Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2 page)

“So at that point,” his sister, Amy, said, her voice sounding sober,
bruised, “it was determined, ‘Oh, well, gosh, we’ve made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I’m sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.’ They had no idea that was the only thing keeping him alive.”

The course David followed is called a washout; David would slowly taper off the old drug, then taper onto a new one. “He knew it was going to be rough,” Jonathan Franzen told me. Franzen’s novel
The Corrections
won a National Book Award; he was the best friend of the second part of David’s adult life. “But he was feeling he could afford a year to do the job. He figured he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil wasn’t perfect.”

It’s something Franzen wanted to stress. (Franzen, interviewed, had a writer’s not quite off-duty quality; part of him wanted to shoulder me aside and tell the story himself.) David had a level of self-criticism that sometimes made him the one person whose company he didn’t enjoy in a pleasant room; now he was happy. He loved his marriage, his life. “This is the main narrative, it’s reason number one among the nine. It was from that position of optimism and happiness and strength that he tried to take another step. All the signs were pointing in the right direction. Because things were going well, he thought he was in a strong enough position to make some fundamental changes. And he had bad luck, it didn’t work.”

Doctors began prescribing other medications, each one a failure. By October, David’s symptoms had landed him back in the hospital. He began to drop weight. That fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he’d just stepped off the Amherst green.

When Amy talked to him by phone, he was sometimes his old self. She said, “The worst question you could ask David in the last year was, ‘How are you?’ And it’s almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don’t see regularly without that question.” David was very honest. He’d answer, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”

The year ran good and bad, fast then slow, ascents with sudden pits, the sky looking very distant overhead. In early May, he sat down at a café with some graduating seniors from his fiction class. He answered their jittery, writer’s-future questions. At the end, his voice went throaty, he choked up. Students assumed he was joking—some smiled, a memory that would cut later. David sniffled. “Go ahead and laugh—here I am crying—but I really am going to miss all of you.”

No medications had worked. In June, David tried to kill himself. Then he was back in the hospital. Doctors administered twelve courses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment that had always terrified David. “Twelve,” his mother repeated. “Such brutal treatments,” his father said. “And after this year of absolute hell for David,” his mother said, “they decided to go back to the Nardil.”

Franzen, worried, flew to spend a week with David in July. David had dropped seventy pounds in a year. “He was thinner than I’d ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at ten percent strength.” David could now make skinny jokes: he’d never before noticed, he said, “how hard certain chairs in the house were.” Franzen would sit with David in the living room, play with his dogs, the two would step outside while David lit a cigarette. “We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, ‘A dog’s mouth is practically a disinfectant, it’s so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.’” When he left, David thanked him for coming. “I felt grateful he allowed me to be there,” Franzen told me.

Six weeks later, David asked his parents to fly west. The Nardil wasn’t working; the great risk with taking time off an antidepressant. A patient departs, returns, and the medication has boarded its doors. David couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to leave the house. He asked, “What if I meet one of my students?” His father said, “He didn’t want anyone to see him the way he was. It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I’m sure.”

The Wallaces stayed ten days. David and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs,
talked. Sally cooked David’s favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods—pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. “We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive,” his mother said. “But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn’t take it.”

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. “I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.”

In the middle of September, Karen left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself. “I can’t get that image out of my mind,” his sister told me—and said another smart, kind, impossible thing. “David and his dogs, and it’s dark. I’m sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry.”

Writers tend to have two great topics, on heavy internal rotation, a very abbreviated playlist. Their careers, their ailments. There’s a famous story, about the party where James Joyce ran into Marcel Proust. You expected heavyweight-champion banter. Joyce said, “My eyes are terrible.” Proust said, “My poor stomach, what am I going to do? In fact, I must leave at once.” (Joyce topped him: “I’m in the same situation, if I can find someone to take me by the arm.”) David wasn’t like that. For one thing, he never told anyone, beyond the tiniest audience, that he’d been diagnosed as a depressive. For another, he didn’t much look the way you imagine a writer; he looked like a stoner, a burner. (The writer Mark Costello was the best friend of the first part of David’s adult life; the Illinois term David taught him, he said, was “dirt bomb.” “A slightly tough, slightly waste-product-y, tennis-playing persona,” Costello said.) David looked like someone who’d played a little varsity, then proceeded to too-cool his way off the squad. A big guy, with the bandanna and flop of hair, someone who was going to invite you to play Hacky Sack, and if you refused, there was a possibility he was going to beat you up.

Which was on purpose. As a student, David had been put off by the campus-writer look—creamy eyes, sensitive politics. He called
them “the beret guys. Boy, I remember, one reason I
still
don’t like to call myself a writer is that I don’t ever want to be mistaken for that type of person.”

Which didn’t prepare you for the company—which was astonishingly ample, gentle, comic, overflowing. It makes sense. Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you’d like to hang out with. Chapters, pages, novels, articles are the next best thing. Even when it’s just a good factual writer, you want to hang around them to get the facts, the way you’d sit next to a brainy kid at a test to copy off their answer sheet. David’s writing self—it’s most pronounced in his essays—was the best friend you’d ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style.

Mark Costello met David at Amherst. They became friends through the housing lottery. “Dave had figured out all the math for how to get the best room, the best game theory way to do it. Go in with one other person. Ask for a double, because no one else was going to do that. And then we proceeded to draw the worst number in western Massachusetts. We lived in a single that’d been forced into a double, right over the Dumpsters.” The roommates walked the campus; crossing a green, it became the Dave Show. He would grab and imitate how people walked, talked, angled their heads, pictured their lives. “Not to mirror what they did, but to sort of capture them. I can’t think of anybody else I’ve met in my life who could do that,” Costello said. “Incredibly quick, incredibly funny. Dave had this ability to be inside someone else’s skin.”

The writer Mary Karr dated David in the early 1990s, when he was coming back from the worst period in his life. The ground must have still had a postconvalescent wobbliness underfoot—but there was David, big-booted, pocketing everything, happy, a man on an information safari. “Data went into his mind, and it would just shoot off sparks. Wildly funny, unbelievable wattage, such a massive interest in and curiosity about his place in the world. He had more frames per second than the rest of us, he just never stopped. He was just constantly devouring the universe.”

This was the time when David began publishing his stuff in
Harper’s
magazine. When a piece ran, staffers “would be walking in the hallways trading lines,” Charis Conn told me. “Or if people had any conversation with him about any part of it, they would
tell
each other. It was just the thrill of this writer—everything he had to write and everything he had to say.” Conn, a
Harper’s
editor and writer, had pulled David into the magazine; when David visited the city, they’d go on rounds, a full-screen version of Amherst Dave. “Him in New York City—that was a show on its own. Sort of gee-whizzing everything, amazed by everything. He was so much smarter than anyone, including you, and yet his attitude was, he was genuinely pleased to be wherever he was, most of the time. If he was with a congenial companion. Amazed and interested in everything. How could he write what he wrote if he wasn’t looking at everything all the time? And you got to be in his senses, so you got to see more. He’s using all six and a half senses at once, which can drive you crazy. But he shared it with us, which was nice of him to do. Talking to him was (a) a delightful social experience, and also a literary experience.”

Just knowing him could land you in some funny spots, make the world turn Wallace-ish—embarrassing, surprising, alive. When David finished
Infinite Jest
, he enrolled Conn in a tiny band: product testers, the literary focus group he mailed the manuscript to. She read back-and-forthing to work on the subway. The stack of book, the pile of novel, riding next to her in its own seat. Commuters would look at it, at her, laugh. “It was a spectacle, it was ridiculous. People thought it was funny. I was very proud of it, I loved it. Nobody knew what it was. But it was a nice feeling.”

David met Jon Franzen in the most natural way for a writer; as a reader, as a fan. He mailed Franzen a nice letter about his first book, Franzen replied, they arranged a meet. And no David. This was right in the middle of the bleak period, when simple calendar stuff turned challenging. “He just flaked,” Jon recalled. “He didn’t show up. That was a fairly substance-filled period in his life.” By the middle part of the ’90s, Franzen found an easy valuation for David’s company: “I
would always use any opportunity to hang out with Dave.” In 1995, banging together a big piece on the reasons for writing and reading, Franzen boarded a train for Connecticut and David. “We met in a parking lot and we hung out for about three hours, just sitting on the edge of the parking lot. I kept saying, ‘I need quotes for the piece, I need quotes for the piece!’” It’s nice to imagine them there, these two writers who would someday write famous books, talking for hours among the fast-asleep cars and concrete dividers. What they decided—David proposed it—was that the point of books was to combat loneliness.

In New York on publishing trips, David bunked with Franzen. This was the just-before-fame moment, when a writer is still picking up his own expenses. “When he used to come stay with me—this was before he got his diet sorted out—as far as I could tell, he subsisted on those cellophane-wrapped Blondies from delis and chewing tobacco. The first thing he did when he got to the apartment would be to select the biggest tomato can from my recycling bag and appropriate it. You know, he was very good about only spitting
in
the can. And about washing the can out very carefully and putting it back into the recycling. So the apartment would always have this faintly wintergreen smell of the can after he left.”

Franzen tried, a single time, to haul David to a literary party. They trooped through the front door together; by the time Franzen hit the kitchen, David had vanished. “I went back and proceeded to search the whole place. It turned out he had walked into the bathroom to lose me, then turned on his heels and walked right back out the front door. To my apartment, where I returned an hour and a half later, to find him trading stories that embarrassed
me
with my then-girlfriend.”

Meetings and departures were fraught; for one thing, David always had the ability, in conversation, to hear a few extra steps down the hall. David put a great examination of departures—half in text, half marooned on a footnote—in the essay he did about spoken English. Four nights after he died, I pulled out the book and read it over the phone to a friend, to show her how awake and
funny David had been. Halfway through I started remembering how unenthusiastic I’d been about getting out of his hair; it wasn’t about me, but it had the queasy feeling of a photo taken before you could pose, suck in the cheek and chin gut. “Suppose you and I are acquaintances,” he writes, “and we’re in my apartment having a conversation, and that at some point I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore. Very delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to handle it: ‘Wow, look at the time’; ‘Could we finish this up later?’; ‘Could you please leave now?
; ‘Go’; ‘Get out’; ‘Get the hell out of here’; ‘Didn’t you say you had to be someplace?’; ‘Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend’; ‘Off you go then, love’; or that sly old telephone-conversation-ender, ‘Well, I’m going to let you go now’ … in real life, I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed … and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight—‘I want to terminate the conversation and have you not be in my apartment anymore’—which evidentially makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic … I’ve actually lost friends this way.”