Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (40 page)

Bit by bit Wallace scratched out enough short fiction so that by late 1997 he thought he had a new collection. He told Pietsch he was surprised how dark the stories were since he hadn’t been feeling “particularly dark” in the past few years. He knew that the mini-tales might not please all the readers of his last two books. They were funny but they were not playful or redemptive, qualities many readers had come to associate with his name. He immediately looked for reassurance that the publication of the collection would not become a replay of
Infinite Jest
, a chance for Little, Brown to cash in on what he called his “late 90s notoriety.” “I don’t think the book
could stand up to that kind of hype,” he wrote Nadell. “It’d be slim, strange and a bit slight. A small book.” But the reflexive cast of his mind immediately set him to wondering whether his modesty meant he really didn’t think the book deserved readers at all. “Do I,” he asked Nadell, “secretly think it’s not strong enough to publish, meaning I should wait a few years or however long it takes to have some Bigger or more reader-friendly stories? Or am I a whore to think that way?”

With Wallace a desire to be published usually won out. Moreover, as he began organizing and revising the stories for a collection, he became more excited by how powerful they were as a group. They centered on fear, longing, anxiety, depression, and boundaries, the challenge of being human in an inhospitable time. Many of the stories examined courtship behavior—his, of course, which was particularly nauseating to him at times—but also the entire back-and-forth that he had witnessed between men and women, fortified by the many stories he’d heard in recovery and in relationships.

The set-up for the core of the collection is consistent: they are little plays, conversations, most between a woman and various men she is interviewing. The interrogator’s questions are never written, though; it is up to the reader to figure them out.
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The tales are designated only by place and date, as if they were jailhouse or psych ward interviews B.I. #59 04-98 HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE EASTCHESTER NY B.I. #15 MCI-BRIDGEWATER OBSERVATION & ASSESSMENT FACILITY BRIDGEWATER MA. The men are not named.

One man tells a story to a friend about seeing a woman get off an airplane and wait at the gate for someone who doesn’t show; he picks her up, exploiting her disappointment. A second invites women to let him tie them up; he claims an almost perfect ability to sense which women secretly want to be dominated in this way, comparing it to “chicken-sexing.”
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In a third, a man uses his withered arm—his “Asset,” he calls it—to get women to sleep with him out of pity: “I see how you’re trying to be polite and not look at it,” he challenges the interrogator. “Go ahead and look though. It don’t bother me…. You want to hear me describe it? It looks like a arm that changed its mind early on in the game when it was in Mama’s
stomach with the rest of me. It’s more like a itty tiny little flipper.” In a fourth, a man tells the interviewer that men who spend a lot of time focusing on the sexual needs of women—“going down on a lady’s yingyang over and over and making her come seventeen straight times and such”—are actually as narcissistic as men who only want to orgasm. “The catch is they’re selfish about being generous,” he lectures. “They’re no better than the pig is, they’re just sneakier about it.”

The men in the stories not only seem to feel nothing; they seem to feel nothing about feeling nothing. They have creepy amounts of self-awareness but no ambition for catharsis. Their hideousness is beyond question. But Wallace was also making a point about women and their endlessly disappointed hopes for sane connections in the era of relative equality (if indeed it was sane connections they wanted and didn’t just say they wanted). It was as if he were challenging women, saying, You think men are disgusting? I’ll show you disgusting men. “How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe,” the narrator of one story, “Octet,” avers, addressing himself. “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.” Wallace would call the stories in a letter to his old Amherst teacher Andrew Parker “a parody (a feminist parody) of feminism,” though they were also a postmodernist parody of postmodernism, as one nameless male chauvinist makes clear:

“I see that Hal is not the last sad character you’ll be inventing,” Pietsch had responded to the first batch of stories he read, which Wallace sent in
February 1997. Wallace added the remainder in mid-August 1998, just before he had to go back to teaching after his anxious sabbatical. He wrote his editor with uncharacteristic enthusiasm:

Publication was set for May 1999, at the end of the school term, so Wallace could tour.

The week that Wallace mailed off the full
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
manuscript to Pietsch, the Poags invited him to dinner to meet a woman. Nearing thirty-seven, Wallace felt ready for a change. The birth of his sister’s first child in February had reminded him he was no closer to the alluring stability of family life. Writing
Brief Interviews
had also shaken him up. The book, he told friends, had made him look at aspects of himself he didn’t find very appealing. He had recently broken up with yet another girlfriend and wrote a friend that he felt like he had been through the experience so many times by now that it left him dispirited—“not about the thing not working out but low vis a vis DFW and his existential state.”

Wallace had told the Poags he wanted to be with either a nurse or a social worker, and the woman they invited, Juliana Harms, worked for the Department of Children and Foster Services. For Wallace the meeting was a date, but the Poags told Harms Wallace was interested in interviewing her for some work he was doing, which, given Wallace’s hunger for material, was also true. Wallace was an inveterate interviewer. He went to a tire factory, trailed an exterminator, and even had watched Francis B. propose to his girlfriend. Now the foursome had Chinese food for dinner and sat on the Poags’ front porch afterward. From across the street they
heard a baby’s cry: Harms tensed up. “That’s not normal,” she said. When the baby calmed down, so did she. Wallace was impressed.

Soon they met again, and before long the pretense of an interview was gone and they were seeing each other. Harms was more like Susie Perkins than like the women Wallace had dated over the past decade; she was not depressed, nor did she have a history of drug or alcohol problems. She had liked
Girl with Curious Hair
but most of all remembered looking at the picture on the back, taken when Wallace lived in Somerville, and thinking, “User”—a drug abuser. Wallace was fascinated by her job, which included entering houses under police protection to remove endangered children, and pressed her for every detail about how she did it.

Immediately, Wallace had wanted to go to bed with her. This was how he usually dated. Harms resisted, though; so instead they would go for long walks; she lived in an apartment on the other side of town from him. They spent hours talking into the night. She loved Kokopelli, a Hopi trickster and fertility god. He had a large one on his wall. The
Oxford English Dictionary
held pride of place on the shelves in his living room. On the first birthday of hers that they celebrated together, a month after they met, Wallace gave Harms the two-volume version, with, as she remembers, “salivating excitement.” They became involved. Wallace’s “Mary” tattoo had faded over the years. “Who’s Marv?” they would joke.

Wallace was in a “post-partum funk,” as he called it, after finishing
Brief Interviews
. The Drone was sick with lymphoma and despite a course of chemotherapy was not getting better. “I’ve been going around crying like a toddler at the prospect of him suffering or dying,” he wrote Brad Morrow. Harms helped him through these difficult moments. In November Wallace took her to Jamaica. The gesture was a counterphobic one—he hated travel, and tourism even more. But Wallace saw a chance to start afresh, a way to slough off his own hideousness. The couple arrived at the Beachcomber Resort in Negril. They swam together, Wallace lulled by the promise that there could be no sharks so close to shore in the Caribbean, and ate spicy food and walked on the beach, where, attracted by his long hair, marijuana sellers swarmed him. “They always come to the addict,” he said. But as often as he could, Wallace barricaded himself in the coral pink bathroom to write. Never liking to be without a project, he had started on a long essay on language which was giving him the usual trouble. “We
snorkeled,” he wrote Franzen in quiet panic on his fifth day at the resort, “Juliana got menaced by a sting ray. She is easy to be with, and that’s good, because except for the 2 hours a day I flail away (futilely) on the usage article, we’re together all the time.” Harms was surprised to find that her new friend locked the door to work even when he was alone.

Back in Bloomington, Wallace settled down to his article. The piece was tied to the publication of a new dictionary of American usage, but he wanted to write about the function of language more broadly, what it really meant to speak of “a common language.” Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus. “Issues of usage, looked at closely even for a moment,” he wrote DeLillo, “become issues of Everything—from neurology to politics to Aristotelian
pisteis
to Jaussian
Kritik
to stuff like etiquette and clothing fashions.” Not surprisingly, as soon as he opened himself up to such vast considerations, Wallace found himself overwhelmed: “Every argument seems to me to sprout several potential objections, each of which feels like it has to be handled or the whole argument falls like a pine.” He invoked an image from Faulkner that writing a novel was like building a hen coop in a hurricane and asked DeLillo to remind him never to do nonfiction again. “The whole thing needs to end,” he added.

The relationship with Harms continued to go well. She got him to cut his hair for the first time in a year and they went to the office Christmas party for the Department of Children and Foster Services, Wallace wearing one of her plastic tortoiseshell headbands. Drone died in mid-December. Wallace held his dog in his arms and cried as the veterinarian gave a lethal injection. The body could not be cremated for three weeks and so he would go by the veterinary office and sit outside the freezer where his dog lay. He sent DeLillo a holiday card with the emendation, “It is a sad Christmas.”

Again Harms was there to comfort him. Wallace asked Harms not to fly in winter; he was afraid of losing her in a crash. Soon Harms moved into his house at the edge of town, bringing her cat. They bought a king-sized bed, because the old one was too small. The two shared corny pop songs they loved, like Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be Your Crying Shoulder.” (Wallace boasted he had the musical taste of a high school girl.) He bought her expensive gifts, happy that the books and the fellowships had made him well-to-do. The couple got engaged and picked out a setting for their
rings. They talked about having a child and agreed that if Harms got pregnant they would be pleased.

But there were issues. Harms wouldn’t let him use a pen on the couch. He was allergic to her cat. She would come home from work and zone out. He worked all day on his fiction.
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At Harms’s urging, Wallace checked himself into an addiction center in Pennsylvania to try to get off nicotine entirely. He had been at various times a smoker, a tobacco chewer, and a patch user—sometimes all three in quick succession—since graduate school.
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The stay lasted more than a week, and Wallace came home highly agitated. He wished he had a major project under way; he wished he were smoking. He wondered about the Nardil. He never felt quite himself on it. It left him somehow slightly detached from reality. He had in recent years, he believed, become hypoglycemic too, and so his historic diet of prepackaged blondies was replaced by sugarless jelly spreads.

Wallace had managed to keep television at bay for many years now, but in order to relax after her grueling days, Harms ordered satellite TV service with, as she remembers, 75 channels. Wallace would sit and click through the stations, landing on one, then moving on to the next, always afraid he was missing something better and so really watching nothing. By now, between the loss of The Drone, the availability of TV, the lack of nicotine, and the scarcity of privacy, he was stupefied. But he was engaged and committed to Juliana.

Juliana was an active Catholic. She and her fiancé discussed his converting. Wallace, who never lost his hope that he could find faith, signed up for an ecumenical Christian program called cursillo: the goal “to bring God from the head to the heart.” But his new attempt to join a formal religion did not get much further than the one with Karr. At the final ceremony, when the participants were meant to attest their belief in God, Wallace expressed his doubts instead. Faith was something he could admire in others but never quite countenance for himself. He liked to paraphrase Bertrand Russell that there were certain philosophical issues he could bear to think about only for a few minutes a year and once told his old Arizona sponsor Rich C. that he couldn’t go to church because “I always get the giggles.”
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