The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace
A towelette takes the excess powder. Julie blots her lipstick on the blotter Faye holds out.
“Tell them that, even now, you cannot stand animals, because animals’ faces have no expression. Not even the possibility of it. Tell them to look, really to look, into the face of an animal, sometime.”
Faye runs a gentle pick through Julie’s moist spiked hair.
Julie looks at Faye in a mirror bordered with bulbs. “Then tell them to look closely at men’s faces. Tell them to stand perfectly still, for time, and to look into the face of a man. A man’s face has nothing on it. Look closely. Tell them to look. And not at what the faces do—men’s faces never stop moving—they’re like antennae. But all the faces do is move through different configurations of blankness.”
Faye looks for Julie’s eyes in the mirror.
Julie says, “Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.”
Julie turns her makeup chair and looks up at Faye. “That’s when I love you, if I love you,” she whispers, running a finger down her white powdered cheek, reaching to trace an angled line of white onto Faye’s own face. “Is when your face moves into expression. Try to look out from yourself, different, all the time. Tell people that you know your face is least pretty at rest.”
She keeps her fingers on Faye’s face. Faye closes her eyes against tears. When she opens them Julie is still looking at her. She’s smiling a wonderful smile. Way past twenty. She takes Faye’s hands.
“You asked me once how poems informed me,” she says. Almost a whisper—her microphone voice. “And you asked whether we, us, depended on the game, to even be. Baby?”—lifting Faye’s face with one finger under the chin—“Remember? Remember the ocean? Our dawn ocean, that we loved? We loved it because it was like us, Faye. That ocean was obvious. We were looking at something obvious, the whole time.” She pinches a nipple, too softly for Faye even to feel. “Oceans are only oceans when they move,” Julie whispers. “Waves are what keep oceans from just being very big puddles. Oceans are just their waves. And every wave in the ocean is finally going to meet what it moves toward, and break. The whole thing we looked at, the whole time you asked, was obvious. It was obvious and a poem because it was us. See things like that, Faye. Your own face, moving into expression. A wave, breaking on a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?”
It wasn’t at the beach that Faye had asked about the future. It was in Los Angeles. And what about the anomalous wave that came out of nowhere and broke on itself?
Julie is looking at Faye. “See?”
Faye’s eyes are open. They get wide. “You don’t like my face at rest?”
The set is powder-blue. The giant “JEOPARDY!” logo is lowered. Its E flickers a palsied fluorescent flicker. Julie turns her head from the sick letter. Alex has a flower in his lapel. The three contestants’ names appear in projected cursive before their desks. Alex blows Julie the traditional kiss. Pat Sajak gives Faye a thumbs-up from stage-opposite. He gestures. Faye looks around the curtain and sees a banana peel on the pale blue carpet, carefully placed in the tape-marked path Alex takes every day from his lectern to the board full of answers. Dee Goddard and Muffy deMott and Merv Griffin’s shiny man hunch over monitors in the director’s booth. Janet Goddard arranges a shot of a pale round boy who dwarfs his little desk. The third contestant, in the middle, feels at his makeup a little. Faye smells powder. She watches Sajak rub his hands together. The red lights light. Alex raises his arms in greeting. There is no digital watch on his wrist.
The director, in her booth, with her headset, says something to camera two.
Julie and the audience look at each other.
Afterword
The word expression is dulled from overuse. This is the story in which twenty-five-year-old Wallace sharpens it up and cuts into a topic to which he’ll always return: the difficulty, the near impossibility—as he sees it—of interpersonal connection. What does it mean to be expressionless? To wear a mask. What would it take to worm that mask off its wearer—your lover, your parent, your sibling, your friend?
If being expressionless is the result of trauma, as it is in this story, then self-expression must be healthy. But somehow, in the cities of the developed world, expressing yourself has started to feel like work. We’re constantly exhorted toward ever-greater feats of affect; to be that little bit more creative; to commit to our goals; to give service with a smile, feigning excitement like contestants on a game show. When life takes on this game-show quality—fake, regimented, spiritually exhausted—expressivity pulls in two directions, both toward and away from truthfulness. It can be another kind of mask, the kind that eats away at the face until you’re no longer sure what your off-camera reaction would be. Few writers would turn to Jeopardy! for clues to the human condition, but Wallace is always interested in Waste Lands of one kind or another. He looks in the most debased places, those apparently most empty of redemptive possibility. He is, after all, a writer who set a novel in a tax office.
The conference room banter of his television hosts and executives is pitch-perfect. Wallace brings his usual fierce intellectual attack and an ear that sometimes seems almost supernatural in such a young writer. Yes, we think. This is how Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak and Bert Convy really talk when they’re watching the World Series in the “Merv Griffin Entertainment executive lounge.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It doesn’t matter if no such lounge exists, though one suspects (probably wrongly) that Wallace sourced floor plans and wallpaper samples, and knew the exact contents of the liquor cabinet. The vast cynicism of corporate decision-making serves as a backdrop for star-crossed lovers cautiously exploring the possibility of a sincere relationship, trying to be real in a world that doesn’t value reality. And of course it features a central character whose childhood best friend was the encyclopedia, perhaps an avatar of Wallace himself: the postmodernist yearning for sincerity, daring his reader to unmask.
—Hari Kunzru
My Appearance
I AM A WOMAN who appeared in public on “Late Night with David Letterman” on March 22, 1989.
In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart’s heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.
The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman’s variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me he felt he and Ron and Ron’s wife Charmian ought to prepare me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday.
On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC’s News Division. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands.
“He’s waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel,” Rudy grimaced, smoking.
On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC’s chief of Creative Development’s huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said:
“Is this entertainment ladies and gentlemen? Or what?”
I had the bitterness of a Xanax on my tongue.
We had Ramon haul out some videotapes of old “Late Night” editions, and watched them.
“How do you feel?” my husband asked me.
In slow motion, Letterman let drop from a r
“The hokeyness of the whole thing is vital,” Rudy said as Letterman dropped a squealing piglet off what was obviously only a pretend rooftop in the studio; we saw something fall a long way from the original roof to hit cement and reveal itself to be a stuffed piglet. “But that doesn’t make him benign.” My husband got a glimpse of his image in our screening room’s black window and rearranged himself. “I don’t want you to think the hokeyness is real.”
“I thought hokeyness was pretty much understood not to be real,” I said.
He directed me to the screen, where Paul Shaffer, David Letterman’s musical sidekick and friend, was doing a go-figure with his shoulders and his hands.
We had both taken Xanaxes before having Ramon set up the videotapes. I also had a glass of chablis. I was very tired by the time the refrigerator magnets were perused and discussed. My husband was also tired, but he was becoming increasingly concerned that this particular appearance could present problems. That it could be serious.
The call had come from New York the Friday before. The caller had congratulated me on my police drama being picked up for its fifth season, and asked whether I’d like to be a guest on the next week’s “Late Night with David Letterman,” saying Mr. Letterman would be terribly pleased to have me on. I tentatively agreed. I have few illusions left, but I’m darn proud of our show’s success. I have a good character, work hard, play her well, and practically adore the other actors and people associated with the series. I called my agent, my unit director, and my husband. I agreed to accept an appearance on Wednesday, March 22. That was the only interval Rudy and I had free in a weekly schedule that denied me even two days to rub together: my own series tapes Fridays, with required read-throughs and a Full Dress the day before. Even the 22nd, my husband pointed out over drinks, would mean leaving L.A.X. very early Wednesday morning, since I was contracted to appear in a wiener commercial through Tuesday. My agent had thought he could reschedule the wiener shoot—the people at Oscar Mayer had been very accommodating throughout the whole campaign—but my husband had a rule for himself about honoring contracted obligations, and as his partner I chose also to try to live according to this rule. It meant staying up terribly late Tuesday to watch David Letterman and the piglet and refrigerator magnets and an unending succession of eccentrically talented pets, then catching a predawn flight the next morning: though “Late Night” ’s taping didn’t begin until 5:30 E.S.T., Rudy had gone to great trouble to arrange a lengthy strategy session with Ron beforehand.
Before I fell asleep Tuesday night, David Letterman had Teri Garr put on a Velcro suit and fling herself at a Velcro wall. That night his NBC Bookmobile featured a 1989 Buyer’s Guide to New York City Officials; Letterman held the book up to view while Teri hung behind him, stuck to the wall several feet off the ground.
“That could be you,” my husband said, ringing the kitchen for a glass of milk.
The show seemed to have a fetish about arranging things in lists of ten. We saw what the “Late Night” research staff considered the ten worst television commercials ever. I can remember number five or four: a German automobile manufacturer tried to link purchase of its box-shaped car to sexual satisfaction by showing, against a background of woodwinds and pines, a languid Nordic woman succumbing to the charms of the car’s stickshift.
“Well I’m certainly swayed,” Letterman said when the clip had ended. “Aren’t you, ladies and gentlemen?”
He offered up a false promo for a cultural program PBS had supposedly decided against inserting into next fall’s lineup. The promo was an understated clip of four turbaned Kurdistani rebels, draped in small-arms gear, taking time out from revolution to perform a Handel quartet in a meadow full of purple flowers. The bud of culture flourishing even in the craggiest soil, was the come-on. Letterman cleared his throat and claimed that PBS had finally submitted to conservative PTA pressure against the promo. Paul Shaffer, to a drum roll, asked why this was so. Letterman grinned with an embarrassment Rudy and I both found attractive. There were, again, ten answers. Two I remember were Gratuitous Sikhs and Violets, and Gratuitous Sects and Violins. Everyone hissed with joy. Even Rudy laughed, though he knew no such program had ever been commissioned by PBS. I laughed sleepily and shifted against his arm, which was out along the back of the couch.
David Letterman also said, at various intervals, “Some fun now, boy.” Everyone laughed. I can remember not thinking there was anything especially threatening about Letterman, though the idea of having to be peeled off a wall upset me.
Nor did I care one bit for the way the airplane’s ready, slanted shadow rushed up the runway to join us as we touched down. By this time I was quite upset. I even jumped and said Oh as the plane’s front settled into its shadow on the landing. I broke into tears, though not terribly. I am a woman who simply cries when she’s upset; it does not embarrass me. I was exhausted and tense. My husband touched my hair. He argued that I shouldn’t have a Xanax, though, and I agreed.
“You’ll need to be sharp,” was the reason. He took my arm.
The NBC driver had put our bags far behind us; I heard the trunk’s solid sound.
“You’ll need to be both sharp and prepared,” my husband said. He judged that I was tense enough to want simply to agree; Rudy did know human nature.
But I was irritable by now. Part of my tension about appearing knew where it came from. “Just how much preparation am I supposed to need?” I said. Charmian and I had already conferred long-distance about my appearance. She’d advised solidity and simplicity. I would be seen in a plain blue outfit, no jewelry. My hair would be down.
Rudy’s concerns were very different. He claimed to fear for me.
“I don’t see this dark fearful thing you seem to see in David Letterman,” I told him. “The man has freckles. He used to be a local weatherman. He’s witty. But so am I, Rudy.” I did want a Xanax. “We both know me. I’m an actress who’s now forty and has four kids, you’re my second husband, you’ve made a successful career change, I’ve had three dramatic series, the last two have been successful, I have an Emmy nomination, I’m probably never going to have a feature-film career or be recognized seriously for my work as an actress.” I turned in the back seat to look at him. “So so what? All of this is known. It’s all way out in the open already. I honestly don’t see what about me or us is savageable.”
My husband ran his arm, which was well-built, out along the back seat’s top behind us. The limousine smelled like a fine purse; its interior was red leather and buttery soft. It felt almost wet. “He’ll give you a huge amount of grief about the wiener thing.”
“Let him,” I said.
As we were driven up through a borough and extreme southeast Manhattan, my husband became anxious that the NBC driver, who was young and darkly Hispanic, might be able to hear what we were saying to one another, even though there was a thick glass panel between us in back and the driver up front, and an intercom in the panel had to be activated to communicate with him. My husband felt at the glass and at the intercom’s grille. The driver’s head was motionless except to check traffic in mirrors. The radio was on for our enjoyment; classical music drifted through the intercom.
“He can’t hear us,” I said.
“… if this were somehow taped and played back on the air while you looked on in horror?” my husband muttered as he satisfied himself about the intercom. “Letterman would eat it up. We’d look like absolute idiots.”
“Why do you insist that he’s mean? He doesn’t seem mean.”
Rudy tried to settle back as serious Manhattan began to go by. “This is the man, Edilyn, who publicly asked Christie Brinkley what state the Kentucky Derby is run in.”
I remembered what Charmian had said on the phone and smiled.
“But was she or wasn’t she unable to answer correctly?”
My husband smiled, too. “Well she was flustered,” he said. He touched my cheek, and I his hand. I began to feel less jittery.
He used his hand and my cheek to open my face toward his. “Edilyn,” he said, “meanness is not the issue. The issue is ridiculousness. The bastard feeds off ridiculousness like some enormous Howdy-Doodyesque parasite. The whole show feeds on it; it swells and grows when things get absurd. Letterman starts to look gorged, dark, shiny. Ask Teri about the Velcro. Ask Lindsay about that doctored clip of him and the Pope. Ask Nigel or Charmian or Ron. You’ve heard them. Ron could tell you stories that’d curl your toes.”
I had a compact in my purse. My skin was sore and hot from on-air makeup for two straight days. “He’s likeable, though,” I said. “Letterman. When we watched, it looked to me as though he likes to make himself look ridiculous as much as he does the guests. So he’s not a hypocrite.”
We were in a small gridlock. A disheveled person was trying to clean the limousine’s windshield with his sleeve. Rudy tapped on the glass panel until the driver activated the intercom. He said we wished to be driven directly to Rockefeller Center, where “Late Night” taped, instead of going first to our hotel. The driver neither nodded nor turned.
“That’s part of what makes him so dangerous,” my husband said, lifting his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “The whole thing feeds off everybody’s ridiculousness. It’s the way the audience can tell he chooses to ridicule himself that exempts the clever bastard from real ridicule.” The young driver blew his horn; the vagrant fell away.
We were driven west and slightly uptown; from this distance I could see the building where Letterman taped and where Ron worked in an office on the sixtieth floor. Ron used to be professionally associated with my husband before Rudy made the decision to go over to Public Television. We were all still friends.