Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (27 page)

Wallace’s literary rebirth did not coincide with any calming of his conviction that he had to be with Karr. Indeed, the opposite. In fact, one day in February, he thought briefly of committing murder for her. He called an
ex-con he knew through his recovery program and tried to buy a gun. He had decided he would wait no longer for Karr to leave her husband; he planned to shoot him instead when he came into Cambridge to pick up the family dog. The ex-con called Larson, the head of Granada House, who told Karr. Wallace himself never showed up for the handover and thus ended what he would later call in a letter of apology “one of the scariest days of my life.” He wrote Larson in explanation, “I now know what obsession can make people capable of”—then added in longhand after—“at least of
wanting
to do.” To Karr at the time he insisted that the whole episode was an invention of the ex-con and she believed him.
²²

By the spring of 1992, Karr’s marriage was finally at an end and Wallace had new hope he could be at her side. He was ecstatic. He was ready to leave Boston. He had come to hate “this soot-fest city,” as he called it to Morrow. And he was sick of teaching. If he could get an advance, he could have the life and the woman he wanted. He had suffered beyond what he knew possible for her, and the suffering felt like an act of absolution.

In April, just before sending in the manuscript pages for Nadell and Howard, Wallace took the train down to Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. Franzen was teaching a class there and had invited him to judge a fiction competition. Wallace also read from
Infinite Jest
. Playing to his young audience, he chose a section about Don Gately that predates his admission to Ennet House. In the segment, the young addict and a partner break into a local assistant district attorney’s house, take pictures of themselves with toothbrushes up their anuses, and send the pictures to him. Beforehand, Wallace asked for a chalkboard and wrote down words and abbreviations that might not be familiar to the students.
Infinite Jest
was filled with the languages Wallace had learned in Boston—from drug addict lingo to Alcoholics Anonymous slogans. One word that Wallace had recently learned was “shunt”—to disarm an alarm system by creating a new circuit for the electricity. Wallace had gotten the word in an interview with a retired burglary detective whom Mark Costello had met working as an assistant district attorney. Wallace had listened for an hour, overwhelmed by the fact-heavy conversation. When Costello looked, “shunt” was the only word he had written in his notebook.
²³

At Swarthmore, Wallace stayed with Franzen, who remembers “an endearingly eccentric figure,” a tobacco chewer with a love of showering,
Diet Dr Pepper, and blondies. They hardly knew each other, despite having become, as Wallace would later put it in a letter to his friend, the “best of pals and lit combatants.” Wallace was urging Franzen and his then wife to join him and Karr in Syracuse, and after the reading the two young men headed north in Franzen’s old Saab to check out the city, Wallace upset he had left his favorite scarf, in the colors of the family tartan, behind.
²⁴
They took turns driving, the weather was bad, and Franzen was amazed at how much wiper fluid his friend used.

When they got to Syracuse, Wallace was surprised to find himself relegated to Karr’s floor for the night alongside Franzen. She appeared not to have the same expectations for his visit that he had. And when Wallace, Franzen, and Karr drove through the town, she asked him to crouch down out of view—apparently she was worried that news of his arrival would reach her husband, who was still nearby. Wallace and Franzen drove back down to Swarthmore the next day, discussing the purpose of literature nearly the whole way. Wallace argued that it was to alleviate loneliness and give comfort, to break through what he characterized in
Infinite Jest
as each person’s “excluded encagement in the self.” He wanted Franzen to know that he had become a different person and a different writer in the four years they’d known each other. After he got home, he wrote Franzen that their chat had been “among the most nourishing for me in recent memory” and suggested that his friend read Brian Moore’s
Catholics
, a story of a man who pledges everything for his faith. Franzen read the book and was unimpressed—his disciple had surpassed him in his quest for sincerity—but then Wallace rarely did things by halves.

A month later, in May 1992, Wallace packed up what little he had and drove to Syracuse. He had rented a first-floor apartment in a house around the corner from Karr and a few blocks from the main campus. It was in a typical graduate-student neighborhood, full of warping clapboard houses and semi-kempt lawns and right across from the food co-op. But being near the woman he loved made all the difference. “Syracuse,” he wrote Debra Spark later in the month, “is very cheap (not to mention lovely to live in, with grass and trees and terrific parks and absurdly little traffic and M. Karr).” Costello came up and brought Wallace’s old college computer. Wallace, he saw, was scribbling eagerly in his spiral-bound book whenever he had a moment. They went with Karr and her son for a tour of
the hippie thrift shops in the tiny towns of Onondaga County. Costello bought a leather jacket, and the couple teased him. He also noticed that Wallace and Karr behaved like friends rather than lovers, probably because Karr wanted things to look ambiguous to her son or maybe because they were still ambiguous. “He really could have been her gay friend, from body language,” Costello remembered.

To Costello’s eyes, Karr seemed like a tougher version of Gale Walden. She had his friend’s number. When she would tease him about his work he would put up with it, to his old roommate’s surprise. He also saw how much Wallace liked being with Dev, Karr’s young son. Wallace told the boy there were talking spiders in his beard and, when Dev asked, explained that the purpose of his bandana was to keep his head from exploding. Children had a quality Wallace would increasingly crave in those around him: they were drawn to him without crowding him. They were part of that group of people—students, recovery friends, ordinary people unconnected to the fiction business—whom he admitted to his circle because they left him room. Such people, he wrote to Franzen, “make me feel both unalone and unstressed.”
²⁵
Costello spent the weekend nights of his visit on chair cushions in his friend’s tiny apartment, Wallace in the bed. He explained that he was banned from sleeping at Karr’s while Dev was there.

With Karr still not quite available, Wallace made do as best he could. He lived on chocolate Pop-Tarts and soda, too poor to eat properly. Getting fed was a priority. So when he met Stephanie Hubbard and Doug Eich, a couple in the orbit of the recovery group he had just joined, his interest was both literary and culinary. He would go to Hubbard’s house, where she would cook and he and Eich discussed language and fiction. Eich misused nauseous for nauseated and Wallace corrected him, adducing his mother. Eich, a graduate student in linguistics, called his new friend “a smug prescriptivist douche-bag.” Wallace was chewing tobacco again, which he would spit into a soda can, apologizing profusely to Hubbard and Eich while enjoying their attention. Then he would take a toothbrush he kept in a Ziploc bag in his sock and brush his teeth in their bathroom. The three would discuss the day’s recovery meetings. Eich and Wallace shared a passion for DeLillo and also Cormac McCarthy. Wallace had discovered McCarthy late, when he was teaching at Amherst. “Something
like Faulkner on acid,” he had written Richard Elman at the time, in excitement. Eich and Wallace agreed that the gritty portrait of the alcoholic in
Suttree
was far more interesting than the self-pitying Consul in Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
.
²⁶

The three would talk for hours. The conversation often turned to faith. Wallace said he was trying to pray, because, even though he did not necessarily believe in God, it seemed like a good thing to do. Karr had become attracted to Catholicism—for her baptism would be a key moment in her recovery from alcohol. So for a time Wallace too hoped to receive the sacraments, thinking that if he and Karr were to marry they could have a religious wedding. (Ultimately the priest told him he had too many questions to be a believer, and he let the issue drop.) Wallace’s real religion was always language anyway. It alone could shape and hold multitudes; by comparison God’s power was spindly. That was why he was obsessed with grammar; as he put it in a letter to Franzen, “If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.”

At first, in Syracuse, Wallace had trouble pushing
Infinite Jest
forward. Change always derailed his writing. Costello had added a new keyboard to Wallace’s college computer. “I simply have to
pound
to get the letters to register,” he complained to Franzen. He couldn’t read some of his old drafts; he was too poor to buy a table to put it on; there were too many distractions. Wallace was, he wrote Franzen, “in a real funk about the Project” and worried his current inertia would “become a stasis that threatens to accumulate its own inertia, etc.” Franzen had made a second visit to Syracuse, this time with his wife, to look at the possibility of moving there again. The three drove down the street on which Raymond Carver had lived when he taught at the university in the 1980s. His old house was for sale. They were amazed to learn that the price was $10,000 higher because it had once been the home of a famous writer.
²⁷
Now Wallace again tried to lure him, advertising that “it’s awfully pretty here now—60s, clear, sunny, every kind of floral scent known to Linnaeus floating around.”

Over the next few months Wallace fell back into his routines. He would get up and go to a 7:15 sobriety meeting, then come back and work, next
go to a gym to work out. Seeing the size of Big Craig and the other men in Granada House had made him serious about weight lifting: he now drank a protein shake every morning with raw egg in it, which he called his “breakfast vomit.”
²⁸
In the evening there was another sobriety meeting and then he would go back to work, altering and typing into his old computer what he’d written in the morning. This arrangement brought out his best writing, he felt, because the process of writing by hand and then transcribing forced his brain to wait for his hands. When he tried composing directly on a PC, it felt wrong.
²⁹

The work moving forward again, Wallace discovered that his tiny apartment felt just right, a counterpart to the bungalow in Tucson and his senior single at Amherst, places where he didn’t feel his ass in the chair. He had gotten hold of the silver velour recliner and put it in the living room. He piled his books and papers on his bed. To sleep he moved them to the floor. He was so happy he sent Franzen pictures of his narrow slice of paradise.

For evening company, there was, by August, Mary, with whom a relationship had finally begun in earnest. “The Era of Skulking seems to be drawing to a close!” Wallace told Spark, reporting that Karr’s estranged husband had begun seeing someone. They would watch action movies together at night, both loving, as Karr told a later interviewer, “movies where shit blew up.” They worked out together and played tennis. Karr cooked for both of them and for her students. They read books out loud to each other and exchanged drafts (Karr was working on
The Liar’s Club
and he poached material from her life.) This was their happiest time. They went to her twentieth high school reunion in Texas and “had big big fun,” Wallace told Spark. Wallace even was willing to dance, though only to the slow music.

But no sooner were he and Karr finally a couple than problems emerged. By the fall he was mad at her for never quite integrating him into her family; she was mad at him for never thinking about anyone’s needs but his own. He responded with more protestations of love, writing from around the corner, as she remembered. “I want you to know that I AM here,” he wrote her, “I AM with you…. Mary, I am going nowhere but to you if you will have me. As you move closer to being available to me…I become more, not less, devoted to you and to my love for you and to my desire to have a life with you if you want me.”

He went on in loving quasi-complaint:

Wallace turned to his recovery groups for companionship. His sponsor, a garrulous older real estate investor with, as others remember, a spectacular sock collection, was there to give him counsel. Mostly Wallace talked to him about Karr and their unhappy relationship. “I had the impression of hurling things,” the man remembers; “you could not please Mary.” He invited Wallace to join a men’s group he was involved in, which Wallace nicknamed “the catacombs.” They would meet at different members’ houses each week, and when they got to Wallace’s they sat amid the tower of manuscript pages and piles of books. He told them he had always looked on how to get women into bed as “a physics problem”; Mary, though, obeyed no law he understood.

That fall Mark Leyner was invited to Syracuse as part of a reading series at the university. Leyner was at the height of his celebrity. He had just published
Et Tu, Babe
and been on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
, where he had been surprised to find Wallace, with whom he had previously been friendly, call him “a kind of antichrist.” Now he smoothly worked his way through his material to the large crowd. As he riffed, he bobbed back and forth like a boxer, or the writer of the moment he was. He singled Wallace’s fiction out for praise but then made fun of alcoholism and said that people who wore bandanas reminded him of the cabin boys on
The Love Boat
. He insisted that the goal of writers was “to entertain,” if “in a very unique way.” At the very end, a hand came up from the back row: it was Wallace, scruffy, in a bandana. “Is it sufficient to entertain people as spectacularly as you have,” he asked now, in his thin voice, “or should there be a further moral purpose to your work?” Leyner replied that he felt entertainment was itself a moral goal and mentioned the well-known moment in
Preston Sturges’s
Sullivan’s Travels
in which a Mickey Mouse cartoon helps convicts forget their hard lives for a moment. Wallace clearly wasn’t satisfied with Leyner’s answer—to give addicts more of the drug wasn’t to cure them—but time was up. Karr drove Leyner to the train station. Wallace, along for the ride, seemed to him grateful to be in her presence.