The relationship with Harms continued to go well. She got him to cut his hair for the first time in a year and they went to the office Christmas party for the Department of Children and Foster Services, Wallace wearing one of her plastic tortoiseshell headbands. Drone died in mid-December. Wallace held his dog in his arms and cried as the veterinarian gave a lethal injection. The body could not be cremated for three weeks and so he would go by the veterinary office and sit outside the freezer where his dog lay. He sent DeLillo a holiday card with the emendation, “It is a sad Christmas.”
Again Harms was there to comfort him. Wallace asked Harms not to fly in winter; he was afraid of losing her in a crash. Soon Harms moved into his house at the edge of town, bringing her cat. They bought a king-sized bed, because the old one was too small. The two shared corny pop songs they loved, like Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be Your Crying Shoulder.” (Wallace boasted he had the musical taste of a high school girl.) He bought her expensive gifts, happy that the books and the fellowships had made him well-to-do. The couple got engaged and picked out a setting for their rings. They talked about having a child and agreed that if Harms got pregnant they would be pleased.
But there were issues. Harms wouldn’t let him use a pen on the couch. He was allergic to her cat. She would come home from work and zone out. He worked all day on his fiction.9 At Harms’s urging, Wallace checked himself into an addiction center in Pennsylvania to try to get off nicotine entirely. He had been at various times a smoker, a tobacco chewer, and a patch user — sometimes all three in quick succession — since graduate school.10 The stay lasted more than a week, and Wallace came home highly agitated. He wished he had a major project under way; he wished he were smoking. He wondered about the Nardil. He never felt quite himself on it. It left him somehow slightly detached from reality. He had in recent years, he believed, become hypoglycemic too, and so his historic diet of prepackaged blondies was replaced by sugarless jelly spreads.
Wallace had managed to keep television at bay for many years now, but in order to relax after her grueling days, Harms ordered satellite TV service with, as she remembers, 75 channels. Wallace would sit and click through the stations, landing on one, then moving on to the next, always afraid he was missing something better and so really watching nothing. By now, between the loss of The Drone, the availability of TV, the lack of nicotine, and the scarcity of privacy, he was stupefied. But he was engaged and committed to Juliana.
Juliana was an active Catholic. She and her fiancé discussed his converting. Wallace, who never lost his hope that he could find faith, signed up for an ecumenical Christian program called cursillo: the goal “to bring God from the head to the heart.” But his new attempt to join a formal religion did not get much further than the one with Karr. At the final ceremony, when the participants were meant to attest their belief in God, Wallace expressed his doubts instead. Faith was something he could admire in others but never quite countenance for himself. He liked to paraphrase Bertrand Russell that there were certain philosophical issues he could bear to think about only for a few minutes a year and once told his old Arizona sponsor Rich C. that he couldn’t go to church because “I always get the giggles.”11
He was back at school now teaching and could be short-tempered, perhaps resenting the time it took up. In one creative writing class he shoved a student who had shown him attitude and then threatened to fail him: “I too have used outrage, abrasiveness, and irritation as a way to keep people at arm’s length,” he wrote Lee Freeman in a note. “So trust me: it is a bush-league defense, and painfully obvious in the terror it betrays.”
By now the new relationship energy with Harms had completely dissipated. Wallace bolted himself in his dark workroom, and when Juliana came home she watched TV alone. Costello was worried by how praising Wallace was when he talked of Harms. He knew, as he remembers, that “admiration was always the tomb” of his friend’s relationships. Wallace and Juliana went to St. Louis to visit Franzen, who felt like Wallace’s interest in her was largely theoretical.12
Harms, too, saw that Wallace was pulling away. The search for the ring had stopped. He got a rescued puppy to replace The Drone, but he found the presence in the house of the new dog, Werner, a pit bull mix, unbearable. “I can’t work,” he complained to Harms. “I have to take care of him all day.” The couple went to a MacArthur Fellowship reunion in Chicago, and Wallace stayed in the hotel room, trying to write. “I need to be ready to write,” he explained to her. But to Costello he acknowledged, “Clean pages are safe around me.” He told Juliana he felt like he was always disappointing her, then got mad when she said he had all the qualities she could hope for in a partner. She grew suspicious — she guessed he was hiding something larger. 13
Harms confronted Wallace, who denied being involved with another woman. She pulled out all his papers. A trained investigator, she knew where to look. She found several notes from a graduate student in Wallace’s department. “I haven’t had a physical affair with her but I’m contemplating it,” Wallace explained sullenly. Harms had had enough. A few weeks later, in early January 2000, Doug Poag helped her move out. Wallace contributed to the down payment for her new house out of his MacArthur money and then was peeved when a new boyfriend quickly moved in.
The graduate student became Wallace’s girlfriend. They exchanged books — he gave her The Screwtape Letters, she gave him the J. D. Salinger collection Nine Stories—“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing” was a line he loved. Things grew increasingly intense, but as ever the work came first for Wallace and the relationship faltered.
In April 1999, Salon.com asked Wallace for his list of underappreciated novels, and in his response he included longtime loves like Omensetter’s Luck, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Blood Meridian, but added Jerzy Kosinski’s little-known Steps, “a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close.”
Kafka’s fragments may have been the comparison he wanted reviewers to make when they read Brief Interviews. He had written a book that was, as he told an interviewer, “mean to just about everyone it’s possible to be mean to,” and had to hope for thoughtful readings. He was, though, resigned to what might come, perhaps even to being ignored. He wrote Brad Morrow that he was glad to be out of the spotlight: “The big Attention eyeball has mostly passed on to other poor schmo’s.” Still, Little, Brown asked him to go on a book tour and he obliged, as long as it was short. “I’m in the midst of the world’s smallest tour,” he boasted to Steven Moore in June. “Just four cities.” Even short book tours filled him with misgivings. “The Statue Talks!” he joked to a friend.