Infinite Jest (188 page)

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 magvids 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 treasuringly, 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.

Then I heard John Wayne’s stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors,
the stride of a guy with stellar calf-development. I heard his low sigh. Then, though
the door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell for
sure that John Wayne’s head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost
painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There
was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I
could feel my throat’s equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had
much to say to one another. There wasn’t even hostility between us. He ate dinner
with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made little
attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light
and very even. No waste, complete utilization of each breath.
³⁸²

Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling
with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly.
None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me to wonder
why this was so.

I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself
was a virgin when he met the Moms in his late thirties. I find this pretty hard to
believe. Orin will also grant that there’s no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms
right up to the end, that his attachment to Orin’s fiancée was not sexual. I had a
sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some
kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second
month after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn’t yet been able to identify
a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself,
except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew
of the liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.

It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual together.
I bet most children have this difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex between
the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless
Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms’s eyes open and staring blankly at the
ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and
around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone numb from the pressure
of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues,
Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D.
Himself had found so especially torturing—these encounters were imaginable but somehow
generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, different configurations
of limbs, the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or passion. I tended to
imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings throughout. The complicit passion
would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the encounter was hidden.
Peterson-allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between
this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled
Cage,
and that the amateur player he became so attached to was the veiled girl, Orin’s
love. I wondered whether it was possible to lie supine and throw up without aspirating
vomit or choking. The plumed spout of a whale. The tableau of John Wayne and my mother
in my imagination was not very erotic. The image was complete and sharply focused
but seemed stilted, as if composed. She reclines against four pillows, at an angle
between seated and supine, staring upward, motionless and pale. Wayne, slim and brown-limbed,
smoothly muscled, also completely motionless, lies over her, his untanned bottom in
the air, his blank narrow face between her breasts, his eyes unblinking and his thin
tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard’s. They stay just like that.

She wasn’t dumb—she figured it was likely that they’d let her loose just to see where
she’d go.

She went home. She went to the House. She got one of the last trains before they closed
the T, probably. It took forever to get from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine in
her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the
features below. She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker
of a federal lady anyway. She looked now just like a linen-pale version of what she
really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow. She figured if she could
speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette
and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince
her to dismantle the ramp. The visibility was so bad she didn’t see it til she cleared
the Shed, the Middlesex County Sheriff’s car, fiercely snow-tired, lights going bluely,
parked idling in the roadlet outside the ramp, wipers on Occasional, a uniform at
the wheel absently feeling his face.