Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  X himself is in a ticklish position w/r/t the whole father-in-law-withinoperable-brain-cancer situation. He and his wife’s father have never had a very close or friendly relationship, and in fact the old man had once actually urged X’s wife to divorce X during a rocky period some years prior when things in the marriage were rocky and X had made some regrettable errors in judgment and had committed some indiscretions which one of X’s wife’s pathologically nosy and garrulous sisters had told the father about and which the old man had been typically judgmental and holier-than-thou about and had loudly communicated to just about everyone in the family that he considered X’s behavior disgusting and wholly infra-dignitater and had urged X’s wife to leave him (i.e., X) over, none of which X has forgotten over the years, not by a long shot, because ever since that rocky period and the old man’s h/t/t condemnations X has felt somehow provisional and tangential and non-grata with respect to his wife’s whole teeming intermeshed close-knit family, which family by this time includes his wife’s six siblings’ own spouses and kids and various soricine great-aunts and -uncles and ordinally disparate cousins, such that a local Conference Center has to be rented every summer for his inlaws’ family’s traditional Family Get-Together (caps theirs), at which annual events X is always somehow made to feel provisional and under continuing suspicion and judgment and pretty much like your classic outsider looking in.

  X’s sense of alienation from his wife’s family has now intensified, too, because the whole enormous roiling pack of them seem now to be unable to think or talk about anything except the iron-eyed old patriarch’s brain cancer and grim treatment options and steady decline and apparently slim chances for lasting more than a few more months at the very outside, and they seem to talk endlessly but only with one another about all this, such that whenever X is there alongside his wife during any of these lugubrious family councils he always feels peripheral and otiose and subtly excluded, as if his wife’s close-knit family has woven in even tighter around itself in this time of crisis, forcing X even further out onto the periphery, he feels. And X’s encounters with his father-in-law himself, whenever X now accompanies his wife on her ceaseless visits to the old man’s sickroom in his (i.e., the old man’s) and his wife’s opulent neoromanesque home across town (and in what feels like a whole different economic galaxy) from the Xes’ own rather modest house, are especially excruciating, for all the above reasons plus the fact that X’s wife’s father—who, even though by this time he’s confined to a special top-of-the-line adjustable hospital bed the family has had brought in, and every time X is there he’s lying stricken in this special high-tech bed being attended to by a Puerto Rican hospice technician, is nevertheless always still immaculately shaved and groomed and attired, with his club tie double-Windsored and his steel trifocals polished, as if ready at any moment to spring up and make the Puerto Rican fetch his Signor Pucci suit and juridical robes and return to 7th District Tax Court to hand down some more mercilessly well-reasoned decisions, a dress and demeanor which the distraught family all seem to regard as one more sign of the tough old bird’s heartbreaking dignity and dum spero joie de vivre and strength of will—that the father-in-law always seems conspicuously chilly and aloof in his manner toward X during these dutiful visits, whereas X in turn, standing there awkwardly behind his wife as she is drawn tearfully in to incline over the sickbed like some spoon or metal rod drawn in and bent forward by the hideous force of a mentalist’s will, usually feels overcome with first alienation and then distaste and resentment and then actual malevolence toward the iron-eyed old man who, if the truth be told, X has always secretly felt was a prick of the first rank, and now finds that even just the glint of the father-in-law’s trifocals afflicts him, and can’t help feeling that he hates him; and the father-in-law, in turn, seems to pick up on X’s hidden involuntary hatred and gives back the clear impression of not feeling at all gladdened or bucked up or supported by X’s presence and of wishing X weren’t even there in the sickroom with Mrs. X and the glossy hospice technician, a wish X finds himself concurring bitterly with inside even as he exerts an even wider and more supportive and compassionate smile out into the space of the room, so that X always feels confused and disgusted and enraged in the old man’s sickroom with his wife and always ends up wondering what he’s even doing there in the first place.

  X, however, of course, also always feels rather ashamed about feeling such dislike and resentment in the presence of a fellow human being and legal relative who’s steadily and inoperably declining, and after each visit to the old man’s luculent bedside, as he drives his distraught wife home in silence, X secretly castigates himself and wonders where his basic decency and compassion are. He locates an even deeper source of shame in the fact that ever since the father-in-law’s terminal diagnosis came down, he (i.e., X) has spent so much time and energy thinking only of himself and of his own feelings of resentful exclusion from his wife’s clannish family’s Drang when, after all, his wife’s father is suffering and dying right before their eyes and X’s loving wife is nearly prostrate with agony and grief and the Xes’ sensitive innocent children are also grieving terribly. X secretly worries that the obvious selfishness of his inner feelings during this time of family crisis when his wife and children so clearly deserve his compassion and support might constitute evidence of some horrific defect in his human makeup, some kind of hideous central ice where his heart’s nodes of empathy and basic other-directedness ought to be, and is increasingly tormented by shame and self-doubt, and then is doubly ashamed and worried about the fact that the shame and self-doubt are themselves self-involving and thus further compromise his ability to be truly concerned and supportive toward his wife and kids; and he keeps all his secret feelings of alienation and distaste and resentment and of shame and self-urtication even about the shame itself completely to himself, and doesn’t feel like he can possibly go to his distraught wife and burden/horrify her even further with his own self-involved pons asinorum, and in fact is so disgusted and ashamed about what he fears he might have discovered about his heart’s makeup that he is unusually subdued and reserved and unforthcoming with everyone in his life for the first several months of his father-in-law’s illness and says nothing to anyone of the storms raging centripetally inside him.

  The father-in-law’s agonizing inoperable degenerative neoplastic lingering goes on and on for so long, however—either because it’s an unusually slow form of brain cancer or because the father-in-law is the sort of tough old nasty bird who clings grimly to life for just as long as possible, one of those cases X privately believes euthanasia was probably originally designed with in mind, viz. one where the patient keeps lingering and degenerating and suffering horribly but refuses to submit to the inevitable and give up the freaking ghost already and doesn’t seem to give any thought to the coincident suffering that his hideous degenerative lingering inflicts on those who, for whatever inscrutable reasons, love him, or both—and X’s secret conflict and corrosive shame finally wear him down so utterly and make him so miserable at work and catatonic at home that he finally swallows all pride and goes hat in hand to his trusted friend and colleague Y and lays the whole situation ab initio ad mala out before him, confiding to Y the icy selfishness of his (X’s) very deepest feelings during his family’s crisis and detailing his indwelling shame over the antipathy he feels as he stands behind his wife’s chair at the $6500 fully adjustable steel-alloy bedside of his now grotesquely wasted and incontinent father-in-law and the old man’s tongue lolls and face contorts in gruesome clonic spasms and a yellowish froth collects steadily at the corners of his (the father-in-law’s) writhing mouth in an attempt to speak and his 1 now obscenely oversized and asymmetrically bulging head rotates on the 300-thread-count Italian pillowcase and the old man’s clouded but still cruelly ferrous eyes behind the steel trifocals travel up past the anguished face of Mrs. X and fall on the tight hearty expression of sympathy and support X always struggles in the car to form and wear f
or these excruciating visits and roll instantly away in opposite directions—the father-in-law’s eyes do—accompanied always by a ragged exhalation of disgust, as if reading the mendacious hypocrisy of X’s expression and discerning the antipathy and selfishness beneath it and questioning all over again his daughter’s judgment in remaining bound to this marginal and reprobative CPA; and X confesses to Y the fact that he has begun, on these visits to the incontinent old h/t/t prick’s sickbed, rooting silently for the tumor itself, mentally toasting its health and wishing it continued metastatic growth, and has begun secretly regarding these visits as rituals of sympathy and support for the malignancy in the old man’s pons, X has, while allowing his poor wife to believe that X is there by her side out of shared commiserative concern for the old man himself… X now vomiting up every last dram of the prior months’ internal conflict and alienation and self-castigation, and beseeching Y to please understand the difficulty for X of telling any living soul of his secret shame and to feel both honored and bound by X’s confidence in him and to find in his heart the compassion to forgo any h/t/t judgments of X and to for God’s sweet sake tell no one of the cryovelate and malignantly selfish heart X fears his innermost secret feelings during the whole hellish ordeal have maybe revealed.

  Whether this cathartic interchange takes place before Y did whatever he did to make X so furious with him, 2 or whether the interchange took place afterward and thus signifies that Y’s stoic passivity in bearing up under X’s vituperations paid off and their friendship was restored—or whether even maybe this present interchange itself is what somehow engendered X’s rage at Y’s supposed ‘betrayal,’ i.e. whether X later got the idea that Y had maybe spilled some of the beans to Mrs. X w/r/t her husband’s secret self-absorption during what was probably the single most emotionally cataclysmic period of her life so far—none of this is clear, but that is all right this time because it is not centrally important because what is centrally important is that X, out of a combination of pain and sheer fatigue, finally humbles himself and bares his necrotic heart to Y and asks Y what Y thinks he (X) ought maybe to do to resolve the inner conflict and extinguish the secret shame and sincerely be able to forgive his dying father-in-law for being such a titanic prick in life and to just put history aside and somehow ignore the smug old prick’s self-righteous judgments and obvious dislike and X’s own feelings of peripheral nongratazation and just somehow hang in there and try to support the old man and feel empathy for the entire teeming hysterical mass of his wife’s family and to truly be there and support and stand by Mrs. X and the little Xes in their time of crisis and truly think of them for a change instead of remaining all bent in on his own secret feelings of exclusion and resentment and viva cancrosum and self-loathing and -urtication and burning shame.

  As was probably made clear in abortive PQ6, Y’s nature is to be laconic and self-effacing to the point where you nearly have to get him in a half-nelson to get him to do anything as presumptuous as actually giving advice. But X, by finally resorting to having Y conduct a thought-experiment in which Y pretends to be X and ruminates aloud on what he (meaning Y, as X) might do if faced with this malignant and horripilative pons asinorum, gets Y finally to aver that the best he (i.e., Y as X, and thus by extension X himself) can probably do in the situation is simply to passively hang in there, i.e. just Show Up, continue to Be There—as in just physically, if nothing else—on the margins of the family councils and at Mrs. X’s side in her father’s sickroom. In other words, Y says, to make it his secret penance and gift to the old man to just hang in there and silently to suffer the feelings of loathing and hypocrisy and selfishness and discountenance, but not to stop accompanying his wife or going to visit the old man or lurking tangentially at the family councils, in other words for X simply to reduce himself to bare physical actions and processes, to get off his heart’s back and stop worrying about his makeup and simply Show Up 3 … which, when X rejoins that for Christ’s sweet sake this is what he’s already been doing all along, Y tentatively pats his (i.e., X’s) shoulder and ventures to say that X has always struck him (=Y) as a good deal stronger and wiser and more compassionate than he, X, is willing to give himself credit for.

  All of which makes X feel somewhat better—either because Y’s counsel is profound and uplifting or else just because X got some relief from finally vomiting up the malignant secrets he feels have been corroding him—and things continue pretty much as before with the odious father-in-law’s slow decline and X’s wife’s grief and her family’s endless histrionics and councils, and with X still, behind his tight hearty smile, feeling hateful and confused and self-urticative but now struggling to try to regard this whole septic emotional maelstrom as a heartfelt gift to his dear wife and—wince—father-in-law, and with the only other significant developments over the next six months being that X’s hollow-eyed wife and one of her sisters go on the antidepressant Paxil and that two of X’s nephews-in-law are detained for the alleged molestation of a developmentally disabled girl in their junior high school’s Special Education wing.

  And things proceed this way—with X now periodically coming hat in hand to Y for a sympathetic ear and the occasional thought-experiment, and being such a passive but overwhelmingly constant presence at the patriarchal bedside and the involved family councils that the most waggish of X’s wife’s family’s great-uncles begins making quips about having to dust him—until, finally, early one morning nearly a year after the initial diagnosis, the inoperably ravaged and agonized and illucid old father-in-law gives up the ghost at last, expiring with the mighty shudder of a clubbed tarpon, 4 and is embalmed and rouged and dressed (as per codicil) in his juridical robes and memorialized at a service throughout which a stilted bier holds the casket high above all those assembled, and at which service X’s poor wife’s eyes resemble two enormous raw cigar-burns in an acrylic blanket, and at which by her side X—to the first suspicious but eventually touched surprise of his massed and black-clad in-laws—weeps longer and louder than anyone there, his distress so extreme and sincere that, on the way out of the Episcopal vestry, it’s the weedy mother-in-law herself who presses her own hand-kerchief into X’s hand and consoles him with brief pressure on his left forearm as she’s helped to her limo, and X is then later that afternoon invited by personal telephone call from the father-in-law’s oldest and most iron-eyed son to attend, along with Mrs. X, a very private and exclusive inner-circle-of-the-bereaved-family post-interment Get-Together in the library of the deceased judge’s opulent home, an inclusive gesture which moves Mrs. X to her first tears of joy since long before going on Paxil.

  The exclusive Get-Together itself—which turns out, by X’s on-site calculation, to include less than 38% of his in-laws’ total family, and features pre-warmed snifters of Remy Martin and unabashedly virid Cuban cigars for the males—involves the arrangement of leather divans and antique ottomans and wing chairs and stout little Willis & Geiger three-step library stepladders into a large circle, around which circle X’s inlaws’ family’s innermost and apparently now most intimate 37.5% are to sit and take turns declaiming briefly on their memories and feelings about the dead father-in-law and their own special and unique individual relationships with him during his long and extraordinarily distinguished life. And X—who is seated awkwardly on a small oaken stepladder next to his wife’s wing chair, and from his position in the circle is to be the fourth-from-last to speak, and who is on his fifth snifter, and whose cigar for some mysterious reason keeps going out, and who is suffering moderate-to-severe prostatic twinges from the flitched texture of the ladder’s top step—finds, as heartfelt and sometimes quite moving anecdotes and encomia circumscribe the inner circle, that he has less and less idea what he ought to say.

  Q: (A) Self-evident.

  (B) Throughout the year of her father’s terminal illness, Mrs. X has given no indication that she knows anything of X’s internal conflict and self-septic horror. X has thus succeeded in keeping his interior state a se
cret, which is what he has professed to want all year. X has, be apprised, kept secrets from Mrs. X on several prior occasions. Part of the interior confusion and flux of this whole premortem interval, however—as X confides to Y after the old bastard finally kicks—has been that, for the first time in their marriage, X’s wife’s not knowing something about X that X did not wish her to know has made X feel not relieved or secure or good but rather on the contrary sad and alienated and lonely and aggrieved. The crux: X now finds himself, behind his commiserative expression and solicitous gestures, secretly angry at his wife over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate in her, and sustain. Evaluate.

  POP QUIZ 9

  You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as ‘short stories’ (not even as those upscale microbrewed Flash Fictions that have become so popular in recent years—even though these belletristic pieces are really short, they just don’t work like Flash Fictions are supposed to). How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe. Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them, somehow—i.e. palpations, feelers into the interstices of her sense of something, etc…. though what that ‘something’ is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you’re working on the pieces (pieces that are taking a truly grotesque amount of time, by the way, far more time than they ought to vis à vis their length and aesthetic ‘weight,’ etc.—after all, you’re like everybody else and have only so much time at your disposal and have to allocate it judiciously, especially when it comes to career stuff (yes: things have come to such a pass that even belletristic fiction writers consider themselves to have ‘careers’)). You know for sure, though, that the narrative pieces really are just ‘pieces’ and nothing more, i.e. that it is the way they fit together into the larger cycle that comprises them that is crucial to whatever ‘something’ you want to ‘interrogate’ a human ‘sense of,’ and so on.