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

remembers the roving subjects as “Wittgenstein, the New Deal, Cantor, current politics, mathematical logic, Descartes, hot girls, Kant, etc.” They’d talk about classes, imaginary or hoped-for girlfriends, and weekend parties at the University of Massachusetts or Mount Holyoke College, where Amy Wallace now went.
    Costello and Wallace were the twin centers of the group. Costello had authority, gravitas, and a boundless interest in the New Deal. Wallace was intense, with a brain that seemed to whirr faster than he could speak, and he was funny, shooting off clever comments and entertaining with his impressions. He had been in an economics course that semester. Did anyone want to see Friedrich Hayek hit on by a girl from Wilton, Connecticut? He could do his grandparents, his neighbors in Urbana, or Costello (when he wasn’t at the table). But his affection for his roommate was evident to all. Many people never saw the one without the other. To young Washington, their relationship was “like a marriage.”
    His new popularity didn’t prevent Wallace from bearing down evenharder in his studies. John Drew, another member of the circle, remembers an undercurrent of competitiveness in the group, of “a whole lot of score keeping and who’s the smartest.” That spring Wallace took the next installment of Kennick’s class, on early modern philosophy. This second unit began with Hobbes, continued through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and finished with Kant. Wallace thrilled to (and had fun imitating) the announcement Kennick made when he got to the German idealist: “Fasten your seat belts. We’re going up!” He also took French again, metaphysics, and economics. In economics, Wallace had to try. He was good at theory, not calculation. But with his grade point average at risk, he worked ceaselessly at the subject and even won a prize for best undergraduate work in the discipline. Costello, also in the class, now had
his
moment of realization about the gifts of his roommate. Wallace got straight A-pluses that semester, spring 1983, his grades perfect. The depression of early 1982 was in the past, forgotten almost, even perhaps by him. When people would ask about why he had left school, he would not answer, or say vaguely that a friend had died and he had needed time away to get over it.
    In May, Wallace returned home. He signed up for a summer logic class and another in calculus at the University of Illinois. He would study right through the summer break. But soon he was sorry. He wrote Washington that he just couldn’t focus while “the smell of flowers is in the air and the birds are singing and the pop of frosty Old Mil cans can be heard from the classroom window. I rose one day and said ‘No.’ That’s what I said.” In fact the reason may have been Susie Perkins—Wallace told friends the two were growing more deeply involved. He dropped calculus and contented himself with more logic classes, which he preferred to math anyway—in math he didn’t hear the “click.”
    Home was not the place it had been. His father had spent the year alone, keeping a radio on for company. But nothing could tarnish Wallace’s exuberance. He was on a high and cocky, the smartest kid at Amherst. He felt raised up and vindicated. Early in the summer, he warned Washington, who was going to work at the particle accelerator at Stanford University, that he needed to get used to “dealing with, yes, living with, dull, unappealing people.” This brotherly advice was a sign of how far Wallace’s confidence had come back since his breakdown.
    Though they lived apart, Wallace’s parents had not given up on theirmarriage and continued going to therapy. They now wanted the family to attend as a group. Wallace and Amy reluctantly agreed. Seeking to get to the root of the Wallace family’s dynamic, the therapist asked Amy to position the different members of the family in the room as she perceived them. She refused, drawing instead a schema of