Infinite Jest (146 page)

Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged
sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut
up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating.
Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy
had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both
he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence, though Mario
did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with fathers or needs
to please, so that the interest was something truly to share, the two of them; and
even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim’s later Work it was without
any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there’d been with Orin
and Hal and tennis, at which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming junior
but a top collegian.

Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’ He did this ironically
about half the time.

In the cab (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood,
Orin had beaten his fine forehead against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn’t
seem to communicate with Himself without his mother’s presence and mediation. It wasn’t
clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different family-members,
he said. But she did. He didn’t have one fucking clue how Himself felt about his abandoning
a decade’s tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about Orin’s being truly great at it,
at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or judgmental that Orin
had quit tennis, or what?

The 5-Woman’s room’s mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of
the frames between the slats were appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair
entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff
down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out. Charlotte Treat had been too sick to
shower for days, and her frame and slats were hard to be near.

At Joelle’s first interface with the whole sad family unit—Thanksgiving, Headmaster’s
House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield—Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please
do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding,
and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication,
and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering—and
something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend.
It wasn’t that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen,
and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza
slumped something awful) she’d ever met. It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless
and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home’s downstairs
(the bathroom’s toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it
wasn’t that Avril’s graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It took a long
time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods
about Orin’s mother. The dinner itself—no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke about
no turkey on Thanksgiving—was delicious without being grandiose. They didn’t even
sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass whose
level somehow never went down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, she
noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air above it shimmer
slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous figures.
He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril’s Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs.
Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario’s salmon. Joelle had a weird
half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle’s
breast. Hal Incandenza and two other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school
ate like refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed her mouth
in a patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress’s neckline
very high. Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment
to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed.
There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever
made of a dog. Joelle noticed Avril also directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal,
and Mario, like a cycle of even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan champagne.
Dr. Incandenza drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen
his drink in the kitchen. A massive hanging garden behind Avril’s and Hal’s captains’
chairs cut complex shadows into the UV light that made the table’s candles’ glow a
weird bright blue. The director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose
with his tumbler. Joelle had the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her
ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-and-Thank-You’d
in a way that was sheer Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen, Dr. Incandenza
molded his twice-baked potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly
started to discourse animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood’s monolithic Studio
system and the subsequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing
for a causal connection. His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin’s
Moms had to be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle’s own personal Daddy.
Joelle could somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who’d been ungainly as a girl
and then blossomed and but who’d only become really beautiful later in life, like
thirty-five. She’d decided Dr. Incandenza looked like an ecologically poisoned crane,
she told him later. Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with
a conductor’s baton. She never did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork.
The whole Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very slightly and
subtly, like heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza
kept shading his eyes from the UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute.
Avril referred to her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere, little
Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is
the Candela, which he defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of
1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All
the table’s males wore coats and ties. The larger of Hal’s two tennis partners passed
out dental stimulators, and no one made fun of him. Mario’s grin seemed both obscene
and sincere. Hal, whom Joelle wasn’t crazy about, kept asking wasn’t anybody going
to ask him the freezing-temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves
in a small conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented
face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining
Bazin’s disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected
to the neo-Thomist Realism of the ‘
Personalistes,
’ an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa
1930–1940—many of Bazin’s teachers had been eminent
Personalistes.
Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did a long impression of
late pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the cosmos’ scale. ‘Billions
and billions,’ he said. One of the tennis friends burped just awfully, and no one
reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said ‘
Billions
and
billions
and
billions
’ in the voice of Sagan. Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about whether
the term
circa
could modify an interval or only a specific year. Then Hal asked for several examples
of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the sleek little
show-offy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. ‘The universe:’—Orin
continued long after the wit had worn thin—‘cold, immense, incredibly universal.’
The subjects of tennis, baton-twirling, and punting never came up: organized sports
were never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly at Dr.
Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white mammarial dome covered part of the Academy’s
grounds outside the dining room’s window. Mario plunged his special fork into Dr.
Incandenza’s potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns on the
term
deconstruction
from the insufferable Hal kid. Everyone’s teeth were dazzling in the candlelight
and UV. Hal wiped Mario’s snout, which seemed to run continuously. Avril invited Joelle
by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her family in rural Kentucky if she
wished. Orin said the Moms was herself originally from rural Québec. Joelle was on
her seventh glass of wine. Orin’s fingering his half-Windsor kept looking more and
more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to find a way to include
Joelle in a production, since she was both a film student and a now a heartily welcome
honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair,
and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario’s deformities
seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between
a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects
orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether
misspoke
was a bona fide word. Dr. Incandenza’s tall narrow head kept inclining toward his
plate and then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy.
Deformed Mario’s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners
of it. In a fake Southern-belle accent that was clearly no jab at Joelle, more like
a Scarlett O’Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always
gave her ‘the vapors.’ Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was
smiling, broadly and constantly, eyes shiny in the plants’ odd light. She was doing
it herself, too, she noticed; her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal’s larger
friend kept pausing to use his dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental
stimulator, but everyone held one politely, as if getting ready to use it. Hal and
the two friends made odd spasmic one-handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one
seemed to notice. Not once in Orin’s presence did anyone mention the word
tennis
. He had been up half the previous night vomiting with anxiety. Now he challenged
Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. Joelle couldn’t for the life of her remember
either of the names of poor old Spielberg’s old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur
things, though her own Daddy’d personally taken her to each one. At some point Orin’s
father got up to go freshen his drink and never returned.

Just before dessert—which was on fire—Orin’s Moms had asked whether they could perhaps
all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being together.
She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand-holding.
Joelle held Orin’s hand and Hal’s smaller friend’s hand, which was so callused up
it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick
ice cream. Dr. Incandenza’s absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed,
it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped
pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in
mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange. The coffee
was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away
without lighting it.

The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill.

Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and
cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that
the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced
them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without
batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

On the way back home, in a cab whose company’s phone-number Hal had summoned from
memory, Orin hung his leg over Joelle’s crossed legs and said that if anybody could
have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it was the
Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she’d liked her. Joelle’s cheek muscles ached something
awful. When they got back to the brownstone co-op on that last pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving
was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from
sleeping. Orin couldn’t ingest anything during the season even if he wanted to: B.U.’s
major-sport teams Tested randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, cleaning back behind
the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in the nightmare she’d somehow
felt should have been hers.

Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had believed
a desperate addict was revealed as the woman in authority for the
demi-maison
of Ennet. The clipboarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom misjudged
persons or their roles.

The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. ‘No, no. No,’ she said into
the telephone. ‘No.’

‘I am sorry,’ she spoke to Marathe over the telephone’s speaker without placing the
hand of privacy over the speaker. ‘This won’t take a second. No she
can’t,
Mars. Promises don’t matter. She’s promised before. How many times. No. Mars, because
it’ll end up hurting us again and just enabling her.’ The other side’s man’s voice
came loudly, and the authority stopped a sobbing with the back of her wrist, then
stiffened. Marathe watched expressionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which
English was straining. There were dogs upon the floor. ‘I know, but no. For today,
no. Next time she calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.’