I wrote to David to say how much I loved and admired the story and to tell him that we wanted to publish it. “Incarnations” was an easy sell at the magazine. I’m not going to lie: its brevity helped.
Throughout the years, David would leave for me, as he did with other editors, ramblingly amusing office voice-mail messages, delivered safely in the middle of the night, when there was no possibility he’d actually have to talk to anybody. Whenever I’d amble into work in the morning and see the red voice-mail light on my phone (no calls in the publishing industry happen before 10:00 A.M. at least), I always knew the message was from David. (From him I also learned that the voice-mail system would cut a message off after two minutes; thus, David would deliver a multipronged series of two-minute messages.) In response to my note to him that we wanted “Incarnations,” David left a set of those 3:00 A.M. voice-mail messages and the typical sign-off—“Call me any time. I’m in and out all day.” He again provided his new number. Yeah, that was the way it was so much of the time—beckoned, yet kept at arm’s length.
Unless he was expecting a scheduled call from you, he rarely answered his home phone, and you’d have to babble into his answering machine until he picked up.
“I had to write you something you wouldn’t reject,” David said.
How tenuous, how wholly tenuous, our relationship always was.
“I needed an excuse to talk to you,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
“I never have as much fun talking to anyone as I have with you,” he said.
A question I often had: Was I granting David, who of course had an unusually wide skill set and who was so very extraordinary in so many ways—here was a man who wrote some of the best sentences in the English language, a true sui generis phenomenon, etc.—all sorts of allowances I wouldn’t have given anyone else? Because otherwise I was pretty tough on people.
“I miss you,” he said.
All I’d wanted from him for the past year was for him to say that he missed me, and now I had it. He had said it.
I caved immediately.
“I miss you, too,” I said. It probably shouldn’t have been as easy as it always was to pick up and become friends again with David. The fact: I was never really ever able to stay mad at him for long. Looking back on it, that was probably a mistake. “So what are we going to do about it?”
He was coming to New York, he said.
So now here he was again, setting the terms of our reality. Always David’s terms, always David’s reality. Of course it was.
He asked about my pet rabbit.
“I’m sure that everyone who sees you walking Lulu outside on a leash is both overwhelmed and impressed,” he said.
“You are always getting me wrong, David,” I said lightly. “I have never walked my rabbit outside on a leash.”
(Although I did take Lulu with me on airplanes sometimes, and it probably was quite the spectacle to behold. You could actually take your rabbits with you through airport metal detectors pre-9/11.)
“Oh,” he replied. “Sorry.”
Should I remind him how incredibly unhappy he’d made me? Should I tell him that I woke up crying nearly every morning from August 1999, when the dread Snidely Whiplash entered my world, through November, when we finally patched things up? I had a terrific run of grievances, but I mentioned only one of them.
“You sent me a really mean letter,” I said.
“Oh, that was like fifteen things ago,” David valiantly replied.
That letter was not “fifteen things ago” for me. But he was thinking of himself, as always, only of himself. (It was also really just so fabulous to know the number on which I fell in the Wallace schema. That was just great.)
“Not a good answer,” I said.
A pause.
David asked if the guy—that guy, the writer—and I had broken up yet. (He just had to get that “yet” in there.)
We had.
“I knew it,” he said. “It was like watching an egg timer.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “What can you do?”
I mean, what did he expect me to say? It wasn’t any of his business, actually.
“You sure seem to have a real cavalier attitude toward relationships, don’t you, Adrienne?”
David was incorrect. I wanted to be in love and I wanted someone to love me. But it now seemed just about impossible to get that balance right. I’d believed that David and I had something approaching that balance, but I was wrong. I was just starting to wonder if anyone could ever love me.
“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about something,” David said. “Do you have incredible four-hours-long conversations with all of the writers you edit?”
Words on the page have always been my safe space. When I look at words on a piece of paper—even and especially David’s—and try to solve them, I am finally in control. And all I really wanted to do was dig into “Incarnations of Burned Children” like some little burrowing animal looking for its hiding place.
I always felt that I could ask David anything about his work—dumb question, smart question, whatever. I actually always found him to be rather transparent as an artist, by which I mean there was nothing I at least felt I couldn’t ask him about his craft, process, motives, etc. I would ask him what he meant by something he wrote, and he would tell me, pretty much.
“Incarnations,” I told him, felt as if it had emerged into the world whole, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. Had it originated in an anecdote he had heard or read?
David claimed he did know a couple whose baby had been burned that way—scalding water in a diaper—and added that he had been thinking about using the anecdote as part of a backstory for a character in the novel he’d been working on—the mysterious thing I’d been hearing about in starts and stops for two years now.
“Wait,” I said. “There’s a eunuch in the novel?”
“Possibly,” he said.
“Weird.”
The mind boggled.
So: How was the novel going?
Not well, he said, not well at all. He remarked that he was having a hard time distinguishing what was irritating in it from what was not.
But David was such an insanely productive person and had such a puritanical work ethic, so it was always unclear to me how seriously to take any of his novel-related fussing and fretting. Mostly, I’d just think: There’s Wallace being Wallace again. I’d just think: There’s Mr. Negativity. But my main observation then was that his talk about the novel did not develop; there was no progression; it was the same old record, the same old loop, over and over, like a Yule log video. And I never got the sense that he was having much fun with it.
By contrast, he did tend to reminisce about the composition of Infinite Jest, though mostly these stories were centered on the conditions in whatever lachrymose little room such-and-such sequence was written in—e.g., the story went that when he was writing the section in which the character Hal Incandenza describes his initial unconscious reaction upon entering a suicide scene (the family patriarch has cooked his head in a microwave), David found the line “golly something smells delicious” so funny that he laughed so hard, and for so long, that the person in the apartment next door had to bang on the wall and yell at him to shut up. But he’d also talk about how much energy he had when he was writing Infinite Jest. He’d talk about how much younger he’d been then.
“You’re still so young, David,” I’d say.
“No, I’m not,” he’d reply. “I used to be a very young writer. Now I’m a very old writer.”
Sometimes you’d also feel compelled to remind David that he’d already written the novel that had changed the world. How many of the hundred billion human beings who’ve lived on this planet have actually ever made any kind of real contribution to civilization? You changed our language, David. What else could ever be required of any person’s life? You’ve done it. You wrote Infinite Jest. Hang up your hat and call it a career alread
y. Enough. Nunc dimittis.
“Yeah,” David would say. “Well.”
What an odd and hellish existence it must have been for him, to know that he’d changed the world, but also to know that changing the world wasn’t enough. But it was better than the alternative, I suppose, for someone like David. Alexander the Great wept when there were no lands left to conquer, after all.
And where “Incarnations” went emotionally, I said, felt very new. Was the new novel similarly, uh . . . raw?
He said that he’d been trying to evolve from what he called his “annoying verbose persona” to something new and again mentioned, as he had a couple of years before, the Raymond Carver story “Cathedral” as a model. (“Cathedral,” by the way, was not published in Esquire, alas. Lish was gone by the time the story ran in The Atlantic in 1981 and was then Carver’s editor at Knopf.)
Superficially, maybe it’s hard to see much Carver in “Incarnations” or anywhere in David’s maximalist fictional world—he railed against catatonic Carver wannabes in his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” for example—but he and Carver were kindred spirits in so many ways. For one, both always took the side of the little guy—the marginal, the heartbroken, the left behind. In the ending of “Cathedral,” the narrator, an inarticulate man, a man prosaic from the ground up (an idiot savant, almost), draws a picture of a cathedral for a blind man. The narrator’s eyes are closed as he draws, and the blind man places his hands over the narrator’s hands and follows along. They are two people communicating deeply, without words. “It was like nothing else in my life up to now,” says the narrator, for whom the act of drawing a church without seeing it, and with another human being, inspires feelings of awe and of hope. It is a transcendently hopeful ending.
David said, “I want to give us something that makes us happy we speak this language.”
IN THOSE YEARS, WHENEVER DAVID WOULD PLAN A TRIP TO NEW YORK, I’d get a series of late-night voice-mail messages, and we’d set up a plan to “break bread,” as he had it. He was coming to New York for the Harper’s 150th anniversary party. We’d see each other at the party, and there was also a plan to get together during the trip.
The party was held in a majestic room at Grand Central, now a European-inspired upmarket food hall. Who knows how many people were there that night. Three hundred? A thousand? I’m bad with guesstimates like that. I suppose the event was suggested as black tie, but there wasn’t much of a Venn diagram intersection between this particular quadrant of publishing (high prestige, low profit) and formalwear. (David once remarked that I was too quick to make fun of people’s clothes, so I’m going to just stop myself now.)
David was standing with a group of people—writers and editors—some of whom I knew slightly. His hair, I regret to report, was styled in a high man bun. (This occasion also marks my first-ever sighting of a man bun.) He and I saw each other, and I witnessed what appeared to be a full-system collapse: his eyes widened, he looked away from me, and a big strained grin came to his face. With too much enthusiasm, like a bobblehead on a dashboard, David nodded at something someone said. He stood there grinning and nodding, grinning and nodding, the ridiculous man bun bobbing away.
My reflexive response to seeing him, it turned out, was not to go toward him but to turn away. This unforgiving public setting was not perhaps the ideal environment for a rendezvous, and I needed a moment.
Naturally, the DFW routine was working its magic on the assembled group. He sure was a slippery one. He could be the sweetest person in the world, but he also had that addict’s easy charm—he was brilliant at having you believe that you were the only reader whose opinion he really valued, that you were the only writer whose work he really liked, that you were the only person he’d really ever cared about. This light phoniness was a trick you couldn’t help but slightly admire, I supposed—making people question your intentionality at least had the effect of keeping everyone thinking about you. And in the way that readers now feel an ownership of David’s work, his persona, his memory, his legacy, people then were also fiercely possessive of David the man. (Which was exactly the way he wanted it.) I’d observed that even individuals who’d had but an oblique connection to him often seemed to think, to some degree, He’s mine.
Well, let them think that, I thought then in Grand Central. Bra-vo.
Did they know that David was not to be trusted and that he in turn trusted no one? Had they considered how much of the act was real, and how much of it was prop furniture, frayed rug and peeling paint, cardboard and plastic?
I was thinking: Let his bullshit work on everyone else.
I was thinking: He always gets what he wants from everyone—especially women—but he’s not going to get that from me.
Maybe ten seconds had passed when I turned around.
David was gone. He’d left the party. He’d fled the scene, slipping out like a ghost. I didn’t hear from him during his trip.
Of course all of my least charitable thoughts about him had been proved true. And again I was reminded: You simply could not believe how ungentlemanly, how socially incompetent, and how cold David could be. You could never get your hopes up that any Marquess of Queensbury rules might be decorously observed—he would always do exactly what he was going to do.
The truth: in order to survive a relationship of any sort with David, you’d better have built up a massive arsenal of internal resources. Because, really, you were completely on your own. Thus it was, and thus it would ever be.
A call from him when he’d returned home.
“I think I saw you at the party and I think we made eye contact,” he said.
“You ‘think’ we made eye contact?” I said. “David, you saw me and you ran away.”
A pause.
“Your interpretation of events is somewhat different from mine.”
Silence upon silences.
“O-K,” I said.
“Well, you looked galactic!” he said.
What on earth was this relationship—or non-relationship?
I told him that he’d hurt my feelings. It was now clear that all this guy could do was bring pain—pain and more pain. Often I’d find myself wishing he’d just go away. But he never did, not entirely.
“Someday when we’re really old,” he said, “we’ll be sitting together in rocking chairs on a porch with our glasses of lemonade, and we’ll hold hands and laugh about the whole Dave and Adrienne saga.”
SOME VERY FANCY WRITERS WON’T ACCEPT ANY EDITS. (PLENTY OF non-fancy writers won’t accept any edits, either—these people always blew me away; as any editor will tell you, the authors who say they don’t need any editing are the ones who need the most.) I’ve worked with writers of varying talent and stature levels, and I can tell you that David was the absolute best one to work with. No one was more playful or more fun. His fiction submissions were always object lessons to other writers about how to do their jobs. The manuscripts were always delivered immaculate and imposingly typo-free (and always in an irksomely microscopic font size) and usually included a note to the copy editors, instructing them to “STET EVERYTHING.” (David’s weird little editorial habits were just the best; I also loved how he would type, penguinlike, his FedEx shipping labels for the most urgent of printed material, and also how he’d both seal and use multiple pieces of tape to keep his envelopes shut, a worst-case-scenarioist as always.)
And yet, as much as a perfectionist and as exacting as David always was about his work, he was also open, engaged, and really incredibly generous with edits. I also appreciated that David, despite everything, took me seriously as a reader, as an editor, and as a thinker, when I had my worries that maybe not too many other people did. (I’ve been condescended to by far lesser men [and women] than David.) I know that various editors’ opinions of him differ, and I certainly appreciate as well as anyone what a nightmare he could be (and he in turn could often be very mean about editors, most of whom were, in his view, always fucking with
his stuff: “I think all he does is masturbate in his office all day,” he said of one), but in my view, he was, professionally, a dream.
Although, looking back on it, I have to admit that I would have been rather blind not to note a mildly erotic component involved in our editorial exchanges: for instance, when he said, after “Incarnations” had closed, that I was his fantasy reader; when he thanked me in a letter for going through the story “so slow & careful”; and when he cryptically said that he wrote the line “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child” for me. I had no response to that one.
In “Incarnations of Burned Children,” the child expresses his pain and terror by the frantic moving of his hands. David and I had some hand logistics discussions—would the hands be there, or there, or there, and for how long? David once remarked to me that his mother, the brilliant writing teacher, had taught him that an action in a piece of writing must be able to be performed physically: Does the written description of the activity track with the real-world movement? The example he used as he stood in front of me then: he pretended to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread. In the draft of “Incarnations,” I believed that there were not enough descriptions of the baby’s hands: in fact, there was only one—“tiny stricken motions”—and it appeared late. I suggested that it be moved earlier. “Nein,” he wrote, but added the very necessary “the toddler still made little fists” early on.
We discussed how the action and the timing of the events in the story needed to be flawless. (He had made an outline to help with exactly that, he said.) In the draft, the hot water collects in the baby’s diaper for three, four minutes, which I believed was too long a period. David reduced the time to one, two minutes—although as he noted to me, the passage of time was the parents’ perception.
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