Infinite Jest (133 page)

‘Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,’ deLint said into Steeply’s
ear.

And irritating throughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at
the very end of the top bleacher, speaking into his fist, coming at the fist from
first one angle and then another, pretending to be two people:

‘Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician.

‘Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he’s just finally
started establishing control from the baseline.

‘Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing
with his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The
regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The
chilly blue eyes.

‘The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim.

‘The Halster’s been having some trouble controlling his volleys.

‘Personally, Jim, I think he’d be better off with his old midsized graphite stick
than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to.

‘Stice being the younger player out there, he’s grown up with the extra-large head.
A large head is all The Darkness knows.

‘You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza’s a man who’s
adapted his game to a large head.

‘Hal’s career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole power-matrix
of the junior game, too, Jim.

‘And what a day for tennis.

‘What a day for family fun of all kinds.

‘This Bud’s for the Whole Family. It’s the Bud Match of the Week. Brought to you.

‘Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large
head.

‘And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray.

‘Jim, Ortho Stice—impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head.

‘It’s all they know, these kids.’

DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate
the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch suffer.

Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and absolutely
crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance,
lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and shallow. Hal moved
in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking
somehow insectile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was
helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle cross-court, barely
clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair
space the acuteness of the angle allowed.

‘Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,’ Poutrincourt said in English.

Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2–1 or 3–2 in the third.

‘The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he’s got a complete game,’ deLint
said as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him
on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom
tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition
with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.

‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on
an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s
cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at,
and you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths
and the number of individual strengths.’

‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s
do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those
kids at lunch you got to meet.’

‘But not speak to.’

‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural
at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East
Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re
looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s
strengths don’t give him a complete game. Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a
baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher. You can’t lob from the net or volley from the
baseline.’

‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’
²⁷⁵
Poutrincourt said in the other ear.

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other
out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the
soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d
take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior
player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’

‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply
at deLint.

‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost,
and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and
draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’

‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong
and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply
wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect.
‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use
here for a complete game is either
gestalt
or
complete game
.’

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial
diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both
hands to force the thing out.

‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother—Hal can’t
lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s
pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started
to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great
groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin;
and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control,
and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’

Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair,
and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds
as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised
than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad
corner, adjusting something on his strings.

‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have
given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here
and Schtitt—I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so
you may see I have prejudice—is that you must have also—so, leave to one side for
a moment the talent and work to become best—that you are doomed
²⁷⁶
if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend
the success of the best, if you get to there.’

Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian
cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and
dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the
parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves
and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court.

‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the
étoiles,
the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion
make it,
they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend
it, or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive
goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the
Japonois,
the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate
still, with the
étoiles
. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience
of having that goal be your entire existence, your
raison de faire,
²⁷⁷
so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’

Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed.

‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining
the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “
OK
” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then
you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have
the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history
by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga
of Eric Clipperton.’

‘With two
p
’s?’

‘Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the
étoiles
who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating
their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here
the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and
substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they
are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the
make-it,
the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play
is always suffering, just so.’

‘Our best boy is better than Hal, you’ll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne.
No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.’ Aubrey deLint
was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush,
two feverish harlequin ovals. ‘John Wayne’s got a gestalt because Wayne’s simply got
everything, and everything with him’s got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and
thinker like Hal just can’t handle.’

‘This was the Founder’s philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incandenza’s father,
who also I am being told dabbled in filming?’ Steeply asked the Canadian.

Poutrincourt’s shrug could have meant too many things to note. ‘I came after. M. Schtitt,
his different goal for the
étoiles
is to walk between these.’ Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman’s shifts between
dialects. ‘To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of
the success.’

DeLint leaned in. ‘Wayne’s got everything. Hal’s strength has become knowing he doesn’t
have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what’s missing as what’s there.’

Steeply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. ‘It all sounds
awfully abstract for something so physical.’

Poutrincourt’s shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. ‘It is contradictory. Two selves,
one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died…’

‘The punter’s father, who dabbled in films.’ Steeply’s raglan sweater had been his
wife’s.

Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: ‘This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that
this Founder was a student of types of sight.’

DeLint said ‘Wayne’s only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel
will and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally
unwilling to change the pace of his game if he’s not doing good. Wayne’s got the touch
and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won’t—if he’s down or things aren’t
going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with
being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show,
which Wayne’ll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more
important, he’ll find. What do you call, a humility.’

Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. ‘The
studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and
what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’

‘The son described his father as quote “genre-dysphoric.” ’

Poutrincourt cocked her head. ‘This does not sound like Hal Incandenza.’

DeLint sniffed meatily. ‘But Wayne’s gestalt’s chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne
is pure force. He doesn’t feel fear, pity, remorse—when a point’s over, it might as
well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne,
and he could have Wayne’s pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally
and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more
vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in
a match. Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long
lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of
a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.’

The Troeltsch person said ‘Holy
crow
.’

‘So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,’ Thierry Poutrincourt
said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself.

‘This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female
thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to
the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin.
We don’t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if
you want.’