Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max

Ashby’s childhood. 6 The same night, as the three were watching Kansas City and St. Louis clinch spots in the World Series, Wallace quietly stiffened their gin and tonics. How had they lost their virginity? heasked them. He claimed to have excellent “gaydar”; then was astonished to learn Ashby was gay.
    Wallace had by now realized that the “perfectly symmetrical” undergraduate beauties at Arizona were not going to be interested in him. In his grandfather’s old long-sleeved T-shirts, lace-up Timberland boots, and McLagan’s beloved leather jacket, he hardly fit the relaxed and sunny Arizona mold. So he turned his attention to the women in the MFA program. “The girls in the writing program are erotic in a different way,” he reported to his Amherst friends. “There’s a propensity towards sandals. Long hair. Armpits make the acquaintance of shavers not quite as often as I’d prefer.” He allowed, though, that “there’s a kind of mystical, dreamy, spacey eroticism about them.”
    At a “Fuck Art. Let’s Dance” party that fall, Wallace met Gale Walden, a young poet. She came from the Chicago area and embodied everything his parents in their house of reason were skeptical of. Her thinking was elliptical and imaginative and seemed to hold the promise of a less anxious relationship to reality. She consulted the horoscope, drew tarot cards, and wore vintage beaded sweaters in the Arizona heat.
    Walden’s independence and disheveled appeal attracted Wallace. (“Sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window,” Wallace writes of one of his characters in
Infinite Jest
.) Walden also knew a great deal of poetry of the sort he had never considered, not Eliot’s poetry of ideas, but of sensibility. She called him “David” instead of “Dave.” He helped with her grammar and taught her history.
    Walden wasn’t sure about getting involved with Wallace. Four years older, she found him immature, “almost as if he chirped rather than talked,” she remembered. She would go around asking her friends, “Shall I date this boy?” Wallace tried to help her make up her mind. He peppered her with letters, popped out of bushes to surprise her, and wrote her a condolence note when her dog died. The note persuaded her to go to a movie with him, and when that turned out to be sold out, they went to a coffee shop, where Wallace was able to persuade her with his brilliant mind.
    Soon they were a couple, well known in the program—he the left-brained genius, she the right-brained beauty. They agreed she wouldn’t have to play tennis and he wouldn’t have to dance. They split their age difference: he would say he was two years older; she would be two yearsyounger. That way when they talked of the future, Walden remembers, they could say, “When we are thirty…” He went along to her poetry classes. One evening Wallace dropped by his old friend Andrea Justus’s house to borrow her car and wound up taking her to a favorite spot in the mountains, where, as they sat on the hood looking at the twinkling city below, he put her levelheadedness to the test by telling her about the remarkable, beautiful, and talented woman he was now dating. (Justus was annoyed.) For Wallace, Walden was a new kind of girlfriend: he had until now gravitated toward women who could ground him, save him, if necessary. Now he had found a muse, a spur to his creativity. He let Costello know he had met an epochal beauty.
    Wallace had been able to be himself with Susie Perkins, a hometown girl, but with Walden he felt the need to pretend, not hard given his natural bent for mystery and secrecy. She liked musicians, so he played her an album by the esteemed Amherst a cappella group the Zumbyes, and claimed he was one of the voices on the recording. Then he had to get his Amherst friends to cover for him. 7 There was a mythopoeic, volatile quality to their relationship. One time Walden demanded he find her a bun with no