Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace Read Online Free PDF Page A

“pretty” but the terrain wasn’t beautiful “the way Illinois is.”
    Over time, Desai and Javit, with their shared pre-med ambitions, separated from Wallace—he was the friendly but forlorn third roommate. They could not figure out what was going on in his head, though they suspected it was not what was going on in theirs. In fact, Wallace was probably not so sure what was going on either. No one had found out the things about himself he wished to keep private, but only because no one seemed to care enough to do so. He knew what he needed, what would make him feel better:great grades. It would be satisfying to show everyone what he could do; his shyness did not preclude competitiveness. Getting straight As, as he would later tell
Amherst
magazine, was “a way to hide from people, to try to earn—through ‘achievement’ or whatever—permission to be at Amherst that I was too self-centered to realize I’d already received when they accepted me.”
    Wallace had liked to study high when he was in high school. He reestablished the routine at Amherst, with two young men who lived down the hall from him. They would get together in their room most days in the late afternoon, do bong hits for forty-five minutes while listening to music, and then go to the dining hall as soon as it opened (they called themselves “the 5:01 brigade”). Wallace would eat his food quickly, with a tea bag dunked into a cup of coffee. At 5:45 he’d head for Frost Library, where he’d study for the next six hours until it closed. Over time he found study spaces on campus that stayed open all night—the Merrill Science Center, for instance, or Webster Library with its stuffed polar bears and botany books.
    That first semester Wallace dug into introductory courses in English, history, and political science and one elective, Evolution and Revolution. Late at night he’d come back to Stearns with his books. Often he would then head off again to the room where the pot was. The discussion was light. Wallace was happy high, more like the Wallace of high school no one at Amherst had met. One member of the group remembers that the three friends would test each other’s knowledge of TV jingles. “
Hazel
?” he remembers the discussion. “Now how did that one go?” Munchies were satisfied by the boxes of Freihofer’s cookies in Sally Wallace’s care packages. Afterward, Wallace would clamber back to his room, take his bathrobe, and march off to brush his teeth or have another shower before retiring to “the vag” for the night.
    There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.” In epistemology, he was dominant, peppering the professor with so many advanced questions he had to askWallace to keep them for his office hours. “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had,” remembers Willem DeVries. 2 For his freshman roommate Desai, the moment of awareness came one morning second semester around one a.m. when Wallace returned to their suite, likely stoned, and asked to borrow his paper on
Henry V
. Wallace, Desai remembers, had earlier glanced at the play for the freshman Shakespeare seminar they both were taking. Now he quickly scanned his roommate’s paper, put it down, went away, and worked for several hours, producing an essay that would earn him an A in the class. “I thought I was smarter,” Desai remembers thinking. “Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish.” So were others at Amherst. The first semester Wallace got two other As and an A-minus. Second semester he won the prize for the freshman with the best