Something happens to Julie Smith when the red lights light. Just a something…. Every concavity…now looks to have come convex. The camera lingers on her. It seems to ogle…. Her face, on-screen, gives off an odd lambent UHF flicker; her expression, brightly serene, radiates a sort of oneness with the board’s data.
Julie, TV’s natural spawn, seems to be assuming some of its properties, to be acquiring, like Pynchon’s San Narciso, a sort of “intent to communicate.” In the end Griffin decides to have Julie play against her autistic brother—“Great P.R.,” as one staffer points out — and the story, full of mirrors and characters’ glimpsing themselves in the glass, ends appropriately with the most important mirror moment of alclass="underline" “Julie and the audience look at each other.”22
Wallace was maturing as a writer. The preoccupation with media now went deeper than just a statement of purpose. The voice of the story was diffuse, hovering, omnipresent without being omniscient. As the critic Sven Birkerts noted in a later essay in Wigwag, “Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around his characters.” This charged airspace is where the artistic activity of the story resides. The story ably frustrates the MFA ukase, the order to “hook” the reader fast. What is at stake for the main character? Everything, and also nothing, the story’s tension residing, with the narrator, in the ether above her.
The story received a favorable reception in Carter’s workshop. (It would continue to be one of Wallace’s best known. He would read it publicly for years.) At one point in the story, Alex Trebek says, “My favorite word is moist,…especially when used in combination with my second favorite word, which is loincloth.” Later when Wallace saw the young man who had supplied the phrase at the Hungarian Pastry Shop waiting in line at one of his signings, he called out, “You’re the moist loincloth guy!”
At semester’s end, Wallace decided to stay in Tucson. Walden would be there, and he could get credit for attending a teacher-training workshop at the Southern Arizona Writing Project. Wallace was used to going home in the summer and staying away turned out to be an unpleasant experience. He found the desert heat oppressive and the relationship with Walden developed problems: they had begun talking about the future, marriage and children; Wallace was not ready. They went to Nogales, just over the Mexican border—“kind of a depressing place,” as Walden remembers — and stayed for a few days, listening to the mariachis play all night long. They broke up, if temporarily. “It’s hot, here. Over 100° and climbing,” Wallace wrote Washington in July. “I have no job, no girlfriend, no friends.” He was “getting high too much, and moping.”
The early part of the summer was taken up by the page proofs of Broom, which was to be published the next January, but the work felt old and stale to him. He told JT he wished he could pull a Norman Mailer and rewrite the book from scratch. He also soon entered into what would come to be a familiar struggle with copy editors. They wanted to standardize his prose, not understanding how thoroughly thought through were his departures from standard grammar. If he used a comma in an unusual place or chose to indicate direct speech with single quotes rather than the usual double ones, there was a reason. He was going, he had written Nadell in April, to have to “copy-edit the copy-editor.” The process exhausted him. When the final proofs came in July, he sent them back to Howard with a typically confused sign-off: “Hoping Very Much I’ll Never Have To Look At That Particular Confoguration Of Words Again, Yet Eager To Do So If It Will Help Viking One Little Bit.”
Meanwhile, Howard was soliciting prepublication quotes for the novel. “No autobiography, no cocaine, no rock clubs, lots of ambition and inventiveness,” he promised Don DeLillo, who passed, as did dozens of others. Most, if they even leafed through it, likely saw the book as derivative of Pynchon, or of DeLillo himself. Elman was one of the few to offer praise — sort of. At Wallace’s request, he read the manuscript and wrote to Howard, in part, “As wild elk produce many elkins, so the American heartland produces its own Menippean satirists. David Wallace’s young genius is undimmed. The magnitude of his borrowings he pays back with interest.” When he shared the quote with Wallace, Wallace asked his old teacher what he meant. “You must not confuse the modesty of hype for lack of admiration of your talent,” the teacher replied evasively. To Howard, he was less disingenuous. “I would be hard put to defend David’s writing, for all its charm, as original, in most of the standard senses of the word.” He added, half joking, “If you want to publish really good writing you should publish mine.”
Shortly after sending off the page proofs in July, Wallace drove up to see Costello, who was now a summer associate at a law firm in Denver. They planned a weekend road trip, but at the last minute Costello was called in to work. Wallace came along to get a little experience of what it was like to be in an office. They parked in the underground garage of the nearly sixty-story building and took the elevator up to Costello’s office. Wallace, wide-eyed, settled in an empty conference room. While his old roommate took a long call from another lawyer, Wallace wrote the first draft of “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR” in a notebook. It is the story of two executives whom chance throws together in a huge office building, the building itself “empty and bright, dispossessed, autonomous and autonomic.” The older one has a heart attack in the building’s garage and falls slowly, inexorably to the ground:
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.
The younger of the two men then tries to come to his rescue. It is unclear whether he succeeds in saving the other’s life with CPR. “They shared pain, though of course neither knew,” the narrator of the story asserts.
The effort was an early example of the paradoxical approach that would come to dominate Wallace’s later fiction: a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings. This would prove one day to be the stance of much of the writing in the story collection Oblivion and, finally and problematically, in The Pale King, but in its earliest incarnations it came easily to Wallace.23
The next day he and Costello took to the road. They planned on going to St. Francis, Kansas, about two hundred miles to the east. There was a well-known NPR station there. Wallace wanted, Costello remembers, Oedipa Maas — like, “to get to the source of the signal.” On the way they stayed overnight in a cheap motel in eastern Colorado. Wallace realized the next morning en route that he had left behind the notebook with the “CPR” story in it, so the two turned around and drove back the twenty miles to the motel to get it; Wallace mentioned to Costello that it also contained “a big thing”—Costello assumed a new novel was being started. They turned around one more time and got to St. Francis, where they sat in the parking lot for a few minutes. That month, a friend of Walden’s took a photo of Wallace for his book jacket. He chose to wear the leather jacket he’d bought from McLagan, the one that always brought him luck.
The fall 1986 school term came with two big changes. Mary Carter was gone, forced out by the faculty. She did not go quietly. Soon, as Wallace wrote to Nadell, she was “going through both a lawsuit and a nervous breakdown in London.” Carter’s departure was awkward for Wallace. He was her favorite; indeed, some people assumed that they were involved, not least because she had some years before published a novel about an older woman and a younger man. Fueling the rumor was that he moved into her apartment after her departure. Some guessed it was a present of some sort (in fact she charged him rent and told him not to smoke inside). He enjoyed the condo, which was much more pleasant than the swamp-cooled bungalow he’d lived in for the past year. It had color-coordinated furniture and wall hangings, not to mention access to a pool. “I got darned little work done,” he complained to Washington about the summer when September finally came around, “just took one gutty class and sat around smoking pot in airconditioning.”