“You know the answer to that,” he said. “Because with the students, I have the power.”
Power, yes. Power was always the motivator, for everyone.
I asked him if he could get out of the interview.
He replied that various people in his professional life were insisting he submit to “the Germans” and added a frantic “I’m just trying to be the good little author!”
The stance was as it ever was, a responsibility swerve—he was powerless, a martyr at the hands of the publicity machine. You’d often hear things like “Some lady wants to take my picture, and they’re saying I have to do it, for reasons I don’t understand.” He’d been sick during a leg of the tour for the hardcover of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and was forbidden by doctors to fly; hence, he had to drive. There was no small amount of complaining about those individuals who, by dint of their power over him, had made him accede to the automotive tour.
I wasn’t the ideal audience for any of his bellyaching about fame and its miseries. Shouldn’t he just drop out of the game if he really were such a renegade? Shouldn’t he be consistent in his opposition to . . . whatever it was he was opposing? (Said Pindar: “Learn what you are and be such.”) It always seemed so clear to me how David should manage life upon the public stage: vanish, like Prospero, into thin air. He’d get more work done that way, and, as an added bonus, he’d have less to complain about. My view (he never listened to me) was always that he gave too much away. Why would someone with so sensitive a psyche want to submit to the rigors, self-chosen though they were, of being perpetually on display? Celebrity seemed too potent an elixir, too full of glittering seductions that corrupted artistic talent. Stay away from it. Protect your gift. You already have all the celebrity anyone could possibly need. You are too comfortable in the temple. Disappear. Become a ghost. I cited the well-worn examples of two of our best literary recluses: Salinger and Harper Lee.
“O-K,” David said, “but don’t you believe there’s at least a degree of mental illness involved in both those cases?”
“Yeah, probably,” I conceded.
“Adrienne,” he said, “can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, David?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’d be a terrible agent?”
THE PROCESS OF CUTTING “OBLIVION” WAS LIKE SCULPTING WITH A dental tool. The sentences and paragraphs were so long, the language-thickets so dense, that our only real option was to reduce the digressions within the sentences themselves. Issues with that: (1) many of the digressions in early parts of the story foreshadowed what was to come; (2) the foreshadowed material, when it appeared later in the story, couldn’t be cut; (3) the narrator’s voice becomes more occluded and digressive as the story progresses, and any reduction in the occlusion and digression at the start would have made the occlusion and digression at the end feel unbalanced; (4) the occlusion and digression of the narrator’s voice at the end couldn’t be reduced because of the convergence of the various plot elements in the later parts of the story.
Over a series of weeks, months, we analyzed the story sentence by sentence, as if hyper-magnifying with a jeweler’s loupe. Items: David noted that he was using a backslash () instead of the normal virgule for things like “and/or” and wondered why I hadn’t queried it. Evidently, he was making a computer systems gag (should I have known this?). And, hello, I espied a consistency error: in an early draft, the Saab makes one appearance as an Audi. (“Please don’t tell anyone,” David, always the perfectionist, said. “Dead man’s talk.”) Saffron is mentioned a few times in the story, and when I noted to David that in ancient Rome saffron was associated with prostitutes (a symbol of a character’s sexual abuse), he wrote that I was his Fantasy Reader (again with the “fantasy reader,” but capitalizing it this time for ironic intent). I told him that he was completely full of it. “But you’re my Platonic ideal of everything,” he said on a call, charmingly, seductively, jeeringly, because his every utterance always had a converse, of course.
In the lines of dialogue at the very end of the story, the husband seems to be trying to wake the wife, who is disoriented and perhaps still in a lucid dream. There seem to be two separate speakers—husband and wife—but no dialogue tags are given. In my notes on the story, next to each line of dialogue, I jotted which character seemed to be speaking when.
In response, David wrote, throwing me completely off the trail, “Why can’t both voices be [the] narrator?” (Similarly, he had suggested to me that the narrator of “Good Old Neon” is perhaps not the apparent speaker, or the character named David Wallace, or the ghost, but all three.)
“Do you think it’s too much like the ending of Dallas?” David asked. “It’s all a dream?”
Oh, but surely this couldn’t be right: the story was all a dream? Surely David was not going to offer me the actual solution to anything. That wasn’t the David I knew.
“This story is my hate letter to Bloomington,” David declared.
Wait, where was Bloomington in “Oblivion”? It’s more New Jersey than Illinois, more dream than reality.
“Well, let’s see,” David said. “There’s golf, there’s the insurance industry . . .”
He went on to say, with who knows how many different layers of irony, self-mockery, and self-contempt, that he’d been trying to get himself fired from his teaching job (although he had given notice the year before).
His love for teaching was one of the purest and most beautiful things about him (but in truth maybe one of the worst things for his own writing), and I always delighted in hearing him talk about how much time and thought he put into his responses to each student’s piece. I was also fascinated by the idiosyncratic high-low nature of the various course syllabi he’d share with me on the phone. What lucky students. He was a mentor to so many people. But by his account to me, he’d again crossed lines he shouldn’t have—some pretty bright, sacred lines—and had again taken advantage of various situations and persons he should not have taken advantage of. He was now, he said, close to being tarred, feathered, and run out of town.
For four years I’d been attempting to accept David’s paradoxes, his self-contractions, and his darkness—the whole rich Wallace bouquet. I loved David, and I wanted him to be better than he was. I’d try to remind myself that no one is ever clear in moral terms, and so who, really, was I to judge? I was a wayward creature myself—I was haughty (and would grow haughtier still), I had a nasty temper, I was too enticed by material luxuries (David, snooping through my closet: “You’ve heard of Marx, I presume?”). I was obstinate, solitary, and self-protective, and I could be dismissive of those who did not live up to my own standard of perfection. I knew I was cold. I knew I was inscrutable. I was not a great friend. I waited an unconscionably long time to return David’s call when he left a message saying that his grandfather had died. These sins were just the beginning. I didn’t have clean hands, either.
One of my most common refrains to David: “How can someone so smart be so dumb?” He’d give one of the small, dark chuckles so characteristic of him, say he’d hoped he was becoming more mature but now had to admit that he was not. It was always so baffling. He wanted to change. He tried to change, I guess. And of course people do evolve and grow (even if David’s characters do not)—what’s the point in believing otherwise? Why even get up in the morning if we’re stuck with who we were yesterday? The drive to surpass the self produced, after all, the pyramids, Beethoven’s Ninth, the Chartres Cathedral, and Infinite Jest. Those are but four examples.
David was laceratingly self-aware, extraterrestrially intelligent, intuitive, empathetic, and sensitive; he was obsessed with the notion of self-improvement and had a deep sense of right and wrong. He knew everything in the world there was to know. But he seemed fundamentally unable to correct his behavior or to manage his anger. Whenever he’d tell me about some bad act he’d committed, whenever David’s dark double again escaped its box, I would often reach the following conclus
ion: he was far crazier than even I knew, or he was actually just a bad guy. I had a copy of my mother’s old DSM-III and spent a lot of time trying to work out a diagnosis for him, but a clinical manual of mental disorders would never provide any of the answers I needed. David was not summarizable. He was not someone who got “solved.”
Questions:
Who looks to the artist’s life for moral guidance anyway?
How much of the human condition do the more stringently self-righteous among us believe we’re exempt from?
What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?
I’ve got no answers for you. I do know that Peter Shaffer wrote that “goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.” Charles Dickens destroyed the lives of everyone close to him, his family most of all. Same goes for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Beethoven. Mozart and his once beloved sister were estranged at the time of his death. Ingmar Bergman slept with nearly every actress he cast in his movies, and he made a lot of movies (most of them exquisite masterpieces). During a rehearsal for G. F. Handel’s opera Ottone, when a well-known Italian soprano refused to sing her opening aria, Handel screamed, “I know well that you are a real she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub!” He picked the soprano up by the waist and threatened to throw her out an open second-story window.
What, you thought creative geniuses were pleasant people? You thought you could be friends with them, maybe? Sure, have at it. Enjoy.
Famous story, as recounted in Gioachino Rossini’s letters: When Rossini, age thirty, visited Beethoven—in his fifties, nearly deaf, and utterly alone—at his squalid apartment in Vienna, Rossini was shocked to encounter such a haunted, desolate figure. (Rossini later wrote that no portraits managed to capture the sadness of Beethoven’s face.) The two composers chatted, and Beethoven complimented The Barber of Seville; Rossini in turn expressed his profound appreciation and gratitude for Beethoven’s superb artistry and genius, for the joy and delight his work had brought to the world.
Beethoven sighed and answered Rossini with these words: “Oh! Un infelice.”
Oh! Unhappy me.
I’d like to think that I know enough about people to understand that everyone drives you crazy but that you love everyone, too. In the words of Yoko Ono: “It’s a wonder that we don’t make love to every single person we meet,” to which I would add: it’s a wonder that we don’t also punch every single person we meet. “Is he good?” “Is he bad?” The answer, about pretty much everyone, is: “Yes, he’s both.”
THE LAST TIME I SAW DAVID, WE HAD LUNCH AT A GREEK RESTAURANT IN midtown. I was running a few minutes late, and he was waiting for me out on the sidewalk, in front of the entrance. (Why hadn’t he just gone inside like a normal person? Anyone else would have gone inside.)
I waved to him from across the street and received a flat palm of recognition in response. As I approached, he held his hand out at a stalwart ninety-degree angle for a shake. This was totally unacceptable and I demanded an embrace. We were finally going to put aside our whole complex emotional history and emerge as friends—and as editor and writer. It was going to be easy, so easy, finally. Why wouldn’t it be easy? Life was easy. Together, we have each other and nature and time. It is as simple as that.
“You really are late,” David said. “I thought you weren’t going to show up.”
How could he not have known that he was one of the most important people in the world to me?
He was wearing a sage-green short-sleeved button-down shirt, white pleated pants, and bright white sneakers. I swear to God, he had the weirdest style of anyone I’ve ever known. I asked him once why he only rarely shaved (it would have been nice to actually really see that handsome face for once), and he said that if he shaved, the world would know how bad his skin was.
“Do you get taller every time I see you?” he asked as we went through the restaurant.
“Always,” I said.
We got seated at the table and David opened the menu immediately. Wordlessly, he started studying the page. I felt an awful dilution in my chest. He did not want to look at me. It was possible that he did not even want to be there.
“Did you know that it’s rude to open the menu as soon as you sit down?” I asked lightly.
“It is?” David replied, glancing up at me through his glasses. “I’ve never heard that. Why?”
“Because the other person thinks you’re more interested in food than you are in them.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. I apologize.”
He closed the menu and pushed it aside.
“You look in no way tubercular,” he said. “I was expecting a concentration camp victim.”
A few weeks before, I’d been as sick as I’d ever been in my entire life with, somehow, walking pneumonia. David and I had spoken a couple of times when I was out of the office (although I was in bed and had little to contribute to the conversation), and he’d kept going on about how effective zinc was to combat colds.
“I was worried about you,” he said.
He was? I wasn’t so sure I believed that.
I asked how he was enjoying California. He said he liked his new school, Pomona—the people there were nice, and a nice house had been rented for him. The place wore its insecurities on its sleeve, though: there was a Harvard Avenue, a Columbia Avenue, an Amherst even, if I could believe it. “The best thing,” he said, “is that they know I don’t show up for any meetings.” He offered that he’d been sleeping fairly well lately and had been trying to stick to a 7:30 wake-up schedule. He complained that blurb-hunting publishers had already found him—he had been hoping he’d be able to hide out for at least a year without anyone knowing where he was. He valiantly listed names of various people he felt he had to dodge on this NYC trip. And was he even going to be able to survive the insipid California weather? He’d never even minded winters in the Midwest, as a matter of fact.
“And do you know what happens when your car breaks down in Illinois in February?”
David was one of the few people I’ve ever known who actually pronounced the first “r” in February: February.
“Oh, I definitely do,” I said. You always feel like a character in a Jack London story in February in the Midwest.
“You die,” he said. “I miss home.”
“Bloomington is home?” I asked.
“It is,” he said. “Always will be.”
A couple of months before, he’d given me a report about a going-away party: “I will have you know that eighty people showed up for it,” he’d said. “That’s right, eight-zero.”
“Sounds like quite the party,” I’d said.
“I felt like Sally Field—‘you like me, you really like me!’ I always assume that no one ever likes me,” he’d said.
I’d then found myself reassuring him, as you often did, that he was actually a kind, gentle, charming, even sometimes delightful person with an uncommonly sweet nature. These were objective facts, except when they weren’t, and you were sure that everything you’d ever believed about him was wrong—when his many paradoxes, self-contractions, and self-involutions twisted into a meta-maze, and somehow you were the one trapped in it.
He paused and considered me from across the table.
“So,” David said. “That was the Miramax guy?”
That morning, when I was showering, David had called my apartment to confirm lunch. Joe answered the phone. Joe worked then as a director of development at Miramax—and if you want a picture of what it was like to be a director of development at Miramax back in the day, just imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever. That boot was Harvey Weinstein’s. (And that face, because I was living the drama right alongside Joe, often, by extension, felt like mine.)
“Yes,” I said.
The atmosphere had grown suddenly spiky.
“He sounds like a very nice guy.”
“He is,” I said.
“Are you going to get married?”
I
told David that things were going very well but also that we were both only thirty years old, so who knew. But the truth was that everything was so nice and good—and safe—that Joe and I felt married already.
David regarded me coldly from across the table.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
This was a question David had never thought to ask me before. Had he ever thought about my happiness? Was he in fact actually thinking about my happiness now? Multiple motives. There were always multiple motives.
“I am,” I said.
“Really,” he replied, staring at me with hard eyes.
There are different levels of knowing people, and David’s inappropriately penetrating black stare did not fall within the parameters of our present situation.
“I believe you,” he said slowly and evenly.
The game was to see who’d look away first.
“How did you meet him?”
“At a party,” I said.
“What party?”
“A book party.”
I always lost these stare-downs. I often worried if it was because I never quite wanted to look at him directly.
“Fascinating,” he said without affect. “And let me guess: you were working the room and he followed you around like a puppy.”
There was that awful dilution in my chest again.
“How’s your family?” I asked.
“They’re about ready to disown me because I haven’t produced issue yet,” David replied.
I thought: You know what? I’m going to have a glass of wine. I summoned the server and ordered a Pinot Grigio, although I knew that drinking in front of David was appallingly inconsiderate. He shouldn’t have had to be around alcohol. As a recovering addict, the maintenance of his sobriety was the central component of his life.
“Do you know that I’ve never seen you drink before?” he asked.
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” he said. “How long have we been friends? How many years has it been?”
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