Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (13 page)

The workshop with Carter was Wallace’s happiest time at Arizona. The program director was supportive in the same way Dale Peterson had been
at Amherst. She herself was an entirely conventional writer and not even a very good one, but she understood that her protégé’s work was special and encouraged him to write what he wanted. “He is going to make us all very proud,” she would tell the other students. Her support for him was evident to all. At a publishing conference Carter convened, she squired Wallace around to meet important fiction agents and editors. Wallace rallied to the challenge, surprising his fellow students who thought of him as shy. They had not realized that he could play the game when he wanted to.
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The double credit in Carter’s workshop required Wallace to supply six new stories in a semester, a rigorous pace. But he continued to write well and fast and anywhere he wanted, caught up in gusts of inspiration. One weekend that spring he disappeared. Walden grew worried, called him, went by and rang the doorbell of the casita but got no response. The next Monday at the offices of the program’s literary magazine, the
Sonora Review
, he presented her with the story “Little Expressionless Animals,” a tale about a young woman who is a champion
Jeopardy!
player. It was thirty pages long. “I wrote straight through,” he told Walden, who had been sure he had run away with another woman.

“Little Expressionless Animals” was Wallace’s first attempt to treat seriously issues that had mostly been played for laughs in
Broom
. Its central preoccupation is the relationship between people and the images they appropriate from media to shape and infuse their thoughts. The narrative tells the story of Julie Smith, the winner of the last seven hundred episodes of the game show. She is a smart, twentyish square peg of a young woman, a descendant of Lenore Beadsman, herself a descendant of Oedipa Maas (and of Amy Wallace). The question at hand for the show’s executives, Merv Griffin and Alex Trebek, is whether to let her continue her
Jeopardy!
streak. “Rules, though,” points out one of their staff. “Five slots, retire undefeated, come back for Champion’s Tourney in April…. Fairness to whole contestant pool. An ethics type of thing.” Griffin, though, prizes the ratings and the advertising income, and, more complexly, the ineluctability of a great image. He sees that Julie Smith is different. “She’s,” he says, “like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus.” That filter operates only when she is on television. This girl, who is almost affectless off camera, comes alive on the set. As the narrator points out:

Julie, TV’s natural spawn, seems to be assuming some of its properties, to be acquiring, like Pynchon’s San Narciso, a sort of “intent to communicate.” In the end Griffin decides to have Julie play against her autistic brother—“Great P.R.,” as one staffer points out—and the story, full of mirrors and characters’ glimpsing themselves in the glass, ends appropriately with the most important mirror moment of all: “Julie and the audience look at each other.”
²²

Wallace was maturing as a writer. The preoccupation with media now went deeper than just a statement of purpose. The voice of the story was diffuse, hovering, omnipresent without being omniscient. As the critic Sven Birkerts noted in a later essay in
Wigwag
, “Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around his characters.” This charged airspace is where the artistic activity of the story resides. The story ably frustrates the MFA ukase, the order to “hook” the reader fast. What is at stake for the main character? Everything, and also nothing, the story’s tension residing, with the narrator, in the ether above her.

The story received a favorable reception in Carter’s workshop. (It would continue to be one of Wallace’s best known. He would read it publicly for years.) At one point in the story, Alex Trebek says, “My favorite word is
moist
,…especially when used in combination with my second favorite word, which is
loincloth
.” Later when Wallace saw the young man who had supplied the phrase at the Hungarian Pastry Shop waiting in line at one of his signings, he called out, “You’re the moist loincloth guy!”

At semester’s end, Wallace decided to stay in Tucson. Walden would be there, and he could get credit for attending a teacher-training workshop at the Southern Arizona Writing Project. Wallace was used to going home in the summer and staying away turned out to be an unpleasant experience.
He found the desert heat oppressive and the relationship with Walden developed problems: they had begun talking about the future, marriage and children; Wallace was not ready. They went to Nogales, just over the Mexican border—“kind of a depressing place,” as Walden remembers—and stayed for a few days, listening to the mariachis play all night long. They broke up, if temporarily. “It’s hot, here. Over 100° and climbing,” Wallace wrote Washington in July. “I have no job, no girlfriend, no friends.” He was “getting high too much, and moping.”

The early part of the summer was taken up by the page proofs of
Broom
, which was to be published the next January, but the work felt old and stale to him. He told JT he wished he could pull a Norman Mailer and rewrite the book from scratch. He also soon entered into what would come to be a familiar struggle with copy editors. They wanted to standardize his prose, not understanding how thoroughly thought through were his departures from standard grammar. If he used a comma in an unusual place or chose to indicate direct speech with single quotes rather than the usual double ones, there was a reason. He was going, he had written Nadell in April, to have to “copy-edit the copy-editor.” The process exhausted him. When the final proofs came in July, he sent them back to Howard with a typically confused sign-off: “Hoping Very Much I’ll Never Have To Look At That Particular Confoguration Of Words Again, Yet Eager To Do So If It Will Help Viking One Little Bit.”

Meanwhile, Howard was soliciting prepublication quotes for the novel. “No autobiography, no cocaine, no rock clubs, lots of ambition and inventiveness,” he promised Don DeLillo, who passed, as did dozens of others. Most, if they even leafed through it, likely saw the book as derivative of Pynchon, or of DeLillo himself. Elman was one of the few to offer praise—sort of. At Wallace’s request, he read the manuscript and wrote to Howard, in part, “As wild elk produce many elkins, so the American heartland produces its own Menippean satirists. David Wallace’s young genius is undimmed. The magnitude of his borrowings he pays back with interest.” When he shared the quote with Wallace, Wallace asked his old teacher what he meant. “You must not confuse the modesty of hype for lack of admiration of your talent,” the teacher replied evasively. To Howard, he was less disingenuous. “I would be hard put to defend David’s writing, for all its charm, as original, in most of the standard senses of the word.” He
added, half joking, “If you want to publish really good writing you should publish mine.”

Shortly after sending off the page proofs in July, Wallace drove up to see Costello, who was now a summer associate at a law firm in Denver. They planned a weekend road trip, but at the last minute Costello was called in to work. Wallace came along to get a little experience of what it was like to be in an office. They parked in the underground garage of the nearly sixty-story building and took the elevator up to Costello’s office. Wallace, wide-eyed, settled in an empty conference room. While his old roommate took a long call from another lawyer, Wallace wrote the first draft of “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR” in a notebook. It is the story of two executives whom chance throws together in a huge office building, the building itself “empty and bright, dispossessed, autonomous and autonomic.” The older one has a heart attack in the building’s garage and falls slowly, inexorably to the ground:

The younger of the two men then tries to come to his rescue. It is unclear whether he succeeds in saving the other’s life with CPR. “They shared pain, though of course neither knew,” the narrator of the story asserts.

The effort was an early example of the paradoxical approach that would come to dominate Wallace’s later fiction: a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings. This would prove one day to be the stance of much of the writing in the story collection
Oblivion
and, finally and problematically, in
The Pale King
, but in its earliest incarnations it came easily to Wallace.
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The next day he and Costello took to the road. They planned on going to St. Francis, Kansas, about two hundred miles to the east. There was a well-known NPR station there. Wallace wanted, Costello remembers, Oedipa Maas–like, “to
get to the source of the signal.” On the way they stayed overnight in a cheap motel in eastern Colorado. Wallace realized the next morning en route that he had left behind the notebook with the “CPR” story in it, so the two turned around and drove back the twenty miles to the motel to get it; Wallace mentioned to Costello that it also contained “a big thing”—Costello assumed a new novel was being started. They turned around one more time and got to St. Francis, where they sat in the parking lot for a few minutes. That month, a friend of Walden’s took a photo of Wallace for his book jacket. He chose to wear the leather jacket he’d bought from McLagan, the one that always brought him luck.

The fall 1986 school term came with two big changes. Mary Carter was gone, forced out by the faculty. She did not go quietly. Soon, as Wallace wrote to Nadell, she was “going through both a lawsuit and a nervous breakdown in London.” Carter’s departure was awkward for Wallace. He was her favorite; indeed, some people assumed that they were involved, not least because she had some years before published a novel about an older woman and a younger man. Fueling the rumor was that he moved into her apartment after her departure. Some guessed it was a present of some sort (in fact she charged him rent and told him not to smoke inside). He enjoyed the condo, which was much more pleasant than the swamp-cooled bungalow he’d lived in for the past year. It had color-coordinated furniture and wall hangings, not to mention access to a pool. “I got darned little work done,” he complained to Washington about the summer when September finally came around, “just took one gutty class and sat around smoking pot in airconditioning.”

His scholarship having ended, that fall Wallace had to teach. The prospect did not delight him. In his audio letter to his Amherst friends on arriving, he had declared the undergraduates at UA to be “roughly of an intelligence level of a fairly damaged person.” More important, he was aware that the teacher-student relationship was one of performer and spectator. The teacher was under constant pressure to
entertain
if he wanted to be liked—and no one wanted to be liked more than Wallace did. The bind was not just that he did not think he could do it, but that if he did do it, was he actually doing something he would admire himself for having done?
The first morning of classes found him lying on the floor of the
Sonora Review
offices in the Modern Languages Building, unable to move. “Give him space. He’s nervous,” Walden whispered to everyone. The others were shocked. Wallace to them was by now the epitome of confidence.

But once he had decided to become good at something, Wallace usually succeeded. It was the decision to dive, not the entry into the water that was hard. Quickly, he became a top instructor, charismatic and popular. He scoured every piece of undergraduate writing, striving to overwhelm the students with the volume and sincerity of his comments. It did not matter that much of what they wrote was indifferent, nor that he was teaching ordinary undergraduate expository writing classes, classes, in other words, for people who by and large only wanted to be done with the class to move on to other things. The vitalizing—he would have said “erotic”—power of his mind made what they did interesting. What he wrote of Julie Smith in “Little Expressionless Animals” applied equally to him:

And as with Julie Smith, there was at once an out-of-proportion commitment and a hint of irony to his behavior. When the university sent an examiner to evaluate his teaching, Wallace had every student in the class bring an apple to present to him. Whether his mockery was appreciated or went unnoticed, that year he won the prize for best teaching assistant in the department.

Teaching taught him a hard lesson, though: he had only a limited amount of energy. If he taught, that drew down the tank with which he wrote. “I leave at dawn and get home at night,” he wrote Washington as the semester began, “promptly get drunk and fall into a sweaty half-sleep.” Two months later, he was back to Washington with more complaints: “I mostly sit around smoking pot, cigarettes, worrying about not working, worrying about the tension between the worry and the absence of and action fuelled by that worry.”