Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (29 page)

Wallace wanted the job as much as ISU seemed to want him to have it; he was ripe to go somewhere. He had been working at maximum speed. Fiction wasn’t the problem, for once. “Full-time writing is going OK volume-wise,” he wrote Debra Spark at the time, “but I find the isolation and lack of contact with people awfully hard to take.” He explained, “Things are sad here. Mary and I have agreed, not as amicably as one might wish, that we do not work as a couple…. We are both angry at one another, though in my case the anger’s just about been replaced by a very dark sadness. She was my best friend in the world, and we both gave up a lot and worked very hard to try to make this work.” One night Wallace tried to push Karr from a moving car. Soon afterward, he got so mad at her that he threw her coffee table at her. He sent her $100 for the remnants. She had a friend who was a lawyer write back to say she still owned the table, all he’d bought was the “brokenness.”

Portions of
Infinite Jest
were beginning to appear in literary magazines. “Three Protrusions,” the excerpt in which Ken Erdedy waits for his pot, had been the first in a widely read one, appearing in
Grand Street
in the spring of 1992. It was a virtuoso, voicy story, not dissimilar in style to Wallace’s earlier work. A year later, a more intriguing excerpt about Ennet House appeared in
Conjunctions
, in its “Unfinished Business” issue. Wallace wrote a preface assuring readers his would not remain so: “NYC guys in serious business suits have paid $ for something they’re legally entitled to by 1/1/94.” Aware that he had an opportunity to introduce a different David Foster Wallace, a writer with deeper goals and purer motivations, he continued:

The fifty pages that followed were a kaleidoscope of first-person testimonials—stories of “hitting bottom”—lifted from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, with rummies and meth heads taking over a fictional world where, since he began tearing through his senior thesis, no one had ever known pain deeper than a breakup before. Gately made his appearance too, another new kind of character for Wallace:

The response to the
Conjunctions
publication was highly favorable. “Fun’s new administration” was finding Wallace readers. And as the
Conjunctions
excerpt appeared, Illinois State had written to offer Wallace a job that would lead to tenure. Wallace was thrilled, even more so when Charlie Harris agreed to let him teach just two classes a semester. The arrangement was so generous that Wallace immediately worried it wouldn’t last. He had visions of a replacement department head “upping it to three or four and you being in Burma or something” on sabbatical. Could he get, he asked Harris, kind of joking, a letter “preferably notarized by at least an appellate-level jurist” confirming the arrangement? Harris promised him it was forthcoming.

Despite, as he wrote to Don DeLillo, with whom he had struck up a correspondence with the encouragement of Franzen, “a certain icky sense about availing myself of academic patronage,” he felt he had made a good decision.
³²
It did not bother him overmuch that, as he wrote Washington, he would be “the least weird writer there.” He explained to Dale Peterson at Amherst, “The chairman is a dreamboat, everybody seems at once passionate and low-ego about teaching writing, and there was an utter absence of the Machiavellian politics that made Arizona such a gnarly place to be…. If I do not like teaching at ISU,” he explained, “I won’t like it anywhere, and I can retire from the field assured that I’ve experienced academia at its nicest.”

In July 1993 the director of the Dalkey Archive, John O’Brien, and his son, met Wallace in front of his new house on North Fell Avenue in Bloomington. The two groaned as they carried Wallace’s weights up the stairs. Wallace had rented the house sight unseen from one of the members of the search committee. It turned out to be pretty, with a fireplace and a screened-in porch, opposite a park. Wallace brought his silver velour recliner, put a spit can nearby, and papered the bathroom with manuscript pages from
Infinite Jest
, tennis competition charts, and an adult diaper wrapper.
¹

Returning to the Midwest brought mixed feelings for the thirty-one-year-old writer. He was particularly wary about being so close to his mother while he was fictionalizing her in his novel. He was drawing her as the lens of therapy had revealed her to him. Avril Incandenza is the seductive puppetmaster of Enfield Tennis Academy. When she speaks, Wallace wrote, everyone inclines their heads to her “very subtly and slightly, like heliotropes.”

And Wallace missed Karr. He had spent the last few months of his time in Syracuse mostly in exile, anxious he’d have to be recording the arrival and departure of “different masculine-model cars” in front of her house, as he wrote Corey Washington in March. He had brought her with him though as a character in his book. Joelle Van Dyne, also known as Madame Psychosis, is a radio show host and drug addict in recovery at Ennet House, a woman who keeps her face veiled either because it is hideously disfigured or because she is so beautiful that every man who sees it falls in love with her. She stars in “Infinite Jest,” the lethal video cartridge.

Predictably, Wallace worried about going back to teaching. He had been writing at an unequaled pace for two years and feared the change to his routine. But he was also an adult now, a man three and a half years sober with a job and a house and an advance for the book he was well under way with. That’s what it meant to live under the new administration of fun: no more irony and distance, commitment not spectation (a favorite word of his),
involvement
. And even, where possible, the hope of redemption. “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished,” he told Larry McCaffery in the
Review of
Contemporary Fiction
interview, which came out just as he arrived in Bloomington, “but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” The writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wallace had always preferred certainty to unclarity, passion to incrementalism, and now he was a full-fledged apostle of sincerity. He had no tolerance for the person he was and gave no quarter to writers whom he thought were like the writer he used to be. When Steve Moore wrote him to recommend a novel he was publishing, praising its “sardonic worldview perfect for the irony-filled nineties,” Wallace shot back that this was “like saying ‘a kerosen[e]-filled fire extinguisher perfect for the blazing housefire.’”

Wallace was particularly allergic to those who dreamt of fame instead of achievement. He took every opportunity to point out to young writers the snares of the sort of early success he had had. He wrote Washington that whenever younger people asked him how to become an author his reaction was to be “polite and banal.” He pointed out, “The obvious fact that the kids don’t Want to Write so much as Want to Be Writers makes their letters so depressing.” To one such inquirer, a young man in his early twenties, he gave some unbending advice: “Take this time to learn to be your own toughest critic and best friend…. I wish I had…. Concentrate on the work, loving it and hating it and making it the best and truest expression of yourself it can be; the publishing stuff will come.” He added, “I’m mostly saying this to myself at 22, 23.” When Washington asked him if he himself had a swelled head, Wallace demurred: “Even a marginal soap-opera actor receives exponentially more mail than Bellow, I’m sure. And
I’m no Bellow,” adding by hand “(yet!),” then a trademark smiley face to deflate his own boast. He went on:

Alone in the summer heat of the Illinois flatlands, Wallace tried to make life as much like Syracuse as he could. He found tennis courts, a gym, a therapist, and a substance abuse recovery group. The group Wallace liked met in a church on Oakland Avenue at noon. It was made up mostly of working-class people. He was a surprise to them. When he walked in for the first time, in his torn T-shirt, work boots, and bandana, several members took him for homeless. Soon he had become a literal fixture there—he took the same seat at every meeting. The members loved the way he talked—for many he was the most articulate person they had ever met—and felt his elaborate, run-on narratives of the daily battle to maintain the equanimity that kept him sober expressed what they were thinking, only better. As ever, it fell to them to tell him not to live so much in his head. They made fun of him for being too analytical and offered him slogans like “Keep It Simple” and “Be Nice to Myself” and “Stop Trying to Figure Everything Out.” For God, they’d suggest, he should just substitute “Good Orderly Direction.” “A grateful heart will never drink,” they might add. The banality of the responses maddened Wallace, but here he was drug- and alcohol-free after almost four years, thanks to people like them. “It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers,” he would write in
Infinite Jest
. “I don’t know how recovery works,” he would tell friends, “but it works.” He was always available to help other members with both spiritual and practical questions, rewriting their job applications or professional correspondence. He attended a second recovery meeting at the Lighthouse Institute, where he sponsored addicts
who had been ordered by courts to attend a recovery program. It came under the rubric of “pay it forward” that he had learned at Granada House: if you help someone, when you need help someone will be there for you too.

The other members began looking after him in turn. They saw him—and he played to this—as a sort of holy fool. A former judge started giving Wallace his cast-off clothes. The daughter of another recovery member brushed Wallace’s long, unruly hair (he refused her offer of conditioner). If his computer crashed, someone from recovery came and rescued his files. Familyless, he was adoptable—one couple hung a stocking for him every Christmas. Wallace went through a number of sponsors until he found one he liked, a man who had entered the program after falling out of a tree while high. The accident had broken his back, made it necessary for him to use two metal canes. He was incontinent and had to go to the “john,” Wallace wrote a friend in a later letter, “like every fifteen minutes.” But Wallace used him to tamp down his own self-absorption. “He’s extremely helpful,” he explained, “as just a plain nonverbal model of what Real problems are when I think I’ve got Problems.”

Since junior year of college, Wallace had never been without a girlfriend for very long. These women filled an important gap in his life. They were the clock by which he noted time’s passing and the mirror in which he examined his character. When he was having problems with Karr back in Syracuse, for instance, he had written to Franzen, “I’m having to countenance the fact that I just may be constitutionally unable to sustain an intimate connection with a girl, which means I’m either terribly shallow or mentally ill or both.”

As the summer wore on, Wallace was still getting his ex out of his system. His male friends in Syracuse had been enormously relieved when ISU had offered him a job; to them the Karr relationship seemed wholly dysfunctional. “Run for your life,” his sponsor, John F., remembers telling him. He now affected to have left Karr behind in letters to friends. “Unpacking, trying to write, chasing tail,” he boasted to Morrow, summarizing his activities his first summer in Illinois. But in fact several months after arriving many of his thoughts were still of Karr; he bought her expensive lingerie and perfume and mailed it anonymously. He even bought the right to name a star after her. He wrote in a notebook, “Now she’s in the sky and a little bit of her will always be overhead.”
He sent her the box with the certificate. Around the same time, he wrote a Syracuse friend that he was “off sex” and promised himself he would never be in such a poisonous relationship again. “I won’t sleep with anybody who lives far away anymore,” he wrote her, “whom I can’t be with—I hope—from now on.”

Fortunately, his department head, Charlie Harris, and Harris’s wife, Victoria, also a professor of English at ISU, stepped in. Victoria had their twenty-four-year-old daughter Kymberly in mind for Wallace. Kymberly was an actress and aspiring playwright who lived in Chicago. On Wallace’s first visit Victoria had shown him her picture. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she’d said. “You should marry her.” The two began corresponding, and soon Harris, leaving behind personal problems in Chicago, had moved home. Wallace and her mother invited her out the next day to a movie. He chose
Jurassic Park
. The three went to downtown Normal’s theater to watch the blockbuster. Wallace was, as ever, also doing research. Steven Spielberg, the movie’s director, was someone Wallace had always been interested in. Though he’d seen the movie twice before in Syracuse, he enjoyed it again, getting, as he would say, his “dose.” Kymberly, on the other hand, had been so bored she’d walked out. Afterward, they went to the Gallery, a club where Wallace refused to join her on the dance floor. Despite their differences the two began hanging out; Wallace gave her sections of
Infinite Jest
to woo her, and soon they were a couple. In the empty Midwest, she felt, he was the most interesting man she knew; Wallace enjoyed her vibrancy and physicality.