, and a yellow legal pad—“that’s in case you say something witty.” (This was David, too: a thief and a vampire.) There were some books. There were pens. There was an amber-colored container with pills in it. He showed me his Illinois driver’s license. I showed him my license from Ohio. We shared the bagel. We exchanged “how I lost my virginity” stories (neither story interesting). He sang the Madness song “Our House.” (He had a great singing voice. He was also completely stuck in the eighties music-wise.) He spoke French. I tried to speak French back. He held forth about the very important distinction between “I could care less” and “I couldn’t care less.” He told me when his birthday was, the name of the city where he was born, and his parents’ ages, and he recited from memory the entirety of the Philip Larkin poem “This Be The Verse,” whose first line is, of course (say it with me now): “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
“It’s odd. It’s as if I’m here offering myself to you,” he said. “I feel totally comfortable with you. And I’m never comfortable with anyone.”
The important point so far about that morning, which became that early afternoon, was that everything was very sweet, and fast. I was about to say that everything was also very ordinary, but that would not have been true.
But.
“I need you to know some things about me,” David said. “This is strictly dead man’s talk. Do you understand?”
It was at this moment that a firm code of omertà was established—because David established it—in our relationship. The tacit “dead man’s talk” agreement that would continue for the years I knew him. It was our thing, though it was his thing with plenty of others, too, I’m sure. “Dead man’s talk?” he would ask. “Dead man’s talk” would be the only possible reply.
In the Land of Men Page 18