“Can I ask you a question?” he finally said. “Everyone says that I remind them of James Spader in sex, lies, and videotape.” Did I detect a soupçon of pride there? “Do you see that about me?”
Although it is true that there is little on earth as glorious as eighties-era Spader—the best of all possible Spaders—I couldn’t have imagined that anyone had ever mentioned any sort of resemblance to the sex, lies, and videotape Spader, a louche vagrant who videotapes women talking about their sex lives, to David as praise.
“You do know that the whole thing about that character is that he’s a pervert, right?” I asked.
“Oh, I know,” he said.
David was sitting with his bare feet up on the seat of the chair, knees bent. It is a fact that he would continue, years after he wrote his famous essay about existential dread and the Caribbean cruise, to privately brag about how he’d won the Best Legs Competition on the ship.
He asked how my parents had explained sex to me when I was a little girl. (What he actually said was “the birds and the bees.”) I told him that my parents weren’t big talkers in that arena and that they’d given me the good-natured book Where Did I Come From?, written by Peter Mayle of all people, and illustrated with grimy-in-a-specifically-seventies-way cartoon people. He said he knew the book—a friend’s child had a copy of it. He started speaking of his past habit of cruising AA meetings for emotionally fragile women (“It’s hard for me to even go now because everyone sits around and talks about me”), of targeting married women and young mothers—that was but the beginning of the horror show, I would soon learn.
Somehow we got on to the monograph Suicide, by Émile Durkheim (I’d never read it, unsurprisingly—but who has?), and he wanted to know my thoughts about the ethics of suicide. I said this was a subject I’d given zero thought to. Next we were into a discussion of Ian Curtis, the singer from Joy Division, who, said David, had committed suicide at twenty-three by putting a noose around his neck and standing on an ice block as it melted. I was aware of the vague outlines of Curtis’s end, but the ghastly method David described was news to me. (David’s account was untrue, by the way, and I have to believe he knew this.) He said that he admired Curtis’s ingenuity for coming up with the ice block idea.
“Can you imagine hating yourself that much?” he asked.
I said I could not.
I watched as David opened a tin of chewing tobacco, which he’d bought earlier in the day at a deli.
“Why don’t you smoke cigarettes instead?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be less of a hassle?”
He replied that he wouldn’t be able to play tennis if he smoked. He shook the tobacco tin at me and asked if I wanted to try some.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“No, thank you.”
“Come on,” he said. “Just try it.”
He brandished the can again.
“No, thank you,” I said.
He removed a bit of tobacco and put it in his hand. He stood. As he came toward me, he offered the extraordinary biographical tidbit that he’d dated a woman—actually, he said “female,” just to make it extra creepy—who chewed tobacco.
“Always an attractive habit in a woman,” I said. “And in a man.”
I related how the only tobacco chewers I’d ever known were gigantic Ohioan rednecks. An image I’ll never be able to delete from my permanent Rolodex: on the floor in front of my senior-year locker, a Mountain Dew can tipped on its side, brown tobacco fluid oozing out of it in really just the most atrocious way.
“Come on,” he said, holding his hand out. “You know you want to.”
I took the brown nubbin from David’s palm. “You,” I said, “are a bad influence.”
“Yes,” he said, “I am.”
I looked at David. David looked at me. His eyes were a rich chestnut flecked with gold.
I put the plug of tobacco in my mouth.
Item: wintergreen tobacco, in case you’ve ever wondered, has the mouthfeel of sulfuric acid.
I couldn’t get into the bathroom fast enough. I spat the vile thing into a tissue, turned the water on, rinsed my mouth, and kept on rinsing.
“You’re gross,” I shouted over the water.
“Hahaha,” said David’s voice from the other room. “Your teeth turned green. Hahaha.”
He came into the bathroom. I considered his reflection in the mirror.
“People who make other people chew tobacco should be prosecuted for war crimes,” I said.
I pivoted to face him. His hair was now completely dry.
“You’re welcome to use my toothbrush,” he said, and smiled.
LATER IN THE WEEK, THERE WAS A PANEL DISCUSSION FOR HARPER’S magazine. The subject of the panel was book-to-film adaptation, and David maintained that he was submitting to the thing only as a favor to his sometimes friend Charis Conn, one of his editors at Harper’s. The story David told me was that Charis had asked to stay with him for a week or so in Bloomington so she could work on her novel. (This whole setup seemed very weird to me, but whatever.) The visit reached an unpleasant finale, said David, that involved shouting and slammed doors and an imperial directive for Charis (whom I also knew—she was a piece of work herself): Leave at once, I say. (David often did tend to exaggerate for narrative effect; he also liked to present himself as a comic—and semi-deranged—character in his stories.) His participation in the panel was atonement for his impetuous boy-king behavior. This was the kind of thing he’d try to do all the time—make reparations to parties he felt he’d wronged. David was always seeking absolution.
“Whenever there’s a problem in a relationship,” he once said, “I always assume it’s my fault.”
The Harper’s panel was held in a university auditorium on West Twelfth Street. David had been complaining about the thing all day and asked me if I could help him get in a better headspace about it. He had a therapeutic stress-relief idea, he said: he wanted me to meet him in the empty theater a couple of hours early and have sex with him in the seats. This request completely blew my mind.
HIM: “But if we really hate it, we can stop.”
ME: “What is wrong with you?”
(Reminder: he was thirty-six years old.)
I now understood that David was an outré character, and I was fine with that. I had no problem with outré. My professional life was spent dealing with outré, massaging outré. But who on earth did he think I was?
The event was standing room only, and I counted myself lucky to get to wedge into an alcove along the side of the auditorium. It was a total hipster crowd—lots of thrift-store clothes and hoodies, beards and barrettes. (Question: Was Mr. Facial Hair in the second row wearing that green John Deere T-shirt to signal an allegiance with the rural working class or to mock it?) Everyone in the audience seemed very amped up to be there, and the overall vibe was much more “concert” than “literary panel.”
The panelists—David, two other novelists, and two film directors—came onstage. David ambled along in the middle, towering over everyone else, wearing a T-shirt with suspiciously tight sleeves—he always enjoyed a shirt that provided at least a subtle biceps reveal—and for some reason chewing a toothpick. Let’s not put too fine a point on it: everyone in the audience had come to see him. David was the one they wanted. I got to hear a young woman with a better seat than I had say, “I’m going to marry him when I grow up!”
The panel was deadly, as these things always are (one of the panelists, Dale Peck, made the announcement that he believed all art should be didactic), but David of course managed to be witty, charming, and extremely interesting. The audience tittered knowingly when he made a sexual joke about slipping videotapes into his VCR. I couldn’t decide which made me uneasier: the joke or the audience’s reaction to it.
The plan, as laid out by David, was for me to stay in the auditorium after the thing was over, near the stage, and wait for him. The panel ended and the audience filtered
out, going back to their real lives; I loitered creepily at the front of the theater. Another of the panelists, the movie director Todd Solondz—who was, inexplicably, a nineties indie-film darling (and is now enjoying a well-deserved professional oblivion)—slunk out from backstage. Solondz was probably about forty but dressed like a student: thrift-store-type clothes, sneakers, and thick black nerdlinger glasses.
As chipperly as possible, I asked him if he’d seen David. With cold eyes, Solondz gave me the once-over.
“You wait out there,” he said, and pointed to the exit.
I tried to explain that David had told me to wait for him here. I was merely following his instructions. I actually knew the guy!
My foil was having none of it. He shook his head.
“You can wait for your autograph outside,” Solondz said, “with everyone else.”
I had an ace up my sleeve, of course: I was in fact my own person and was not in need of any DFW-imparted legitimacy. I could still sputter the dread “Do you know who I am?” Yeah, that move was still very much available.
But the thing was I had done this before (and would do it again, alas), and I’d felt preposterously like the Person of Consequence in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”: “Do you know to whom you are speaking?” It’s never pretty to see someone defending her illusions about herself. And anyway, to be honest, whenever I uttered my ponderous title, I always felt like an actor playing the part of Literary Editor. (This is not, however, to say that I didn’t always take my job very seriously.)
So I decided not to put up a stink with this man. It wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere anyway—he had made his judgment of me and that was that.
In high dudgeon, I stalked up toward the exit. Back to my point about how anger is a process and a choice.
But maybe someday, I thought, I’d be in a position to fire this guy—yeah, fire him from . . . something. Or maybe I’d be the head of some movie studio somewhere, and I’d cancel this guy’s movie. Oooh, I looked forward to that one. Just when he least expected it: canceled. It would be so great. I mean, I hated Solondz’s movies anyway, loathed their aesthetic and their nasty worldview. (I also knew that when you’re consumed with thoughts of retaliation, you are probably not coming down on the right side of things.)
A male voice called my name.
David had his canvas messenger bag slung over his right shoulder, and he’d put on a sport coat, a big boxy one.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Why are you leaving?”
He stopped a few feet in front of me and we faced each other. With one athletic hop, he jumped toward me. David moved like an athlete; his actions were always crisp, brisk, tight. He was not a spaz, never a spaz, despite those jokey avowals.
He grasped my hand and gave it a shake. His hand was firm, and soft, and warm.
“Hi,” he said, looking me steadily in the eye. He drew my hand to his chest and placed it over his heart. “I’m Dave.”
Although I knew the feeling was unreasonable, I was mad at him, slightly. I pulled my hand away. I half blamed him for leaving me vulnerable to humiliations of all sorts. I told him what had happened.
“I’d rather die than let someone think I’m some sort of groupie,” I said.
I mean, who would even want to be a literary groupie? Most of the (male) fiction writers I knew were so odd and persnickety, they were always broke (and they were always talking about money), and, worst of all, they were always at home. Literary groupies really just had to be groupies of the lowest order.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much, sweetie,” David said as we went through the door. He had just started calling me sweetie. “He’s an odd dude. Can you imagine him in high school? I’m sure he got the shit kicked out of him, and it just so happens that you’re the person on whom he decided to enact his revenge today.”
As difficult as certain aspects of David’s life had been (as I was just starting to learn) and as much pain as he endured, he certainly had never been made to feel so powerless and inferior, not in such a tawdry—let’s be real: sexist—way. He’d never been made to feel as if his only identity in the world were as a leech, a parasite. No, worse than that: a silly little ephemeron trifler, a life lived only in relationship to another person. I couldn’t have expected him to understand.
“Hey, did you notice that I kept trying to make eye contact with you up there?” he asked. “Every time I caught your eye, I’d stick my tongue out at you.”
I had not noticed that. I found that I was more interested in watching the audience watch him than I was in watching him. I kept thinking about how, to them, he was unreal, a thing, an abstraction—when he was now so very unabstract to me.
“Nice joke about the VCR,” I said. “Didn’t know you worked blue.”
If I didn’t know that lewd material was David’s favorite kind of material, I didn’t know him too well yet.
Some Fanilow-type people were waiting for him out on the sidewalk. A woman said she was working on a scholarly article about him and said she’d send it if he gave her his address; in her notebook, he wrote his address at work. A bearded lit bro said that Infinite Jest had changed his life, asked David to sign his hardcover copy, and kept right on talking. I thought we’d need a Jaws of Life to pry the dude away. A couple of young women were idling and smoking, waiting for a glimpse of their man. I knew I was figuring this out a bit late, but people definitely had an odd and intense relationship to David’s work and to his persona. And they so wanted to be recognized by him as what . . . as peers? As fellow travelers? As fellow humans? What even was their deal? I for one never had an interest in meeting an artist I admired. (Once at an event, I found myself standing right next to Sondheim, and was so afraid that I might have to talk to him that I ran off and found a paper bag to breathe in.) It seemed very important to keep your idols distinct from your actual people.
And I wondered what that was like for David, the terrible burden of always being expected to be brilliant (not that he had anything much to say to this particular group of fans), knowing that so much was demanded from him in each encounter. I’ll never forget when an acquaintance of mine who vaguely knew Thomas Pynchon said, “He’s never even said anything interesting.” I thought then: Well, no wonder Thomas Pynchon became so darn Thomas Pynchon–y. Who could possibly endure the weight of being him?
I also supposed that a celebrity like David got to see humanity at its weirdest and most affected—everyone always performing for you, presenting false versions of themselves, trying to please you. But the celebrity was, of course, expected to perform, too, and so in each encounter everyone had to meet everyone else in their falsity and pretend that the masks were real.
But in order to write, and to live, the mask had to come off.
“I DON’T WANT TO HAVE ANY SECRETS FROM YOU,” DAVID SAID. “I WANT to tell you everything.”
He spoke endlessly of the grubby turmoil of his past, and I heard more about the dazed cycles of self-destruction and self-erasure that seemed to have prevented him from living. In presenting his raw and battered soul, David was, I believed, demanding total trust. I was starting to learn just how trapped in his own thinking and just how self-devouring he was. To know David was to take many walks down the DFW memory lane and to hear accounts—often of questionable taste—about his bizarre and disturbing history with women. Although, to be accurate, the women in his stories were never even “women,” so much as phantasms of people, personlike ideas in the margins of his own story, expressed in relation to him.
He called himself a slut and a con man. He said that he’d always believed that it wasn’t good enough merely to have women fall in love with him; he needed each woman to love only him and to never love anyone else ever again. (Never only a part, always the whole.) And for their love, after they’d been slept with, he said, he repaid them, in classic Orin Incandenza form, with a null set symbol (there are three; I never asked which symbol was his favorite), traced onto their bodies. “And
none of them ever knew what it was,” he declared. (In Infinite Jest, the evil Orin traces an infinity sign onto his women. A null set is so very much worse.)
“But don’t worry, sweetie,” he said, with various levels of irony, self-mockery, bitterness, and also tenderness—yes, there was so much tenderness, too. “I’m much more mature now.”
I sure hoped so. I also sure hoped that every promise of love from him was not also a threat. Minimally, what if all of it was a foreshadowing? If you want to believe the false version of me, go ahead, sweetie, but you’ve been warned. You will be thrown onto the pile, too. I did not want to believe that the only possible outcome to any relationship with him would be, at best, betrayal, but would more likely be end-times-level annihilation—locusts descending from the skies, plague, famine, cities torched.
“And all of these people,” David said, speaking of . . . what? The literary universe, those who believed him to be a perfect intellectual and moral model, those who expected him to be a fully integrated being, those who believed a false version of him? “They think I hung the moon. When it’s actually possible I’m the devil.”
Scene: After the two of us departed a meal (“supper,” as David would have had it—le petit prince masquerading as country bumpkin) at a restaurant with a genial couple, old friends of his, I observed, “Well, they were nice.”
“They are extremely nice,” David said. “They’re not like most people. They won’t trash you as soon as you walk away.”
“People don’t trash you, David,” I said.
“People don’t trash you,” he said. (Correction: yes, they did.) “Everyone trashes me. I am hated.”
But how could that have been? The most important thing now was that I believed that David was a good person. I’d always considered myself an excellent judge of character, and I would not have had any interest in him had this not been my essential assessment. The David I wanted to see was the one who said that in college at Amherst, when he did his laundry, if he used a dryer that had someone else’s clothes in it, he’d take the dry clothes out, fold them, and place them in a stack. He wouldn’t just dump the other person’s clothing into some unruly heap. That was the David I wanted to try to believe in, despite everything (although it is also true that I never did quite make up my mind about him, either): the good citizen, the gentle soul.
In the Land of Men Page 20