David Wallace - Infinite jest

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 mag-vids 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 trea-suringly, 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]