A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

But the supper’s tensest development is that Alice’s mother and my own new friend Trudy—whose purslane-and-endive salad, rice pilaf, and Tender Medallions of Braised Veal are simply too perfect tonight to engage any of her critical attention, and who I should mention has, all week, made little secret of the fact that she’s not exactly crazy about Alice’s Serious Boyfriend Patrick, or about his and Alice’s Serious Relationship 133 —that Trudy notices and misconstrues my and Alice’s coded gestures and stifled giggles as signs of some kind of burgeoning romantic connection between us, and Trudy begins yet once again extracting and spreading out her purse’s 4×5s of Alice, and relating little tales of Alice’s childhood designed to make Alice appear adorable, and talking Patrick down, and in general I have to say acting like a procuress… and this would be bad enough, tension-wise (especially when Esther gets into the act), but now poor Alice—who, even though deeply preoccupied with birthday-deprivation and Mona-hatred, is by no means dim or unperceptive—quickly sees what Trudy’s doing, and, apparently terrified that I might possibly share her mother’s misperception of my connection with her as anything more than an anti-Mona alliance, begins directing my way a kind of Ophelia-type mad monologue of unconnected Patrick-references and Patrick-anecdotes, all of which causes Trudy to start making her weird dentally asymmetric grimace at the same time she begins cutting at her Tender ...