The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘I’m on that already. It’s Sunday. Laurel’s got me in for tomorrow all day. It’s a two hour toot up the interstate. The two are a hundred and ten percent compatible.’ Atwater sniffed and swallowed hard. ‘You know I know this area.’

  The other Style piece the associate editor had referred to concerned The Suffering Channel, a wide grid cable venture that Atwater had gotten Laurel Manderley to do an end run and pitch directly to the editor’s head intern for WHAT IN THE WORLD. Atwater was one of three full time salarymen tasked to the WITW feature, which received .75 editorial pages per week, and was the closest any of the BSG weeklies got to freakshow or tabloid, and was a bone of contention at the very highest levels of Style. The staff size and large font specs meant that Skip Atwater was officially contracted for one 400 word piece every three weeks, except the juniormost of the WITW salarymen had been on half time ever since Eckleschafft-Böd had forced Mrs. Anger to cut the editorial budget for everything except celebrity news, so in reality it was more like three finished pieces every eight weeks.

  ‘I’ll overnight photos.’

  ‘You will not.’

  As mentioned, Atwater was rarely aware of the up and down fist thing, which as far as he could recall had first started in the pressure cooker environs of the Indianapolis Star. When he became aware he was doing it, he sometimes looked down at the moving fist without recognition, as if it were somebody else’s. It was one of several lacunae or blind spots in Atwater’s self concept, which in turn were part of why he inspired both affection and mild contempt around the offices of Style. Those he worked closely with, such as Laurel Manderley, saw him as without much protective edge or shell, and there were clearly some maternal elements in Laurel’s regard for him. His interns’ tendency to fierce devotion, in further turn, caused some at Style to see him as a manipulator, someone who complicitly leaned on people instead of developing his own inner resources. The former associate editor in charge of the magazine’s SOCIETY PAGES feature had once referred to Skip Atwater as an emotional tampon, though there were plenty of people who could verify that she had been a person with all kinds of personal baggage of her own. As with institutional politics everywhere, the whole thing got very involved.

  Also as mentioned, the editorial exchange on the telephone was in fact very rapid and compressed, with the exception of one sustained pause while the associate editor conferred with someone from Design about the shape of a pull quote, which Atwater could overhear clearly. The several beats of silence after that, however, could have meant almost anything.

  ‘See if you get this,’ the associate editor said finally. ‘How about if I say to you what Mrs. Anger would say to me were I hypothetically as enthused as you are, and gave you the OK, and went up to the ed meeting and pitched it for let’s say 10 September. Are you out of your mind. People are not interested in shit. People are disgusted and repelled by shit. That’s why they call it shit. Not even to mention the high percentage of fall ad pages that are food or beauty based. Are you insane. Unquote.’ Mrs. Anger was the Executive Editor of Style and the magazine’s point man with respect to its parent company, which was the US division of Eckleschafft-Böd Medien.

  ‘Although the inverse of that reasoning is that it’s also wholly common and universal,’ Atwater had said. ‘Everyone has personal experience with shit.’

  ‘But personal private experience.’ Though technically included in the same toll call, this last rejoinder was part of a separate, subsequent conversation with Laurel Manderley, the intern who currently manned Atwater’s phone and fax when he was on the road, and winnowed and vetted research items forwarded by the shades in Research for WHAT IN THE WORLD, and interfaced for him with the editorial interns. ‘It’s done in private, in a special private place, and flushed. People flush so it will go away. It’s one of the things people don’t want to be reminded of. That’s why nobody talks about it.’

  Laurel Manderley, who like most of the magazine’s high level interns wore exquisitely chosen and coordinated professional attire, permitted herself a small diamond stud in one nostril that Atwater found slightly distracting in face to face exchanges, but she was extremely shrewd and pragmatic—she had actually been voted Most Rational by the Class of ’96 at Miss Porter’s School. She was also all but incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence and thus could not, by any dark stretch of the imagination, ever be any kind of rival for Atwater’s salaryman position at Style. As he had with perhaps only one or two previous interns, Atwater relied on Laurel Manderley, and sounded her out, and welcomed her input so long as it was requested, and often spent large blocks of time on the phone with her, and had shared with her certain elements of his personal history, including pictures of the four year old schipperke mixes who were his pride and joy. Laurel Manderley, whose father controlled a large number of Blockbuster Video franchises throughout western Connecticut, and whose mother was in the final push toward certification as a Master Gardener, was herself destined to survive, through either coincidence or premonition, the tragedy by which Style would enter history two months hence.

  Atwater rubbed his nose vertically with two fingers. ‘Well, some people talk about it. You should hear little boys. Or men, in a locker room setting: “Boy, you wouldn’t believe the dump I took last night.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to imagine that’s what men talk to each other about.’

  ‘It’s not as if it comes up all that often,’ Atwater conceded. He did feel a little uneasy talking about this with a female. ‘My point is that the whole embarrassment and distaste of the issue is the point, if it’s done right. The transfiguration of disgust. This is the UBA.’ UBA was their industry’s shorthand for upbeat angle, what hard news organs would call a story’s hook. ‘The let’s say unexpected reversal of embarrassment and distaste. The triumph of creative achievement in even the unlikeliest places.’

  Laurel Manderley sat with her feet up on an open file drawer of Atwater’s desk, holding her phone’s headset instead of wearing it. Slender almost to the point of clinical intervention, she had a prominent forehead and surprised eyebrows and a tortoiseshell barrette and was, like Atwater, extremely earnest and serious at all times. She had interned at Style for almost a year, and knew that Skip’s only real weakness as a BSG journalist was a tendency to grand abstraction that was usually not hard to bring him back to earth on and get him to tone down. She knew further that this tendency was a form of compensation for what Skip himself believed was his chief flaw, an insufficient sense of the tragic which an editor at the Indiana Star had accused him of at an age when that sort of thing sank deep out of sight in the psyche and became part of your core understanding of who you are. One of Laurel Manderley’s profs at Wellesley had once criticized her freshman essays for what he’d called their tin ear and cozening tone of unearned confidence, which had immediately become dark parts of her own self concept.

  ‘So go write a Ph.D. thesis on the guy,’ she had responded. ‘But do not ask me to go to Miss Flick and make a case for making Style readers hear about somebody pooping little pieces of sculpture out of their butt. Because it’s not going to happen.’ Laurel Manderley now nearly always spoke her mind; her cozening days were behind her. ‘I’d be spending credibility and asking Ellen to spend hers on something that’s a lost cause.

  ‘You have to be careful what you ask people to do,’ she had said. Sometimes privately a.k.a. Miss Flick, Ellen Bactrian was the WHAT IN THE WORLD section’s head intern, a personage who was not only the associate editor’s right hand but who was known to have the ear of someone high on Mrs. Anger’s own staff on the 82nd floor, because Ellen Bactrian and this executive intern often biked down to work together from the Flatiron district on the extraordinary bicycle paths that ran all the way along the Hudson to almost Battery Park. It was said that they even had matching helmets.

  For complicated personal and political reasons, Skip Atwater was uncomfortable around Ellen Bact
rian and tried to avoid her whenever possible.

  There were a couple moments of nothing but background clatter on his end of the phone.

  ‘Who is this guy, anyhow?’ Laurel Manderley had asked. ‘What sort of person goes around displaying his own poo?’

  2.

  Indiana storms surprise no one. You can see them coming from half a state away, like a train on a very straight track, even as you stand in the sun and try to breathe. Atwater had what his mother’d always called a weather eye.

  Seated together in the standard Midwest attitude of besotted amiability, the three of them had passed the midday hours in the Moltkes’ sitting room with the curtains drawn and two rotating fans that picked Atwater’s hair up and laid it down and made the little racks’ magazines riffle. Laurel Manderley, who was something of a whiz at the cold call, had set this initial meeting up by phone the previous evening. The home was half a rented duplex, and you could hear its aluminum siding tick and pop in the assembling heat. A window AC chugged gamely in one of the interior rooms. The off white Roto Rooter van in the driveway had signified the Moltkes’ side of the ranch style twin; Laurel’s Internet directions to the address had been flawless as usual. The cul de sac was a newer development with abrasive cement and engineering specs still spraypainted on the curbs. Only the very western horizon showed piling clouds when Atwater pulled up in the rented Cavalier. Some of the homes’ yards had not yet been fully sodded. There were almost no porches as such. The Moltkes’ side’s front door had had a US flag in an angled holder and an anodized cameo of perhaps a huge black ladybug or some kind of beetle attached to the storm door’s frame, which one had to back slightly off the concrete slab in order to open. The slab’s mat bid literal welcome.

  The sitting room was narrow and airless and done mostly in green and a tawny type of maple syrup brown. It was thickly carpeted throughout. The davenport, chairs, and end tables had plainly been acquired as a set. A bird emerged at intervals from a catalogue clock; a knit sampler over the mantel expressed conventional wishes for the home and its occupants. The iced tea was kneebucklingly sweet. An odd stain or watermark marred the room’s east wall, which Atwater educed was the load bearing wall that the Moltkes shared with the duplex’s other side.

  ‘I think I speak for a lot of folks when I want to know how it works. Just how you do it.’ Atwater was in a padded rocker next to the television console and thus faced the artist and his wife, who were seated together on the davenport. The reporter had his legs crossed comfortably but was not actually rocking. He had spent a great deal of preliminary time chatting about the area and his memories of regional features and establishing a rapport and putting the Moltkes at ease. The recorder was out and on, but he was also going with a stenographer’s notebook because it made him look a little more like the popular stereotype of someone from the press.

  You could tell almost immediately that something was off about the artist and/or the marriage’s dynamics. Brint Moltke sat hunched or slumped with his toes in and his hands in his lap, a posture reminiscent of a scolded child, but at the same time smiling at Atwater. As in smiling the entire time. It was not an empty professional corporate smile, but the soul effects were similar. Moltke was a thickset man with sideburns and graying hair combed back in what appeared to be a lopsided ducktail. He wore Sansabelt slacks and a dark blue knit shirt with his employer’s name on the breast. You could tell from the dents in his nose that he sometimes wore glasses. A further idiosyncrasy that Atwater noted in Gregg shorthand was the arrangement of the artist’s hands: their thumbs and forefingers formed a perfect lap level circle, which Moltke held or rather somehow directed before him like an aperture or target. He appeared to be unaware of this habit. It was a gesture both unsubtle and somewhat obscure in terms of what it signified. Combined with the rigid smile, it was almost the stuff of nightmares. Atwater’s own hands were controlled and well behaved—his tic with the fist was entirely a private thing. The journalist’s childhood hay fever was back with a vengeance, but even so he could not help detecting the Old Spice scent which Mr. Moltke emitted in great shimmering waves. Old Spice had been Skip’s own father’s scent and, reportedly, his father’s father’s before him.

  The pattern of the davenport’s upholstery, Skip Atwater also knew firsthand, was called Forest Floral.

  The WITW associate editor’s typing feats were just one example of the various leveling traditions and shticks and reversals of protocol that made Style’s parties and corporate celebrations the envy of publishing interns throughout Manhattan. These fetes took place on the sixteenth floor and were usually open bar; some were even catered. The normally dry and insufferable head of Copyediting did impressions of various US presidents smoking dope that had to be seen to be believed. Given the right kinds of vodka and flame source, a senior receptionist from Haiti could be prevailed upon to breathe fire. A very odd senior paralegal in Permissions, who showed up to the office in foul weather gear nearly every day no matter what the forecast, turned out to have been in the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, and organized revues that could get kind of risqué. Some of the interns got bizarrely dressed up; nails were occasionally done in White Out. Mrs. Anger’s executive intern had once worn a white leather suit with outrageous fringe and a set of cap pistols in a hiphugger belt and holster accessory. A longtime supervisor of shades used Crystal Light, Everclear, skinned fruit, and an ordinary office paper shredder to produce a libation she called Last Mango in Paris. The interns’ annual ersatz awards show at the climax of Oscars Week often had people on the floor—one year they’d gotten Gene Shalit to appear. And so on and so forth.

  Of arresting and demotic party traditions, however, none was so prized as Mrs. Anger’s annual essay at self parody for the combination New Year’s and closing of the Year’s Most Stylish People double issue bash. Bedecked in costume jewelry, mincing and fluttering, affecting a falsetto and lorgnette, holding her head in such a way as to produce a double chin, tottering about with a champagne cocktail like one of those anserine dowagers in Marx Brothers films. It would be difficult to convey this routine’s effect on morale and esprit. The rest of the publishing year, Mrs. Anger was a figure of near testamental awe and dread, serious as a heart attack. A veteran of Fleet Street and two separate R. Murdoch startups, wooed over from Us in 1994 under terms that were industry myth, Mrs. Anger had managed to put Style in the black for the first time in its history, and was said to enjoy influence at the very highest levels of Eckleschafft-Böd, and had worn one of the first Versace pantsuits ever seen in New York, and was nobody’s fool whatsoever.

  Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then conceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of the allure was atavistic, he acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of negative beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellent. In another, he had compared her face and throat to whatever canids see in the full moon that makes them howl. The associate editor would never see one jot of material like this, obviously. Some BSG salarymen built their pieces gradually from the ground up. Atwater, trained originally as a background man for news dailies, constructed his own WITW pieces by pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous waterfall of prose which was then filtered more and more closely down to 400 words of commercial sedim
ent. It was labor intensive, but it was his way. Atwater had colleagues who were unable even to start without a Roman numeral outline. Style’s daytime television specialist could compose his pieces only on public transport. So long as salarymen’s personal quotas were filled and deadlines met, the BSG weeklies tended to be respectful of people’s processes.

  When as a child he had misbehaved or sassed her, Mrs. Atwater had made little Virgil go and cut from the fields’ edge’s copse the very switch with which she’d whip him. For most of the 1970s she had belonged to a splinter denomination that met in an Airstream trailer on the outskirts of Anderson, and she did spareth not the rod. His father had been a barber, the real kind, w/ smock and pole and rat tail combs in huge jars of Barbicide. Save the odd payroll data processor at Eckleschafft-Böd US, no one east of Muncie had access to Skip’s true given name.

  Mrs. Moltke sat with her spine straight and ankles crossed, her huge smooth calves cream white and unmarred by veins and the overall size and hue of what Atwater wrote were museum grade vases and funereal urns of the same antiquity in which the dead wore bronze masks and whole households were interred together. Her platter sized face was expressive and her eyes, though rendered small by the encasing folds of fat, were intelligent and alive. An Anne Rice paperback lay face down on the end table beside her fauxfrosted beverage tumbler and a stack of Butterick clothing patterns in their distinctive bilingual sleeves. Atwater, who held his pen rather high on the shaft, had already noted that her husband’s eyes were flat and immured despite his constant smile. The lone time that Atwater had believed he was seeing his own father smile, it turned out to have been a grimace which presaged the massive infarction that had sent the man forward to lie prone in the sand of the horseshoe pit as the shoe itself sailed over the stake, the half finished apiary, a section of the simulation combat target range, a tire swing’s supporting limb, and the backyard’s pineboard fence, never to be recovered or even ever seen again, while Virgil and his twin brother had stood there wide eyed and red eared, looking back and forth from the sprawled form to the kitchen window’s screen, their inability to move or cry out feeling, in later recall, much like the paralysis of bad dreams.