Infinite Jest (176 page)

The tall thin quiet man, Himself, with his razor-burn and bent glasses and chinos too short, whose neck was slender and shoulders sloped, who slumped in candied east-window sunlight with his tailbone supported by windowsills, meekly stirring a glass of something with his finger while the Moms stood there telling him she'd long-since abandoned any reasonable hope that he could hear what she was telling him — this silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with Accomplice! The memory hung somewhere just out of conscious reach, and its tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: I could not remember.

Off down the Weston street a church with an announcement-board in the grass out front — white plastic letters on a slotted black surface — and at least once Mario and I stood watching a goatish man change the letters and thus the announcement. One of the first occasions where I remember reading something involved the announcement-board announcing:

LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN

with the letters all spaced far out like that. A big fresh-cement-colored church, liberal with glass, denomination not recalled, but built in what was, in the B.S. 8O's probably, modern — a parabolic poured-concrete shape billowed and peaked like a cresting wave. A suggestion in it of some paranormal wind somewhere that could make concrete billow and pop like a tucking sail.

Our own subdorm room now has three of those old Weston captain's chairs whose backs dent your spine if you don't fit it carefully between two spindles. We have an unused wicker basket for laundry on which are stacked some corduroy spectation-pillows. Floor plans for Hagia Sophia and S. Simeon at Qal'at Si'man on the wall over my bed, the really prurient part of Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, also from the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of maniera greca porn: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of Mario's bed a surplus-store trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director's chair where he's always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and vest for the night. A fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer's chair for using the TP to type. Five total chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen I'd had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a hyperemic organ and an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche's lower border. Now I couldn't for the life of me recall what I'd done with the frieze, or which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.

The Weston living room had had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum cove lighting and at one end an elevated fieldstone fireplace with a big copper hood that made a wonderful ear-splitting drum-head for wooden spoons, with memories of some foreign adult I didn't recognize grinding at her temples and pleading Do Stop. The Moms's jungle of Green Babies had spread out into the room from another corner, the plants' pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended from clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the otherworldly glow of a white-hooded tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of rubber-tree leaves.

And a coffee table of green-shot black marble, too heavy to move, on whose corner Mario knocked out a tooth after what Orin swore up and down was an accidental shove.

Mrs. Clarke's varicotic calves at the stove. The way her mouth overhead would disappear when the Moms reorganized something in the kitchen. My eating mold and the Moms's being very upset that I'd eaten it — this memory was of Orin's telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.

My trusty NASA glass still rested on my chest, rising when my rib cage rose. When I looked down my own length, the glass's round mouth was a narrow slot. This was because of my optical perspective. There was a concise term for optical perspective that I again could not quite make resolve.

What made it hard really to recall our old house's living room was that so many of its appointments were now in the living room of the Headmaster's House, the same and yet altered, and by more than rearrangement. The onyx coffee table Mario had fallen against (specular is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped trying to recall it) now supported compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello-shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree, when in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself's mother, who died of emphysema shortly before Mario's surprise birth. Orin reports she'd looked like an embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all pupil. The Moms's birth-mother had died in Quebec of an infarction when she — the Moms — was eight, her father during her sophomore year at McGill under circumstances none of us knew. The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in Alberta, the original L'Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost.

Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year's blizzard, Orin imitating the Moms's high breathy 'My son ate this! God, please!,' never tiring of it.

Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself's mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she'd been speared there. An air of deep dehydration had hung about her, he said, as if she osmosized moisture from whoever came near. She spent her last few years living in the Marlboro St. brownstone they'd had before Mario and I were born, tended by a gerontologic nurse Orin said always wore the expression of every post-office mug shot you've ever seen. When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady's wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs. Mrs. Clarke would still pale whenever Mario asked about her.

It's become easier to see the climacteric changes in the Moms's own body since she began confining herself more and more to the Headmaster's House. This occurred after Himself's funeral, but in stages — the gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the grounds, and the signs of aging. It is hard to notice what you see every day. None of the physical changes has been dramatic — her nerved-up dancer's legs becoming hard, stringy, a shrinking of the hips and a girdly thickening at the waist. Her face settles a little lower on her skull than it did four years ago, with a slight bunching under the chin and an emerging potential for something pruny happening around her mouth, in time, I thought I could see.

The word that best connoted why the glass's mouth looked slotty was probably foreshortened.

The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one's Moms begin to age makes you feel inside. Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.

Either our old kitchen or a neighbor's kitchen panelled with walnut and hung with copper pâté-molds and herbal sprigs. An unidentified woman — not Avril or Mrs. Clarke — standing in that kitchen in snug cherry slacks, loafers over bare feet, waggling a mixing spoon, laughing at something, a long-tailed comet of flour on her cheek.

It occurred to me then with some force that I didn't want to play this afternoon, even if some sort of indoor exhibition-meet came off. Not even neutral, I realized. I would on the whole have preferred not to play. What Schtitt might have to say to that, v. what Lyle would say. I was unable to stay with the thought long enough to imagine Himself's response to my refusal to play, if any.

But this was the man who made Accomplice!, whose sensibility informed the hetero-hardcore Möbius Strips and the sado-periodontal Fun with Teeth and several other projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick.

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase of HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I'd not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts' observation transom or the spectators' gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I'd take out all the ankle's ligaments and never play again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.

I couldn't stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. This was concerning 'adult' films, which from what I've seen are too downright sad to be truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult is kind of a misnomer.

Orin had told me that once he and Smothergill, Flechette, and I think Penn's older brother had gotten hold of a magnetic video of some old hardcore X-film — The Green Door or Deep Throat, one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and jism. There were excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, instructional mag-vids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands — they were pop-eyed at the prospect of genuine porn. There were rules about videos' suitability for viewing in the Honor Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Schtitt didn't yet have deLint — the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they were discreet.

Nevertheless, word about this 'adult' film got around, and somebody — probably Mary Esther Thode's sister Ruth, then a senior and insufferable — ratted the boys' viewing-plans out to Schtitt, who took the matter to Himself. Orin said he was the only one Himself called into the Headmaster's office, which in that era had only one door, which Himself asked Orin to close. Orin recalled seeing none of the unease that always accompanied Himself's attempts at stern discipline. Instead Himself invited Orin to sit and gave him a lemon soda and stood facing him, leaning back slightly so that the front edge of his desk supported him at the tailbone. Himself took his glasses off and massaged his closed eyes delicately — almost trea-suringly, his old eyeballs — in the way Orin knew signified that Himself was ruminative and sad. One or two soft interrogatives brought the whole affair out in the open. You could never lie to Himself; somehow you just never had the heart. Whereas Orin made almost an Olympic sport of lying to the Moms. Anyway, Orin quickly confessed to everything.

What Himself said then moved him, Orin told me. Himself told Orin he wasn't going to forbid them to watch the thing if they really wanted to. But just please to keep it discreet, just Bain and Smothergill and Orin's immediate circle, nobody younger, and nobody whose parents might hear about it, and for God's sake don't let your mother get wind. But that Orin was old enough to make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he decided he wanted to watch the thing.. . . And so on.

But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin's father — though he wouldn't forbid it — would rather Orin didn't watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn't ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he'd personally prefer that Orin wait until he'd found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he'd wait until he'd experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.

What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself's assumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin. I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt's pipe.

I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Our room's door remained ajar from Mario's exit with Coyle to find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht's heads popped in briefly and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness's ruined map and withdrew when they got no response. The second floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Québecois squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a kind of whistle out of one corner of the subdorm building, and the whistling came and went.