Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “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.”

  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.

  LUCKILY THE ACCOUNT REPRESENTATIVE KNEW CPR

  An Account Representative, newly divorced, finished another late evening of work at his office, in Accounts. It was well past ten. In another office, at the opposite end of a different floor, the firm’s Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, married for almost thirty years, grandfather of one, also finished working late. Both men left.

  There were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines. Each man, leaving, balanced his weight against that of a heavily slender briefcase. Monograms and company logos flanked handles of leathered metal, which each man held. Each man, on his separate empty floor, moved down white-lit halls over whispering and mealy and monochromatic carpet toward elevators that each sat open-mouthed and mute in its shaft along one of the large Building’s two accessible sides. Each man, passing through his department’s hall, felt the special subsonic disquiet the overtime executive in topcoat and unfresh suit and loosened tie feels as he moves in nighttime through areas meant to be experienced in, and as, daytime. Each received, to the varying degrees their respective pains allowed, an intuition of the askew as, in the neatly stacked slices of lit space between the executive and the distant lament of a custodian’s vacuum, the Building’s very silence took on expression: they sensed, almost spinally, the slow release of great breath, a spatial sigh, a slight sly movement of huge lids cracked in wakened affinity with the emptiness that was, after all, the reasonable executive realizes, half the Building’s total day. Realizes that the Building not only took up but organized space; contained the executive and not vice versa. That the Building was not, after all, comprised of or by executives. Or staff.

  Particularly the divorced Account Representative, who remarked, silently, alone, as his elevator dropped toward the Executive Garage, that, at a certain unnoticed but never unheeded point in every corporate evening he worked, it became Time To Leave; that this point in the overtime night was a fulcrum on which things basic and unseen tilted, very slightly—a pivot in hours unaware—and that, in the period between this point and the fresh-suited working dawn, the very issue of the Building’s ownership would become, quietly, in their absence, truly an issue, hung in air, unsettled.

  The Account Representative hung in air, dropping on his elevator’s wire. This again-single junior executive was spare, lithe, had about him an air of extreme economy, was young for an executive (almost literally a junior executive), was most at ease with those he countenanced at a distance of several feet, and had a professional manner, with respect to the accounts he represented for the firm, describable along a continuum from smoothly capable to cold. His elevator descended with a compact hum that was usually hard to hear.

  The Account Representative’s imported and clean-white motor scooter leaned at the angle of its kickstand beside a solid and eq
ually clean broad Brougham of a car. These were the only vehicles left in the empty Executive Garage below the Staff Garage below the Building’s basement maintenance level. Now, well past ten, the Building’s deepest plane seemed very distant from everything else. The empty Executive Garage was enormous, broad, long, its ceiling a claustrophobic eight-and-a-quarter feet, its (barely) overhead lights harshly yellow, its surfaces’ cement the tired color of much exhaust. The ding, trundle, and sigh of the Account Representative’s elevator’s closure produced echoes and echoes of echoes against and between the Executive Garage’s gray stone planes, as did the click of the Account Representative’s dress shoes and the jangled separation of his keys from his change. The silence of the place, complete and sensitive to disturbance, discouraged whistling. The Executive Garage smelled of: automobile exhaust, something vaguely but thoroughly rubber, and the Account Representative. A humid stir of air moved through the Garage: it came from the curving orifice of the Exit Ramp, located next to the Reserved Spaces—reserved for Directors and Operating Officers—perhaps half a terranean city block from the centrally parked Brougham and cycle. The Exit Ramp spiraled darkly around and out of sight, up through the Staff level and toward the silent, empty, municipally lit street above it.

  The Account Representative rounded the keel of the shiny black Brougham and was at his scooter when an elevator on the Executive Garage’s opposite side trundled and sighed.

  His safety helmet was attached and locked to the cycle’s tail clamp, was thus for now the cycle’s own safety helmet; and the Account Representative, whose wife, from whom he was now legally separate, had been into the combined and confabulated sides of things, had a temporary experience of the helmeted scooter as Shetland centaur, sprite-ridden, emptily and tinily owned—tonight’s experience very temporary, because the junior executive looked almost immediately past the cycle and across the Garage toward the echoed ding of its opposite elevator. The elevator disgorged the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, who moved stiffly, flushed, into the open, low yellowed space of the Executive Garage.

  The Account Representative and the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production knew each other only slightly, and only by sight, and the Account Representative had removed his contact lenses in the men’s room in Accounts before settling down into a long evening of close reading by white light. But since the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production was such a large man—tall, large, broad and blunt, his back a slow-moving hull in Production’s daytime hallways, was also florid, craggy, an executive old enough to be literally senior—the Account Representative recognized almost instantly that it was the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production who emerged from the Executive Garage’s opposite elevator and clicked and jangled his way, stiffly, toward the Account Representative’s focus, the big older man’s head cocked as at an unheard pitch, distracted, his quite large body queerly and slantedly slowed, halting, listing, failing to satisfy a clear disposition to briskness, moving only via a shift of weight from side to side, a humanoid balloon with too much air, bearing his heavy slender leather-handled case toward the solid black Brougham that sat next to the Account Representative’s “spritely” and helmeted cycle, all the while feeling at something in the front of his topcoat with a hand full of tissues and keys.

  The Account Representative bent back to the involved removal of his securely clamped helmet. He was preparing to feel that male and special feeling associated with the conversational imperative faced by any two men with some professional connection who meet in nighttime across an otherwise empty and silent but fragilely silent underground space far below the tall and vaguely pulsing site of a long and weary day for both: the obligation of conversation without the conversational prerequisites of intimacy or interests or concerns to share. They shared pain, though of course neither knew.

  Bent to the decapitation of his cycle, the Account Representative was choosing words neither dismissive nor inviting, neither terse nor intrusive; he was composing a carefully casual face, narrowing salutatory options toward a sort of landlocked “Halloo” that contained already an acknowledgment of distance and an easy willingness to preserve same. Bent, he composed the flesh of his face, shaped a cool but respectfully cool and by no stretch of the imagination pained eye with which to meet the inevitable eye of the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production. The opposite elevator’s door trundled shut; things inside ascended, sounding.

  The Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production was still distant enough to produce echoes, but was, peripherally, still bearing down, slowly, a balloon, a glacier, on the Account Representative, who lifted his face’s composition from the (at last) amputated helmet and turned from the white cycle to the approach of the senior executive.

  The Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, he saw, having been bearing down, his jangled hand to his topcoat’s front, had now stopped; he now stood, stock-still, lifting his thick neck and large head to nothing, as an animal keens to the waft of a warning scent.

  The Account Representative looked, then watched, as the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production stood—frozen, inflated—and grimaced; the senior executive grimaced at a point behind and apparently just above the Account Representative, as if parsing an auto antenna’s rune on the scratched eight-foot-three-inch clearance of the Executive Garage’s ceiling.

  The Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production stood, grimaced, rooted just beyond perfect astigmatic focus. He balanced heavily, grimaced again, dropped a noisy slender briefcase, and placed both hands over a vague concavity that seemed, a bit blurrily, to have appeared in the double-breasted front of his topcoat. He grabbed at himself as do those in pain; he seemed to fold himself in two, his whole big body curving out and around the apparent pain of his coat’s front’s divot. He emitted what sounded like a gargle, trebled by echo.

  The Account Representative watched as the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production pirouetted, raked a raw clean streak in a cement pillar’s soot and clipped a WRONG WAY sign’s weighted concrete doughnut with a roundabout heel as he pirouetted, reached out at air, hunched, crumpled, and fell. He seemed to fall, the Account Representative remarked, watching, surprised out of time, at about half the rate the average thing takes to fall.

  The Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, gargling, holding his chest’s recession, fell with a slow grace to the exhausted floor of the Executive Garage, where he proceeded to writhe.

  Luckily the Account Representative knew CPR. In time, alert, composed, svelte, lithe, well-kept, independent, now a lone wolf—though an efficient wolf—in life’s gray forest, less cold by far than smoothly efficacious, he was, in a samaritan shot, across the stony yardage between his slender case and unhelmeted cycle and the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, straddling the writhing huge blunt older man, who was, at this new close emergency range, now revealed to the Account Representative to have large facial pores, blankly kind eyes, and a delicate capillary web of red in his jowls, his mouth fishily agape, forehead toad-white and sickly sour, chin lost in a pool of his own throat’s meat, hands rattling a rhythmless beat against the breasts of his clothes, faint mewed gargles lost in the trebled echoes of the Account Representative’s immediate and repeated calls for help from above. Clothes, coat, gray knit suit seemed to be spreading, loose, from the supine senior executive—spreading like water, thought the Account Representative, an inveterate thrower of stones at the skins of ponds—spreading as water retreats in rings from what’s disturbed its center.

  The Account Representative, throughout this interval, from the moment the pillar and sign were streaked and clipped, had been shouting for help in the empty Executive Garage. His shouts, the supine Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production’s gargles, and attendant echoes were making for a sum-noise-total whose dimensions, seemingly limitless here in the enclosed Executive Garage, were such that the Account Representative would have been
nonplussed and surprised to the point of outright denial—as he tilted the big, craggy large-pored head back over a fulcrum of palm and used a clean slender finger to clear the stricken executive’s cervically pink throat of tongue and foreign matter—at how little of the cacophonous and seemingly total sound of his calls for help was carrying curved up the tiny Exit Ramp and oozing through rare chinks in the bunkered ceiling of the Executive Garage and sounding on the vacant Staff level, to say nothing of negotiating the now reversed spiral of the Ramp or escaping the quite thick concrete walls of the Staff Garage into the silent but well-lit business-district street above, across which two lovers walked, stately, pale as dolls, arms woven, silent, listening for but hearing always no real difference in the city’s constant distant nighttime traffic’s hiss and sigh.

  Meanwhile, below the Staff Garage below the street, in the hugely echoing and deserted Executive Garage, the Account Representative had ripped the spreading cloth from the queer recession and was positively having at the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production’s defective heart. He administered CPR, beating at the soft dent of a chest’s breastbone, alternating quartered beatings with infusions of breath down through the senior stricken executive’s full but faintly blue lips and tilted head and into the rising sunken chest, the chest falling, the Account Representative taking affordable time and breath at every possible fourth-beat pause to call “Help” in the directions of the quiet street as, using CPR, he kept the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production minimally alive, until help could arrive, as he had been trained and certified by the petite new-Bohemian almond-eyed Red Cross volunteer instructor—by whom, he remembered, all the students had volunteered to be straddled and infused, and whom the Account Representative had, one spontaneous and quartz-lit evening, bought a cup of coffee and a slice of nine-grain toast, and had asked to the Sales Trainees’ Annual Formal, and had married—certified by her to do, one never knowing when it could save a life, he seduced utterly by his fiancée’s dictum that you erred, in doubt, always on the side of prepared care and readiness to preserve minimal life-function, until help could arrive, his arms and lumbar beginning now to burn as he beat, bent, at the supine senior executive, pausing to call “Help” again and loosen his own stiff collar, sweat moving oily on the tight skin beneath his own newer lined topcoat and gray knit clothes, his own breath coming harder as he kept the incapacitated Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production minimally alive, pending the arrival of help, at well past ten, amid complete emptiness, calling “Help” unheard, the happily married and blankly kind grandfather of one person’s own life now literally the junior executive’s, to have and to hold, for a lifetime, amid swirls of forgotten exhaust, beneath the composed and watchful eye of his decapitated cycle’s light.