David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"You're unable to fix an electric stove?"

'My aunt asks again if I'm sure it's no problem and I don't answer because I'm afraid of how my voice will sound. I carefully disconnect the other end of each bundle from each burner's transformer and loop all the wire very neatly and lay it at the bottom of the stove. I tidy things up. Suddenly the inside of this stove is the very last place on earth I want to be. I begin to be frightened of the stove. Around its side I can see my aunt's feet as she stands. I hear the refrigerator door open. A dish is set on the counter above me and something crinkly removed; through the odors of stove-slime and ancient connections I can smell a delicate waft of chili. I rattle a screwdriver against the inside of the stove so my aunt thinks I'm doing something. I get more and more frightened.'

'He told me he loved me lots of times.'

"Frightened of what?"

'I've broken their stove. I need a binding tool. But I've never bound a wire.'

'And when he said it he believed it. And I know he still does.'

"What does this have to do with anything?"

'It feels like it has everything to do with it. I'm so scared behind this dirty old stove I can't breathe. I rattle tools.'

"Is it that you love this pretty old woman and fear you've harmed a stove she's had since before Kennedy?"

'But I think feeling like he loved somebody scared him.'

'This is a crude piece of equipment.'

"Whom else have you harmed."

'My aunt comes back behind the stove and stands behind me and peers into the tidied black hollow of the stove and says it looks like I've done quite a bit of work! I point at the filthy distributor circuit with my screwdriver and do not say anything. I prod it with the tool.'

"What are you afraid of."

'But I don't think he needs to get hurt like this. No matter what.'

'I believe, behind the stove, with my aunt kneeling down to lay her hand on my shoulder, that I'm afraid of absolutely everything there is.'

"Then welcome."

I AM a woman who appeared in public on "Late Night with David Letterman" on March 22, 1989.

In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart's heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.

The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman's variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me he felt he and Ron and Ron's wife Charmian ought to prepare me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday.

On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC's News Divison. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands.

"He's waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel," Rudy grimaced, smoking.

On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC's chief of Creative Development's huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said:

"Is this entertainment ladies and gentlemen? Or what?"

I had the bitterness of a Xanax on my tongue.

We had Ramon haul out some videotapes of old "Late Night" editions, and watched them.

"How do you feel?" my husband asked me.

In slow motion, Letterman let drop from a rooftop twenty floors above a cement lot several bottles of champagne, some plump fruit, a plate-glass window, and what looked, for only a moment, like a live piglet.

"The hokeyness of the whole thing is vital," Rudy said as Letterman dropped a squealing piglet off what was obviously only a pretend rooftop in the studio; we saw something fall a long way from the original roof to hit cement and reveal itself to be a stuffed piglet. "But that doesn't make him benign." My husband got a glimpse of his image in our screening room's black window and rearranged himself. "I don't want you to think the hokeyness is real."

"I thought hokeyness was pretty much understood not to be real," I said.

He directed me to the screen, where Paul Shaffer, David Let-terman's musical sidekick and friend, was doing a go-figure with his shoulders and his hands.

We had both taken Xanaxes before having Ramon set up the videotapes. I also had a glass of chablis. I was very tired by the time the refrigerator magnets were perused and discussed. My husband was also tired, but he was becoming increasingly concerned that this particular appearance could present problems. That it could be serious.

The call had come from New York the Friday before. The caller had congratulated me on my police drama being picked up for its fifth season, and asked whether I'd like to be a guest on the next week's "Late Night with David Letterman," saying Mr. Letterman would be terribly pleased to have me on. I tentatively agreed. I have few illusions left, but I'm darn proud of our show's success. I have a good character, work hard, play her well, and practically adore the other actors and people associated with the series. I called my agent, my unit director, and my husband. I agreed to accept an appearance on Wednesday, March 22. That was the only interval Rudy and I had free in a weekly schedule that denied me even two days to rub together: my own series tapes Fridays, with required read-throughs and a Full Dress the day before. Even the 22nd, my husband pointed out over drinks, would mean leaving L.A.X. very early Wednesday morning, since I was contracted to appear in a wiener commercial through Tuesday. My agent had thought he could reschedule the wiener shoot — the people at Oscar Mayer had been very accommodating throughout the whole campaign — but my husband had a rule for himself about honoring contracted obligations, and as his partner I chose also to try to live according to this rule. It meant staying up terribly late Tuesday to watch David Letterman and the piglet and refrigerator magnets and an unending succession of eccentrically talented pets, then catching a predawn flight the next morning: though "Late Night'"s taping didn't begin until 5:30 E.S.T., Rudy had gone to great trouble to arrange a lengthy strategy session with Ron beforehand.

Before I fell asleep Tuesday night, David Letterman had Teri Garr put on a Velcro suit and fling herself at a Velcro wall. That night his NBC Bookmobile featured a 1989 Buyer's Guide to New York City Officials; Letterman held the book up to view while Teri hung behind him, stuck to the wall several feet off the ground.

"That could be you," my husband said, ringing the kitchen for a glass of milk.

The show seemed to have a fetish about arranging things in lists of ten. We saw what the "Late Night" research staff considered the ten worst television commercials ever. I can remember number five or four: a German automobile manufacturer tried to link purchase of its box-shaped car to sexual satisfaction by showing, against a background of woodwinds and pines, a languid Nordic woman succumbing to the charms of the car's stickshift.

"Well I'm certainly swayed," Letterman said when the clip had ended. "Aren't you, ladies and gentlemen?"

He offered up a false promo for a cultural program PBS had supposedly decided against inserting into next fall's lineup. The promo was an understated clip of four turbaned Kurdistani rebels, draped in small-arms gear, taking time out from revolution to perform a Handel quartet in a meadow full of purple flowers. The bud of culture flourishing even in the craggiest soil, was the come-on. Letterman cleared his throat and claimed that PBS had finally submitted to conservative PTA pressure against the promo. Paul Shaffer, to a drum roll, asked why this was so. Letterman grinned with an embarrassment Rudy and I both found attractive. There were, again, ten answers. Two I remember were Gratuitous Sikhs and Violets, and Gratuitous Sects and Violins. Everyone hissed with joy. Even Rudy laughed, though he knew no such program had ever been commissioned by PBS. I laughed sleepily and shifted against his arm, which was out along the back of the couch.