I was about to say that David—with his ridiculous nicotine patches that kept coming detached from his sweaty, sweaty skin (a fruitless new treatment for his tobacco addiction), his bad attitude, his joyless writing of his beautiful essay about dictionary usage wars and the English language, and his non-writing of his novel—was a real can of worms to me for about a year. But, no—that’s not quite right. We could still talk about writing . . . about his writing, I mean. And we were still, improbably, able to work together as editor and writer.
I took a very short voice piece of his, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII),” for Snap Fiction. The story ran in one of the greatest months of Esquire ever, the “heroes” special issue, which also contained Tom Junod’s justly celebrated profile of Mr. Rogers. Although it is also true that Woody Allen (yes, Woody Allen) was included in this issue, too. As a hero.
It was always fun to read David’s appropriation-of-voice pieces, though whenever he ventriloquized an unsophisticated character, as he did in the “Porousness” piece (see also, if you dare: the failed voice experiment of the infamous “Wardine be cry” sequence in Infinite Jest, written in some sort of horrible pidgin dialect—though David offered to me, by way of explaining away the lesser quality of the Wardine pages, that he wrote them in grad school), the situation always did bring somewhat to mind the case of Sondheim and the Maria lyrics in West Side Story. What happens when a hyperintelligent upper-middle-class guy who went to Williams College and who later studied with the avant-garde music theorist Milton Babbitt attempts the voice of a poor Puerto Rican girl? You get “I Feel Pretty.”
David also agreed (after a lot of hemming and hawing and also an aggrieved “But I don’t want to be a journalist; I want to be a novelist”) to write a piece for me about Thomas Harris’s then forthcoming novel, Hannibal. The idea was that a critique of Hannibal would lead into a discussion of the aims of literary fiction versus commercial fiction. But the manuscript of Hannibal was under embargo and I couldn’t get a copy. I went through the appropriate editorial apparatuses—publicist, editor, literary agent—but got nowhere. Then I tried every trick in the book, including some queasy-making name-dropping, and, still with zero progress, I asked some unscrupulous-seeming assistants at the publishing house if they’d sneak me the manuscript (really should not have done that). Still nothing. David’s essay would have been something else.
He said he was disappointed that it didn’t work out, and I believed him, sort of—until he wondered aloud if I’d been using him all along the past year just to get his name in the magazine.
ON THE SURFACE, EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE SEEMED TO BE GOING pretty well for me that year. Actually, had I been seeing more clearly, I would have understood that things were going pretty well. But it’s hard to see anything straight: the closer you are to something, the harder it is to have any perspective.
In the late winter, on the evening of Monica Lewinsky’s TV interview with Barbara Walters, I held a fiction reading with young authors I’d published at a bar on Orchard Street. I created the guest list and I hosted the evening. (You might even say that, for this night at least, I reigned over an absolutist system.) A male writer in the audience told me that another male writer in the audience was mad at me because he’d heard that I believed Martin Amis wrote better prose than Don DeLillo. Some nerd-fights are worth having and other nerd-fights are not. This one, I decided, was not. A few months later, in celebration of the 1999 summer fiction issue—which would turn out to be the last-ever summer fiction issue—I organized a party at Elaine’s, the clubby restaurant on the Upper East Side favored, for better or worse, by a certain specific type of midcentury male writer—the GMN type, let’s say. (There’s a famous story about how Mailer had once sent Elaine an epical letter of complaint; she wrote “boring” at the top of the letter and sent it right back to him.) On the walls of Elaine’s were framed book jackets from the most celebrated of the writers who’d eaten and drunk there—on a tab. These authors were men. Yes. Elaine’s seemed to be a fine place at which to be a man.
An uninvited yet very welcome Steve Martin showed up at the summer fiction issue party, standing by the bar, distributing business cards drolly noting that the recipient had met Steve Martin. The passed hors d’oeuvres were just terrible, but everyone knew about the food at Elaine’s, and no one had come to our party to eat anyway. At 8:00 sharp, Elaine herself—and what an unnerving individual she was—flicked the lights in the bar area off and on, off and on, the none-too-subtle sign for the Esquire celebrants to skedaddle. With that flick of the switch, the place, like magic, transformed at once from party scene back to restaurant.
I’D BELIEVED I’D EXPERIENCED DAVID’S RAGE BEFORE, BUT I WAS WRONG about that. I had tried to do what I believed was the responsible thing and told him on a call that I had assigned a short review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men to Greil Marcus, a writer David admired and whose work he’d written about. I also felt I needed to emphasize to David that I’d have nothing to do with the content of the review. (No one ever talked to me about the ethics or the standards and practices of any of this, by the way. No one had ever told me jack crap about anything. I was just trying to figure it all out on my own.) David was on a mailing list for Esquire comp copies and was unfortunately sent an issue of the magazine with the review in it.
A letter arrived from him—a self-serving sockdolager of rage, entitlement, and self-pity. David was furious that he’d been sent the magazine. He believed the short Marcus review in Esquire was a pan of Brief Interviews (it was not). (And by the way, as for David’s constant public claims never to have read criticism of his work: untrue, and as an e.g., I can confirm that he had swathes of a spookily perceptive DFW career summation by A. O. Scott in The New York Review of Books memorized.) David’s letter took the stance of an apology: he confessed that he’d been mad at yours truly—plexusly kicked whenever he thought of me, in fact—and had been going around saying mean things about me behind my back. He divulged that he’d also written a hostile letter about me to the writer I was involved with—but that he regretted the letter, he really did. This guy, it must be noted, revered David’s work and would have chosen David over me any day. (And the guy, quite charitably, never mentioned the letter to me, and I certainly never asked him about it, God knows.)
“I will never cross you, Adrienne,” David wrote. “Another lesson learned.” He went on to suggest that our relationship had been little more than a sham of mutual professional self-interest, which really was the worst possible thing he could say to me. But David was an outstanding student of human nature (of course he was; recall: I look for the darkness in people. And when I find it, that’s what I cling to) and understood the fissures at the center of your soul—and knew exactly how to cleave them apart.
David, in the letter, declared me venomous, mocked me, and wrote that I’d hurt him “way, way” more than he’d hurt me. We were engaged in a contest of pain, evidently. The letter climaxed into an extraordinary threat of blackmail about our relationship—because apparently the moments of truth we had experienced together were now to be considered shameful—and he instructed me never to contact him again. His offer: he would stop “bitching” to people about me if and only if I agreed to never again speak to him.
The closing:
“All success w/ all endeavors whaever [sic] they may be & c.,”
The signature:
“Snidely Whiplash”
So David Foster Wallace was the dastardly mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Which meant, I guessed, that I was the hapless damsel he’d tied to the railroad track.
But no, no, that wasn’t right—that wasn’t right at all. I knew what his rage was about, even as he tried to reformulate his position into a version more to his liking. He hated me because I had power over him.
I needed him to understand that the letter was unacceptable. So I did what any rational person would have done: I picked up the phone and called him. He h
ad changed his number—a classic Orin Incandenza move (in Infinite Jest, the odious Orin ditches his bimbos by writing them a letter and changing his number). This was a thing David did all the time: he would, with cruel surgical precision, drop people from his life forever.
The trouble I’d feared was always in store had finally arrived. Misery, which had previously visited my life only in gusts, became, for a period, constant and unvaryingly severe. I listened to Mozart and Cole Porter, and I read Pale Fire again, but none of the old tricks worked.
Whom could I talk to about it? What would I even have been permitted to say? Was my story even worth telling? He was David F. Wallace (as some of his cute little return address stickers had it) and I was not. He was a man and I was a woman. He was thirty-seven and I was twenty-seven. I was just some regular person, and he was David F. Wallace, that supreme genius, that towering colossus unto himself, the famous evangelist for empathy and for heads beating heartlike. But he was also a wicked Snidely Whiplash and quite the hideous man ne plus ultra. (Not to mention very touchy about his literary reputation.) This was tough information to relate. Would anyone even want to hear it? He was ferociously protected on all quarters. I was dreadfully exposed. Any way I looked at it, I’d lose.
I kept thinking: His life is actually worth more than mine.
I kept thinking: He can treat people any way he wants to, and there will never be any consequences.
The world spun emptily. I had no interest in flowers. How ugly everything is, I remember thinking at a grocery store on University Place as I considered its bounty: cherries; I was holding miraculous fresh cherries, then out of season. I cried at work. I cried at home. I cried on the subway. I cried at the gym. I woke up crying. (Hadn’t even known that was possible.) I thought I was finally seeing clearly, to the dark heart of the matter, to that place, previously hidden from view, where everything actually happened. I believed that reality had finally opened its door and showed me what it was. But the truth was that I wasn’t seeing more—I was seeing less.
Had I actually been involved in an emotionally abusive relationship with David? Was that what it had been? I knew that I was still very young, and I worried that I would now be emotionally damaged, in some vague indefinite way, from David, forever.
But I also understood that pretty much everything David ever said was self-negating and that he was fundamentally incapable of making a forward statement without also making the backward one. Forward, backward—and at the same time. Which is to say that I knew the letter was also a plea. He needed reassurance that I still loved him.
We made up a couple of months later. Letters were exchanged and apologies were accepted, though it was David who needed to apologize, not I, and when he correctly wrote that my letters were better and more articulate than his, it was the absolute least he could have done.
I wrote to him about how during a particular recent phone conversation with him I had experienced an existential “I am a fraud” moment—a line he repurposed (to my biliousness) in the first sentence of his celebrated tour de force “Good Old Neon.” He in turn wrote that he no longer believed that I was an L. mactans, a black widow spider. (In Infinite Jest, Latrodectus Mactans is the name of protagonist James Incandenza’s film production company—a reference to Incandenza’s venomous, and very tall, wife, Avril.)
But I knew David. I knew the game. Back to my point about how he proceeded by paradox and contradiction and about how nothing could be accepted on its surface. Each story was a cover story that pointed to its inverse.
So now I knew, I decided, what he had thought of me—possibly always. (I was . . . Avril? You always had to be prepared to get into a lot of very weird areas with David.) Finally, everything was explained. A workplace voice-mail message, weenie-ishly left after-hours, appeared with his new number, in case I needed it. I did not call him.
“WHY,” I ONCE ASKED DAVE EGGERS, “IS BEING IN OUR TWENTIES SO hard?”
His response: “We’re unsettled. We don’t know where our next meal is coming from.”
I STARTED DATING A CHARMING YOUNG MAN—A NON-WRITER, WHICH was an improvement—who lived in London, an eerily precise replica of the singer Davy Jones from the Monkees and about as tall. Anthony had gone to Eton (verified), was a titled lord (verified), and claimed to be closely related to Virginia Woolf (unverified). He took one look around my very tiny, rabbited apartment and quipped, “Well, this isn’t much of a dowry.” It is not impossible that my restaurant demands, in both London and New York, were a touch on the extravagant side. Once when Anthony came to New York to visit, I ridiculously insisted that he take me to Daniel, perhaps the most expensive restaurant in the city at the time. Maybe I should have offered to pay for something? And why did I think that dashing around London with Anthony on the back of his motorbike was such a capital idea? (Loved how he said “motorbike,” however.) These were questions.
More significantly, Rust Hills was let go from Esquire that year. Or maybe it’s simpler and more polite to say that Rust’s emeritus position was eliminated. There was no Veuve Clicquot send-off for him or for anyone who got fired from the magazine in that era. Esquire wasn’t really a Veuve Clicquot kind of place (Esquire did not have a Veuve Clicquot sort of budget, but fewer magazines did now). Rust just disappeared. I sent him a short, feeble note that should have been better and never spoke to him again. No one in the office even ever mentioned him, not once—although writers did, frequently, for if an editor is remembered at all, it is only by his writers. But for the rest of my career at Esquire, Rust Hills drifted ghostlike over me, a regular Banquo at the fiction department feast. Or famine, as it would eventually turn out.
Early on, the evil part of me—the icky, ambitious part; the callow youth who was always looking out for number one—experienced a slight little buzz whenever I heard myself say that I was the fiction department now. Just as quickly, though, I’d think: My God, I actually have become Al Haig (“I am in control here”). Plus, it wasn’t as if Rust had ever been in my way or anything; he’d actually only ever tried to be helpful, with his long author lists written on legal pads and with the occasional short-story submission he’d pass along to me. In truth, Rust hadn’t actually edited anything at the magazine since I’d been there, and it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so.
It was a tough business—not a smidgen of respect given to a guy who’d devoted most of his working life to Esquire. I wasn’t the noblest person in the world, not by a long shot, but the whole thing made me deeply uneasy—one minute, you were the red-hot center, and the next you weren’t even a memory. But how many people are ever remembered for their jobs anyway? We all believe we should be more loved and respected, professionally and otherwise, than we are (we’ve all watched too many celebrity awards shows), but most people leave no legacy. Most of us are wiped off the face of time.
A colleague had once told me, during a period when several people were fired, “There are no tenured positions at Esquire.” (Indeed, this dude was eventually fired.)
I naturally also took this as a warning. There were no editors for life left here, or anywhere. (But why should there have been?)
And of course I understood that Rust’s dismissal had little to do with “me”—this was just the way life went: the young replace the old. And the young can be had cheaply.
Remember, remember, I’d tell myself, whatever power this job provides is an illusion.
Remember, remember, I’d say, when you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.
Another lesson: I had to remember to quit before I got fired. I didn’t want to become a Japanese soldier-holdout in the fifties, hiding on a Polynesian island, believing I was still fighting the war. I also knew this was an entitled approach to working life I couldn’t afford; I was no aristocrat, but I could be an aristocrat of the spirit, at least in theory. I could try to transfigure myself into that mind-set, maybe somewhat. I wanted to write. I started working on a novel.
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Writers take an idea, and they make a world out of it. They dream up a different drama. This seemed important. It wasn’t power if you’d been granted it through someone else. You had to create your own power, your own stage, and, if I may say, your own reality.
The mind must be free and incoercible. Only when the mind is free can you live your life as if something is at stake.
21
In the spring of 2000, a submission of “Incarnations of Burned Children” arrived in the mail to me from David (original title: “Incarnations of Burned Children [IV]”—there was a Burned Children cycle?). The attached letter—friendly, chatty—felt as if it were in the middle of a conversation we were apparently already having, and it contained no indication that he had any awareness that nearly every encounter I’d had with him for the past year had been like getting zapped by a cattle prod. In the letter, he asked about the writer I’d been seeing. Right on cue. David was always so predictable. I thought, What does he want from me now?
A rapprochement, or the reconstitution of any sort of functional relationship with this guy, seemed unlikely. How could we move beyond that abysmal period when everything was black and red, the color of venomous spiders? Working with him would inevitably mean that, at minimum, we’d become emotionally entangled again.
Yet on David’s end, I had to grant that the submission was a gesture of faith. “Incarnations of Burned Children” was a gift: an immaculate 1,100-word prose poem that had the stature of a classic fable. It seemed as if it were that had always existed. Scalding water from an overturned pot pools in a baby’s diaper, and the mother and father don’t know the cause of the—possibly fatal?—trauma. The parents’ attempts at rescue only cause more pain, and they become unwitting accomplices in the harm of their child, for this is what human beings do in David’s fiction: they fail each other and themselves. The story gutted me then, and now that I am a parent, it destroys me in a whole new way.
In the Land of Men Page 26