But in my view, I was underthinking it. I was underthinking everything.
Said David of the “Aging Woman” issue: “When I saw it, I was imagining your face turning various shades of pink and purple, and I started laughing really hard.”
Say what you want to about David, but he appreciated the manifold nuances, the many crippling paradoxes and challenges, of my particular job situation. He got what drove me nuts about it.
He had, he offered, the ideal title for a memoir he predicted I’d write someday: Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?
This was already the title of a novel by the experimental writer Cris Mazza—who, incidentally, devised the term “chick lit,” though in her meaning, the phrase was meant to be ironic.
But Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? was better than The Sorrow and the Pity, I reckoned. (And Humiliated and Insulted was taken, too.)
“God, it must be so weird to be a woman,” David added.
But had it ever really occurred to me before that moment that the term “sexual harassment” could actually be applied to me? The challenges and struggles of my professional life, such as they were, collapsed into that one unpleasant category: sexual harassment. Jesus. I wanted to be better than that. I wanted life to be temples and monuments; I wanted the Adagio of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, Thomas Jefferson’s letters to John Adams. But what I usually got was just so discouragingly earthbound . . . no, body-bound: “Is she a ‘big’ girl?” and “Veal? You are veal.” I wanted to be pure reason, pure intellect. I wanted to be pure essence. (I wanted to be a brain in a vat, basically. I didn’t even want to have a body.) I wished I didn’t have to think about boring things like sexual harassment.
“You’re sort of stuck,” David said.
I was twenty-eight and stuck.
I knew he was right, but I needed him to tell me why.
“Not only is it too late for you to go to grad school now,” he said, “but it’s also almost too late for you to get any other job.”
“But I don’t want to be stuck,” I said.
“I don’t think you appreciate how well I know you,” he replied.
Did he? I was never so sure about that. But it was OK. I didn’t even mind too much. Eventually you understand that that’s just the way life goes: everyone is always getting us wrong, but we’re always getting everyone else wrong, too, so I guess you can say that it all evens out in the end. He would use some vague idea of me, a phantasm unconnected to reality, for an unnamed character, the executive intern, in his story “The Suffering Channel.” The character, last seen at the gym, is killed off in a sentence: “She had ten weeks to live”—dead, along with the other vain, frivolous young women who’d wasted their lives working meaningless magazine jobs, back when meaningless magazine jobs were something to even have an opinion about, in the dying days of the golden age of print.
“And I know,” he said, “that you’re never going to let anyone else tell you what to read, or what to think, ever again.”
I asked David to explain to me why it was that magazines were always just so interminably “magazine-y.” Why was everything of the same formulaic template, and why did everything have to be put through the same grinder, as he had so memorably put it?
“It’s a question of stimulation versus narcosis,” David said. “And it’s not clear how much you can fuck with that.”
“Sometimes I just feel so inconsistent, you know?”
I wanted to be engaged in meaningful work. I wanted to be a fully integrated person, and I wanted to feel that there was purpose to my work, to my life—which, if we are to believe Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (which we must, because everything we understand about the human spirit is there), is all anyone ever wants. We all make compromises in our jobs. But how many compromises was an endurable number?
“We are all corporate products whose jobs are to be dishonest,” David said. “We lie in order to capture a certain audience, but that’s the price of being alive.”
The one thing I knew was that I did not want to live a life of ambivalence and tension. It now seemed so very difficult indeed not to become the sort of person you didn’t want to become.
THERE WERE ONLY TWO NEWS STORIES THAT VENAL SUMMER OF 2001: the scandal involving Lizzie Grubman, a publicist/socialite/party gal who’d allegedly shouted, “Fuck you, white trash!” before backing up her Mercedes SUV into a line of revelers at a Hamptons nightclub (the Conscience Point Inn; I’ve always enjoyed that detail), and a significantly less amusing scandal involving Congressman Gary Condit and a missing intern, Chandra Levy.
Then 9/11 happened. Then the chyrons started running across the bottoms of the TV news screens—and haven’t left since. We were shell-shocked, we felt vulnerable and exposed, as if we’d been shorn a few layers of skin. We found that in our shell shock we were formal and restrained, but we were all joined in the same thoughts: There is a profound darkness in human nature; there is something deeply unresolved and malign at the center of people.
“We don’t make time or space for grief,” as Hilary Mantel has said. “The world tugs us along, back into its harsh rhythm before we are ready for it, and for the pain of loss doctors can prescribe a pill.” The world of the practical wins because it always does—because the practical, the quotidian, is the essence of life. We didn’t know what else to do, so we did what we always do: we got back to work. In doing so, we found that we were all everyday-minded midwesterners at heart: let’s get on with it—let’s get back to the prosaic, back to the routine.
Seated at our desks, finally, several days later, a week, we were confronted with our prop telephones, prop computers, all of us thinking in some vague way about how vexed and strange it all was, about how nothing would ever be the same again—but that wasn’t deep enough. That didn’t get at the center of the mystery at all.
Finally, someone at work made a low joke, a low joke about the real world: “You know who the luckiest man in America is right now? Gary Condit.”
David liked to say, paraphrasing Lewis Hyde, that irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage, but in this instance I will respectfully disagree. Irony, this time, was just what we needed. Irony was a sign of life.
I HAD NOT EVEN KNOWN THAT I HAD NO IDEA HOW TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP until I met the man who would become my husband. I knew it was love when Joe said, “You’re not going anywhere.” (I didn’t even know that I was trying to go anywhere until Joe pointed it out. Had I, early on, been trying to get out of the relationship with him, a man so obviously perfect for me in every way? Had I always been trying to get out of every relationship? Was I actually that messed up?) For my thirtieth birthday, Joe took me to see a cabaret show at the Café Carlyle, because he understood, even when we were just beginning, that all I’ve ever wanted to be is Elaine Stritch. So of course Joe was the man I would marry. (There were many more reasons to love him, of course.)
When I mentioned to David that Joe and I had moved in together, David said, “Well, make sure to give him my love,” in a sneering tone that I did not appreciate. But that was OK. David and I were friends. With David, you took the good, you took the bad. That was the way it worked. Those were the rules of the game. He turned forty, writing in a letter that he was now very, very old.
“For what it’s worth,” he said on a call around that time, “when you get to be my age, you start to feel that culture is passing you by.”
He’d accepted a new teaching job, at a college first identified to me only as a small liberal arts school in California. He was going to stay in Bloomington for one more year to teach, but mainly he needed to stay put so he could finally get some work done. The previous year, he’d been to a retreat in France, for the purpose of (as he told me) clearing his head about work. When David talked about “work,” it was always understood that he meant the novel. Work was always the novel.
On a call: Dare I ask how the novel was going now?
“It’s turning out to be my Finnegans Wake, unfort
unately.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Yeah, no shit. If you saw it now, the experience would be like going through my laundry and examining the pee stains on my underwear.”
He said that at the rate he was proceeding, the novel would probably end up being about four thousand pages long.
“I’m going to need your help with it at some point,” he said.
When I think about it, David and I almost never spoke about his nonfiction work (which, as Tom Bissell correctly notes in his excellent foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, “got better and funnier—the funniest since Twain—while the fiction got darker and more theoretically severe”), except when he’d mention the various feuds he was having with assorted magazine editors, or when he’d say that he’d taken on such-and-such magazine’s assignment for the money. The nonfiction always came more easily to him than the fiction; thus it always seemed that David (Calvinist, self-punishing, school of hard knocks) did not respect his talent for it.
Throughout the years, David would say to me of some rival fiction writers, “I worry that his prose is better than mine.”
ME (WEARY): “It’s not, David.”
HIM: “OK. Good.”
I’d think: Were we really having this conversation again? How could we even have been having this conversation? I knew, he knew, we all knew, that he had no equal. He outclassed everyone.
From time to time, he’d send me manuscripts of in-progress stories for notes. “I really need your help on something,” he’d say when he’d ask me to read a piece. “I’ve lost all perspective.” And then, because he trusted no one, because he believed there was global interest in everything he did, because he was a total pain in the neck, he would inevitably write the admonition “FYEO” in a note included with the story and instruct me to destroy the manuscripts after they’d been read and discussed.
A menace and an eerie somnolence hung over the ones I saw: “Good Old Neon,” “Mr. Squishy,” “Another Pioneer,” and “Oblivion.” These pieces were darker even than the stories in Brief Interviews: all examinations of minds on the brink, and the characters again entombed, though this time the men were not hideous manipulators but emasculated emotional isolates. All the stories seemed part of the same general project, part of the same cycle, but I couldn’t figure out how they all fit together. Again, I worried about him. I told him that “Good Old Neon,” in which the supposed narrator (though the narrator could also be the narrator’s ghost or also a character named David Wallace) is so tortured by the fear that his life has been a preposterous farce that he commits suicide by driving his sports car into a bridge abutment, was too upsetting for me to talk about with him.
“Is it any good?” he’d say, after sending me something to read, anxious as an undergrad. He was always candid about what of his fiction he felt was weak. (He wasn’t so sure about “Another Pioneer,” for example.) While it is true that I regarded David not merely as a great writer but as one of the greatest and most uncompromising artists of all time, it was important not to bow before his writing as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. I suppose that the overarching feedback I’d usually give him could be summarized as: it’s overegged, David; pull back; tone it down, please, for the love of God, too much. As I saw it, my job as a reader, and as his friend, was to try to help save him from himself.
Example: In the draft I saw of “Mr. Squishy,” a creepy, “thunderingly unexceptional” (I love that) focus-group facilitator obsessed with the idea of injecting ricin into a brand of prepackaged snack cakes fantasizes about having what is described in the draft I saw as “moist, slapping, semiviolent” intercourse with a married coworker. I had a major objection to the adjective “semiviolent.”
“You’re gross,” I said.
“I guess you’d know,” David replied.
“The ‘semiviolent’ is so horrible,” I said. “Ugly and rape-y.”
“I didn’t think of that,” he said. “But you’re right, sweetie. Thank you.”
(He did cut the awful “semiviolent” from the book version of “Mr. Squishy.”)
I would have loved to publish any of the stories he sent me to read (even “Another Pioneer”), but all but “Oblivion” had already appeared in literary journals by the time I saw them. And there was a problem with “Oblivion” for Esquire: it was thirty thousand words long.
My strategy these days was to annoy Granger so much when I wanted to buy a story that he would eventually just give in so that he wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. Granger did let me acquire “Oblivion” for Esquire, but it would have to be cut, by a lot, like by almost half. But even at fifteen thousand words, it would still be far longer than any fiction we’d published since we’d been at the magazine. We had options, though. Maybe we’d run the truncated version of the story as a folio insert in one issue, or maybe we’d break it in two halves, serializing it over the course of two months. We’d figure it out.
The sentences in “Oblivion” can run hundreds of words, and the paragraphs can run pages. As in all of David’s work, everything in “Oblivion” feeds into everything else, echoing, proliferating, expanding—becoming something else entirely . . . or else replicating self-similarly, and we would have to work out a way to compress it without severing any of its many starfish limbs. David was ready and willing to embark with me on the process of cutting the story. We would solve the puzzle. Of course we would.
And it was just so thrilling to think that I could bring this story into the magazine. “Oblivion” is one of the best stories David ever wrote, and I adore and admire it so much that I still can’t even believe it exists or that I had the chance to burrow into it with him as deeply as I did.
“I understand now why you still work there,” David said. “They listen to you.”
They did? Well, I wasn’t so sure about that. When I’d arrived at Esquire four years before, we were publishing, say, ten feature-length short stories per year; now it was maybe half that. (And when I quit, when Rome was burning, when the empire was in free fall, the number was . . . what? Two? One? Wait, was the magazine even publishing fiction at all? For how many more years would the magazine even continue to exist?)
Superficially, “Oblivion” is a self-spiraling interior monologue centered on a marital conflict about snoring, but underneath is a veiled story of sexual abuse. It’s a hard, surreal, blackly funny (very Lynchian) piece and is yet another grim assessment of the possibility of human connection. The wife, Hope, seems to believe that her husband’s snoring is keeping her awake, but the husband insists that the wife is dreaming the whole thing. The narrator of the story seems to be the husband, Randall, a pedantic, golf-obsessed twit who uses phrases like “a mensa et thoro” and who eye-rollingly sets off words in quotation marks, but the final dialogue seems to suggest that the story has been the wife’s dream; the character we’d believed was the narrator turns out not to be the narrator at all, and the whole story has been (probably) the wife’s unconscious processing of her family trauma through an appropriated voice that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
“Oblivion” wouldn’t be scheduled for months, and David and I had a long time to work on edits. We started the editorial process when he was still in Illinois and ended it after he’d moved to California. He told me he’d written the story during a six-month period when he couldn’t sleep and believed he was losing his mind.
DAVID WAS SAYING THAT THE PARIS REVIEW HAD ASKED HIM TO DO AN interview. He didn’t want to do it (but he did want to do it, too), and he was hemming and hawing and making a big dramatic deal out of the whole thing. He should do it. He knew he should do it. He’d always wanted to have a Paris Review interview someday (what writer doesn’t share this dream?), he said, but now here it was, and he just couldn’t bring himself to participate. Or was it, he wondered, that he didn’t want to seem like the kind of person who wanted to participate?
But he did want to do it. (Correction: no, he d
idn’t.)
David wondered if, instead of the interview, he could send The Paris Review a short-story submission, as a kind of trade. He was big on quid pro quo (QPQ, as he’d have it) exchanges of this sort. Always looking for an angle, that guy; he always had something up his sleeve.
But then again, he really should do the interview. Everyone was telling him he should do the interview.
“Geez, don’t do it if you don’t want to,” I said cavalierly, yet sensibly.
He could have his Paris Review interview later. There would be time. David was only forty years old. There would be so much more time.
This was not the response David was hunting around for.
“You do know that it’s a huge honor to be asked, don’t you?” he said. “You do know what a thing it is for a writer to have one of these, right?”
I assured him that I did understand. The interviews in The Paris Review elevated conversation to the highest art; they were always exactly what you wanted in human speech: talk about temples and monuments, talk about why it is that life is so vexed and mysterious. Human voices never provided what you wanted. Instead, conversation was “Is she a ‘big’ girl?” and “Veal? You are veal.”
(And David didn’t do The Paris Review interview.)
At a later date, after he had moved to California, he was asked to film an interview for German TV. As he described it to me, the taping was supposed to take place over two whole days. “Do you want to know what will happen?” David asked. “First, I’ll start drooling. Second, I’ll projectile vomit. Third, my brain will explode.”
David was great at talking and great at thinking (or maybe, actually, he was bad at thinking, since thinking always became paralysis?), and he was the most seasoned of public speakers—so what was the problem exactly? I asked him to explain to me why it was that he hated doing interviews but he enjoyed teaching.
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