The David Foster Wallace Reader

  It’s 1970. A woman with hair like fire sits several rows from a movie theater’s screen. A child in a dress sits beside her. A cartoon has begun. The child’s eyes enter the cartoon. Behind the woman is darkness. A man sits behind the woman. He leans forward. His hands enter the woman’s hair. He plays with the woman’s hair, in the darkness. The cartoon’s reflected light makes faces in the audience flicker: the woman’s eyes are bright with fear. She sits absolutely still. The man plays with her red hair. The child does not look over at the woman. The theater’s cartoons, previews of coming attractions, and feature presentation last almost three hours.

  Alex Trebek goes around the “JEOPARDY!” studio wearing a button that says PAT SAJAK LOOKS LIKE A BADGER. He and Sajak play racquetball every Thursday.

  It’s 1986. California’s night sky hangs bright and silent as an empty palace. Little white sequins make slow lines on streets far away under Faye’s warm apartment.

  Faye Goddard and Julie Smith lie in Faye’s bed. They take turns lying on each other. They have sex. Faye’s cries ring out like money against her penthouse apartment’s walls of glass.

  Faye and Julie cool each other down with wet towels. They stand naked at a glass wall and look at Los Angeles. Little bits of Los Angeles wink on and off, as light gets in the way of other light.

  Julie and Faye lie in bed, as lovers. They compliment each other’s bodies. They complain against the brevity of the night. They examine and reexamine, with a sort of unhappy enthusiasm, the little ignorances that necessarily, Julie says, line the path to any real connection between persons. Faye says she had liked Julie long before she knew that Julie liked her.

  They go together to the O.E.D. to examine the entry for the word “like.”

  They hold each other. Julie is very white, her hair prickly short. The room’s darkness is pocked with little bits of Los Angeles, at night, through glass. The dark drifts down around them and fits like a gardener’s glove. It is incredibly romantic.

  On 12 March 1988 it rains. Faye Goddard watches the freeway outside her mother’s office window first darken and then shine with rain. Dee Goddard sits on the edge of her desk in stocking feet and looks out the window, too. “JEOPARDY!” ’s director stands with the show’s public relations coordinator. The key grip and cue-card lady huddle over some notes. Alex Trebek sits alone near the door in a canvas director’s chair, drinking a can of soda. The room is reflected in the dark window.

  “We need to know what you told her so we can know whether she’ll come,” Dee says.

  “What we have here, Faye, is a twenty-minutes-tops type of thing,” says the director, looking at the watch on the underside of her wrist. “Then we’re going to be in for at least another hour’s setup and studio time. Or we’re short a slot, meaning satellite and mailing overruns.”

  “Not to mention a boy who’s half catatonic with terror and general neurosis right this very minute,” Muffy deMott, the P.R. coordinator, says softly. “Last I saw, he was fetal on the floor outside Makeup.”

  Faye closes her eyes.

  “My husband is watching him,” says the director.

  “Thank you ever so much, Janet,” Dee Goddard says to the director. She looks down at her clipboard. “All the others for the four slots are here?”

  “Everybody who’s signed up. Most we’ve ever had. Plus a rather scary retired WAC who’s not even tentatively slotted till late April. Says she can’t wait any longer to get at Julie.”

  “But no Julie,” says Muffy deMott.

  Dee squints at her clipboard. “So how many is that all together, then?”

  “Nine,” Faye says softly. She feels at the sides of her hair.

  “We got nine,” says the director; “enough for at least the full four slots with a turnaround of two per slot.” The rain on the aluminum roof of the Merv Griffin Enterprises building makes a sound in this room, like the frying of distant meat.

  “And I’m sure they’re primed,” Faye says. She looks at the backs of her hands, in her lap. “What with Janet assuming the poor kid will bump her. Your new mystery data guru.”

  “Don’t confuse the difference between me, on one hand, and what I’m told to do,” says the director.

  “He won’t bump her,” the key grip says, shaking her head. She’s chewing gum, stimulating a little worm of muscle at her temple.

  Alex Trebek, looking at his digital watch, begins his pre-slot throat-clearing, a ritual. Everyone in the room looks at him.

  Dee says, “Alex, perhaps you’d put the new contestants in the booth for now, tell them we may or may not be experiencing a slight delay. Thank them for their patience.”

  Alex rises, straightens his tie. His soda can rings out against the metal bottom of a wastebasket. He clears his throat.

  “A good host and all that.” Dee smiles kindly.

  “Gotcha.”

  Alex leaves the door open. The sun breaks through the clouds outside. Palm trees drip and concrete glistens. Cars sheen by, their wipers on Sporadic. Janet Goddard, the director, looks down, pretends to study whatever she’s holding. Faye knows that sudden sunlight makes her feel unattractive.

  In the window, Faye sees Dee’s outline check its own watch with a tiny motion. “Questions all lined up?” the outline asks.

  “Easily four slots’ worth,” says the key grip; “categories set, all monitors on the board check. Joan’s nailing down the sequence now.”

  “That’s my job,” Faye says.

  “Your job,” the director hisses, “is to tell Mommy here where your spooky little girlfriend could possibly be.”

  “Alex’ll need all the cards at the podium very soon,” Dee tells the grip.

  “Is what your job is today.” Janet stares at Faye’s back.

  Faye Goddard gives her ex-stepfather’s wife, Janet Goddard, the finger, in the window. “One of those for every animal question,” she says.

  The director rises, calls Faye a bitch who looks like a praying mantis, and leaves through the open door, closing it.

  “Bitch,” Faye says.

  Dee complains with a weak smile that she seems simply to be surrounded by bitches. Muffy deMott laughs, takes a seat in Alex’s chair. Dee eases off the desk. A splinter snags and snaps on a pantyho. She assumes a sort of crouch next to her daughter, who is in the desk chair, at the window, her bare feet resting on the sill. Dee’s knees crackle.

  “If she’s not coming,” Dee says softly, “just tell me. Just so I can get a jump on fixing it with Merv. Baby.”

  It is true that Faye can see her mother’s bright-faint image in the window. Here is her mother’s middle-aged face, the immaculately colored and styled red hair, the sore-looking wrinkles that triangulate around her mouth and nose, trap and accumulate base and makeup as the face moves through the day. Dee’s eyes are smoke-red, supported by deep circles, pouches of dark blood. Dee is pretty, except for the circles. This year Faye has been able to see the dark bags just starting to budge out from beneath her own eyes, which are her father’s, dark brown and slightly thyroidic. Faye can smell Dee’s breath. She cannot tell whether her mother has had anything to drink.

  Faye Goddard is twenty-six; her mother is fifty.

  Julie Smith is twenty.

  Dee squeezes Faye’s arm with a thin hand that’s cold from the office.

  Faye rubs at her nose. “She’s not going to come, she told me. You’ll have to bag it.”

  The key grip leaps for a ringing phone.

  “I lied,” says Faye.

  “My girl.” Dee pats the arm she’s squeezed.

  “I sure didn’t hear anything,” says Muffy deMott.

  “Good,” the grip is saying. “Get her into Makeup.” She looks over at Dee. “You want her in Makeup?”

  “You did good,” Dee tells Faye, indicating the closed door.

  “I don’t think Mr. Griffin is well,” says the cue-card lady.

  “He and the boy deserve each other. We can throw in the WAC. We can call her
General Neurosis.”

  Dee uses a thin hand to bring Faye’s face close to her own. She kisses her gently. Their lips fit perfectly, Faye thinks suddenly. She shivers, in the air-conditioning.

  “JEOPARDY!” QUEEN DETHRONED AFTER THREE-YEAR REIGN

  —Headline, Variety, 13 March 1988.

  “Let’s all be there,” says the television.

  “Where else would I be?” asks Dee Goddard, in her chair, in her office, at night, in 1987.

  “We bring good things to life,” says the television.

  “So did I,” says Dee. “I did that. Just once.”

  Dee sits in her office at Merv Griffin Enterprises every weeknight and kills a tinkling pitcher of wet weak martinis. Her office walls are covered with store-bought aphorisms. Humpty Dumpty was pushed. When the going gets tough the tough go shopping. Also autographed photos. Dee and Bob Barker, when she wrote for “Truth or Consequences.” Merv Griffin, giving her a plaque. Dee and Faye between Wink Martindale and Chuck Barris at a banquet.

  Dee uses her remote matte-panel to switch from NBC to MTV, on cable. Consumptive-looking boys in makeup play guitars that look more like jets or weapons than guitars.

  “Does your husband still look at you the way he used to?” asks the television.

  “Safe to say not,” Dee says drily, drinking.

  “She drinks too much,” Julie Smith says to Faye.

  “It’s for the pain,” Faye says, watching.

  Julie looks through the remote viewer in Faye’s office. “For killing the pain, or feeding it?”

  Faye smiles.

  Julie shakes her head. “It’s mean to watch her like this.”

  “You deserve a break today,” says the television. “Milk likes you. The more you hear, the better we sound. Aren’t you hungry for a flame-broiled Whopper?”

  “No I am not hungry for a flame-broiled Whopper,” says Dee, sitting up straight in her chair. “No I am not hungry for it.” Her glass falls out of her hand.

  “It was nice what she said about you, though.” Julie is looking at the side of Faye’s face. “About bringing one good thing to life.”

  Faye smiles as she watches the viewer. “Did you hear about what Alex did today? Sajak says he and Alex are now at war. Alex got in the engineer’s booth and played with the Applause sign all through “The Wheel” ’s third slot. The audience was like applauding when people lost turns and stuff. Sajak says he’s going to get him.”

  “So you don’t forget,” says the television. “Look at all you get.”

  “Wow,” says Dee. She sleeps in her chair.

  Faye and Julie sit on thin towels, in 1987, at the edge of the surf, nude, on a nude beach, south of Los Angeles, just past dawn. The sun is behind them. The early Pacific is lilac. The women’s feet are washed and abandoned by a weak surf. The sky’s color is kind of grotesque.

  Julie has told Faye that she believes lovers go through three different stages in getting really to know one another. First they exchange anecdotes and inclinations. Then each tells the other what she believes. Then each observes the relation between what the other says she believes and what she in fact does.

  Julie and Faye are exchanging anecdotes and inclinations for the twentieth straight month. Julie tells Faye that she, Julie, best likes: contemporary poetry, unkind women, words with univocal definitions, faces whose expressions change by the second, an obscure and limited-edition Canadian encyclopedia called LaPlace’s Guide to Total Data, the gentle smell of powder that issues from the makeup compacts of older ladies, and the O.E.D.

  “The encyclopedia turned out to be lucrative, I guess you’d have to say.”

  Julie sniffs air that smells yeasty. “It got to be just what the teachers tell you. The encyclopedia was my friend.”

  “As a child, you mean?” Faye touches Julie’s arm.

  “Men would just appear, one after the other. I felt so sorry for my mother. These blank, silent men, and she’d hook up with one after the other, and they’d move in. And not one single one could love my brother.”

  “Come here.”

  “Sometimes things would be ugly. I remember her leading a really ugly life. But she’d lock us in rooms when things got bad, to get us out of the way of it.” Julie smiles to herself. “At first sometimes I remember she’d give me a straightedge and a pencil. To amuse myself. I could amuse myself with a straightedge for hours.”

  “I always liked straightedges, too.”

  “It makes worlds. I could make worlds out of lines. A sort of jagged magic. I’d spend all day. My brother watched.”

  There are no gulls on this beach at dawn. It’s quiet. The tide is going out.

  “But we had a set of these LaPlace’s Data Guides. Her fourth husband sold them to salesmen who went door-to-door. I kept a few in every room she locked us in. They did, really and truly, become my friends. I got to be able to feel lines of consistency and inconsistency in them. I got to know them really well.” Julie looks at Faye. “I won’t apologize if that sounds stupid or dramatic.”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid. It’s no fun to be a kid with a damaged brother and a mother with an ugly life, and to be lonely. Not to mention locked up.”

  “See, though, it was him they were locking up. I was just there to watch him.”

  “An autistic brother simply cannot be decent company for somebody, no matter how much you loved him, is all I mean,” Faye says, making an angle in the wet sand with her toe.

  “Taking care of him took incredible amounts of time. He wasn’t company, though; you’re right. But I got so I wanted him with me. He got to be my job. I got so I associated him with my identity or something. My right to take up space. I wasn’t even eight.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t hate her,” Faye says.

  “None of the men with her could stand to have him around. Even the ones who tried couldn’t stand it after a while. He’d just stare and flap his arms. And they’d say sometimes when they looked in my mother’s eyes they’d see him looking out.” Julie shakes some sand out of her short hair. “Except he was bright. He was totally inside himself, but he was bright. He could stare at the same thing for hours and not be bored. And it turned out he could read. He read very slowly and never out loud. I don’t know what the words seemed like to him.” Julie looks at Faye. “I pretty much taught us both to read, with the encyclopedia. Early. The illustrations really helped.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t hate her.”

  Julie throws a pebble. “Except I don’t, Faye.”

  “She abandoned you by a road because some guy told her to.”

  Julie looks at the divot where the pebble was. The divot melts. “She really loved this man who was with her.” She shakes her head. “He made her leave him. I think she left me to look out for him. I’m thankful for that. If I’d been without him right then, I don’t think there would have been any me left.”

  “Babe.”

  “I’d have been in hospitals all this time, instead of him.”

  “What, like he’d have been instantly unautistic if you weren’t there to take care of him?”

  Among things Julie Smith dislikes most are: greeting cards, adoptive parents who adopt without first looking inside themselves and evaluating their capacity for love, the smell of sulphur, John Updike, insects with antennae, and animals in general.

  “What about kind women?”

  “But insects are maybe the worst. Even if the insect stops moving, the antennae still wave around. The antennae never stop waving around. I can’t stand that.”

  “I love you, Julie.”

  “I love you too, Faye.”

  “I couldn’t believe I could ever love a woman like this.”

  Julie shakes her head at the Pacific. “Don’t make me sad.”

  Faye watches a small antennaeless bug skate on legs thin as hairs across the glassy surface of a tidal pool. She clears her throat.

  “OK,” she says. “This is the only line on an American
football field of which there is only one.”

  Julie laughs. “What is the fifty.”

  “This, the only month of the year without a national holiday, is named for the Roman emperor who…”

  “What is August.”

  The sun gets higher; the blood goes out of the blue water.

  The women move down to stay in the waves’ reach.

  “The ocean looks like a big blue dog to me, sometimes,” Faye says, looking. Julie puts an arm around Faye’s bare shoulders.

  ‘We loved her like a daughter,’ said “JEOPARDY!” public relations coordinator Muffy deMott. ‘We’ll be sorry to see her go. Nobody’s ever influenced a game show like Ms. Smith influenced “JEOPARDY!” ’

  —Article, Variety, 13 March 1988.

  Weak waves hang, snap, slide. White fingers spill onto the beach and melt into the sand. Faye can see dark sand lighten beneath them as the water inside gets tugged back out with the retreating tide.

  The beach settles and hisses as it pales. Faye is looking at the side of Julie Smith’s face. Julie has the best skin Faye’s ever seen on anyone anywhere. It’s not just that it’s so clear it’s flawed, or that here in low sun off water it’s the color of a good blush wine; it has the texture of something truly alive, an elastic softness, like a ripe sheath, a pod. It is vulnerable and has depth. It’s stretched shiny and tight only over Julie’s high curved cheekbones; the bones make her cheeks hollow, her eyes deep-set. The outlines of her face are like clefs, almost Slavic. Everything about her is sort of permeable: even the slim dark gap between her two front teeth seems a kind of slot, some recessive invitation. Julie has used the teeth and their gap to stimulate Faye with a gentle deftness Faye would not have believed.