The David Foster Wallace Reader

  “Stay right where you are,” says the television.

  “And then you hear about how every once in a while one of them gets on TV somehow. By accident,” says Muffy. “There’s a shot of them in the crowd at a ball game, or they’re interviewed on the street about a referendum or something, and they go home and plunk right down in front of the set, and all of a sudden they look and they’re inside the set.” Muffy pushes her glasses up. “And sometimes you hear about how it drives them mad, sometimes.”

  “There ought to be special insurance for that or something,” Dee says, tinkling the ice in the pitcher.

  “Maybe that’s an idea.”

  Dee looks around. “You seen the vermouth around here anyplace?”

  Julie and Faye walk past a stucco house the color of Pepto-Bismol. A VW bus is backing out of the driveway. It sings the high sad song of the Volkswagen-in-reverse. Faye wipes her forehead with her arm. She feels moist and sticky, something hot in a Baggie.

  “But so I don’t know what to tell them,” she says.

  “Being involved with a woman doesn’t automatically make you a lesbian,” says Julie.

  “It doesn’t make me Marie Osmond, either, though.”

  Julie laughs. “A cross you’ll have to bear.” She takes Faye’s hand.

  Julie and Faye take walks a lot. Faye drives over to Julie’s place and helps her into her disguise. Julie wears a mustache and hat, Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a Nikon.

  “Except what if I am a lesbian?” Faye asks. She looks at a small child methodically punching a mild-faced father in the back of the thigh while the father buys Häagen-Dazs from a vendor. “I mean, what if I am a lesbian, and people ask me why I’m a lesbian?” Faye releases Julie’s hand to pinch sweat off her upper lip. “What do I say if they ask me why?”

  “You anticipate a whole lot of people questioning you about your sexuality?” Julie asks. “Or are there particular people you’re worried about?”

  Faye doesn’t say anything.

  Julie looks at her. “I can’t believe you really even care.”

  “Maybe I do. What questions I care about aren’t really your business. You’re why I might be a lesbian; I’m just asking you to tell me what I can say.”

  Julie shrugs. “Say whatever you want.” She has to keep straightening her mustache, from the heat. “Say lesbianism is simply one kind of response to Otherness. Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.”

  “I don’t want to hear mask theories, Julie,” Faye says. “I want to hear what I should really tell people.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me which people you’re so worried about.”

  Faye doesn’t say anything. A very large man walks by, his face red as steak, his cowboy boots new, a huge tin star pinned to the lapel of his business suit.

  Julie starts to smile.

  “Don’t smile,” says Faye.

  They walk in silence. The sky is clear and spread way out. It shines in its own sun, glassy as aftershave.

  Julie smiles to herself, under her hat. The smile’s cold. “You know what’s fun, if you want to have fun,” she says, “is to make up explanations. Give people reasons, if they want reasons. Anything you want. Make reasons up. It’ll surprise you—the more improbable the reason, the more satisfied people will be.”

  “That’s fun?”

  “I guarantee you it’s more fun than twirling with worry over the whole thing.”

  “Julie?” Faye says suddenly. “What about if you lose, sometime? Do we stay together? Or does our being together depend on the show?”

  A woman in terry-cloth shorts is giving Julie a pretty brazen look.

  Julie looks away, in her hat.

  “Here’s one,” she says. “If people ask, you can give them this one. You fall totally in love with a man who tells you he’s totally in love with you, too. He’s older. He’s important in terms of business. You give him all of yourself. He goes to France, on important business. He won’t let you come. You wait for days and don’t hear from him. You call him in France, and a woman’s voice says a French hello on the phone, and you hear the man’s electric shaver in the background. A couple days later you get a hasty French postcard he’d mailed on his first day there. It says: ‘Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.’ You reel into lesbianism, from the pain.”

  Faye looks at the curved side of Julie’s face, deep skin of a perfect white grape.

  Julie says: “Tell them this man who broke your heart quickly assumed in your memory the aspects of a political cartoon: enormous head, tiny body, all unflattering features exaggerated.”

  “I can tell them all men everywhere look that way to me now.”

  “Give them this one. You meet a boy, at your East Coast college. A popular and beautiful and above all—and this is what attracts you most—a terribly serious boy. A boy who goes to the library and gets out a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, researches the precise location and neurology of the female clitoris—simply, you’re convinced, to allow him to give you pleasure. He plays your clitoris, your whole body, like a fine instrument. You fall for the boy completely. The intensity of your love creates what you could call an organic situation: a body can’t walk without legs; legs can’t walk without a body. He becomes your body.”

  “But pretty soon he gets tired of my body.”

  “No, he gets obsessed with your body. He establishes control over your own perception of your body. He makes you diet, or gain weight. He makes you exercise. He supervises your haircuts, your make-overs. Your body can’t make a move without him. You get muscular, from the exercise. Your clothes get tighter and tighter. He traces your changing outline on huge sheets of butcher’s paper and hangs them in his room in a sort of evolutionary progression. Your friends think you’re nuts. You lose all your friends. He’s introduced you to all his friends. He made you turn slowly around while he introduced you, so they could see you from every conceivable angle.”

  “I’m miserable with him.”

  “No, you’re deliriously happy. But there’s not much you, at the precise moment you’re feeling most complete.”

  “He makes me lift weights while he watches. He has barbells in his room.”

  “Your love,” says Julie, “springs from your incompleteness, but also reduces you to another’s prosthetic attachment, calcified by the Medusa’s gaze of his need.”

  “I told you I didn’t want abstractions about this stuff,” Faye says impatiently.

  Julie walks, silent, with a distant frown of concentration. Faye sees a big butterfly beat incongruously at the smoke-black window of a long limousine. The limousine is at a red light. Now the butterfly falls away from the window. It drifts aimlessly to the pavement and lies there, bright.

  “He makes you lift weights, in his room, at night, while he sits and watches,” Julie says quietly. “Pretty soon you’re lifting weights nude while he watches from his chair. You begin to be uneasy. For the first time you taste something like degradation in your mouth. The degradation tastes like tea. Night after night it goes. Your mouth tastes like tea when he eventually starts going outside, to the window, to the outside of the window at night, to watch you lift weights nude.”

  “I feel horrible when he watches through the window.”

  “Plus, eventually, his friends. It turns out he starts inviting all his friends over at night to watch through the window with him as you lift weights. You’re able to make out the outlines of all the faces of his friends. You can see them through your own reflection in the black glass. The faces are rigid with fascination. The faces remind you of the carved faces of pumpkins. As you look you see a tongue come out of one of the faces and touch the window. You can’t tell whether it’s the beautiful serious boy’s tongue or not.”

  “I reel into lesbianism, from the pain.”

  “You still love him, though.”

 
Faye’s thongs slap. She wipes her forehead and considers.

  “I’m in love with a guy and we get engaged and I start going over to his parents’ house with him for dinner. One night I’m setting the table and I hear his father in the living room laughingly tell the guy that the penalty for bigamy is two wives. And the guy laughs too.”

  An electronics shop pulls up alongside them. Faye sees a commercial behind the big window, reflected in the fly’s-eye prism of about thirty televisions. Alan Alda holds up a product between his thumb and forefinger. Smiles at it.

  “You’re in love with a man,” says Julie, “who insists that he can love you only when you’re standing in the exact center of whatever room you’re in.”

  Pat Sajak plants lettuce in the garden of his Bel Air home. Bert Convy boards his Lear, bound for an Indianapolis Motor Home Expo.

  “A dream,” says Alex Trebek to the doctor with circumflex brows. “I have this dream where I’m standing smiling over a lectern on a little hill in the middle of a field. The field, which is verdant and clovered, is covered with rabbits. They sit and look at me. There must be several million rabbits in that field. They all sit and look at me. Some of them lower their little heads to eat clover. But their eyes never leave me. They sit there and look at me, a million bunny rabbits, and I look back.”

  “Uncle,” says Patricia (“Patty-Jo”) Smith-Tilley-Lunt, stout and loosefaced behind the cash register of the Holiday Inn Restaurant at the Holiday Inn, Interstate 70, Ashtabula, Ohio:

  “Uncle uncle uncle uncle.”

  “No,” says Faye. “I meet a man in the park. We’re both walking. The man’s got a tiny puppy, the cutest and most beautiful puppy I’ve ever seen. The puppy’s on a little leash. When I meet the man, the puppy wags its tail so hard that it loses its little balance. The man lets me play with the puppy. I scratch its stomach and it licks my hand. The man has a picnic lunch in a hamper. We spend all day in the park, with the puppy. By sundown I’m totally in love with the man with the puppy. I stay the night with him. I let him inside me. I’m in love. I start to see the man and the puppy whenever I close my eyes.

  “I have a date with the man in the park a couple days later. This time he’s got a different puppy with him, another beautiful puppy that wags its tail and licks my hand, and the man’s hand. The man says it’s the first puppy’s brother.”

  “Oh Faye.”

  “And but this goes on, me meeting with the man in the park, him having a different puppy every time, and the man is so warm and loving and attentive toward both me and the puppies that soon I’m totally in love. I’m totally in love on the morning I follow the man to work, just to surprise him, like with a juice and Danish, and I follow him and discover that he’s actually a professional cosmetics researcher, who performs product experiments on puppies, and kills them, and dissects them, and that before he experiments on each puppy he takes it to the park, and walks it, and uses the beautiful puppies to attract women, who he seduces.”

  “You’re so crushed and revolted you become a lesbian,” says Julie.

  Pat Sajak comes close to skunking Alex Trebek in three straight games of racquetball. In the health club’s locker room Trebek experiments with a half-Windsor and congratulates Sajak on the contract renewal and iterates hopes for no hard feeling re that Applause-sign gag, still. Sajak says he’s forgotten all about it, and calls Trebek big fella; and there’s some towel-snapping and general camaraderie.

  “I need you to articulate for me the dynamics of this connection between Faye Goddard and Julie Smith,” Merv Griffin tells his shiny executive. His man stands at the office window, watching cars move by on the Hollywood Freeway, in the sun. The cars glitter.

  “You and your mother happen to go to the movies,” Faye says. She and Julie stand wiping themselves in the shade of a leather shop’s awning. “You’re a child. The movie is Son of Flubber, from Disney. It lasts pretty much the whole afternoon.” She gathers her hair at the back of her neck and lifts it. “After the movie’s over and you and your mother are outside, on the sidewalk, in the light, your mother breaks down. She has to be restrained by the ticket man, she’s so hysterical. She tears at her beautiful hair that you’ve always admired and wished you could have had too. She’s totally hysterical. It turns out a man in the theater behind you was playing with your mother’s hair all through the movie. He was touching her hair in a sexual way. She was horrified and repulsed, but didn’t make a sound, the whole time, I guess for fear that you, the child, would discover that a strange man in the dark was touching your mother in a sexual way. She breaks down on the sidewalk. Her husband has to come. She spends a year on antidepressants. Then she drinks.

  “Years later her husband, your stepfather, leaves her for a woman. The woman has the same background, career interests, and general sort of appearance as your mother. Your mother gets obsessed with whatever slight differences between herself and the woman caused your stepfather to leave her for the woman. She drinks. The woman plays off her emotions, like the insecure and basically shitty human being she is, by dressing as much like your mother as possible, putting little mementos of your stepfather in your mother’s In-box, coloring her hair the same shade of red as your mother does. You all work together in the same tiny but terrifyingly powerful industry. It’s a tiny and sordid and claustrophobic little community, where no one can get away from the nests they’ve fouled. You reel into confusion. You meet this very unique and funny and sad and one-of-a-kind person.”

  “The rain in Spain,” director Janet Goddard says to a huge adolescent boy so plump and pale and vacant he looks like a snowman. “I need you to say ‘The rain in Spain’ without having your head under your arm.

  “Pretend it’s a game,” she says.

  It’s true that, the evening before Julie Smith’s brother will beat Julie Smith on her seven-hundred-and-forty-first “JEOPARDY!” slot, Faye tells Julie about what Merv Griffin’s man and the director have done. The two women stand clothed at Faye’s glass wall and watch distant mountains become Hershey kisses in an expanding system of shadow.

  Faye tells Julie that it’s because the folks over at MGE have such respect and admiration for Julie that they want to exercise careful control over the choice of who replaces her. That to MGE Julie is the mystery of the game show incarnate, and that the staff is understandably willing to do pretty much anything at all in the hopes of hanging on to that power of mystery and incarnation through the inevitability of change, loss. Then she says that that was all just the shiny executive’s bullshit, what she just said.

  Julie asks Faye why Faye has not told her before now what is going to happen.

  Faye asks Julie why Julie sends all her sheltered winnings to her brother’s doctors, but will not talk to her brother.

  Julie isn’t the one who cries.

  Julie asks whether there will be animal questions tomorrow.

  There will be lots and lots of animal questions tomorrow. The director has personally compiled tomorrow’s categories and answers. Faye’s been temporarily assigned to help the key grip try to repair a defectively lit E in the set’s giant “JEOPARDY!” logo.

  Faye asks why Julie likes to make up pretend reasons for being a lesbian. She thinks Julie is really a lesbian because she hates animals, somehow. Faye says she does not understand this. She cries, at the glass wall.

  Julie lays her hands flat on the clean glass.

  Faye asks Julie whether Julie’s brother can beat her.

  Julie says that there is no way her brother can beat her, and that deep down in the silence of himself her brother knows it. Julie says that she will always know every fact her brother knows, plus one.

  Through the window of the Makeup Room Faye can see a gray paste of clouds moving back over the sun. There are tiny flecks of rain on the little window.

  Faye tells the makeup lady she’ll take over. Julie’s in the makeup chair, in a spring blouse and faded cotton skirt, and sandals. Her legs are crossed, her hair spiked with
mousse. Her eyes, calm and bright and not at all bored, are fixed on a point just below her own chin in the lit mirror. A very small kind smile for Faye.

  “You’re late I love you,” Faye whispers.

  She applies base.

  “Here’s one,” Julie says.

  Faye blends the border of the base into the soft hollows under Julie’s jaw.

  “Here’s one,” says Julie. “To hold in reserve. For when you’re really on the spot. They’ll eat it up.”

  “You’re not going to get bumped. He’s too terrified to stand up, even. I had to step over him on the way down here.”

  Julie shakes her head. “Tell them you were eight. Your brother was silent and five. Tell them your mother’s face hung tired from her head, that first men and then she herself made her ugly. That her face just hung there with love for a blank silent man who left you touching wood forever by the side of the road. Tell them how you were left by your mother by a field of dry grass. Tell them the field and the sky and the highway were the color of old laundry. Tell them you touched a post all day, your hand and a broken baby’s bright-white hand, waiting for what had always come back, every single time, before.”

  Faye applies powder.

  “Tell them there was a cow.” Julie swallows. “It was in the field, near where you held the fence. Tell them the cow stood there all day, chewing at something it had swallowed long ago, and looking at you. Tell them how the cow’s face had no expression on it. How it stood there all day, looking at you with a big face that had no expression.” Julie breathes. “How it almost made you need to scream. The wind sounds like screams. Stand there touching wood all day with a baby who is silence embodied. Who can, you know, stand there forever, waiting for the only car it knows, and not once have to understand. A cow watches you, standing, the same way it watches anything.”