Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (31 page)
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Authors: David Foster Wallace
Q.
‘It’s not a good word, I know. It’s not just quote sadness the way one feels sad at a funeral or film. More a plummeting quality. A timelessness to it. The way the light gets in winter just before dusk. Or that—all right—how, say, at the height of lovemaking, the very height, when she’s starting to come, when she’s truly responding to you now and you can see in her face that she’s starting to come, her eyes widening in that way that is both surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive can fake or feign if you really look intently at her eyes and really
see
her, you know what I’m talking about, that apical moment of maximum human sexual connection when you feel closest to her,
with
her, so much closer and realer and more ecstatic than your own coming, which always feels more like losing your grip on the person who’s grabbed you to keep you from falling, a mere neural sneeze that’s not even in the same ballpark’s area code as
her
coming, and—and I know what you will make of this but I’ll tell you anyhow—but how even this moment of maximum connection and joint triumph and joy at making them start to come has this void of piercing sadness to it, of the loss of them in their eyes as their eyes widen to their very widest point and then as they begin to come begin to shut, close, the eyes do, and you feel that familiar little needle of sadness inside your exultation as they arch and their eyes close and you can feel that they’ve closed their eyes to shut you out, you’ve become an intruder, their union is now with the feeling itself, the climax, that behind those drawn lids the eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward, into some void where you who sent them cannot follow. That’s shit. I’m not putting it right. I can’t make you feel what I felt. You’ll turn this into Narcissistic Male Wants Woman’s Gaze On Him At Climax, I know. Well I don’t mind telling you I’d begun to cry, at the anecdote’s climax. Not loudly, but I did. Neither of us were smoking by now. We were both up against the headboard, facing the same way, though addorsed is how I remember it for the story’s last part, when I wept. Memory is strange. I do remember listening for some acknowledgment from her that I was crying. I felt embarrassed—not for crying, but for wanting so badly to know how she took it, whether it made me seem sympathetic or selfish. She stayed where he left her all day, supine in the gravel, weeping, she said, and giving thanks to her particular religious principles and forces. When of course as I’m sure you could have predicted I was weeping for myself. He left the knife and drove off in the unmuffled Cutlass, leaving her there. He may have told her not to move or do anything for some specified interval. If he did, I know she obeyed. She said she could still feel him inside her soul, the mulatto—it was hard to break the focus. I felt certain that the psychotic had driven off somewhere to kill himself. It seemed clear from the anecdote’s outset that someone was going to have to die. The story’s emotional impact on me was profound and unprecedented and I will not even try to explain it to you. She said she wept because she had realized that as she stood hitchhiking her religion’s spiritual forces had guided the psychotic to her, that he had served as an instrument of growth in her faith and capacity to focus and alter energy fields by the action of her compassion. She wept out of gratitude, she says. He left the knife up to the handle in the ground next to her where he had thrust it, apparently stabbing the ground dozens of times with desperate savagery. She said not one word about my weeping or what it signified to her. I displayed far more emotion than she did. She learned more about love that day with the sex offender than at any other stage in her spiritual journey, she said. Let’s both have one last one and then that will be it. That her whole life had indeed led inexorably to that moment when the car stopped and she got in, that it was indeed a kind of death, but not at all in the way she had feared as they entered the secluded area. That was the only real commentary she indulged in, just at the anecdote’s end. I did not care whether it was quote true. It would depend what you meant by true. I simply didn’t care. I was moved, changed—believe what you will. My mind seemed to be moving at the quote speed of light. I was so sad. And that whether or not what she believed happened happened—it seemed true even if it wasn’t. That even if the whole focusedsoul-connection theology, that even if it was just catachrestic New Age goo, her belief in it had saved her life, so whether or not it’s goo becomes irrelevant, no? Can you see why this, realizing this, would make you feel conflicted in—of realizing your entire sexuality and sexual history had less genuine connection or feeling than I felt simply lying there listening to her talk about lying there realizing how lucky she’d been that some angel had visited her in psychotic guise and shown her what she’d spent her whole life praying was true? You believe I’m contradicting myself. But can you imagine how any of it felt? Seeing her sandals across the room on the floor and remembering what I’d thought of them only hours before? I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this sounds to you. I’m not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, had I—can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this? Why I felt this apical sadness and fear at the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and New Age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched her hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and never seeing her again? Why it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you’re bound to ask. Ask it now. This is your chance. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now? All borne out? Be happy. I don’t care. I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of story.’
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (XXIV)
Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat. There was breath and the mugginess of bodies and the force of the hot stove on the back of my emergent neck; there was the lunatic crackle of the wireless’s movement among city stations, Da scanning for better reception. I could not move: about and around me the towels trapped hair at my shoulders’ skin and Mum circled the chair, cutting against the bowl’s rim with blunt shears. At one edge of my vision’s strain a utensil drawer hung open, at the other the beginning of Da, head cocked past the finger at the glowing dial. And straight ahead, before me and centered direct across the shine of the table’s oilcloth, like a tongue between the teeth of the pantry’s opening doors, hung my brother’s face. I could not move my head: the weight of the bowl and towels, Mum’s shears and steadying hand—she, eyes lowered, intent on her crude task, could not see the face of my brother emerge against the pantry’s black. I had to sit still and straight as a tin grenadier and watch as his face assumed, instantly and with the earnestness reserved for pure cruelty, whichever expression my own emerging face betrayed.
The face in the well-oiled doors’ crack hung, I inert, the face neckless and floating unsupported in the cleavage of the angled doors, the concentration of its affect somewhere between sport and assault, Da’s shaggy head cocked and sightless at the tuner, two bars of strings distorted by the storm and snatches of voices found and lost again; and Mum intent on my skull and unable to see the white hair-framed face reproducing my own visage, copying me—for we called it that, ‘copying,’ and he knew how I hated it—and for me alone. And with such intensity and so little lag in following that his face less mimed than lampooned my own, made instantly distended and obscene whatever position my own face’s pieces assumed.
And how it became worse, then, in that kitchen of copper and tile and pine and burnt peat’s steam and static and sleet on the window in undulant waves, the air cold before me and scorching behind: as I became more agitated at the copying and the agitation registered—I felt it—on my face, the face of my brother would mimic and lampoon that agitation; I feeling then the increased agitation at the twinned imitation of my face’s distress, his registering and distorting that new distress, all as I became more and more agitated behind the cloth Mum had fastened over my mouth to protest my disturbing her shears’ assertion of my face’s true shape. It ascended by levels: Da’s cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner’s parade, the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempts by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features’ movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry’s black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag’s restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us both farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the funhouse mirror—the gross and pitiless
sameness,
the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges—as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man’s sobs blocked by cloth, storm’s thrum and electric hiss and Da’s mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin’s face would show the same, to mock it—until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare—unseen and -seeing—into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.
1
Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.
2
Never the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, however: thrice rejected early in his career, he had reason to believe that something personal and/or political was afoot with the Guggenheim Fellowship committee, and had decided that he’d simply be damned, starve utterly, before he would ever again hire a graduate assistant to fill out the tiresome triplicate Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship application and go through the tiresome contemptible farce of ‘objective’ consideration ever again.
3
That is not wholly true.
1
The multiform shapes the therapist’s mated fingers assumed nearly always resembled, for the depressed person, various forms of geometrically diverse cages, an association which the depressed person had not shared with the therapist because its symbolic significance seemed too overt and simple-minded to waste their time together on. The therapist’s fingernails were long and shapely and well maintained, whereas the depressed person’s fingernails were compulsively bitten so short and ragged that the quick sometimes protruded and began spontaneously to bleed.
2
(i.e., one of which purulent wounds)
3
The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously
chosen
or
chosen to cling to
a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).
4
The therapist—who was substantially older than the depressed person but still younger than the depressed person’s mother, and who, other than in the condition of her fingernails, resembled that mother in almost no physical or stylistic respects—sometimes annoyed the depressed person with her habit of making a digiform cage in her lap and changing the shapes of the cage and gazing down at the geometrically diverse cages during their work together. Over time, however, as the therapeutic relationship deepened in terms of intimacy and sharing and trust, the sight of the digiform cages irked the depressed person less and less, eventually becoming little more than a distraction. Far more problematic in terms of the depressed person’s trust and self-esteem-issues was the therapist’s habit of from time to time glancing up very quickly at the large sunburst-design clock on the wall behind the suede easy chair in which the depressed person customarily sat during their time together, glancing (i.e., the therapist glancing) very quickly and almost furtively at the clock, such that what came to bother the depressed person more and more over time was not that the therapist was looking at the clock but that the therapist was apparently trying to
hide
or
disguise
the fact that she was looking at the clock. The depressed person—who was agonizingly sensitive, she admitted, to the possibility that anyone she was trying to reach out and share with was secretly bored or repelled or desperate to get away from her as quickly as possible, and was commensurately hypervigilant about any slight movements or gestures which might imply that a listener was conscious of the time or eager for time to pass, and never once failed to notice when the therapist glanced ever so quickly either up at the clock or down at the slender, elegant wristwatch whose timepiece rested hidden from the depressed person’s view against the underside of the therapist’s slim wrist—had finally, late in the first year of the therapeutic relationship, broken into sobs and shared that it made her feel totally demeaned and invalidated whenever the therapist appeared to try to hide the fact that she wished to know the exact time. Much of the depressed person’s work with the therapist in the first year of her (i.e., the depressed person’s) journey toward healing and intrapersonal wholeness had concerned her feelings of being uniquely and repulsively boring or convoluted or pathetically self-involved, and of not being able to trust that there was genuine interest and compassion and caring on the part of a person to whom she was reaching out for support; and in fact the therapeutic relationship’s first significant breakthrough, the depressed person told members of her Support System in the agonizing period following the therapist’s death, had come when the depressed person, late in the therapeutic relationship’s second year, had gotten sufficiently in touch with her own inner worth and resources to be able to share assertively with the therapist that she (i.e., the respectful but assertive depressed person) would prefer it if the therapist would simply look openly up at the helioform clock or openly turn her wrist over to look at the underside’s wristwatch instead of apparently believing—or at least engaging in behavior which made it appear, from the depressed person’s admittedly hypersensitive perspective, as if the therapist believed—that the depressed person could be fooled by her dishonestly sneaking an observation of the time into some gesture that tried to look like a meaningless glance at the wall or an absent manipulation of the cagelike digiform shape in her lap.