“I am mentally ill,” he said.
He spoke of a suicide attempt in college, said he had taken a year off school (graduated a year late and lied to the day about the reason) and had gone back home and driven a bus. Later, there were other attempts. He told me he’d been to McLean, the famous psychiatric hospital in Boston.
“I couldn’t do anything right, not even kill myself!” he said.
Like so many other of David’s most deliberately self-deprecating one-liners, this mordant comment had the character of something rehearsed, rehashed.
“I also need you to know that I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic,” he said.
David said he had gotten clean a decade before and had dedicated his life since to his sobriety. There were stories about rehab, about his time in the halfway house that would become his model for Ennet House in Infinite Jest. When he was younger he’d gone through life thinking that he was better than everyone else, “but nothing breaks you down quicker than cleaning toilets in a halfway house filled with a bunch of terminal-stage drug addicts.”
He said he’d found the only effective path to sobriety in AA. “The dumber it is, the better it works,” he noted of the seeming simplicity of the AA ethos. He added that this was generally a good lesson for life, too.
David asked about my experiences with drugs. I explained that I was so squeaky clean in that department that I’d barely even seen any drugs; if I ever found myself in the unhappy situation of being at a party with drugs, my friends would always leave the room to do their substance-related activities (“Oh, God, Adrienne’s here”) rather than deal with my stringent disapproval face-to-face. In many ways, I was as rasa a tabula as there ever could have been. Maybe this appealed to David. Or maybe it didn’t, who knows? This is my story, not his.
“I’m jealous that you don’t need AA and I do,” he said.
After we’d spent a few hours on the grass outside the tennis courts, we went for a walk. I could sense that he was silently freaking out about carrying his tennis racquet—his worry (that he was a spectacular self-parody of David Foster Wallace wandering the streets of the Lower East Side) emanated from him in waves—and I asked if he wanted me to hold it. He did, and wouldn’t you know it, I was the one who carried that racquet (and mine) for the rest of the day.
When we were on Lower Broadway, David said quietly, “I have something to ask you, Andrea.”
“What did you just call me?”
“What? I don’t know. What did I say?”
“You called me ‘Andrea.’”
“Oh shit, I did? I’m sorry.”
Question: Did he even know whom he was talking to?
“You do know my name, don’t you?” I asked.
“Um, yes,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve never known any Adriennes before. I’m a space cadet. Get ready.”
Never did find out what he wanted to ask or who Andrea was.
We went to a restaurant—an upmarket diner, really, Time Cafe—on Lafayette Street. It was the sort of place where you could get lunch at 3:00, which it was. As we got seated at the table, David said, in that soft-spoken, guileless, nearly childlike way he had that could lull you into thinking he was less brilliant, and less dangerous, than he was, “I usually take first dates to the slaughterhouse near where I live.”
Had I even considered this a “date”? I’m not sure. David ordered a turkey burger (his burger line in those days: “Well done. And I mean italicize ‘well done’”). I got the pasta. Before our meals arrived, David pulled the amber-colored container out of his bag and took out a pill.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Syphilis,” he deadpanned.
I had a sip of water. I had a sip of milk. (I was then still an unembarrassable orderer of milk in restaurants.)
“I’m going to tell you the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “Please don’t react immediately.”
He told me that during a crippling period of insanity when he was trying to stay sober, he’d bought a gun and hired a hit man to kill someone. (Later, David’s biographer would say that David had just considered buying a gun and hiring a hit man. I have no idea where the truth lies—David was, shall we say, an unreliable narrator.)
“I can see you scooting your chair back from the table,” he said, wincing away. “I’m sorry. That’s one of the things with being an addict. You can never tell when you’re making other people uncomfortable.”
This man sitting across the table from me had had a very different life experience from mine, I now knew. It seemed important to remember that.
“Can you even imagine me with a gun? I’m such a spaz, I would end up accidentally shooting myself!”
He placed both hands on the table.
“Dead man’s talk?” he asked.
“Dead man’s talk,” I said obediently.
“Now maybe you can see how much I trust you,” he said.
But he barely knew me. On what basis had he decided that I was to be trusted?
“Do you hate me?”
This would not be the last time he would ask me this question.
“No,” I replied.
“I need you to understand that I’m a different guy now,” he said. As he spoke, his hands tremored slightly on the tabletop.
“Your hands are shaking,” I said.
He raised his hands, holding them out flat in front of him. “Do you see?” he asked. “I can’t keep them still.”
In addition to everything else wrong with him, he said, he was allergic to sugar. I held my hands up next to his. Still as stones.
“Do you want any of this?” David asked, pushing his plate toward me. The turkey burger really was appallingly well done. “It’s yummy.”
In my restaurant experiences with David, he was always trying to share his food with you. Also in my restaurant experiences with David, he never once ordered anything I would actually have wanted to eat.
“If you met my friends at home, everyone would be very confused: I never go out with anyone who’s appropriate for me. ‘Dave, who’s this attractive, intelligent, sane woman?’”
He had created this whole fantasy relationship when he barely knew me? Didn’t I get any say in the matter? Also, he wasn’t being very nice to his ex-girlfriends. A note to the men of the world: when you speak ill of your ex-girlfriends, we know that we’ll be next up.
“And you’d actually even be able to deal with my parents,” he said. He added that I would like his mother, whom he described as tall, blond, highly theatrical, and a Meryl Streep doppelgänger. She’d recently won a national teaching award, he said, and placed a hand over his heart.
“I’m almost never attracted to a nice woman,” he said.
Now whenever David described someone as “nice” in this tone of generalized blandness, you’d start to worry that the nice—but, in truth, not overly remarkable—other person held his interest just about as much as would a walnut. I had a bad feeling about this. Was he also suggesting that he’d already decided I was boring?
“If I’m presented with two relationship choices—one of them sunshine and flowers, and the other a flashing red light: beep, beep, honk, honk, danger, danger!—I’ll see that red light, and I’ll say, ‘By gosh, that’s where I’m going!’”
I wanted to know why someone would choose to becloud his own happiness. I was just some regular person, Adri, Matt Miller, the most regular person in the world, and as stoical as Seneca (sometimes). I didn’t understand.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
How did he phrase it, exactly? I wish I could remember, but the essence of his reply was that in order for him to function, he needed extreme highs and extreme lows. I do clearly remember this: “When you exist without the extremes, you miss them.” And then: “I always make the wrong decision, in every area of my life. I’m defective. You will soon learn this.”
The expected narrative would have gone this way: David would have presented himself as a surv
ivor, as someone who had fought through the hopelessness of addiction and profound mental illness and emerged on that hard-won other side. But with David there would be no narrative of the expected answer—ever. Throughout the years of my relationship with him, David’s psychological existence would be the principal topic of our conversations. The other topic, the one I was better at dealing with—and, I hope, better at understanding—was his work.
I tried to pay for lunch. As I opened my wallet, David took a look at my mass of credit cards. “It would scare me too much to have all of those,” he said, and asked if he could pay. I’d never thought I had a lot of credit cards, but since he brought it up, maybe it was true that my wallet did sort of have a bulge in it like a meatball.
As he signed the bill, he asked if I wanted to have dinner with him.
Every Friday, I’d bring home a tote bag of reading material from work—submissions, review copies of books—and I’d set aside Sundays as my big reading day. I loved my reading time, and I approached each manuscript with such a crazy sense of expectation then; there was always the hope that maybe this story would be, say, the new “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the new “The Things They Carried.” It really is so true that editors need to be people of enormous faith.
“Haven’t you got anything else to do today?” I asked.
He’d already set up several evenings of activities with me during his trip. Back in Bloomington, he’d (weirdly, for he knew me not at all) given me his American Express card number so I could buy tickets to a play for us to see (and went on to say that I could use his credit card to buy anything else I wanted for myself) and asked me to attend some other events with him.
“Not a thing,” David said.
17
David wanted to go to his hotel and change clothes, and I acceded to a stop there. The room had ivory-colored wallpaper printed with blue-green palm leaves. On the high dresser in the room was an array of orangey translucent prescription bottles; on the desk, pointing toward the bed, was a black Vornado fan he’d brought from home. That fan took up one whole duffel bag.
I sat primly on the bed and watched David as he listened to several accumulated voice-mail messages on the room phone. He provided a caustic little commentary about each message and did an impression of one of the callers (OK, twist my arm—it was Jonathan Franzen).
As he placed the receiver back in the cradle, he said, “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear any of those.”
The substance of some of the messages had to do with a dinner party he was supposed to attend that night. He didn’t want to go, he said.
This was of interest. I reminded him that he’d told me he didn’t have any plans tonight.
“Yeahhhh,” David said. “I may have told you a little fib.”
The more he talked about the party, the more certain I became that it had been organized for him, as the guest of honor.
“I think you should go,” I said.
“Eh. They always get sushi. And they know I hate sushi.”
He went over to the TV and found the station showing the French Open. He asked if I would mind if he took a shower.
“Go for it,” I said.
He left the bathroom door half-open (he later said he’d been hoping that I would come in as he showered), and I moved over to the floor, sitting in front of the TV. I turned the channel from tennis to golf, mostly to mess with him. The Memorial Tournament, always held at Buckeye golf legend Jack Nicklaus’s country club outside Columbus, was on. I will admit that my grandparents were big golf people (for a couple of years in the late sixties, my grandfather had been the president of his country club, a position that had seemed to me just about as high prestige as being the minister plenipotentiary to France), and when I was a little kid they’d always come to visit us in Columbus on Memorial Tournament weekends. They’d go to the tournament with my parents, returning with humble gifts for me that immediately took on a totemic significance: a white-and-green Memorial Tournament visor, a pen with a floating golf ball, multicolored golf tees. At another more recent stop on the PGA tour, the Firestone Tournament, my grandmother (“George”) had been hit on the head with a wayward golf ball as she sat on a folding stool at the third green. (My parents continue to maintain that this accident was the beginning of the end for her.)
My point here: golf is the only sport I had any actual real feelings about. Do with that what you will.
The shower stopped. When David emerged from the bathroom, he was fully clothed, thank God (I knew he would be), and wearing a blue button-down shirt and cargo shorts. His hair was wet. He started hunting around the room for his glasses. I got up and started searching for them, too; found them facedown on the nightstand. He put the glasses on and squinted at the TV.
“You switched it to golf?” he asked.
The blue button-down shirt looked as if it had been wadded up for decades in a swamp of some sort. He could see me looking at his shirt with distrust.
“My clothes always get wrinkled when I travel,” he said enlighteningly.
Well, I had just the perfect solution for him then: hang up those wrinkled old clothes in the bathroom, turn the shower on hot, and close the door—you’ve got yourself an instant steam clean.
“Wow, that is so smart,” David said with just a tad too much gusto. “I’ve never thought of that before: steam your shirts in the bathroom. That’s just so smart.”
Seriously?
“How does suggesting that you steam your shirts make me ‘smart’?” I asked. “It’s like Hints from Heloise or something. It’s just housewife wisdom—it’s the opposite of ‘smart,’ actually.”
David’s gaze at me was sharp.
“Touché,” he said.
He pulled an armchair over in front of the TV. He asked if I minded if he changed the channel.
“Not at all,” I said.
He switched the TV back to the French Open and sat down.
I asked him again about the dinner party.
“They know I blow things off all the time,” he said, glued to the televised tennis. “It’s fine.”
Now, I’m not saying I’m ever the smartest person in the room, but I do believe that I have the intuition of a Jedi, and I knew how the scene at the dinner party would go: the people there would be watching the door all evening, waiting, waiting, for David to walk through it. When it was eventually accepted that he was not going to show, the chatter around the table would go, “Welp, Dave disappeared with some girl again.” It was with a quiver of horror that I recognized this girl was, in the present circumstance, me.
“You’re not going to call them?” I asked. “You should at least call them. Don’t you think you’re being rude?”
“But I don’t like them,” David said, and gave me a small coy smile. “I like you.”
He then went on to identify a couple of these people as his best friends (a Wallace specialty: saying mean things about his friends) and told me he’d been having an argument with some of them about Kant at dinner the previous evening.
“That sounds interesting,” I said. “What were you talking about?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” David said tartly, eyes back on the TV.
Yes, yes, I appreciated that David was so intellectually brilliant that he could make anyone feel like the most junior member of an Attic society, but he needed to understand that he would treat me as an equal. He had placed me in the blanket category of “Woman.” He was telling me that he didn’t believe I was capable of playing with the big boys.
I stood up from the bed.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” I said.
He turned and looked at me in astonishment.
“What?” he asked.
Suddenly, I wasn’t even sure that I liked him. He obviously didn’t exactly hold me in terribly high regard. In an instant, the entire day spent with him collapsed, and everything was exposed as a sham, revealed as a toy town made of cardboard and plastic; if I were to take a c
loser look, I’d see that the walls were held up with scaffolding, the nightstand and chairs were props, and the phone was just a toy phone an actor uses. The weird candor or whatever it was David had been offering, and the relationship fast-trackiness, had merely been some sort of performance of intimacy. I could see that now. I could see it quite clearly.
“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to,” I said. “Whatever assumptions you’ve made about me, David, are incorrect.”
He winced and stood.
Would I stay in this room with him, or would I walk out? I would learn a lot from the very complex experience of knowing David over the years. For one: he helped me understand that anger is active, that it is a process and a decision.
“Look, I’m really sorry,” he said, in what I believed sounded like genuine self-rebuke. He came a couple of steps toward me. “I’m an asshole. I’m a sexist asshole.”
Anger is not just something that happens to you—it is a choice you make.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?” he asked, and placed his hands square on my shoulders. We were about the same height.
It is a choice to follow your anger forward, step by step.
“Please,” he said, “don’t leave.”
In this case, I would not follow my anger. I would choose to back down.
“Are we still friends?” he asked.
I would find it in myself to give him another chance.
“We are,” I said.
“Excellent,” David said, and lowered his hands from my shoulders. “I grew up in a house with strong women and I have a lot of experience with being told when I’m being a sexist shithead. You’ll find that I’ve been trained to always put down the toilet seat, too.”
I sat. So did he. We watched TV in silence for a few moments.
In the Land of Men Page 19