I WAS LISTENING TO THE BEATING OF HIS HEART AND THINKING IT WOULD have to always be this way. It would always have to be this way now. His hands were in my hair. “Can you help me?” he asked. “I need you to help me.”
He said, “I look for the darkness in people. And when I find it, that’s what I cling to.”
He said, “I haven’t had one honest day in my life.”
He said, “I never thought I’d find you.”
He said, when I asked why the bed in his hotel room had remained unmade for the day, “I slept all afternoon. This is what happens when you’re not around. I need you with me all the time.” He didn’t want me to go to work that week, and he’d call me over and over again on the days I did go in. He said he’d delayed his flight home because he wanted to stay with me forever.
He said, “You’re a china doll, made of porcelain. How can you be real?”
He said, “You’d be a stellar mother. I can just feel it.”
He spoke of his desire to marry and have children, spoke of his love for a very young family member, repeatedly described as the world’s most beautiful baby.
He said, “When I see you, all I can think is Mount. Hump. Impregnate. It’s terrible being a guy.”
He said, “But you wouldn’t want to have a baby with me. I’m sorry I’m so defective. Our children would be reptiles.”
He said, “This is what I’ve always wanted but never thought I could have.”
He said, “I can’t move to New York. You’d have to come out and live with me.”
He said, “Never leave.”
He said, “You are my resolution.”
He said, “I’ve found her. I’ve finally met my match.”
I was lying in bed, and David passed his hands over the length of my body without touching me. There was a current of electricity from his fingertips, and it’s hard to describe or explain what happened or how it felt, but I thought, This is a snake putting a spell on a mouse. David pressed the air from his lungs into mine, and such was the power of his breath and his electricity, and such was the power of his stare, that we didn’t need to talk about what he’d done. Something, I knew, was transferred then.
18
This was the message David left on my work voice mail when he arrived home in Bloomington:
“Well, that was the trip from hell. The man next to me on the plane had a mild heart attack and urinated on my leg. I couldn’t change my pants until I got home. I miss you. I love you.”
I loved him, too, but what my expectations were with him, I’m not sure. But I do know I presumed that he would always be in my life. Of course he would. It would have to be that way. The world looked different after spending five days with David; it felt different. The world was different. He now felt indispensable. Everything with him seemed so easy, beguilingly easy, in many respects.
David, on the phone when he was home, said, “I’ve been trying to think of the perfect word for you.”
Oh, really now? I geared myself up for a superlative ten-cent word, something rich, something exquisite. This was going to be so great.
“‘Willowy,’” David said.
Willowy. OK. I liked that fine. Willowy was fine, willowy was good. But I knew what a willow was. It was passive. A willow was a tree whose existence had everything to do with its bowing.
“My willowy, French-eyed girl,” he said softly. “Please come to Bloomington.”
But I couldn’t go to Bloomington, not then at least. I wanted to, but I was terrified. That was all I wanted to do—to be with David and to be in love with David. But love, with him, was a danger, the biggest danger there was. And I already knew what would happen: I would go to him because he would never come to me, and I would slip into the intoxication and the seduction of being with him, and I would not leave. He would make me surrender my life for him. And he would, sooner or later, abandon me. There could be no other possible conclusion.
But David was terrified of being abandoned, too, and had erected fortresses of all sorts to guarantee his protection.
“I’ll even pay for the plane ticket,” he said.
Thomas Jefferson (a deeply compromised man himself), in one of his most famous letters, wrote to Maria Cosway, an English painter and musician then living in Paris whom he admired, “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.”
But I couldn’t come to Bloomington. The following day, I was flying to Berlin, that exciting tinderbox of Europe, for a long-planned vacation with a friend from college, Adam, and his German mother.
I was not well traveled (though I was already better traveled than David, an inveterate homebody)—I’d been to Paris a couple of times and, improbably, to Russia (to this very day, I consider flying Aeroflot the single riskiest thing I’ve ever done)—and this weeklong German vacation was a big deal for me. I was really excited about it. I gave David the phone number for the house where we were staying—with Adam’s mother’s best friend, in a suburb of west Berlin. David promised he’d call. I hoped he’d call. I needed him to call.
David said, “I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish we could keep talking.”
That was all I wanted to do, too—I wanted to talk to David. If the trip to Berlin had not already been planned, I believe I probably would have gone to him. But at the same time, I already found him overwhelming. It was not impossible that I needed to take a little break so I could think some things over.
“I can’t move to New York,” he said again. He again added, “You’d have to come here.”
I already understood that David would always define the terms of your reality. That’s what he did, that’s who he was. And I also already understood that I could never be a woman who slid into a man’s premade life and claimed it as her own. I had a world. I had a job. It had taken a lot of work to achieve those things. And no offense to downstate Illinois, but I was from the same sort of place—“Midwestern born, bred, and educated,” I used to say about myself, with pride, with self-abnegation, with a great big freaking chip on my shoulder—and there was no way that I was going back there already.
I thought about him constantly on the trip to Berlin. Mostly I thought about his stare, which was hard, and unearthly, and challenging, and took you apart at a molecular level. “You should ask for permission before you stare at someone like that,” I said to him.
The Berlin trip, to put it in the most lenient terms, was not a success. Our host loathed me. She hated having me in her house. She complained about my bathroom habits (note: I have impeccable bathroom habits), she was appalled by my iced coffees (which I ordered, to make matters worse, at uncouth times), and in restaurants she was repelled when I placed my order in English or cravenly had another member of our party order for me in German. Although this woman’s English was excellent (so I was told), she made a big point of speaking only in German . . . and when a group of people at a table is speaking a language only you don’t understand, of course you must assume they’re all making fun of you, even though they’re probably not. Rarely are you as important to someone else’s life as you may wish to believe you are. We’re always a part, never the whole.
Early in the week Adam and I went wandering along Berlin’s linden-lined boulevards and through the lush Tiergarten to the Berlin Zoo. I drank my first Kir Royale, an elegant Continental potion made with champagne and crème de cassis, in an outdoor café in the Friedrichshain district, which was described to me by Adam thusly: “It’s the East Village, basically.” That was a reference I got. At the Reichstag, I knew I should have been thinking about fires. Hitler set a fire there and pretended to be a fireman.
Midweek, Adam’s mother and our host went with us into Berlin. All four of us were making the journey on a commuter train from the suburb into the city, to do a bit of group sightseeing. That morning, on the outdoor platform at the suburban train station, Adam and I each bought a ticket from a machine. The women, however, did not buy tickets.
Vaguely, our host suggested (Adam tra
nslated for me) that the trains operated on a kind of honor system and that tickets were never checked. I found it unlikely that the Berlin mass transit system had such a laissez-faire approach to ticketing, but I gave the matter a languid mental shrug and assumed I’d never give it any more thought.
On the train, our group got a four-seater, two seats facing the other. Adam and I sat side by side, and his mother and our host (who had short, choppy blond hair and thin, pitiless lips) sat across from us. We settled in for our ride, and I nerdily flipped through my Fodor’s Berlin guidebook. The train made one stop, two. At the third stop, the doors opened and two male voices said in tandem, “Fahrkarten, bitte!”
I twisted around. Two uniformed transit officers were working the aisle.
“Fahrkarten, bitte!” said the first cop.
“Fahrkarten, bitte!” said the second.
This was unexpected, but I was prepared, ticket clutched in hand. I privately congratulated myself for being so conscientious and law-abiding; it was also fun to think about how the ladies were going to talk themselves out of this one.
Our host, seated across from me, craned over to get a good view of the cops. She then considered me for a moment with bright little blue eyes, leaned over to me, and yanked my ticket right out of my fingers. Just seized the thing right from me.
Adam’s mother watched as this happened. She paused a beat. She looked at me, looked at her son, her handsome twenty-five-year-old son whom she loved so much, and, deciding to follow her pal’s lead, grabbed his ticket from him. Don’t ask me what their motivation was. A last gasp at youthful orneriness? Fear? Both, probably.
The officers stopped at our seats.
“Fahrkarten, bitte!” said the first cop.
“Fahrkarten, bitte!” said the second cop.
The two women (one of whom was in her late fifties, and the other younger, both of them divorced) produced their—our—tickets. They showed the officers our tickets, the ones Adam and I had bought for ourselves.
Ticketless passengers are viewed dimly by the Berlin transit police. At the next station, Adam and I were summoned out onto the platform. The women followed along behind us, silent, unrepentant.
“Papiere, bitte!” said the first cop.
“Papiere, bitte!” said the second.
The mood on the platform went right to DEFCON 1. I had no papers, no passport, and (obviously) no ticket. I felt like poor old Timofey Pnin: “I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!” I was reduced to sign language and finger pointing, overcome with an image of myself getting handcuffed by the police and hauled away in a vehicle that I now pathetically recognize as the dogcatcher’s cart in Lady and the Tramp. When I started sobbing there on the platform, I’d like to think that it had little to do with my specific situation, but everything to do with the cosmic idea of injustice. (Sure, I was that principled.)
Adam talked to the cops. He’s a beautiful man, Adam, and a smooth talker (smooth in German, too, I’d have to guess), and, frankly, one of those confabulators I’ve always enjoyed and, God help me, have always seemed to attract. (Why was it that I’ve always been so susceptible to those for whom reality isn’t good enough, to those who want a different kind of theater?) Long story short: whatever it was Adam said was convincing enough for the transit police to let us go.
After that, Adam and I took our remaining trips into Berlin alone, without the ladies.
When Adam and I came back to our host’s house one night toward the end of the trip, our host had something to say to me, the only words in English she spoke to me the entire week:
“Day-fid called.”
She emphasized the word “David” unsavorily, as if this David person were the king of the swamp people.
When I got back home to New York, David’s was the first number I dialed. I called him before I called my parents.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said.
Well, that was a rather odd, doomy thing to say.
“This is not possible,” I said.
“I did call you in Berlin, you know,” he said. “There was this weird honking sound, and then some lady answered. When I asked for you, she started yelling at me in German. See, I was trying to be a good boyfriend.”
I noted again David’s habit of announcing his intentionality and proclaiming how he wanted an action to be interpreted. He wanted points. Was he keeping score? Why was he keeping score?
During my time with him in New York, I had observed and experienced some weird stuff. There were strange examples of emotional illiteracy: a beautiful, tender moment might be followed by “Sweetie, I’m just trying to be nurturing” or “Do you see how vulnerable I’m trying to be with you?”—remarks that undermined the primary experience, when I wanted the primary experience to be the only thing. There were odd flashes of physical control (“your toes and fingers should always be painted the same color” was a most unwelcome comment and one of the tamer examples). Like a child, David had to be led by the hand through crowded rooms.
I had also developed the unpleasant sense that part of his impulse to talk about other women was to make me—or shall I be more general and say whichever woman he was talking to—possessive? territorial? jealous? crazy? He actually seemed to want me to be a head case about him. He actually seemed to want me to be anxious, insecure, and dependent. I was too self-contained for such nonsense, though. David and I were very different that way: I had a more fluid and (hopefully) more merciful idea of relationships. Weren’t relationships, if they were worth anything, meant to be loose and fluid? Weren’t they meant to go as they went?
“No one owns anyone,” writes my hero Liv Ullmann in her superb memoir, Changing. “Together, we have each other and nature and time.
“It is as simple as that.”
And did it occur to me, given my job and all, that any romantic involvement with David Foster Wallace might have been inappropriate, unprofessional, and, frankly, high risk? Yes, it did, of course it did. (But did it occur to him? And did he even care?) That was one very big reason for a lips-zipped approach. But more to the point: there was no neat, bright social shorthand to talk about him, and anything I might have said would have been reduced to gossip anyway. The more I talked, the more the thing would not be viewed as real.
Or maybe I’ve just always liked to keep things safely in cages.
In interviews, David would duck any questions about addiction and depression—mental health issues are more openly discussed now than they were then, for starters (although he still wouldn’t have talked about any of it)—and the public image we had of him then didn’t have much to do with the one we have of him today. From acquaintances of mine who knew him slightly (would they have taken issue with “slightly”? did they maybe believe they knew him better than they really did? wasn’t there something a little too terribly self-congratulatory about their insistence on calling him “Dave”?), I heard him described as formal. I heard him described as courtly, as sweet, as shy. I heard him described as a really chill dude. I heard him described as human greatness incarnate. How, I would wonder, were we even talking about the same guy? Yes, David’s theatrical constructed persona—stubbly Zarathustra in a bandanna?—did have something to do with the man I knew, but that was just one of the many diamond facets upon the glittering DFW diadem. It was always unclear to me how many literary-world people knew the swirling haunted-house aspect of David. Because if you did not know the swirling haunted-house aspect of David, you did not know David.
But for those who did grasp at least some of it: to know David was also to understand that he demanded full protection (“dead man’s talk”) and that you would help him be seen exactly the way he wanted to be seen. So was it possible that we were all joined in protecting him?
It was very confusing. Better not to say much at all if I could help it. Which of course added to the hermetic nature of everything.
“It’s odd,” David said. “I think we must share genetic material. I’ve never met anyone who ha
s at least as many privacy issues as I do.”
THAT SUMMER WAS ONE LONG PHONE CALL WITH DAVID. THE RHIZOMATIC conversations pinballed all over the place, and you knew a call was really on fire when he’d say, his words trying to catch up with his brain, “I’m trying to think what else, I’m trying to think what else.” And you’d be off onto another topic. David was, at his Olympian remove, a tremendous gossip and enjoyed being provided tales of folly or excess from the so-called literary world. “OK, let’s dish,” he’d say. But the sad truth was that I never had too many good stories—mostly they were secondhand, or not even that. But at least we knew a lot of the same people: “And how many times did he tell you where he went to college?” he’d ask; “You know, he sounds smart, and he has a smart-person sheen, but he’s not actually that smart”; “Wait, was that the really hairy guy we were talking about?” He’d say, “Sure must hurt to be him,” if he had a low opinion of someone. Declaring that an individual had “hard-core integrity” was high praise; the highest: when David said that a person was an “actual adult.”
He was an aficionado of the prank call and really had me going with a couple of these performances: posing as an aspiring writer, inquiring about the status of a short-story submission called—get ready—“sex, lies, and bacon” (did David know the Esquire man or what?). David once pretended to be Salinger: “Miss Miller, this is J. D. Salinger, and I am about to make your career.” I’m remembering now how much David enjoyed the narrator’s description of his wife in that excellent Salinger story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”: “a breathtakingly levelheaded girl.” All hail the exacting adverb.
Now, it is a fact that many writers of fiction like to brag about how they don’t read too many new books or new authors. Not so David—the man read everything. Send him a book to read, any book, and he’d read it. And no matter what kind of time I was having with him, he’d often check in with writer recommendations: “Hey, I thought you might like this guy. He’s really good.” (Yes, it was always a guy. And about every third time the guy was William T. Vollmann.) More often than not, he’d provide the writer’s address. David Foster Wallace: more connected than you would have thought. No, more connected than he would have wanted you to think.
In the Land of Men Page 21