Infinite Jest (57 page)

Hal’s eldest brother
Orin Incandenza got out of competitive tennis when Hal was nine and Mario nearly
eleven. This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence
of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism.
At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s nationally; he was a senior; he
was at that awful age for a low-70s player where age eighteen and the terminus of
a junior career are looming and either: (1) you’re going to surrender your dreams
of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) you’re going to get
your full spectrum of gram-negative and cholera and amoebic-dysentery shots and try
to eke out some kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian satellite pro tour and
try to hop those last few competitive plateaux up to Show-caliber as an adult; or
(3) or you don’t know what you’re going to do; and it’s often an awful time.
⁹³

E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates
stay on for two years and serve in deLint’s platoon of prorectors
⁹⁴
in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys,
and Orin’s being directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind
of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector’s job was only
for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial… and then of
course what then, what are you going to do after
that,
etc.

Orin’s decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril
Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin
decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full support
of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still
in favor of college, privately, you could tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to
be a professional-caliber adult tennis player. His competitive peak had come at thirteen,
when he’d gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis
IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after
that he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised
his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the
clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested
and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock at fourteen and fifteen—this
had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit,
Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled
off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn’t even qualifying
for the major events’ main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the
Boys’ 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy’s
B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was
essentially that of a baseliner, a counterpuncher, but without the return of serve
or passing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The
E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal
lob: he could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail
a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or
three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed
through spare
P.M.
devoted more and more to Eschaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee
transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton’s first
game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was mostly marginal
and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played.

College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision
drew nigh. Oblique family pressures aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he’d had
stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like a viable
goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff E.T.A.
tended to be a bit weak in, both Himself and Schtitt being at that point pretty anti-quantitative.
His grades were solid. His board-scores weren’t going to embarrass anybody. Orin was
basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top-level competitive
sport on his secondary transcript.

And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis.
A national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-and-Under Singles, while mediocre by the standards
of aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches’ chins shiny. Orin got a
couple Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band
that established itself under his dorm-room’s window six nights running until Mrs.
Incandenza got Himself to authorize ‘F. D. V.’ Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio
State flew him out to Columbus for such a weekend of ‘prospective orientation’ that
when Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days drinking Alka-Seltzer with
an ice pack on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in
their elite Strategic Studies program after
Decade Magazine
had run a short interest-piece on Orin and the Croate and Eschaton’s applied use
of c:\Pink
₂
.
⁹⁵

Orin chose B.U. Boston U. Not a tennis power. Not in Cal-Tech’s league academically.
Not the sort of place that hires bands or flies you out for Roman orgies of inducement.
And only just about three clicks down the hill and Comm. Ave. from E.T.A., west of
the Bay, around the intersection of Commonwealth and Beacon, Boston. It was kind of
a joint Orin Incandenza/Avril Incandenza decision. Orin’s Moms privately thought it
was important for Orin to be away from home, psychologically speaking, but still to
be able to come home whenever he wished. She put everything to Orin in terms of worrying
that her concern over what’d be best for him psychologically might prompt her to overstep
her maternal bounds and speak out of turn or give intrusive advice. According to all
her lists and advantage-disadvantage charts, B.U. was from every angle far and away
O.’s best choice, but to keep ever from overstepping or lobbying intrusively the Moms
actually for six weeks would flee any room Orin entered, both hands clapped over her
mouth. Orin had this way his face would get when she’d beg him not to let her influence
his choice. It was during this period that Orin had characterized the Moms to Hal
as a kind of contortionist with other people’s bodies, which Hal’s never been able
to forget. Himself, from his own experience, probably thought it’d be better for Orin
to get the hell out of Dodge altogether, do something Midwest or PAC, but he kept
his own counsel. He never had to struggle not to overstep. He probably figured Orin
was a big boy. This was four years and 30-some released entertainments before Himself
put his head in a microwave oven, fatally. Then it turned out Avril’s adoptive-slash-half-brother
Charles Tavis, who at this time was back chairing A.S.A. at Throppinghamshire,
⁹⁶
turned out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston
University’s varsity tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up
a meet between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the B.U. tennis coach.
The B.U. tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily
handsome old patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who
liked his ‘lads’ to wear all white and actually literally vault the net, win or lose,
after matches. B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and
that had been in the A.D. 1960s, way before this fashion-conscious guy’s tenure; and
when the coach saw Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how mediocrity is
contextual. B.U.’s players all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and
wore ironed shorts and those faggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe
across the chest, and talked without moving their jaw, and played the sort of stiff
and patrician serve-and-volley game you play if you’ve had lots of summer lessons
and club round-robins but had never ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically.
Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck-sneakers w/o socks and yawned compulsively as he
beat B.U.’s immaculately groomed #1 Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40
offensive lobs for winners. Then at the four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U.
coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and a Lacoste polo shirt and got a look at the
size of Orin’s left arm, and then at Orin’s Moms in a tight black skirt and levantine
jacket with kohl around her eyes and a moussed tower of hair and about fell back over
sideways the other way. She had this effect on older men, somehow. Orin was in a position
to dictate terms limited only by the parameters of B.U.’s own sports-budget marginality.
⁹⁷
Orin signed a Letter of Intent accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi
lap-top w/ software and off-campus housing and living expenses and a lucrative work-study
job where his job was to turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football
Terriers’ historic Nickerson Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers—the
sprinkler job was B.U.’s tennis team’s one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis—who
at Avril’s urging that fall cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as
Assistant Headmaster to assist Orin’s father’s oversight of the Academy
⁹⁸
in a progressively more and more total capacity as both in- and external travels
took J. O. Incandenza away from Enfield more and more often—said 3½ years later that
he’d never really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U.
tennis apparatus, that he wasn’t in this for the Thank-Yous, that a person who did
a service
for
somebody’s gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide
person; at least that’s what he thought, he said; he said what did Avril and Hal and
Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was he perhaps just rationalizing away some
legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for seeming to move in just as he, Orin,
moved out? though surely not for Tavis’s assuming more and more total control of the
E.T.A. helm as J. O. Incandenza spent increasingly long hiati either off with Mario
on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in alcohol-rehabilitative facilities
(13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the Blue Cross statements right
here), and even more surely not for the final felo de se anyone with any kind of denial-free
sensitivity could have predicted for the past 3½ years; but, C.T. opined on 4 July
Y.D.P.A.H. after Orin, who now had plenty of free summer time, declined his fifth
straight invitation back to Enfield and his family’s annual barbecue and Wimbledon-Finals-InterLace-spontaneous-dissemination-watching,
Orin might just be harboring a resentment over C.T. moving into the Headmaster’s office
and changing the door’s ‘
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT…
’ before Himself’s microwaved head had even cooled, even if it was to take over a
Headmaster’s job that had been positively
keening
to have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having eliminated
his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters
of Intent were due from seniors who’d decided to slouch off to college tennis, just
as invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over
Lateral Alice Moore’s paraboloid desk, just as E.T.A.’s tax-exempt status was coming
up for review before the M.D.R.
⁹⁹
Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to readjust to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation
procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation procedures, just as litigations with
Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged damage from E.T.A.’s initial hilltop-flattening
and with Empire Waste Displacement over the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement
vehicles were reaching the appellate stage, just as applications and fellowships for
the Fall term were in the final stages of review and response. Well
someone
had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone
who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absence
of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose
replacement was naturally,
naturally
going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can’t get mad at
a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to assume the stress of filling in
as anger-object than that dead man’s thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic
assistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH’s master
bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping
usurper. Tavis had been ready for all this stress and more, he told the assembled
Academy in preparatory remarks before last year’s Fall term Convocation, speaking
through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow’s nest of Gerhardt
Schtitt’s transom down into the rows of folding chairs arranged all along the base-
and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 6–9: he not only fully accepted the stress and resentment,
he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet unromantic fashion,
to work hard to remain open to it, to this resentment and sense of loss and irreplaceability,
even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out get it out, the anger
and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological health, since Tavis
acknowledged publicly that there was more than enough on every E.T.A.’s plate to begin
with as it was. The Convocation assembly was outside, on the Center Courts that in
winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of Dairy Products from
the American Heartland, hot and muggy. Upperclassmen who’d heard these same basic
remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and hangman’s-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam
motions, listening. The sky overhead was glassy blue between clots and strings of
clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 30–32 the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up
a background of ‘
Tenabrae Factae Sunt,
’ sotto v. Everybody had had on the black armbands everybody still wore for functions
and assemblies, to keep from forgetting; and the cotton U.S. and crisp nylon O.N.A.N.
flags flapped and clanked halfway down the driveway’s poles in remembrance. The Sunstrand
Plaza still as of that fall hadn’t yet found a way to muffle its East Newton ATHSCME
fans, and Tavis’s voice, which even with the police bullhorn tended to sound distant
and receding anyway, wove in and out of the sound of the fans and the whump of the
E.W.D. catapults and locusts’ electric screams and the exhaust-rich hot rush of the
summer wind up off Comm. Ave. and the car-horns and Green Line’s trundle and clang
and the clank of the flags’ poles and wires, and everybody but the staff and littlest
kids up front missed most of Tavis’s explanation that Salic law’d nothing to do with
the fact that there was simply no way the late Headmaster’s beloved spouse and E.T.A.
Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could have become Headmaster:
how would ‘Headmistress’ have sounded? and she had the females and female prorectors
and Harde’s custodians to oversee, and curricula and assignments and schedules, and
complex new O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation to finalize the Kafkan application for, plus
daily HmH-sterilization and personal-ablution rituals and the constant battle against
anthracnose and dry-climate blight in the dining room’s Green Babies, plus of course
E.T.A. teaching duties on top of that, with the addition of untold sleepless nights
with the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, the academic PAC that watchdogged
media-syntax and invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak
with trilled
r
’s on prescriptive preservation, and held marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell’s
‘Politics and the English Language,’ and whose Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM’s)
was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting the new Gentle administration’s
Title-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseout-fat-trimming initiative, besides of course
being practically laid out flat with grief and having to do all the emotional-processing
work attendant on working through that kind of personal trauma, on top of all of which
assuming the administrative tiller of E.T.A. itself would have been simply an insupportable
burden she’s thanked C.T. effusively on more than one public occasion for leaving
the plush sinecure of Throppinghamshire and coming down to undertake the stress-ridden
tasks not only of bureaucratic administration and insuring as smooth a transition
as possible but of being there for the Incandenza family itself, w/ or w/o Thank-Yous,
and for helping support not only Orin’s career and institutional decision-processes
but also for being there supportively for all involved when Orin made his seminal
choice not to go ahead and play competitive college tennis after all, at B.U.