David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

Also because D.L. was also weird, and conspicuously so, even in an environment — a graduate writing program — where neurosis was oxygen, colorful tics arranged and worn like jewelry. D.L. carried Tarot cards, and threw them (in class), would leave her loft only on her psychic's endorsement, wore daily the prenominate lime synthetics — a lonely onion in a petunia-patch of carefully casual cotton skirts, tie-dyes, those baggy pastel post-Bermudas, clogs, sandals, sneakers, surgeons' clothes.

Also because she also seemed greedy and self-serving, and not near naïve enough to get away with the way she seemed. She idolized Professor Ambrose with a passion, but in a greedy and self-serving way that probably turned Ambrose himself off right from the very first workshop, when she brought a conspicuously battered copy of Lost in the Funhouse for him to autograph — at East Chesapeake Trade something One Did Not Do. Was thus, for our interpretive purposes, right from day one, a sycophant, an ass-kisser.

Also because she actually went around calling herself a postmodernist. No matter where you are, you Don't Do This. By convention it's seen as pompous and dumb. She made a big deal of flouting convention, but there was little to love about her convention-flouting; she honestly, it seemed to us, couldn't see far enough past her infatuation with her own crafted cleverness to separate posture from pose, desire from supplication. She wasn't the sort of free spirit you could love: she did what she wanted, but it was neither valuable nor free.

We could all remember the opening line of the first story she turned in for the very first workshop: "Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival." Nuff said? Professor Ambrose summed it up well— though not without tact — when he told the workshop that Ms. Eberhardt's stories tended "not to work for him" because of what he called a certain "Look-Mom-no-hands quality" that ran through her work. You don't want her facial reaction described.

At least she produced, though. She was fiendishly, coldly fertile. True, certain catty coffeehouse arguments were advanced concerning the preferability of constipation to diarrhea, but Mark Nechtr never joined in. He spoke rarely, and certainly never about the kids he studied under Ambrose with, or the overall promise of their work, or their neuroses and tics, or their exchanges of bodily fluids. He kept his oar out of other people's fluids and minded his own healthy business. This was interpreted by the community as the sort of dignified reticence only the valued can afford, and so he was even more loved. It was actually kind of sickening — D.L.'s fellow McDonald's alumnus Tom Sternberg, the diplopic ad actor, had Mark pegged as one of those painfully radiant types whose apparent blindness to their own radiance only makes the sting of the light meaner. Sternberg had Mark so pegged by the time they'd all met as arranged at Maryland International Airport and departed via red-eye for Chicago's O'Hare, thence by complimentary LordAloft copter to Collision, Illinois, and the scheduled Reunion of everyone who has ever been in a McDonald's commercial, arranged by J.D. Steelritter Advertising and featuring a party to end all parties, a spectacular collective Reunion commercial, the ribbon-cutting revelation of the new Funhouse franchise's flagship discotheque, and the promised appearance of Jack Lord, dramatic Hawaiian policeman, sculptor, pilot, and — again under the aegis of the same J.D. Steelritter who'd put Sternberg and D.L. together as commercial children thirteen years ago to the day whose start I've interrupted — director of a new and deregulated helicopter-shuttle franchise, LordAloft, that was going national as of today, Reunion day.

All that may have seemed like a digression from this background, and as of now a prolix and confusing one, and I'll say that I'm sorry, and that I am acutely aware of the fact that our time together is valuable. Honest. So, conscious of the need to get economically to business, here are some plain, true, unengaging propositions I'll ask you just to acknowledge. Mark Nechtr is a suburban Baltimore native, young, and (another thing he didn't ever talk about) a trust-fund baby, heir to a detergent fortune. He is enrolled in a graduate writing program at the East Chesapeake Tradeschool, where he turned down the offer of financial aid, for obvious reasons, but pretty gracious ones. He is a fair competitive target archer, has been shooting competitively ever since he lost his technical virginity to a squat sweatshirted Trinitarian YWCA instructor who proselytized him on the virtues of 12-strand strings, fingerless leather gloves, blankly total concentration, dead release, and the advantages of arrows fletched by hand. Mark tends to walk almost tiptoed— something about exaggerated arches — has vaguely oriental eyes, radiates the aforementioned radiance, though he has glove-paled hands and a proclivity for neckless, rather effeminate surgeon shirts— slight imperfections that enhanced the overall perfection of the etc. etc.

How he was civilly married to Drew-Lynn Eberhardt was, quickly: one fine day he witnessed the lime-clad postmodernist write something really petty and vicious on the seminar room's green blackboard, right before the first bell rang for Dr. Ambrose's workshop; she saw him see her — shit, he was sitting right there, the only one of the eleven other students in the room that early; but D.L, seeing him see, still didn't erase the thing, wouldn't; she was on her way out of the whole Program by then; tactfully cool receptions from Ambrose always broke the hottest bulbs' thin skins first; she didn't care what the unproductive big-necked object of the seminar's love saw; he could go on ahead and rat on her, tell Ambrose what he'd seen her write, or erase it, since you two are on such great good pedagogical terms. Well and she fled, in her pelvis-led way, in tears, as the bell rang, clutching her own polyester chest with a pathetic vulnerability that stirred something in this boy who, underneath a sunny hide-brown healthy surface, saw himself as pretty vulnerable and fucked up in his own right. But so he didn't move to erase the petty critical limerick, and didn't rat to Ambrose, to any of us, about who'd written it. He was unworried about us thinking he'd written it, so we didn't, and anyway authorial identity was obvious— D.L. was the only student AWOL that day, and the thing had her dry, sour spite all over it (besides being self-conscious and bad). Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. And Professor Ambrose, though he said nothing, didn't even use the eraser at first, was nevertheless visibly hurt: he had the reputation of being a pretty sensitive guy, off the page. Actually he was devastated, was what he wrote J.D. Steelritter, but he never told Mark Nechtr that.

By now Mark and D.L. were being seen together. Why? You can bet that question got asked, the subject of their fluids receiving the attention of many oars.

She because Mark was healthy and loved, and hadn't ratted, had minded his own business, even in the face of what he'd seen and what we all wanted from Ambrose. He hadn't ratted, which D.L. couldn't understand and so genuflected to as mystery, as something deserving of respect, as virtue (she loves the word virtue, and even manages, as the coptering three of them sneeze in a harmony with the abrupt Midwest dawn, to pronounce the word vaguely as she sneezes: vuh, vuh, vuhr shoo —the habit drives Mark quietly up the wall).

Yes and but he, Mark: why? Well, first because, that fine sea-breezy day, Mark had thought he'd maybe seen a little true thing, a tiny central kernel of illumination in that failed limerick D.L. had composed and graphed critically over Professor Ambrose's — and American metafiction's — most famous story, an accidentally-acute splinter that got under Mark's skin and split wider the shivers and cracks inside him, as somebody being taught how but not why to write fiction. He had, quietly, stopped totally trusting his teacher, inside, by then. Mark was down, blocked, confused then about what he was even doing at E.C.T., not producing what he was supposed to be producing. This condition was not helped by the respect — love, really — that came at him from everywhere in the Program, except from D.L.