Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge’s system of angled shadow.

  “Because if no one is really the way we see them,” I said, “that would include me. And you.”

  Rudy admired the sunset out loud. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just slightly over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he’d been looking only at the water. I’d watched him.

  “Oh, my,” is what David Letterman said when Reese the coordinator’s distinguished but raccoon-ringed face had resolved out of a perfect ring of exploded explosives. Months later, after I’d come through something by being in its center, survived in the stillness created by great disturbance from which I, as cause, perfectly circled, was exempt, I’d be struck all over again by what a real and simply right thing it was for a person in such a place to say.

  And I have remembered and worked hard to show that, if nothing else at all, I am a woman who speaks her mind. It is the way I have to see myself, to live.

  And so I did ask my husband, as we were driven in our complimentary limousine to join Ron and Charmian and maybe Lindsay for drinks and dinner across the river at NBC’s expense, just what way he thought he and I really were, then, did he think.

  Which turned out to be the mistake.

  SAY NEVER

  LABOV

  A thing that is no fun? Stomach trouble. You don’t believe me, you ask Mrs. Tagus here, she’ll illuminate issues. Me: no stomach trouble. A stomach of hardy elements, such as stone. Arthritis yes, stomach trouble no.

  The tea is not helping Mrs. Tagus’s stomach trouble. “Such discomfort Mr. Labov!” she says to me in my kitchen of my apartment, where we are. “Excuse me for the constant complaining,” she says, “but it seems that to me anything that is the least little worry these days means the automatic making of my stomach into a fist!” She makes with a fist in the air, in her coat, and bends to blow on the very hot tea, which is steaming with violence into the cold air of my kitchen. “And now such worry,” Mrs. Tagus says. She is making an example of a fist in the air in a firm manner I envy, because of the arthritis I have in my limbs every day, especially in these winters; but I only express sympathy to the stomach of Mrs. Tagus, who has been my best and closest friend since my late wife and then her late husband passed away inside three months of each other seven years ago may they rest in peace.

  I am a tailor. Labov the North-side tailor who can make anything. Now retired. I chose, cut, fit, stitched and tailored the raccoon coat Mrs. Tagus has been wearing for years now and is inside of now in my kitchen which my landlord keeps cold, like the rest of this apartment, which my late wife Sandra Labov and I first rented in the years of President Truman. The landlord wants Labov out so he can raise rent to a younger person. But he should know who should know better than a tailor how it’s no trouble to wear finely stitched coats and wait for spring. An ability to wait has always been one of my abilities.

  I made the heavy raincoat with lining of various fur Mrs. Tagus’s late husband and my close friend Arnold Tagus was interred in eight years ago this August.

  “Lenny,” Mrs. Tagus has murmured to her tea. There is no more fist in the air; she is warming her hands on the emergency cup of tea. “Lenny,” she says, distracted from me by the warmth she holds in her dry hands.

  Lenny is Mr. and Mrs. Tagus’s son, Lenny Tagus. Also there is a younger son, Mike Tagus. Me: no children. Mrs. Labov had reproduction troubles which I loved her no less when we found out. But no children. But Labovs and all the Taguses are like this. Close. I watched the Tagus boys grow up, Lenny and Mike, prides and joys.

  You know the type who comes right out with it? Mrs. Tagus is not such a type of person. Something is on her mind: she beats around it, a gesture here, a word there, a sigh maybe; she shapes it inside her like with a soft medium, for instance clay, and you have to patiently work the medium with her to get the something out in the open.

  Me: I come right out with it, when there’s something.

  MIKEY AND LOUIS

  “You want to still date her?”

  “Are you fucking kidding? I want to strangle her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’d love to still date her.”

  “Just stay away. She seems like bad news. She seemed like she was really into it.”

  “She blew me off. I didn’t blow her off.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Carlina blew me off.”

  “So how, Tagus?”

  “She just said how she didn’t want to go out no more. It didn’t feel so good, either. I can maybe see why they cry, when you blow them off.”

  “She said that? Just like that?”

  “Just like after I’d rammed about half a gram up her nose and bought her drinks all night.”

  “Bad news.”

  “I must of rammed about a gram up her nose.”

  “I bet you didn’t have to ram anything up anything. I bet her nose didn’t need much persuading.”

  “It started out nice. It was her and Lenny, who I want her to hit it off with, and me. Her and him do my whole gram while I’m over at the bar getting us drinks. Then he takes off to like tuck his kids into bed. He’s dribbling the shit out his nose, he’s bouncing off walls, and he’s going to tuck in his kids. And then me and her have an argument about it. I don’t even remember what about. And then later she just blows me off.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “She just left me sitting there. I don’t even know how she got back home.”

  “.…”

  “I think I feel like killing her.”

  “Not worth it. Have a beer.”

  “Two months, man. That’s two months down the tube. I had her meet everybody. Mom, Labov. I told her personal shit. Shit about who I was.”

  “Bad news.”

  “You bet your sweet ass bad news, Lou.”

  “ ’Does Lenny have to say about it? You talk this out with Lenny?”

  “He’d condescend. He’s a pecker in situations like this. He talks down to me. Big brother little brother. And plus he’s out like all day. Bonnie says she don’t even know where, office, bar, where. She’s half crying herself the whole time. Her and Len got their own problems. They’re both like this about something. Shaky. Pissed off. Lenny was on the drinks and the toot like a last meal. I go to the bar to get them drinks, they just do it without me. Who’s gonna figure on that?”

  “Nobody, man.”

  “And then I bought her drinks all night.”

  “Open the beer.”

  “I think I might kill her.”

  “Nobody’s killing anybody, Mikey.”

  “Try to think of somebody for me to hit, at least.”

  LEN

  Cinnamon girl, spiced cream, honey to kiss, melt hot around the center of me.

  LABOV

  “Lenny is your pride and joy,” I say to Mrs. Tagus. I say: “What could be with Lenny that makes for stomach trouble for a proud and joyful mother such as you Mrs. Tagus?”

  “If you had gotten a letter and then a call on the telephone like I got today Mr. Labov, even your perfect stomach would make for itself a knot, a fist. And for me, with stomach trouble…” She shakes her head in her well-made coat.

  I press Mrs. Tagus to eat a saltine.

  “Lenny trouble,” she murmurs, beating around the something. While a saltine is being carefully chewed she murmurs also: “Bonnie.”

  So I can gather there are troubles between Lenny Tagus, Mrs. Tagus’s son, a teacher, in college, who wrote a book about Germans before Hitler (in a print so tiny who could read it?) that got called Solid and Scholarly in a Review Mrs. Tagus has taped onto her refrigerator with the kind of invisible tape you don’t get off in a hurry. There is trouble between Mrs. Tagus’s Lenny and Lenny Tagus’s Bonnie, his wife of eight, nine years, a sweeter and better girl than even as perfect a catch as Len could hope for, who has borne him h
ealthy and polite children, and who makes a knish so good it is spelled s-i-n.

  Mrs. Tagus is whispering unhearable things, sipping her tea which is now cooler and has stopped its steaming violently into the cold air of my apartment’s kitchen.

  “So how do letters and telephones and your children I love like my own make for such stomach trouble?” I say. I place four stacked crackers next to Mrs. Tagus’s saucer.

  “If you had gotten the call I got from Bonnie,” Mrs. Tagus says. “From this girl who who would want to hurt her? Who who would want to not give her feelings weight on the scale?”

  I can see the whiteness of my breath a little in the kitchen air. I find a reassurance in how I can see it. I put my hand on Mrs. Tagus’s fist of a hand on my cold kitchen table. The skin of the knuckles of Mrs. Tagus is drawn tight and dry, and when she unfists the fist to let me comfort the hand I feel the skin crinkle like paper. Me: unfortunately also skin like paper. I look at our two hands. If my late Sandra were here with us this night I would say, to her only, things concerning oldness, coldness, trouble with stairs, paper-dry skin with brown sprinkles and yellowed nails, how it seems to Labov we get old like animals. We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we’re baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?

  Sandra Labov: the type everybody could say things to concerning issues like this. I miss her with everything. The loss of Sandra Labov is what makes my kitchen’s clock’s black hands go around, telling me when to do what.

  Me and Mrs. Tagus have gotten close, like if you’ll excuse me I think old people need to in this city these days. Her husband and me were like this, we were so close. For Mr. Tagus and the Taguses: tailored clothes at discounts. For me and Mrs. Labov: insurance at cost. Taguses and Labovs are close. So close I all of a sudden look at my clock and press Mrs. Tagus to tell me the cause of her stomach trouble straight out.

  “Lay it on the line, Mrs. Tagus,” I say.

  She sighs and feels at herself in the cold. I watch her breath. She leans close and lays it on the line, whispering to me the words: “Infidelity, Mr. Labov.” She looks with her cloudy eyes from operated-on cataracts behind her thick spectacles into my eyes and says, with a cleared throat: “Betrayal, also.”

  I let silence collect around this thing that’s finally out in the open’s hard medium and then ask Mrs. Tagus to clear me up on what’s all this about betrayal.

  “He’s going to kill Bonnie by making her die of the pain of the shame of it. Or Mikey could justly raise hands against him, his own blood,” is what Mrs. Tagus says she is having the awful stomach trouble over tonight, this some sort of triangular problem between the three children that I still don’t feel like I’m cleared up on.

  Mrs. Tagus fights against some tears. Her tea has gotten cold and lighter in color than tea, and I get up to my feet for the can of tea and the hot water in the copper kettle my wife Sandra and I received from Arnold and Greta Tagus on the day of our wedding when Roosevelt passed away may he rest, and Mrs. Tagus clears her throat some more and feels at her stomach through her coat I stitched together, using fine gut thread to weld the pelts.

  She says the call on the phone from her daughter-under-law Bonnie Tagus today that has her in her condition had also to do with half a Xeroxed letter from Lenny, her son and pride, a half a letter which Mrs. Tagus received in her postal box, also today, but before the call on the phone from Bonnie Tagus. It all comes in a rush. The half a letter from Lenny she says was a Xerox (not even personal?). He had mailed several Xerox copies of the letter, by Express Mail. A rush job. “ ‘An outpouring’ he says,” Mrs. Tagus says, “ ‘to all friends and family.’ ” Illuminating all issues for everybody. She looks at me at the kettle on the stove which only one big burner still has gas. Did I, Mr. Labov, also get such a first half of a letter? But I get my mail once a week only, on Tuesday (today is almost Friday, by the clock), on account of my box here at my building has been broken into, and I feel it is insecure, and my check for Social Security from the government comes by mail, so I have a secure box I got at the Post Office but the Post Office is half an hour by El or seven dollars by taxicab and let’s not even discuss bus routes and in this weather who needs the more than once a week bother? So it could be in my box. Mrs. Tagus has confidence in the security of her postal box here in the building, which she and Arnold Tagus first moved in starting with the weekend they electrocuted the Rosenbergs because of Nixon.

  I put some more hot and dark freshened tea before Mrs. Tagus, in a specially gotten mug, from the Mug House in Marshall Fields, with a lid on it, to keep the heat in the tea, which I got with emergencies like this one maybe in the back of my mind. The night years ago when Mikey Tagus swallowed his tongue in high school football, cup after cup Arnold and Greta drank out of some emergency mugs, with lids, that I’d brought, at the Emergency Room. We all sat close with tea and prayed with worry. That night was the first time Mrs. Tagus’s stomach made like a fist. And she is making with the fist with her hand in the air again, and in the fist are crinkled paper pages, from a letter, smeared like Xeroxes get when wet, from Lenny. She rocks in my kitchen chair and looks across the alley at the fire escape which is the view, speaking.

  LEN’S HALF AN OPEN LETTER SENT TO “THAT COMMUNITY OF MY FAMILY AND INTIMATE FRIENDS—LETTER APPROPRIATELY CONCEIVED ALSO AS AN INFORMATIONAL SATELLITE, A PROBE LAUNCHED INTO THE EMOTIONAL CONSTELLATION SURROUNDING AND INFORMING THIS CORRESPONDENT’S PERSONAL ORBIT—EXCLUDING THE PARTIES BONNIE FLUTTERMAN TAGUS AND MICHAEL ARNOLD TAGUS—REGARDING THIS CORRESPONDENT AND THE ABOVE TWO EXCLUDED PARTIES”

  21-2

  Beloved fathers and teachers,

  Please know that the party Leonard Shlomith Tagus, Gent., Ph.D., author of Motion in Poetry: The Theme of Momentum in Weimar Republic Verse, a monograph from which royalties in excess of three figures are forecast to accrue in fiscal 1985, Northwestern University’s lone blade-burnished Teutonist, student, teacher, son, father, brother; that wiliest of connubial mariners, that L. S. Tagus, having for nine years navigated successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of Inclination and Opportunity, has, as of today, 21 February 1985, committed adultery, on four occasions, with one Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, former significant other of my brother, Michael Arnold Tagus; that the party anticipates further episodes of such adultery; and that such past and highly probable future episodes will be brought to the attention of the party’s wife, Ms. Bonnie Flutterman Tagus, between 1:00 and 2:00 pm (lunch) this date.

  Know further that it is neither the desire & intention of L. Tagus, nor the project of an openly probing letter, either: (a) to excuse those libidinal/genital activities on the part of this party likely to excite disfavor or -ease within his intimate constellation; or: (b) to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse (see (a)); but rather merely: (c) to inform those parties on whom my existence and the behavior that defines same can be expected to have an effect of the events outlined above and discussed, as usual, below; and: (d) to describe, probably via the time-tested heuristic pentad, the W’s of why those events have taken and do and will take place; and: (e) to project the foreseeable consequences of such activities for this correspondent, for those other parties (B.F.T., M.A.T.) directly affected by his choices, and for those other other parties whose psychic fortunes are, to whatever extent, bound up with our own.

  (a) and (b) conceded, then, and (c) killed in the telling:

  Cinnamon girl. Full-lipped, candy-skinned, brandy-haired South-American-type girl. A type: a girl the color of dirty light, eyes a well-boiled white and hair like liquor, scintillant and smoky; precisely pointed breasts that shimmy when her chest caves in, when her chest caves in and hand flutters worried about the breastbone, from the laughter. Which is constant. This is a merry girl. Laughs at any stimuli not macabre or political, avoid abortion controversy; but otherwise a
weather without change, a thing that carries her from place to place rather than obversely, a laugh of the piercing sort that resembles a possessed state, helpless, crumpled in around her perception of anomaly or embarrassment, harmless harm to anyone in a world that is only a violent cartoon, wet eyes darting around for assistance, some invitation to gravity, the detumescence of a nipple scraped in shimmy by cotton, some distraction to let her decontort. A merriment that is almost on the edge of pain.

  And I watched her crumple, eyes the color of cream squeezed tight, over a tall and sonorous Graphix water-pipe, at the apartment of Mikey Tagus; and a wax-deaf man in a city of sirens heard one siren’s fatal call; and the malignant, long-slalomed rocks mated with a crunch through the dry eggshell prow of my careful character. Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, secretarial aide at North Side offices of Chicago Park District. Twenty, lovely, light and dark, hair sticky with gin, our lady of wet rings on album covers, Spanish lilt, pointed boots, a dairy sheen to redly white skin, lips that gleam, shine a light—shine without aid of tongue—they manufacture their own moisture.

  Contrast—please, neither offense nor explanation intended—contrast a wide-bottomed, solid, pale-as-all-indoors woman of thirty-four. Known in milliscopic detail. Large squash-shaped mole on left arm sports a banner of black hair. Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake’s own tired sweep. A woman ever armed with hemorrhoid pillow in one of only two stages of inflation, an obscene pink doughnut of hardened plastic, cushioning with her own dioxides the woman’s legacy from the long and labored birth of Saul Tagus. A woman whose lips are chronically dry (bad sebum flow) and collect a white paste at the corners. Whose posture, I confess, has always been a little too good for my complete peace of mind. And whose quiet static laughter is always appropriate, conscious, complicated by an automatic and sophisticated concern for the special sensitivities of everyone present.