The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  The artist’s wife said: ‘I know that one time when he was a boy that she came in and I think caught Brint playing with himself maybe, and made him come down in the sitting room and do it in front of them, the family, that she made them all sit there and watch him. Do you follow what I’m saying, Skip?’

  The most significant sign of an approaching tornado would be a greenish cast to the ambient light and a sudden drop in pressure that made one’s ears pop.

  ‘His daddy didn’t outright abuse him, but he was half crazy,’ Amber said, ‘a deacon. A man under great pressure from his own demons that he wrestled with. And I know one time Brint saw her take and beat a little baby kittycat to death with a skillet for messing on the kitchen floor. When he was in his high chair, watching. A little kittycat. Well,’ she said. ‘What do you suppose a little boy’s toilet training is going to be like with folks like that?’

  Nodding vigorously being one of his tactics for drawing people out in interviews, Atwater was nodding at almost everything the subject’s wife was saying. This, together with the fact that his arms were still out straight before him, lent him a somnambulist aspect. Wind gusts caused the car to shimmy slightly in the clearing’s mud.

  By this time, Amber Moltke had shifted her mass onto her left haunch and brought her great right leg up and was curled kittenishly in such a way as to incline herself toward Atwater, gazing at the side of his face. She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red. Her leg was like something you could slide down into some kind of unimaginable chasm. The chief outward sign that Atwater was affected one way or the other by the immense sexual force field around Mrs. Moltke was that he continued to grip the Cavalier’s steering wheel tightly with both hands and to face directly ahead as though still driving. There was very little air in the car. He had an odd subtle sense of ascent, as if the car were slightly rising. There was no real sign of any type of overhead view, or even of the tiny road’s dropoff to SR 252 and the nitrogen works that commenced just ahead—he was going almost entirely on Mrs. Moltke’s report of where they were.

  ‘This is a man, now, that will leave the premises to break wind. That closes the privy door and locks it and turns on the exhaust fan and this little radio he’s got, and runs water, and sometimes puts a rolled up towel in the crack of the door when he’s in there doing his business. Brint I mean.’

  ‘I think I understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘Most times he can’t do his business if there’s somebody even there. In the house. The man thinks I believe him when he says he’s going to just go driving around.’ She sighed. ‘So Skip, this is a very very shy individual in this department. He’s wounded inside. He wouldn’t hardly say boo when I first met him.’

  Following college, Skip Atwater had done a year at IU-Indianapolis’s prestigious grad journalism program, then landed a cub spot at the Indianapolis Star, and there had made no secret of his dream of someday writing a syndication grade human interest column for a major urban daily, until the assistant city editor who’d hired him told Skip in his first annual performance review, among other things, that as a journalist Atwater struck him as being polished but about two inches deep. After which performance review Atwater had literally run for the privacy of the men’s room and there had struck his own chest with his fist several times because he knew that at heart it was true: his fatal flaw was an ineluctably light, airy prose sensibility. He had no innate sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things that made human beings’ misfortunes significant to one another. He was all upbeat angle. The editor’s blunt but kindly manner had made it worse. Atwater could write a sweet commercial line, he’d acknowledged. He had compassion, of a certain frothy sort, and drive. The editor, who always wore a white dress shirt and tie but never a jacket, had actually put his arm around Atwater’s shoulders. He said he liked Skip enough to tell him the truth, because he was a good kid and just needed to find his niche. There were all different kinds of reporting. The editor said he had acquaintances at USA Today and offered to make a call.

  Atwater, who also possessed an outstanding verbal memory, retained almost verbatim the questions Laurel Manderley had left him with on the phone at Ye Olde Country Buffet after he’d summarized the morning’s confab and characterized the artist as catatonically inhibited, terribly shy, scared of his shadow, and so forth. What Laurel had said didn’t yet add up for her in the story was how the stuff got seen in the first place: ‘What, he gives it to somebody? This catatonically shy guy calls somebody into the bathroom and says, Hey, look at this extraordinary thing I just pooped out of me? I can’t see anybody over age six doing that, much less somebody that shy. Whether it’s a hoax or not, the guy’s got to be some kind of closet exhibitionist,’ she’d opined. Every instinct Atwater possessed had since been crying out that this was the piece’s fulcrum and UBA, the universalizing element that made great soft news go: the conflict between Moltke’s extreme personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of personal expression or art. Everyone experienced this conflict on some level. Though lurid and potentially disgusting, the mode of production in this case simply heightened the conflict’s voltage, underlined the stakes in bold, made it at once deep and accessible for Style readers, many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the salarymen knew.

  Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.

  Only the third shift attendant knew that R. Vaughn Corliss slept so terribly, twining in and out of the sheets with bleatings of the purest woe, foodlessly chewing, sitting up and looking wildly about, feeling at himself and moaning, crying out that no he wouldn’t go there, not there not again no please. The high concept mogul was always up with the sun, and his first act after stripping the bed and placing his breakfast order was to erase the disk of the bedroom’s monitor. A selected few nights’ worth of these disks the attendant had slipped in during deep sleep and copied, however, as a de facto form of unemployment insurance, since Corliss’s temper and caprice were well known; and the existence of these pirate disks was also known to certain representatives of Eckleschafft-Böd whose business it was to know such things.

  It was only if, after sheep, controlled breathing, visualizing IV pentothal drips, and mentally reviewing in close detail a special collector’s series of photographs of people on fire entitled People on Fire, Corliss still could not fall or fall back asleep that he’d resort to the failsafe: imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or even ever seen all assembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss’s own.

  In the morning, the reinvented high concept cable entrepreneur’s routine was invariant and always featured a half hour of pretend rowing on a machine that could simulate both resistance and crosscurrent, a scrupulously Fletcherized breakfast, and a session of the 28 lead facial biofeedback in which microelectric sensors were affixed to individual muscle groups and exhaustive daily practice yielded the ability to form, at will, any of the 216 facial expressions common to all known cultures. Corliss was in constant contact via headset cellular throughout this regimen.

  Unlike most driven business visionaries he was not, when all was said and done, an unhappy man. He felt sometimes an odd complex emotion that, when broken down and examined in quiet reflection, revealed itself to be self envy, which appears near the top of certain Maslovian fulfillment pyramids as a rare and culturally specific form of joy. The
sense Skip Atwater had gotten, after a brief and highly structured interface with Corliss for a WITW piece on the All Ads cable channel in 1999, was that the producer’s reclusive, eccentric persona was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom Atwater had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected an hermetic torment for reasons which Atwater’s notebooks contained several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article published in Style.

  Atwater and Mrs. Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each other’s air; the Cavalier’s glass surfaces were almost entirely steamed over. At the same time, an imperfection in its gasket’s seal was allowing rain droplets to enter and move in a complex system of paths down his window. These branching paths and tributaries were in the left periphery of the journalist’s vision; Amber Moltke’s face loomed vividly in the right. Unlike Mrs. Atwater, the artist’s wife had a good firm chin with no wattles, though her throat’s girth was extraordinary—Atwater could not have gotten around it with both hands.

  ‘The shyness and woundedness must be complex, though,’ the journalist said. ‘Given that the pieces are public. Publicly displayed.’ He had already amassed a certain amount of technical detail about the preparation of the displays, back at the Moltkes’ duplex. The pieces were not varnished or in any way chemically treated. They were, however, sprayed lightly with a fixative when fresh or new, to help preserve their shape and intricate detail—evidently some of the man’s early work had become cracked or distorted when allowed to dry completely. Atwater knew that freshly produced pieces of art were placed on a special silver finish tray, an heirloom of some sort from Mrs. Moltke’s own family, then covered in common kitchen plastic wrap and allowed to cool to room temperature before the fixative was applied. Skip could imagine the steam from a fresh new piece fogging the Saran’s interior and making it difficult to see the thing itself until the wrap was removed and discarded. Only later, in the midst of all the editorial wrangling over his piece’s typeset version, would Atwater learn that the fixative in question was a common brand of aerosol styling spray whose manufacturer advertised in Style.

  Amber gave a brief laugh. ‘We’re not exactly talking the big time. Two bean festivals and the DAR craft show.’

  ‘Well, and of course the fair.’ Atwater was referring to the Franklin County Fair, which like most county fairs in eastern Indiana was held in June, quite a bit earlier than the national average. The reasons for this were complicated, agricultural, and historically bound up with Indiana’s refusal to participate in Daylight Savings Time, which caused no end of hassles for certain commodities markets at the Chicago Board of Trade. Atwater’s own childhood experiences had been of the Madison County Fair, held during the third week of each June on the outskirts of Mounds State Park, but he assumed that all county fairs were roughly similar. He had unconsciously begun to do the thing with his fist again.

  ‘Well, although the fair ain’t exactly your big time either.’

  Also from childhood experience, Skip Atwater knew that the slight squeaks and pops one could hear when Amber laughed were from different parts of her complex foundation garment as they strained and moved against one another. Her kneesized left elbow now rested on the seat back between them, leaving her left hand free to play and make tiny languid motions in the space between her head and his. A head nearly twice the size of Atwater’s own. Her hair was wiglike in overall configuration, but it had a high protein luster no real wig could ever duplicate.

  His right arm still rigidly out against the Cavalier’s wheel, Atwater turned his head a few more degrees toward her. ‘This, though, will be very public. Style is about as public as you can get.’

  ‘Well, except for TV.’

  Atwater inclined his head slightly to signify concession. ‘Except for TV.’

  Mrs. Moltke’s hand, with its multiple different rings, was now within just inches of the journalist’s large red right ear. She said: ‘Well, I look at Style. I’ve been looking at Style for years. I don’t bet there’s a body in town that hasn’t looked at Style or People or one of you all.’ The hand moved as if it were under water. ‘Sometimes it’s hard keeping you all straight. After your girl there called, I said to Brint it was a man coming over from People when I was telling him to go on and get cleaned up for company.’

  Atwater cleared his throat. ‘So you see my point, then, which in no way forms any sort of argument against the piece or Mr. Moltke’s—’

  ‘Brint.’

  ‘Against Brint’s consenting to the piece.’ Atwater would also every so often give a small but vigorous all body shiver, involuntary, rather like a wet dog shaking itself, which neither party commented on. Bits of windblown foliage hit the front and rear windshields and remained for a moment or two before they were washed away. The sky could really have been any color at all and there would be no way to know. Atwater now tried to rotate his entire upper body toward Mrs. Moltke: ‘But he will need to know what he’s in for. If my editors give the go ahead, which I should again stress I have every confidence they ultimately will, one condition is likely to be the presence of some sort of medical authority to authenticate the… circumstances of creation.’

  ‘You’re saying in there with him?’ The gusts of her breath seemed to strike every little cilium on Atwater’s cheek and temple. Her right hand still covered the recorder and several inches of Atwater’s knee on either side. Her largo pulse was visible in the trembling of her bust, which was understandably prodigious and also now pointed Atwater’s way. Probably no more than four inches separated the bust from his right arm, which was still held out stiffly and attached to the steering wheel. Atwater’s other fist was pumping like mad down beside the driver’s door.

  ‘No, no, not necessarily, but probably right outside, and ready to perform various tests and procedures on the… on it the minute Mr. Moltke, Brint, is finished. Comes out with it.’ Another intense little shiver.

  Amber gave another small mirthless laugh.

  ‘I’m sure you know what I mean,’ Atwater said. ‘Temperature and constitution and the lack of any sort of sign of any human hand or tool or anything employed in the… process of the…’

  ‘And then it’ll come out.’

  ‘The piece, you mean,’ Atwater said. She nodded. In a way that made no physical sense given their respective sizes, Atwater’s eyes seemed now to be exactly level with hers, and without being aware of it he blinked whenever she did, though her hand’s small circles often supervened.

  Atwater said: ‘As I’ve said, I have every confidence that yes, it will.’

  At the same time, the journalist was also trying not to indulge himself by imagining Laurel Manderley’s reaction to the faxed reproductions of the artist’s pieces as they slowly emerged from the machine. He felt that he knew almost all the different permutations her face would go through.

  Nor was it clear whether Mrs. Moltke was looking at his ear or at the underwater movements of her own hand up next to the ear. ‘And what you’re saying is then, why, to get ready, because once it comes out nothing will be the same. Because there’ll be attention.’

  ‘I would think so, yes.’ He tried to turn a little further. ‘Of various different kinds.’

  ‘You’re saying other magazines. Or TV, the Internet.’

  ‘It’s often difficult to predict the forms of public attention or to know in advance what—’

  ‘But after this kind of amount of attention you’re saying there might be art galleries wanting to handle it. For sale. Do art galleries do auctions, or they just put it out with a price sticker on it and folks come and shop, or what all?’

  Atwater was aware that this was a very different type and level of exchange than the morning’s confab in the Moltkes’ home. It was hard for him not to feel that Amber might be patronizing him a bit, playing up to a certain stereotype of provincial naiveté—he did this himself in certain situations at Style. At
the same time, he felt that to some extent she was sincere in deferring to him because he lived and worked in New York City, the cultural heart of the nation—Atwater was absurdly gratified by this kind of thing. The whole geographical deference issue could get very complicated and abstract. At the right periphery, he could see that a certain delicate pattern Amber was tracing in the air near his ear was actually the cartography of that ear, its spirals and intending whorls. Sensitive from childhood about his ears’ size and hue, Atwater had worn either baseball caps or knit caps all the way through college.

  Ultimately, the journalist’s failure to think the whole thing through and decide just how to respond was itself a form of decision. ‘I think they do both,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes there are auctions. Sometimes a special exhibit, and potential buyers will come for a large party on the first day, to meet the artist. Often called an art opening.’ He was facing the windshield again. The rain came no less hard but the sky looked perhaps to be lightening—although, on the other hand, the steam of their exhalations against the window was itself whitish and might act as some type of optical filter. At any rate, Atwater knew that it was often at the trailing end of a storm front that funnels developed. ‘The initial key,’ he said, ‘will be arranging for the right photographer.’