He added that he would probably wind up “cutting 40 % of what they ask and making the font slightly smaller and hoping to fool them.” DeLillo wrote back that he had to follow his instincts; as Wallace summarized his advice back to Pietsch, when “you feel incipient bladder tumors at the thought of cutting something don’t cut it.”
The edits Wallace agreed to left Pietsch in, as he wrote Wallace in mid-May, “a state of editorial ecstasy…the veil lifted.” But ten days later he was back with more unwelcome news. “Here’s what happened,” he wrote Wallace, “I got to the end of Infinite Jest Friday a week ago and mailed that letter to you. Then over the weekend I was struck by the realization that I hadn’t actually edited the manuscript yet. Only now do I feel that I know the novel well enough to make more detailed suggestions.” Anticipating his author’s response, he added, “I know this is harrowing for you, but I believe that this is the work you want me to do. This is my best editing, David.”
A new round of editing followed, focusing on the first five hundred pages. “I’m prepared to thumbwrestle you over every one of these cuts,” Pietsch challenged Wallace, having absorbed the latter’s language of playful combat. He chopped at endnotes, and went after more of the “interAmerican huggermugger” in the back, where Wallace had stashed it. Wallace quickly responded to the edits, as he did when agitated, with a circle signifying “total acquiescence to demand” and a dash meaning “bared teeth,” “dickering,” or that a proposed cut had to be discussed on the phone.
Pietsch was also still worried about how the parts fit together. This was a novel in which, with the possible exception of Gately’s story, the plot reaches no conclusion. You don’t know for sure if the terrorists find the lethal cartridge. The reader never learns what drove Hal mad. Is Avril Incandenza an agent for the Quebecois terrorists? There were hints that she and John “No Relation” Wayne,9 the top player in the school, both were. Wallace insisted that the answers all existed, but just past the last page. The novel continued in time in the reader’s mind — that is, it meant for it to have the trajectory of a “broad arc” rather than a Freytagian triangle. Pietsch asked for one clarification now. He wanted some indication of the fate of Orin Incandenza, who may be responsible for sending out the lethal cartridge to get back at his mother.
Wallace, amid all the cutting and rewriting, gave it a try. “Potential insertion into page 1229 about which I’m not exactly qualmless,” he faxed Pietsch on June 11 and sent a scene, with overtones of 1984, in which Quebecois terrorists trap Orin under a surreally massive inverted “tumbler” and unloose roaches on him — his “special conscious horror.” The goal is to suffocate him — a fate similar to that which he inflicted on the roaches infesting his bathroom several hundred pages earlier.
Another set of alterations was forced by a phone call. In May, Mary Karr, who had read some of the portions of the novel serialized in magazines, called Pietsch to point out that many of the Ennet House scenes were taken either from what Wallace heard or saw at Granada House and in recovery meetings, where conversations were supposed to be private. For Wallace, an accusation of this sort could elicit maximum anxiety, the threat of new exposure and problems. He might find himself once again in Girl with Curious Hair territory. But this time things went far more smoothly. He changed some names in the manuscript, altered other details, and added a strongly worded but evasive denial to the copyright page that the events in the novel were disclosed at confidential recovery meetings.10
Wallace flew to New York once more at the end of June with the manuscript in a box on his lap. Kymberly Harris came with him this time. Their relationship had revived in the spring. Wallace had even requested a sit-down with her parents and, arriving highly nervous, asked if it would be okay for Kymberly to live with him. “David is asking for my thumb,” she joked. The Harrises gave their consent, amused by Wallace’s formality, but he had been serious, in a way; a midwestern rigor in certain matters was still within him and this was a major step in his mind. Kymberly had moved in with her clothes and furniture in April, but, now just a couple of months later, she planned to audition for the Actors Studio in New York. Wallace dropped in on Pietsch and handed off his bundle and was back in Bloomington a week later. Soon after, the Actors Studio wrote Kymberly to say she had been accepted. Wallace pronounced himself thrilled, delighted that she had gotten into the “Yale Medical School of Acting,” then, quickly less thrilled, asked her to wait a year before she went east. At first she agreed, but by August she realized that the more deeply she got involved with Wallace the less likely she would be ever to leave Bloomington. She told him she was going to New York, with him or not, and four friends came and moved her and her things out, leaving him the silver velour recliner, Jeeves, his old bed, and little else.
Soon Wallace found other companionship. One day he was out jogging and a dog appeared by his side. Wallace realized it was a stray and decided to take it home. “The Drone,” as he named him after the mythic club in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, was a black Lab mix, as Jeeves was.11 He was more rebellious than Jeeves, less of a house pet.12 Together the two ruled the house, their chew toys and fur everywhere. Their water came from the cooler. If Wallace was away for more than a few hours, he brought in a sitter.
To Wallace’s surprise, Little, Brown had already produced a brochure with a short piece by Wallace on writing and a brief excerpt from the novel and distributed it at the annual booksellers’ convention in late spring. And just a few weeks after he brought his final manuscript to New York with Harris, Pietsch sent him bound copies for subsidiary rights sales and prepublication quotes. After discussion, the cover was a picture of blue sky with puffs of clouds. It was inspired by the “wallpaper scheme” of the administrative offices’ waiting room at the tennis academy that incites Hal’s agoraphobia, with its “fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky.”13 Wallace wrote to DeLillo that the book had “a cover that’s (troublingly, to me) identical to the passenger safety card on American Airlines flights.”
The work of Infinite Jest almost done, Wallace was casting around for new projects. The state fair piece and the sections of Infinite Jest that had run in journals had made him in demand. He said no to a week at a nudist colony and a chance to attend the launch of a scent endorsed by Elizabeth Taylor at an air force base, the similarity of these offers sparking the suspicion, as he later told an interviewer, that all the magazine editors in New York read each other’s mail.14 Wallace was vulnerable to being wanted and he had liked all the new readers his magazine work got him. So he agreed to write a piece for Details about the tennis star Michael Joyce (it was ultimately published in Esquire), and another on the U.S. Open for Tennis, a magazine that he’d devoured as a teenage player. Both magazines were looking for a piece of the Wallace voice, that tone of a sensitive, sincere genius operating in second gear. His nonfiction persona was, as Wallace told an interviewer, “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.” He became adept at the back-and-forth of magazine work, limiting the psychic cost of the editing by calling and leaving long messages at night on his editors’ voice mails.
Wallace also began a review of Joseph Frank’s four-volume biography of Dostoevsky for the Voice Literary Supplement, where Lee Smith, the editor of Signifying Rappers, was now working. Wallace had over the years become deeply attracted to the Russian’s writing and life. The parallels between Dostoevsky’s and his own certainly caught his eye, as they had at Granada House. Wasn’t his time there comparable to Dostoevsky’s exile in Siberia, where the Russian had first seen how much he had in common even with the most desperate souls? He left this implied in the lengthy article he produced: