Sorry, David

I’m convinced that in every group of girlfriends there’s at least one chick who makes herself known for her general disdain toward men. She’s hulking, vaguely bestial, and is always the one left at the corner of the bar, scaring people away with her perma-scowl. In my group of friends, this girl is me – except I don’t hulk, I just kind of cross my arms over my chest James Dean style and lean against things. I’m the girl who says things like, “What do you mean, ‘Is he an idiot?’ Scoff. Is he a man?” and, “I think a healthy relationship is one in which the man never feels safe.” I swear, it isn’t that I hate them. It’s just that men, like rats, cockroaches, and beady-eyed cats, are just one of those creatures that inexplicably scare me. They’re just so unreadable, so capable of lying so well that even they believe themselves.

Recently, I sat down on the bus one morning, prepared to off-set my boring work commute with David Foster Wallace’s short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, when some guy wearing too much cologne sat down next to me and attempted to make small talk.

“David Foster Wallace has a new book out?” he asked, his cologne somehow managing to emanate from his mouth.

“No, he died two years ago,” I responded, annoyed and resisting the urge to add, you maladroit. But then I made the mistake of looking up, and looking up only made me painfully aware of the fact that this guy – this poor, misguided yuppie of a guy with his well-tailored pin-stripe suit and eager, earnest face, the face of a truly clean slate – was actually all kinds of attractive, barring his cologne overdose. And if there’s a type of guy that scares me more than others, it’s guys I find attractive. I just find it so much harder to function like a smart, normal human being when someone who’s fun to look at is looking at me.

He laughed good-naturedly, mumbled something about being out of the loop on literature news, and asked, “So, what’s it about?”

I could’ve said that it’s quite possibly the best short story collection I’ve read from Foster Wallace, that his prose style is meticulous and appropriate to each story he tells. I could’ve said that it’s the kind of short story collection that engages from the very first line, that it fascinates you with the mundane, familiarizes you with what’s foreign, and demands to be read out loud so that the sound of every word gets the appreciation it deserves. I wanted to say that Foster Wallace is one of the few writers I’ve read who writes with such immaculate, natural, and genuine empathy – there are no characters left unaccounted for in his stories, no vulnerable moment held back. I wanted to say that it was the first story in the collection that convinced me to buy it, that Foster Wallace articulated with admirably ease what I’ve always wanted to say about why I am the way I am with men when he wrote:

Tell them to stand perfectly still, for time, and to look into the face of a man A man’s face has nothing on it. Look closely. Tell them to look. And not at what the faces do – men’s faces never stop moving – they’re like antennae. But all the faces do is move through different configurations of blankness … Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.[1]

And then I wanted to ask, “How can you possibly put down a book that, time and time again, shows you yourself?”

But because I’m socially inept, the only thing that maneuvered out of my mouth was, “Oh. Well. It’s a short story collection. So. It’s about a number of things.”

Somewhere in literary heaven, David Foster Wallace is shaking his fist at me with justifiable contempt. Scoff. Men.

Jayne Wilson wrote her first short story when she was six-years-old – it was god-awful, but she’s never looked back. She graduated from the University of California, Davis where she studied English with a Creative Writing emphasis. She shall kill no albatross.

[1] Wallace, David Foster. “Little Expressionless Animals.” Girl With Curious Hair. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.