A month later, in May 1992, Wallace packed up what little he had and drove to Syracuse. He had rented a first-floor apartment in a house around the corner from Karr and a few blocks from the main campus. It was in a typical graduate-student neighborhood, full of warping clapboard houses and semi-kempt lawns and right across from the food co-op. But being near the woman he loved made all the difference. “Syracuse,” he wrote Debra Spark later in the month, “is very cheap (not to mention lovely to live in, with grass and trees and terrific parks and absurdly little traffic and M. Karr).” Costello came up and brought Wallace’s old college computer. Wallace, he saw, was scribbling eagerly in his spiral-bound book whenever he had a moment. They went with Karr and her son for a tour of the hippie thrift shops in the tiny towns of Onondaga County. Costello bought a leather jacket, and the couple teased him. He also noticed that Wallace and Karr behaved like friends rather than lovers, probably because Karr wanted things to look ambiguous to her son or maybe because they were still ambiguous. “He really could have been her gay friend, from body language,” Costello remembered.
To Costello’s eyes, Karr seemed like a tougher version of Gale Walden. She had his friend’s number. When she would tease him about his work he would put up with it, to his old roommate’s surprise. He also saw how much Wallace liked being with Dev, Karr’s young son. Wallace told the boy there were talking spiders in his beard and, when Dev asked, explained that the purpose of his bandana was to keep his head from exploding. Children had a quality Wallace would increasingly crave in those around him: they were drawn to him without crowding him. They were part of that group of people — students, recovery friends, ordinary people unconnected to the fiction business — whom he admitted to his circle because they left him room. Such people, he wrote to Franzen, “make me feel both unalone and unstressed.”25 Costello spent the weekend nights of his visit on chair cushions in his friend’s tiny apartment, Wallace in the bed. He explained that he was banned from sleeping at Karr’s while Dev was there.
With Karr still not quite available, Wallace made do as best he could. He lived on chocolate Pop-Tarts and soda, too poor to eat properly. Getting fed was a priority. So when he met Stephanie Hubbard and Doug Eich, a couple in the orbit of the recovery group he had just joined, his interest was both literary and culinary. He would go to Hubbard’s house, where she would cook and he and Eich discussed language and fiction. Eich misused nauseous for nauseated and Wallace corrected him, adducing his mother. Eich, a graduate student in linguistics, called his new friend “a smug prescriptivist douche-bag.” Wallace was chewing tobacco again, which he would spit into a soda can, apologizing profusely to Hubbard and Eich while enjoying their attention. Then he would take a toothbrush he kept in a Ziploc bag in his sock and brush his teeth in their bathroom. The three would discuss the day’s recovery meetings. Eich and Wallace shared a passion for DeLillo and also Cormac McCarthy. Wallace had discovered McCarthy late, when he was teaching at Amherst. “Something like Faulkner on acid,” he had written Richard Elman at the time, in excitement. Eich and Wallace agreed that the gritty portrait of the alcoholic in Suttree was far more interesting than the self-pitying Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano.26
The three would talk for hours. The conversation often turned to faith. Wallace said he was trying to pray, because, even though he did not necessarily believe in God, it seemed like a good thing to do. Karr had become attracted to Catholicism — for her baptism would be a key moment in her recovery from alcohol. So for a time Wallace too hoped to receive the sacraments, thinking that if he and Karr were to marry they could have a religious wedding. (Ultimately the priest told him he had too many questions to be a believer, and he let the issue drop.) Wallace’s real religion was always language anyway. It alone could shape and hold multitudes; by comparison God’s power was spindly. That was why he was obsessed with grammar; as he put it in a letter to Franzen, “If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.”
At first, in Syracuse, Wallace had trouble pushing Infinite Jest forward. Change always derailed his writing. Costello had added a new keyboard to Wallace’s college computer. “I simply have to pound to get the letters to register,” he complained to Franzen. He couldn’t read some of his old drafts; he was too poor to buy a table to put it on; there were too many distractions. Wallace was, he wrote Franzen, “in a real funk about the Project” and worried his current inertia would “become a stasis that threatens to accumulate its own inertia, etc.” Franzen had made a second visit to Syracuse, this time with his wife, to look at the possibility of moving there again. The three drove down the street on which Raymond Carver had lived when he taught at the university in the 1980s. His old house was for sale. They were amazed to learn that the price was $10,000 higher because it had once been the home of a famous writer.27 Now Wallace again tried to lure him, advertising that “it’s awfully pretty here now—60s, clear, sunny, every kind of floral scent known to Linnaeus floating around.”
Over the next few months Wallace fell back into his routines. He would get up and go to a 7:15 sobriety meeting, then come back and work, next go to a gym to work out. Seeing the size of Big Craig and the other men in Granada House had made him serious about weight lifting: he now drank a protein shake every morning with raw egg in it, which he called his “breakfast vomit.”28 In the evening there was another sobriety meeting and then he would go back to work, altering and typing into his old computer what he’d written in the morning. This arrangement brought out his best writing, he felt, because the process of writing by hand and then transcribing forced his brain to wait for his hands. When he tried composing directly on a PC, it felt wrong.29
The work moving forward again, Wallace discovered that his tiny apartment felt just right, a counterpart to the bungalow in Tucson and his senior single at Amherst, places where he didn’t feel his ass in the chair. He had gotten hold of the silver velour recliner and put it in the living room. He piled his books and papers on his bed. To sleep he moved them to the floor. He was so happy he sent Franzen pictures of his narrow slice of paradise.
For evening company, there was, by August, Mary, with whom a relationship had finally begun in earnest. “The Era of Skulking seems to be drawing to a close!” Wallace told Spark, reporting that Karr’s estranged husband had begun seeing someone. They would watch action movies together at night, both loving, as Karr told a later interviewer, “movies where shit blew up.” They worked out together and played tennis. Karr cooked for both of them and for her students. They read books out loud to each other and exchanged drafts (Karr was working on The Liar’s Club and he poached material from her life.) This was their happiest time. They went to her twentieth high school reunion in Texas and “had big big fun,” Wallace told Spark. Wallace even was willing to dance, though only to the slow music.