Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  Early in the fourth year of their marriage, the wife felt herself becoming obsessed with the irrational suspicion that her husband was sexually climaxing into the master bathroom’s toilet. She examined the toilet’s rim and the bathroom trash basket closely almost every day, pretending to clean, feeling increasingly out of control. The old trouble with swallowing sometimes returned. She felt herself becoming obsessed with the suspicion that her husband maybe took no genuine pleasure in their lovemaking together but was concentrated only on making her feel pleasure, forcing her to feel pleasure and passion; lying awake at night, she feared that he took some kind of twisted pleasure in imposing pleasure on her. And yet, just experienced enough to be full of doubts (and of herself) at this innocent time, the young wife also believed that these irrational suspicions and obsessions could be merely her own youthful, self-centered Ego displacing its inadequacies and fears of true intimacy onto the innocent husband; and she was desperate not to spoil their relationship with insane displaced suspicions, like the way she had failed and wrecked the relationship with her previous lover because of irrational worries.

  And so the wife fought with all her strength against her callow, inexperienced mind (she then believed), convinced that any real problem lay in her own selfish imagination and/or her inadequate sexual persona. She fought against the worry she felt about the way, nearly always, when she had moved down his body in the bed and taken him in her mouth, the husband would nearly always (it seemed then), after waiting with tense and rigid abdominal muscles for what felt somehow like the exact minimum considerate amount of time with his thingie in her mouth, would always reach gently down and pull her gently but firmly back up his body to kiss her passionately and enter her from below, gazing into her eyes with a very concentrated expression as she sat astride him, she sitting always slightly hunched out of embarrassment at the slight asymmetry of her breasts. The way he would exhale sharply in either passion or displeasure and reach down and pull the wife up and slide his thingie inside her in one smooth motion, the gasp sharp as if involuntary, as if trying to convince her that merely having his thingie in her mouth drove him mad with desire to be all the way up inside her down there, he said, and to have her, he said, ‘right up close’ against him instead of ‘so far away’ down his body. This nearly always made her feel somehow uneasy as she sat astride him, hunched and bobbing and with his hands on her hips and sometimes forgetting herself and grinding down with her pubic bone against his pubis, fearful that the grinding plus her weight on him could cause injury but often forgetting herself and involuntarily bearing down at a slight angle and grinding against him with less and less caution, sometimes even arching her back and thrusting out her breasts to be touched, until the moment he nearly always—nine times out of ten, on average—gave another gasp of either passion or impatience and rotated slightly onto his side with his hands on her hips, rolling her gently but firmly over with him until she was all the way beneath him and he ranged over her and either still had his thingie deep in her or else reentered her smoothly from above; he was very smooth and graceful in the movements and never hurt her when changing positions and rarely had to reenter, but it always caused the wife some worry, afterwards, that he almost never came to his sexual climax (if indeed he ever really did come to his climax) from beneath her, that as he felt his climax building inside himself he seemed to feel an obsessive need to rotate and be inside her from above, from the familiar Missionary Position of male dominance, which although it made his thingie feel even more deeply inside her down there, which the wife enjoyed very much, she worried that the husband’s need to have her beneath him at the sexual climax indicated that something she did when sitting astride him and moving either hurt him or denied him the sort of intense pleasure that would lead to his sexual climax; and so the wife to her distress sometimes found herself preoccupied with worry even as they finished and she began to have another small after-shock of climax while grinding gently against him from below and searching his face for evidence of a truly genuine climax there and sometimes crying out in pleasure beneath him in a voice that sounded, she sometimes thought, less and less like her own.

  The sexual relationship the wife had had prior to meeting her husband had occurred when she was a very young woman—hardly more than a child, she realized later. It had been a committed, monogamous relationship with a young man whom she had felt very close to and who was a wonderful lover, passionate and giving and very skilled (she had felt) in sexual technique, who was very vocal and affectionate during lovemaking, and attentive, and had loved to be in her mouth for oral sex, and had never seemed hurt or sore or distracted when she forgot herself and ground against him, and always closed both his eyes in passionate pleasure when he began to move uncontrollably into his sexual climax, and whom she had (at that young age) felt that she loved and loved being with and could easily imagine marrying and being in a committed relationship with forever—all until she had begun, late in the first year of their relationship together, to suffer from irrational suspicions that the lover was imagining making love with other women during their lovemaking together. The fact that the lover closed both his eyes when he experienced intense pleasure with her, which at first had made her feel sexually secure and pleased, began to worry her a great deal, and the suspicion that he was imagining being inside of other women when he was inside of her became more and more of a dreadful conviction, even though she also felt that it was groundless and irrational and only in her mind and would have hurt the lover’s feelings just terribly if she had said anything to him about it, until finally it became an obsession, even though there was no tangible evidence for it and she had never said anything about it; and even though she believed the whole thing was almost surely just in her mind, the obsession became so terrible and overwhelming that she began to avoid making love with him, and began having sudden irrational bursts of emotion over trivial issues in their relationship, bursts of hysterical anger or tears that were in fact bursts of irrational worry that he was having fantasies about sexual encounters with other women. She had felt, towards the end of the relationship, as if she were totally inadequate and self-destructive and crazed, and she came away from the relationship with a terrible fear of her own mind’s ability to torment her with irrational suspicions and to poison a committed relationship, and this added to the torment she felt about the obsessive worrying that she was now experiencing in her sexual relationship with her husband, a relationship that had also, at first, seemed to be more close and intimate and fulfilling than she could rationally believe she deserved, knowing about herself all (she believed) she did.

  PART TWO. YEN4U

  She once, as an adolescent, in an Interstate rest-stop women’s room, on a wall, above and to the right of vending machines for tampons and feminine hygiene products, had seen, surrounded by the coarse declamations and crudely drawn genitalia and the simple and somehow plangent obscenities inscribed there in varied anonymous hands, standing out in both color and force, a single small red felt-tip block-capital rhyme, tiny and precise and seeming somehow—via something about the tiny hand’s precision against all that surrounding scrawl—less coarse or bitter than how simply sad, and had remembered it ever since, and sometimes thought of it, for no apparent reason, in the darkness of her marriage’s immature years, although, to the best of her later recollection, the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

  IN DAYS OF OLD

  WHEN MEN WERE BOLD

  AND WOMEN WEREN’T INVENTED

  THEY ALL DRILLED HOLES

  IN ROADSIDE POLES

  AND STOOD THERE QUITE

  CONTENTED[,]

  PART THREE. ADULT WORLD

  Meanwhile, back in the present, the immature wife fell deeper and deeper inside herself and inside her worry and became more and more unhappy.

  What changed everything and saved everything was that she had an epiphany. She had the epiphany three years and seven m
onths into the marriage.

  In secular psychodevelopmental terms, an epiphany is a sudden, life-changing realization, often one that catalyzes a person’s emotional maturation. The person, in one blinding flash, ‘grows up,’ ‘comes of age.’ ‘Put[s] away childish things.’ Releases illusions gone moist and rank from a grip of years’ duration. Becomes, for good or ill, a citizen of reality.

  In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life, maturation and acquiescence to reality are gradual processes, incremental and often imperceptible, not unlike the formation of renal calculus. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the ‘magical thinking’ of children that achievement of insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

  What precipitated the young wife’s sudden blinding epiphany was her abandonment of mentation in favor of concrete and frantic action. * She abruptly (within just hours of deciding) and frantically telephoned the ex-lover whom she’d formerly been in a committed relationship with, now by all accounts a successful associate manager at a local auto dealership, and implored him to agree to meet and talk with her. Placing this call was one of the most difficult, embarrassing things the wife (whose name was Jeni) had ever done. It appeared irrational and risked seeming totally inappropriate and disloyal: she was married, this was her former lover, they had not exchanged a word in almost five years, their relationship had ended badly. But she was in crisis—she feared, as she put it to the ex-lover over the telephone, for the very soundness of her mind, and needed his help, and would, if necessary, beg for it. The former lover agreed to meet the wife for lunch at a fast food restaurant near the auto dealership the following day.

  The crisis that had galvanized the wife, Jeni Roberts, into action was itself precipitated by nothing more than another of her bad dreams, albeit one that comprised a kind of compendium of many of the other bad dreams she’d suffered during the early years of her marriage. The dream was not itself the epiphany, but its effect was galvanic. The husband’s car slowly passes his downtown firm and proceeds off down the street in a light rain, its YEN4U license plate receding, followed by Jeni Roberts’ car. Then Jeni Roberts is driving on the heavy-flow expressway that circumscribes the city, trying desperately to catch up with the husband’s car. Her wipers’ beat matches that of her heart. She cannot see the car with its special personalized license plate anywhere up ahead but feels the particular special sort of anxious dream-certainty that it is there. In the dream, every other vehicle on the expressway is symbolically associated with emergency and crisis—all six lanes are filled with ambulances, police cars, paddywagons, fire engines, Highway Patrol cruisers, and emergency vehicles of every conceivable description, sirens all singing their heart-stopping arias and all their emergency lights activated and flashing in the rain so that Jeni Roberts feels as though her car is swimming in color. An ambulance directly in front of her will not let her by; it changes lanes whenever she does. The nameless anxiety of the dream is indescribably horrid—the wife, Jeni, feels she simply must (wiper) must (wiper) must catch the husband’s car in order to avert some kind of crisis so horrible it has no name. A river of what looks to be sodden Kleenex flows wind-blown along the expressway’s breakdown lane; Jeni’s mouth feels full of raw hot sores; it is night and wet and the whole road swims with emergency colors—spanked pinks and slapped reds and the blue of critical asphyxia. It is when they are wet that you realize why they call Kleenex tissue, flowing by. The wipers match her urgent heart and the ambulance still, in the dream, will not let her pass; she slaps frantically at the steering wheel in desperation. And now in the window at the rear of the ambulance, as if in answer, appears a lone splayed hand at the glass, pressing and slapping at the glass, a hand reaching up from some sort of emergency stretcher or gurney and opening spiderishly out to stroke and slap and press whitely against the rear window’s glass in full view of Jeni Roberts’ Accord’s retractable halogen headlights so that she sees the highly distinctive ring on the ring finger of the male hand splayed frantically against the emergency glass and screams (in the dream) in recognition and cuts hard left without signaling, cutting off various other emergency vehicles, to pull abreast of the ambulance and tell it to please stop because the stochastic husband she loves and must somehow catch up to is inside on a stretcher ceaselessly sneezing and slapping frantically at the window for someone he loves to catch up and help; but then (such is the dream’s motive force that the wife actually wets the bed, she discovers on waking) and but then as she pulls abreast on the left of the ambulance and lowers her passenger window with the Accord’s automatic feature in the rain and gesticulates for the ambulance driver to lower his own window so she can implore him to stop it’s (in the dream) the husband driving the ambulance, it’s his left profile at the wheel—which the wife has always somehow been able to tell he prefers to his right profile and customarily sleeps on his right side partly with this fact in mind, though they’d never spoken openly about the husband’s possible insecurities about his right profile—and but then as the husband turns his face toward Jeni Roberts through the driver’s window and lit-up rain as she gesticulates it seems to be both him and not him, her husband’s familiar and much-loved face distorted and pulsed with red light and wearing a facial expression indescribable as anything other than: Obscene.

  It was this look on the face that (slowly) turned left to look at her from the ambulance—a face that in the very most enuretic and disturbing way both was and was not the face of the husband she loved—that galvanized Jeni Roberts awake and prompted her to gather every bit of her nerve together and make the frantic humiliating call to the man she had once thought seriously of marrying, an associate sales manager and probationary Rotarian whose own facial asymmetry—he had suffered a serious childhood accident that subsequently caused the left half of his face to develop differently from the right side of his face; his left nostril was unusually large, and gaped, and his left eye, which appeared to be almost all iris, was surrounded by concentric rings and bags of slack flesh that constantly twitched and throbbed as irreversibly damaged nerves randomly fired—was what, Jeni had decided after their relationship foundered, had helped fuel her uncontrollable suspicion that he had a secret, impenetrable part to his character that fantasized about lovemaking with other women even while his healthy, perfectly symmetrical, and seemingly uninjurable thingie was inside her. The ex-lover’s left eye also faced and scanned a markedly different direction than did his dextral, more normally developed eye, a feature that was somehow advantageous in his auto sales career, he tried to explain.

  Galvanic crisis notwithstanding, Jeni Roberts felt awkward and very nearly mortified with embarrassment as she and the ex-lover met and selected their meal options and sat down together in a windowside booth of molded plastic and made radically incongruous small talk while she prepared to try to ask the question that would accidentally precipitate her epiphany and a whole new less innocent and self-deluded stage of her married life. She had decaf in a disposable cup and put in six prepackaged creamers as her former sexual partner sat with his entree’s styrofoam box unopened and gazed both through the window and at her. He had a ring on his pinkiefinger and his sportcoat was unbuttoned, and the white shirt beneath the coat bore the distinctive furrows of an oxfordcloth dress shirt that had only recently been removed from its retail packaging. The sunlight through the big window was noon-colored and made the crowded franchise feel like a greenhouse; it was hard to breathe. The associate sales manager watched as she started the tops of the creamers with her teeth to safeguard her nails and removed them and placed them in the foil ashtray and dumped the thimblefuls of creamer into the disposable cup and stirred them in with a complimentary square-tipped stirrer one after another, the look in his developmentally appropriate eye the puddly look of nostalgia. She was still profligate with the creamer. She had both a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring, and the rock wa
sn’t cheap by a long shot. The former lover’s stomach hurt and eye-flesh ticced especially bad now because of how now they were in the dreaded last three bank days of the month and Mad Mike’s Hyundai put unbelievable pressure on reps to move units in the last three days so they could go on that month’s books and inflate the books for the clowns in the regional office. The young wife cleared her throat several times in her special way that the man solely responsible for the performance of all Mad Mike’s reps remembered all too well, doing the dry nervous thing with her throat to communicate the fact that she recognized how inappropriate a question like this was going to appear now at this juncture, with them with their unhappy history and now no longer in any way even like marginally connected, and her happily married, and that she felt embarrassed but was also in some kind of she was saying genuine inner-crisis-type situation about something, and desperate—the way usually only serious credit problems made people look desperate and trapped like this—with her eyes with that drowning look in them of she was begging him not to take advantage of her desperate position in any way including judgment or ridicule at her expense. Plus and how she always drank her coffee with two hands around the cup even in a hot environs like this one here. Hyundai-U.S.’s volume, margins, and financing terms were among the countless economic conditions affected by fluctuations in the value of the yen and related Pacific currencies. The young wife had spent an hour at the mirror in order to choose the shapeless blouse and slacks she wore, actually taking her soft contacts back out in order to wear her glasses as well, and nothing on her face in the windowlight but a quick dab-and-blot of gloss. The expressway’s heavy flow glittered through the window that lit up her right side with sun; and through the glass the Mad Mike’s lot, with its plastic pennants and a man in a wheelchair with his wife or like nurse getting worked by fat Kidder in the hospital gown and arrow-through-head-prosthesis the reps all had to wear on the days Messerly was there to keep tabs, lay also within the divided purview of the booth’s former lover—who still loved her, Jeni Ann Orzolek of Marketing 204, and not his current fiancée, he realized with the sickening wince of a mortal wound reopened—and just beyond it, shimmering in the heat, the Adult World lot, with its all makes and classes of vehicle day and night, moving them through like Mad Mike Messerly could only fantasize.