“Four years,” I said.
“Yes. Four years. It’s been four years.”
We were silent for a few moments.
He mentioned that he’d done a reading with Jonathan Franzen a couple of nights before and had been lustily eyeing Franzen’s pre-reading whiskey. My glass of wine arrived, and David asked about the writer I’d been involved with, because he always did that. He talked about this guy at length. We discussed how it’s incorrect to say that dogs are color blind, but rather that they have red-green color blindness. We talked about Jeffrey Dahmer because why not. David had not known that Dahmer spent the formative years of his childhood in Akron. (It’s true that we do try to keep this quiet.) He said that he’d been drinking a lot of carrot juice lately. He said that the Mexican food in L.A. was really good. I asked him how his novel was going. He responded with the international jack-off gesture. I took the hint and pried no more.
I told David a little bit about the novel I was working on. I didn’t go on about it too much, or at least I really hope I didn’t. (By this point, I’d been around long enough to know that no one wants to hear writers talk about their books, ever.)
“I wonder why you’re telling me this,” he said acidly.
Of course, David could never bring himself to offer me a token show of support or even display any phony interest in my writing. He was too competitive for that. Power. It was all about power. My role was to be of service to his work. I knew he operated this way, of course, but I guess I’d thought that maybe we had a different sort of relationship now.
I’d recently made the very same mistake, by the way, mentioning to another famous (older male) novelist that I was working on a book. (Safety tip: don’t do that.) The old man offered the reply, “Well, even if it’s not very good, it’s so important that you write it.”
These comments stung, but at least they served as a reminder that there is only one honest approach to writing, especially if you are a woman: write as if no one will care (most likely no one will); only when you write for yourself will you be freed from the burden of expectation. A Soviet tank of the spirit. That’s what I would be.
David asked if I wanted to try his chicken entrée. He slid his plate to me. “Please have some,” he said. “It’s yummy.”
The server asked if I wanted another glass of Pinot Grigio. I declined.
“See, this is so incredible to me,” David said, “that you can stop at one glass. I would consume bottles. But you, you are not an addict.”
As we were leaving the restaurant, he asked, “Can you please come with me and drop me off at my hotel, so I don’t have to go all that way alone?”
His hotel was fifteen blocks from the restaurant, but OK.
Outside, David stayed pliantly back on the curb as I set about the task of hailing a taxi. I glanced back at him for just a fractional moment and was struck by a hesitancy in his bearing—he looked timid almost. He could be so weirdly docile . . . but he could be so very domineering and controlling, too. And he was also, of course, a colossus. David was his own mountain. There was never anyone else like him, and there will never be anyone else like him again. As an artist, whom could you even begin to compare him to? Lewis Carroll? Nikolai Gogol? Flannery O’Connor? Edgar Allan Poe, for God’s sake? A freak of nature, a weirdo, an aberration: a genius.
We slid into a taxi and buckled our seat belts.
“You always buckle your seat belt, don’t you?” he asked.
“Always,” I said. “I’m very responsible.”
My sunglasses were hooked onto the collar of my shirt and I made a move to unhook them.
“Don’t put your sunglasses on,” David said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I need to be able to see you.”
Our eyes met. Slowly, he traced a finger up my arm.
“May I touch your face?” he asked.
My breathing was growing uneven. Did he even notice?
“Yes,” I said.
I traced a finger up his arm now. “May I kiss you?” he asked. “Yes,” I said.
The kiss was received, though it should not have been.
What was it about this profoundly self-divided, damaged, sweet, cruel, peculiar man, who was so full of need and yearning, yet so utterly lacking hope and trust?
But it was possible that I, too, had inadequate hope and trust.
“What is it between us?” David whispered into my hair.
His hotel was on a block of Times Square you’d find yourself on only if you’re with someone from out of town. He and I stood facing each other on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. Everything was held in suspension.
“You’re welcome to come up,” he said.
Harried Times Square dematerialized and dissolved. The silence fell away in heavy beats, and that’s all there was in the world: David’s eyes and mine.
“I can’t,” I said.
David’s mouth was nearly as expressive as his eyes. That was another thing I always noticed about him.
“OK,” he said.
He turned. The automatic doors opened and received him, and as I watched him walk into the hotel lobby, I was as sure as I’ve ever been about anything that I’d never see him again.
On his flight home, a coffeepot short-circuited and caused a small fire, and he later asked if I’d had something to do with it.
After that, David and I did what we always did: we got back to work. “Oblivion” was still waiting for us. By this point, we’d had quite a lot of practice mentally shoving the eccentricities of the past off to the side and just carrying on. Just proceeding forward. That’s how we did it. That’s who we were. I would forgive him, and he would forgive me, and we would begin again. Don’t even ask me how this was possible. Maybe it shouldn’t have been possible. David accepted, by his own accounting, over 70 percent of my suggested cuts on the story and offered others on his own initiative. We were extremely proud of ourselves. We had done the unthinkable and cut “Oblivion” nearly in half. During the process, David helped me understand, more deeply than I had before, that art is about rigor and precision. He was a perfectionist and a visionary and he made art exactly the way he wanted to, and I loved him for it.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, ESQUIRE KILLED “OBLIVION.” NO REAL EXPLANATION was ever given, but I suppose that even at fifteen thousand words, the story was probably still too long. The decision came to me in an email and that was that. I was so enraged that I couldn’t even talk to anyone at work about it. I would stay at the magazine for a few more years, but the fate of “Oblivion” was an injustice that latched itself onto me like the vengeful little teeth of a burr.
I told David that they’d killed the story.
“It’s possible that you’ll take a bigger emotional hit on this than I will,” he said.
“What should I do?” I asked. “Should I quit?”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t know what you’d live on. You’ve never been poor.”
I didn’t know what to say. What could I possibly say? Sometimes you just have a complete communication breakdown.
“Thank you for being so nice about this whole thing, David,” I said.
That was all I could come up with. It wasn’t deep enough, of course, and it didn’t get to the center of the mystery at all. But words let you down, they did, they did. Words never got at anything real. During communication breakdowns, platitudes and conventional wisdom became your emergency kit. Human voices never provided what you needed.
What I couldn’t bring myself to tell him was that I had failed him and failed myself.
“That’s the way we are,” David said. “We’re nice to each other.”
DAVID AND I WERE IN LESS FREQUENT CONTACT AFTER THAT, AND HE would never publish in Esquire again. We spoke a few times, and exchanged some notes—he told me that he was engaged, and later married. As for Esquire, let us just say that I reached my career’s pinnacle and its rock bottom concurrently. In 2004, we were nominated for
another National Magazine Award for Fiction. I hoped that the nomination would help me move beyond the “Oblivion” debacle—or at least mentally shove it to the side. The other contenders for the prize that year were The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, and The Atlantic, which was nominated for the award twice, for two sets of short stories.
In early May, the ceremony was again held at the Waldorf Astoria. Esquire, which was up for seven awards, was given one of the best tables in the grand ballroom. There was no celebrity presenter that year (let’s assume the organizers had learned their lesson with Rosie and the staph infection routine), and it was not impossible that everyone at our table drank more dry white wine than was perhaps ideal for an early-afternoon event. W won an award for a beautiful and inventive special issue about Kate Moss; the publishing executive (male, fiftyish, now dead) who accepted the prize made a little comment about how Kate, then age thirty, was getting old. The audience laughed, because media professionals were all too often complicit, and the Esquire journalist seated next to me, a man whom I had known for a decade, since I was twenty-two, flashed me a look that said, “You’re not getting any younger, either.” I was just starting to worry about the passage of time. What was it that I had been chasing for the past ten years?
Esquire had a great day and won one award, and another, and another. How lucky I was to get to work at such a superb magazine, I thought. The fiction category was one of the last announced. Though the merry wheel of fortune was spinning in Esquire’s favor that day, I still didn’t believe we had much of a shot with the fiction prize. The New Yorker seemed to win the award nearly every year (except for Zoetrope’s upset victory in 2001), and The Atlantic had those two nominations, and The Paris Review was The Paris Review.
But Esquire won. As Granger climbed the stage to deliver his acceptance speech (it was customary for editors in chief to accept the awards on behalf of the magazine), a fellow editor leaned across the table and said that I ought to have seen my own face. Shockingly, Granger’s speech was about me. He spoke extemporaneously into the microphone, referring to me as “my literary editor,” but then again, he always called me that. He told the room why he had hired me seven years before (in case they had been wondering): I was a good writer, and I had written him a great letter. It was a kind, gracious speech (I was deeply embarrassed to have been made the center of attention, but also appreciative), though he didn’t say anything about my abilities as an editor. My assumption, frankly, had always been that he believed I was a better writer than I was an editor. When Granger sat back down at the table, he handed me the trophy.
Everyone at work was thrilled with the award. I was thrilled. And for a time, I believed that the prize would be just the thing to spur a renewed excitement in Esquire’s fiction program. Yet the following year, despite thousands of fiction submissions, the magazine did not publish even one short story. I’d been chasing the mythical Denis Johnson, a frequent Esquire contributor from past editorships, and was finally submitted a story. I worked like a little badger to push it through, but I couldn’t even get a response. Of course I understood better than anyone that magazine short stories may not have had much practical, bottom-line value, but it was then impossible to imagine The Atlantic, Harper’s, or, God forbid, The New Yorker giving up on short fiction with such dispatch. I was no longer an advocate for writers. My only role in the world now was to reject them.
Eventually, I refused to encourage any authors I admired to submit their work. What would the point have been? The magazine, once home to Hemingway and Mailer, Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, seemed to have lost all interest in fiction. My novel was published, and I knew it was time for me to be on my way. As Granger had noted during his acceptance speech, my writing had gotten me into this. It would also get me out.
The question: How much could I give up and still be me?
After I quit, the new literary editor had two big early fiction ventures: a commissioned short story about the “death” of Derek Jeter, and the Napkin Project, in which two hundred and fifty fiction writers were sent five-inch-square paper cocktail napkins and asked to write original short stories on those little napkins.
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CATASTROPHE OF DAVID’S SUICIDE, I HAVE A dream about him. The dream takes place in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Ohio, and David is lying on my childhood bed, on his back, dressed entirely in white and wearing his ridiculous white bandanna. His eyes are closed. He doesn’t move. My bedroom is flooded with white light, and everything in the scene is still, and lifeless, and silent. I’m standing at the door to the room, but I can’t move forward toward him, and I can’t move back out; I can’t shift my gaze away. There’s no other substance to the dream, no other dimension: it is this one still image and only that, and one color: white.
That morning, I had to report to jury duty. In the courthouse, I spent most of my time checking the news on my phone, still flummoxed by the alarming recent entrance of this Sarah Palin person onto the national stage. I’d had such splendid associations with the name “Palin” up until this point (Michael: the best of all Pythons and Palins), and I was having a hard time with this one. The fall of Lehman Brothers and subsequent stock market crash was three days away: Rome was about to go up in flames and the bloated empire about to begin its collapse. We had no idea what we were in store for that particular Friday in September. We never do, I guess.
I’d been in this courthouse before, a decade ago, the last time I’d served on jury duty. Back then I had been a juror on a run-of-the-mill insurance-fraud case. During my lunch breaks, I’d gotten into the habit of calling David from a lobby pay phone—talking to him was a lot more fun than scrounging around Financial District delis for dangerous-looking sushi.
My case had not been interesting, but I had been greatly impressed by the level of seriousness with which my fellow jurors approached it. They actually gave me some sort of hope for democracy. I became friendly with one of the jurors, a club kid who went by the nom de guerre “Justin Thyme” (adjust your opinion: he was actually a very sharp guy), and I ended up getting a ride back from the Hamptons once with another juror for some reason. We were a tight little group for a while there.
One of those lunchtime calls to David on the courthouse pay phone was, I remembered, also on a Friday afternoon. I had a flight to Boston to catch that evening.
“Have fun in Beantown,” David had said then. “The people there are not nice. They’re the worst people on earth, actually.”
The purpose of my trip was to visit a friend who was pregnant with her first child.
“Well, just tell her not to watch Alien,” David helpfully suggested.
We talked a little about movies—David said he’d never seen Rosemary’s Baby—and then he was on to his former life in Boston, the place where he really started writing Infinite Jest, the book that changed the world. He’d been in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard because, as it was explained to me, he believed it would help with his work, but he’d had a breakdown. He told me about some of the people who’d cared for him then, when he was, as he put it, in and out of hospitals all the time.
“They were always like, ‘Oooh, I love you, Dave, I love you,’” he said in an unkind falsetto. That was David for you: always deriding those who loved him. He was also giving me a warning: Don’t love me. And he added, self-punitively, self-mockingly, “And I’d go, ‘Yeah. There’s a lot to love.’”
I had not experienced anything like the dimensions of anguish he’d endured and had so harrowingly described—a despair, by his admissions to me, he feared was always still lurking there, lying in wait in the darkest byways of his mind. I would ask him to promise me that his dire predictions for his future not be true. When he was thirty-six, he told me he’d always believed he’d never make it to fifty. He didn’t. He would never have a third act. David would never grow old, would never be reduced to irrelevance or self-parody, but would instead reside forever—and forever really is such a ve
ry, very long time—as the void he left inside us.
“Boy, I wish I had some dark past,” I said, attempting, and failing, to be cute.
“No, you don’t,” David replied with unexpected sharpness. “People don’t understand what it’s like.” The pronoun “it” was left undefined—was it addiction, mental illness? Was it darkness? Was it the burden of being him? “Stay my French-eyed girl, with bluebirds flying in circles around your head, and forest animals serenading outside your window. You would have been appalled if you’d known me in Boston anyway.”
“I think,” I said, “I would have liked you fine.”
“Well, of course you were a fetus at the time,” David said, and hesitated. “It’s odd—I just had this sensation of déjà vu. Do you also feel that we’ve had this conversation before?”
No, I did not share the feeling.
He said he had a question for me. “Have you ever heard of the theory of eternal recurrence?”
He’d once wondered if I ever felt that he was “testing” me—intellectually, that is. I said then I didn’t, but I was never so sure about that. There was a sense in which he was always testing me. I told him on the pay phone there in the courthouse lobby that I knew almost nothing about eternal recurrence except for the idea that time is not a straight line but a circle; events in your life repeat themselves infinitely, in the same order. There’s no beginning and no end—there’s just one thing.
Like everyone else, I’d gone through a little Nietzsche phase, and I knew that his version of eternal recurrence went something vaguely like: if you can’t imagine living every second of your life over again, you have not lived well. It’s a useful thing to think about—every event takes on a very different intensity and a very different consequence if you imagine you’re going to do it all over again, forever. It’s probably a good question to ask yourself before you make any decision: Would I actually want to relive this moment? If you have any say in the matter, do something only if the answer is yes.
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