Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “You’re unable to fix an electric stove?”

  ‘My aunt asks again if I’m sure it’s no problem and I don’t answer because I’m afraid of how my voice will sound. I carefully disconnect the other end of each bundle from each burner’s transformer and loop all the wire very neatly and lay it at the bottom of the stove. I tidy things up. Suddenly the inside of this stove is the very last place on earth I want to be. I begin to be frightened of the stove. Around its side I can see my aunt’s feet as she stands. I hear the refrigerator door open. A dish is set on the counter above me and something crinkly removed; through the odors of stove-slime and ancient connections I can smell a delicate waft of chili. I rattle a screwdriver against the inside of the stove so my aunt thinks I’m doing something. I get more and more frightened.’

  ‘He told me he loved me lots of times.’

  “Frightened of what?”

  ‘I’ve broken their stove. I need a binding tool. But I’ve never bound a wire.’

  ‘And when he said it he believed it. And I know he still does.’

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  ‘It feels like it has everything to do with it. I’m so scared behind this dirty old stove I can’t breathe. I rattle tools.’

  “Is it that you love this pretty old woman and fear you’ve harmed a stove she’s had since before Kennedy?”

  ‘But I think feeling like he loved somebody scared him.’

  ‘This is a crude piece of equipment.’

  “Whom else have you harmed.”

  ‘My aunt comes back behind the stove and stands behind me and peers into the tidied black hollow of the stove and says it looks like I’ve done quite a bit of work! I point at the filthy distributor circuit with my screwdriver and do not say anything. I prod it with the tool.’

  “What are you afraid of.”

  ‘But I don’t think he needs to get hurt like this. No matter what.’

  ‘I believe, behind the stove, with my aunt kneeling down to lay her hand on my shoulder, that I’m afraid of absolutely everything there is.’

  “Then welcome.”

  MY APPEARANCE

  I am a woman who appeared in public on “Late Night with David Letterman” on March 22, 1989.

  In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart’s heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.

  The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman’s variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me he felt he and Ron and Ron’s wife Charmian ought to prepare me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday.

  On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC’s News Divison. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands.

  “He’s waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel,” Rudy grimaced, smoking.

  On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC’s chief of Creative Development’s huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said:

  “Is this entertainment ladies and gentlemen? Or what?”

  I had the bitterness of a Xanax on my tongue.

  We had Ramon haul out some videotapes of old “Late Night” editions, and watched them.

  “How do you feel?” my husband asked me.

  In slow motion, Letterman let drop from a rooftop twenty floors above a cement lot several bottles of champagne, some plump fruit, a plate-glass window, and what looked, for only a moment, like a live piglet.

  “The hokeyness of the whole thing is vital,” Rudy said as Letterman dropped a squealing piglet off what was obviously only a pretend rooftop in the studio; we saw something fall a long way from the original roof to hit cement and reveal itself to be a stuffed piglet. “But that doesn’t make him benign.” My husband got a glimpse of his image in our screening room’s black window and rearranged himself. “I don’t want you to think the hokeyness is real.”

  “I thought hokeyness was pretty much understood not to be real,” I said.

  He directed me to the screen, where Paul Shaffer, David Letterman’s musical sidekick and friend, was doing a go-figure with his shoulders and his hands.

  We had both taken Xanaxes before having Ramon set up the videotapes. I also had a glass of chablis. I was very tired by the time the refrigerator magnets were perused and discussed. My husband was also tired, but he was becoming increasingly concerned that this particular appearance could present problems. That it could be serious.

  The call had come from New York the Friday before. The caller had congratulated me on my police drama being picked up for its fifth season, and asked whether I’d like to be a guest on the next week’s “Late Night with David Letterman,” saying Mr. Letterman would be terribly pleased to have me on. I tentatively agreed. I have few illusions left, but I’m darn proud of our show’s success. I have a good character, work hard, play her well, and practically adore the other actors and people associated with the series. I called my agent, my unit director, and my husband. I agreed to accept an appearance on Wednesday, March 22. That was the only interval Rudy and I had free in a weekly schedule that denied me even two days to rub together: my own series tapes Fridays, with required read-throughs and a Full Dress the day before. Even the 22nd, my husband pointed out over drinks, would mean leaving L.A.X. very early Wednesday morning, since I was contracted to appear in a wiener commercial through Tuesday. My agent had thought he could reschedule the wiener shoot—the people at Oscar Mayer had been very accommodating throughout the whole campaign—but my husband had a rule for himself about honoring contracted obligations, and as his partner I chose also to try to live according to this rule. It meant staying up terribly late Tuesday to watch David Letterman and the piglet and refrigerator magnets and an unending succession of eccentrically talented pets, then catching a predawn flight the next morning: though “Late Night” ’s taping didn’t begin until 5:30 E.S.T., Rudy had gone to great trouble to arrange a lengthy strategy session with Ron beforehand.

  Before I fell asleep Tuesday night, David Letterman had Teri Garr put on a Velcro suit and fling herself at a Velcro wall. That night his NBC Bookmobile featured a 1989 Buyer’s Guide to New York City Officials; Letterman held the book up to view while Teri hung behind him, stuck to the wall several feet off the ground.

  “That could be you,” my husband said, ringing the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  The show seemed to have a fetish about arranging things in lists of ten. We saw what the “Late Night” research staff considered the ten worst television commercials ever. I can remember number five or four: a German automobile manufacturer tried to link purchase of its box-shaped car to sexual satisfaction by showing, against a background of woodwinds and pines, a languid Nordic woman succumbing to the charms of the car’s stickshift.

  “Well I’m certainly swayed,” Letterman said when the clip had ended. “Aren’t you, ladies and gentlemen?”

  He offered up a false promo for a cultural program PBS had supposedly decided against inserting into next fall’s lineup. The promo was an understated clip of four turbaned Kurdistani rebels, draped in small-arms gear, taking time out from revolution to perform a Handel quartet in a meadow full of purple flowers. The bud of culture flourishing even in the craggiest soil, was the come
-on. Letterman cleared his throat and claimed that PBS had finally submitted to conservative PTA pressure against the promo. Paul Shaffer, to a drum roll, asked why this was so. Letterman grinned with an embarrassment Rudy and I both found attractive. There were, again, ten answers. Two I remember were Gratuitous Sikhs and Violets, and Gratuitous Sects and Violins. Everyone hissed with joy. Even Rudy laughed, though he knew no such program had ever been commissioned by PBS. I laughed sleepily and shifted against his arm, which was out along the back of the couch.

  David Letterman also said, at various intervals, “Some fun now, boy.” Everyone laughed. I can remember not thinking there was anything especially threatening about Letterman, though the idea of having to be peeled off a wall upset me.

  Nor did I care one bit for the way the airplane’s ready, slanted shadow rushed up the runway to join us as we touched down. By this time I was quite upset. I even jumped and said Oh as the plane’s front settled into its shadow on the landing. I broke into tears, though not terribly. I am a woman who simply cries when she’s upset; it does not embarrass me. I was exhausted and tense. My husband touched my hair. He argued that I shouldn’t have a Xanax, though, and I agreed.

  “You’ll need to be sharp,” was the reason. He took my arm.

  The NBC driver had put our bags far behind us; I heard the trunk’s solid sound.

  “You’ll need to be both sharp and prepared,” my husband said. He judged that I was tense enough to want simply to agree; Rudy did know human nature.

  But I was irritable by now. Part of my tension about appearing knew where it came from. “Just how much preparation am I supposed to need?” I said. Charmian and I had already conferred long-distance about my appearance. She’d advised solidity and simplicity. I would be seen in a plain blue outfit, no jewelry. My hair would be down.

  Rudy’s concerns were very different. He claimed to fear for me.

  “I don’t see this dark fearful thing you seem to see in David Letterman,” I told him. “The man has freckles. He used to be a local weatherman. He’s witty. But so am I, Rudy.” I did want a Xanax. “We both know me. I’m an actress who’s now forty and has four kids, you’re my second husband, you’ve made a successful career change, I’ve had three dramatic series, the last two have been successful, I have an Emmy nomination, I’m probably never going to have a feature-film career or be recognized seriously for my work as an actress.” I turned in the back seat to look at him. “So so what? All of this is known. It’s all way out in the open already. I honestly don’t see what about me or us is savageable.”

  My husband ran his arm, which was well-built, out along the back seat’s top behind us. The limousine smelled like a fine purse; its interior was red leather and buttery soft. It felt almost wet. “He’ll give you a huge amount of grief about the wiener thing.”

  “Let him,” I said.

  As we were driven up through a borough and extreme southeast Manhattan, my husband became anxious that the NBC driver, who was young and darkly Hispanic, might be able to hear what we were saying to one another, even though there was a thick glass panel between us in back and the driver up front, and an intercom in the panel had to be activated to communicate with him. My husband felt at the glass and at the intercom’s grille. The driver’s head was motionless except to check traffic in mirrors. The radio was on for our enjoyment; classical music drifted through the intercom.

  “He can’t hear us,” I said.

  “… if this were somehow taped and played back on the air while you looked on in horror?” my husband muttered as he satisfied himself about the intercom. “Letterman would eat it up. We’d look like absolute idiots.”

  “Why do you insist that he’s mean? He doesn’t seem mean.”

  Rudy tried to settle back as serious Manhattan began to go by. “This is the man, Edilyn, who publicly asked Christie Brinkley what state the Kentucky Derby is run in.”

  I remembered what Charmian had said on the phone and smiled.

  “But was she or wasn’t she unable to answer correctly?”

  My husband smiled, too. “Well she was flustered,” he said. He touched my cheek, and I his hand. I began to feel less jittery.

  He used his hand and my cheek to open my face toward his. “Edilyn,” he said, “meanness is not the issue. The issue is ridiculousness. The bastard feeds off ridiculousness like some enormous Howdy-Doodyesque parasite. The whole show feeds on it; it swells and grows when things get absurd. Letterman starts to look gorged, dark, shiny. Ask Teri about the Velcro. Ask Lindsay about that doctored clip of him and the Pope. Ask Nigel or Charmian or Ron. You’ve heard them. Ron could tell you stories that’d curl your toes.”

  I had a compact in my purse. My skin was sore and hot from on-air makeup for two straight days. “He’s likeable, though,” I said. “Letterman. When we watched, it looked to me as though he likes to make himself look ridiculous as much as he does the guests. So he’s not a hypocrite.”

  We were in a small gridlock. A disheveled person was trying to clean the limousine’s windshield with his sleeve. Rudy tapped on the glass panel until the driver activated the intercom. He said we wished to be driven directly to Rockefeller Center, where “Late Night” taped, instead of going first to our hotel. The driver neither nodded nor turned.

  “That’s part of what makes him so dangerous,” my husband said, lifting his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “The whole thing feeds off everybody’s ridiculousness. It’s the way the audience can tell he chooses to ridicule himself that exempts the clever bastard from real ridicule.” The young driver blew his horn; the vagrant fell away.

  We were driven west and slightly uptown; from this distance I could see the building where Letterman taped and where Ron worked in an office on the sixtieth floor. Ron used to be professionally associated with my husband before Rudy made the decision to go over to Public Television. We were all still friends.

  “It will be on how your ridiculousness is seen that whether you stand or fall depends,” Rudy said, leaning into my compact’s view to square the knot of his tie.

  Less and less of Rockefeller’s skyscraper was visible as we approached. I asked for half a Xanax. I am a woman who dislikes being confused; it upsets me. I wanted after all, to be both sharp and relaxed.

  “Appear,” my husband corrected, “both sharp and relaxed.”

  “You will be made to look ridiculous,” Ron said. He and my husband sat together on a couch in an office so high in the building my ears felt as they’d felt at take-off. I faced Ron from a mutely expensive chair of canvas stretched over steel. “That’s not in your control,” Ron said. “How you respond, though, is.”

  “Is what?”

  “In your control,” Ron said, raising his glass to his little mouth.

  “If he wants to make me look silly I guess he’s welcome to try,” I said. “I guess.”

  Rudy swirled the contents of his own glass. His ice tinkled. “That’s just the attitude I’ve been trying to cultivate in her,” he said to Ron. “She thinks he’s really like what she sees.”

  The two of them smiled, shaking their heads.

  “Well he isn’t really like that, of course,” Ron told me. Ron has maybe the smallest mouth I have ever seen on a human face, though my husband and I have known him for years, and Charmian, and they’ve been dear friends. His mouth is utterly lipless and its corners are sharp; the mouth seems less a mouth than a kind of gash in his head. “Because no one’s like that,” he said. “That’s what he sees as his great insight. That’s why everything on the show is just there to be ridiculed.” He smiled. “But that’s our edge, that we know that, Edilyn. If you know in advance that you’re going to be made to look ridiculous, then you’re one step ahead of the game, because then you can make yourself look ridiculous, instead of letting him do it to you.”

  Ron I thought I could at least understand. “I’m supposed to make myself look ridiculous?”

  My husband lit a cigarette. He crossed his
legs and looked at Ron’s white cat. “The big thing here is whether we let Letterman make fun of you on national television or whether you beat him to the punch and join in the fun and do it yourself.” He looked at Ron as Ron stood. “By choice,” Rudy said. “It’s on that issue that we’ll stand or fall.” He exhaled. The couch was in a patch of sunlight. The light, this high, seemed bright and cold. His cigarette hissed, gushing smoke into the lit air.

  Ron was known even then for his tendency to fidget. He would stand and sit and stand. “That’s good advice, Rudolph. There are definite do’s and don’t’s. Don’t look like you’re trying to be witty or clever. That works with Carson. It doesn’t work with Letterman.”