Infinite Jest (97 page)

‘Eureka,’ my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot.

I asked whether I could ask what was going on.

‘Goddamn bed squeaks,’ he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot,
bearing down on it repeatedly. There was now a squeaking sound from the mattress when
he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to the bedroom
window. ‘Do you or do you not hear that?’ he said, bearing down and letting up. My
mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand.
She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot.

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father’s face from under his rigid
white professional wig. My father served for two years as the Man from Glad, representing
what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a California-based
advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear
were also white.

My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress
and put his hand at the small of his back and straightened up, continuing to look
at the mattress.

‘This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring
with us out here for quote sentimental value has started squeaking,’ my father said.
His saying ‘your mother’ indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his
hand out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly
down at the bed. ‘It’s driving us fucking nuts.’

My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the
windowsill and bent over from the foot of the bed and bore down on the spot my father
had isolated, and it squeaked again.

‘And at night this one spot here we’ve isolated and identified seems to spread and
metastisate until the whole Goddamn bed’s replete with squeaks.’ He drank some of
his tomato juice. ‘Areas that gibber and squeak,’ my father said, ‘until we both feel
as if we’re being eaten by rats.’ He felt along the line of his jaw. ‘Boiling hordes
of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats,’ he said, almost trembling with irritation.

I looked down at the mattress, at my mother’s hands, which tended to flake in dry
climates. She carried a small bottle of moisturizing lotion at all times.

My father said, ‘And I have personally had it with the aggravation.’ He blotted his
forehead on his white sleeve.

I reminded my father that he’d mentioned needing my help with something. At that age
I was already taller than both my parents. My mother was taller than my father, even
in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father’s body was denser
and more substantial.

My mother came around to my father’s side of the bed and picked the bedding up off
the floor. She started folding the sheets very precisely, using both arms and her
chin. She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember
was white lacquer.

My father looked at me. ‘What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box
spring off the bed frame under here,’ my father said, ‘and expose the frame.’ He took
time out to explain that the bed’s bottom mattress was hard-framed and known uniformly
as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed
and then penguin-toed on the bedroom’s blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato
juice and looked down at the edge of the bed’s metal frame and felt along the outline
of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar
of his white commercial tunic.

‘The frame on this bed is old,’ he told me. ‘It’s probably older than you are. Right
now I’m thinking the thing’s bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that’s what’s
gibbering and squeaking at night.’ He finished his tomato juice and held the glass
out for me to take and put somewhere. ‘So we want to move all this top crap out of
the way, entirely’—he gestured with one arm—‘entirely out of the way, get it out of
the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don’t maybe just need to tighten up
the bolts.’

I wasn’t sure where to put my father’s empty glass, which had juice residue and grains
of pepper along the inside’s sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little
bit with my foot. ‘Are you sure it isn’t just the mattress?’ I said. The bed’s frame’s
bolts struck me as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking.

My father gestured broadly. ‘Synchronicity surrounds me. Concord,’ he said. ‘Because
that’s what your mother thinks it is, also.’ My mother was using both hands to take
the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp.
The pillows were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father’s
allergies.

‘Great minds think alike,’ my father said.

Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally
electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent.

My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser.
She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows.
I had started to move to help her, but I couldn’t decide where to put the empty tomato
juice glass.

‘But you just want to hope it isn’t the mattress,’ father said. ‘Or the box spring.’

My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit
it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter.

My father said, ‘Because a new frame, even if we can’t get the bolts squared away
on this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It wouldn’t be too bad, see.
Even top-shelf bed frames aren’t that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously
expensive.’ He looked at my mother. ‘And I mean fucking
outrageous
.’ He looked down at the back of my mother’s head. ‘And we bought a new box spring
for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago.’ He was looking down at the back
of my mother’s head as if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had
crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either at or out the
master bedroom window. Our home’s whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside,
which meant that the view from my parents’ bedroom on the first floor was of just
sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle
of 55° and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision’s lawns had trees
yet. ‘Of course that was during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother
had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the household,’
my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional
toupee on, and still looked at my mother.

My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for
the Glad F.P.R. Co.’s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors
to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of
a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving
an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage
problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set,
where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely
what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue.
In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great
evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for
those times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which
bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night
in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail
long after my mother and I had gone to bed.

I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father’s empty tomato
juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the inside
sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard
to wash off.

‘For Christ’s sake Jim just put the thing down,’ my father said.

I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother’s
dresser, pressing down to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet.
My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could
tell she was getting out of our way.

My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom
door.

I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box
spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles
and replied that I was becoming almost frighteningly quick and perceptive. He went
around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, ‘I want to
let’s just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us
some room to maneuver.’

‘Right,’ I said.

My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents’ bed. My father rubbed his
hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring and
began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress
had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began
pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind
the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white
ceiling, exceeded 90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress’s
overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms
and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled
mattress with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up
of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.

The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed,
now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and
the bed’s box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs
were trembling under the mattress’s canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and
support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the
mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them.

My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back
up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end
of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door
into the uncarpeted hallway.

This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little
structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted
both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My father
had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress’s upright weight because
of an old competitive-tennis injury.

While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father’s
end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable
cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of
the bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all
the way around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling.
The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around
upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the
daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly
concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed
cube. But the lamps didn’t fall off. They remained attached to the wall.

‘God damn it to hell,’ my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress.

My father also said, ‘Fucking son of a…’ when the mattress’s thickness made it difficult
for him to squeeze through the doorway still holding his end.

In time we were able to get my parents’ giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that
ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak
from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been
inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father’s face onto his side of the mattress,
darkening part of the protector’s fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress
at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor
of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn’t provide sufficient resistance, the mattress
wouldn’t stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the way across the
width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright
mattress’s top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely
concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched
drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming
concavity.

My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall
and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and looked at me and said,
‘Fuck it.’

My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle.

My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back
to my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped
and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton.
He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring
to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the
mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there
in the hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of
the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints
on the wall’s white paint.