Infinite Jest (52 page)

White halogen off the green of the composite surface, the light out on the indoor
courts at the Port Washington Tennis Academy is the color of sour apples. To the spectators
at the gallery’s glass, the duos of players arrayed and moving down below have a reptilian
tinge to their skin, a kind of seasick-type pallor. This annual meet is mammoth: both
academies’ A and B teams for both Boys and Girls, both singles and doubles, in 14
and Unders, 16 and Unders, 18 and Unders. Thirty-six courts stretch out down away
from one end’s gallery under a fancy tri-domed system of permanent all-weather Lung.

A jr. tennis team has six people on it, with the highest-ranked playing #1 singles
against the other team’s best guy, the next-highest-ranked playing #2, and on down
the line to #6. After the six singles matches there are three doubles, with a team’s
best two singles players usually turning around and also playing #1 doubles—with occasional
exceptions, e.g. the Vaught twins, or the fact that Schacht and Troeltsch, way down
on the B squad in 18’s singles, play #2 doubles on E.T.A.’s 18’s A team, because they’ve
been a doubles team since they were incontinent toddlers back in Philly, and they’re
so experienced and smooth together they can wipe surfaces with the 18’s A team’s #3
and #4 singles guys, Coyle and Axford, who prefer to skip doubles altogether. It all
tends to get complicated, and probably not all that interesting—unless you play.

But so a normal meet between two junior teams is the best out of nine matches, whereas
this mammoth annual early-November thing between E.T.A. and P.W.T.A. will try to be
the best out of 108. A 54-match-all conclusion is extremely unlikely—odds being 1
in 2
²⁷
—and has never happened in nine years. The meet’s always down on Long Island because
P.W.T.A. has indoor courts out the bazoo. Each year the academy that loses the meet
has to get up on tables at the buffet supper afterward and sing a really silly song.
An even more embarrassing transaction is supposed to take place in private between
the two schools’ Headmasters, but nobody knows quite what. Last year Enfield lost
57–51 and Charles Tavis didn’t say one word on the bus-ride home and used the lavatory
several times.

But last year E.T.A. didn’t have John Wayne, and last year H. J. Incandenza hadn’t
yet exploded, competitively. John Wayne, formerly of Montcerf, Québec—an asbestos-mining
town ten clicks or so from the infamously rupture-prone Mercier Dam—formerly the top-ranked
junior male in Canada at sixteen as well as #5 overall in the Organization of North
American Nations Tennis Association computerized rankings, was finally successfully
recruited by Gerhardt Schtitt and Aubrey deLint last spring via the argument that
two gratis years at an American academy would maybe let Wayne bypass the usual couple
seasons of top college tennis and go pro immediately at nineteen with more than enough
competitive tempering. This reasoning was not unsound, since the top four U.S. tennis
academies’ tournament schedules closely resemble the A.T.P. tour in terms of numbing
travel and continual stress. John Wayne is currently ranked #3 in the O.N.A.N.T.A.’s
Boys’ 18’s and #2 in the U.S.T.A. (Canada, under Provincial pressure, has disowned
him as an emigrant) and has in this Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment reached
the semis of both the Junior French and Junior U.S. Opens, and has lost to exactly
nobody American in seven meets and a dozen major tournaments. He trails the #1 American
kid, an Independent
⁸⁵
down in Florida, Veach, by only a couple U.S.T.A. computer points, and they haven’t
yet met in sanctioned play this year, and the kid is well known to be hiding out from
Wayne, avoiding him, staying down in Pompano Beach, allegedly nursing a like four-month
groin-pull, sitting on his ranking. He’s supposed to show at the WhataBurger Invitational
in AZ in a couple weeks, this Veach, having won the 18’s at age seventeen there last
year, but he’s got to know Wayne’s coming down, and speculation is rife and complex.
O.N.A.N.T.A.-wise, there’s an Argentine kid that Mexico’s Academia de Vera Cruz has
got rat-holed away who’s #1 and not about to lose to anybody, having this year taken
three out of four legs of the Junior Grand Slam, the first time anybody’s done that
since a sepulchral Czech kid named Lendl, who retired from the Show and suicided well
before the advent of Subsidized Time. But so there’s Wayne at #1.

And it’s been established that Hal Incandenza, last year a respectable but by no means
to-write-home-about 43rd nationally and bouncing between #4 and #5 on the Academy’s
A team in Boys’ 16’s singles, has made a kind of quantumish competitive plateaux-hop
such that this year—the one nearly done, Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Depend Absorbent Products
Division soon to give way to the highest corporate bidder for rights to the New Year—Incandenza,
mind you this year just seventeen, is 4th in the nation and #6 on the O.N.A.N.T.A.
computer and playing A-#2 for E.T.A. in Boys’ 18’s. These competitive explosions happen
sometimes. Nobody at the Academy talks to Hal much about the explosion, sort of the
way you avoid a pitcher who’s got a no-hitter going. Hal’s delicate and spinny, rather
cerebral game hasn’t altered, but this year it seems to have grown a beak. No longer
fragile or abstracted-looking on court, he seems now almost to hit the corners without
thinking about it. His Unforced-Error stats look like a decimal-error.

Hal’s game involves attrition. He’ll probe, pecking, until some angle opens up. Until
then he’ll probe. He’d rather run his man ragged, wear him down. Three different opponents
this past summer had to go to oxygen during breaks.
⁸⁶
His serve yanks across at people as if on a hidden diagonal string. His serve, now,
suddenly, after four summers of thousand-a-day serves to no one at dawn, is suddenly
supposed to be one of the best left-handed kick serves the junior circuit has ever
seen. Schtitt calls Hal Incandenza his ‘revenant,’ now, and sometimes points his pointer
at him in an affectionate way from his observation crow’s nest in the transom, during
drills.

Most of the singles’ A matches are under way. Coyle and his man on 3 are in an endless
butterfly-shaped rally. Hal’s muscular but unquick opponent is bent over trying to
get his breath while Hal stands there and futzes with his strings. Tall Paul Shaw
on 6 bounces the ball eight times before he serves. Never seven or nine.

And John Wayne’s without question the best male player to appear at Enfield Academy
in several years. He’d been spotted first by the late Dr. James Incandenza at age
six, eleven summers back, when Incandenza was doing an early and coldly conceptual
Super-8 on people named John Wayne who were not the real thespio-historical John Wayne,
a film Wayne’s not-to-be-fucked-with papa eventually litigated the kid’s segment out
of because the film had the word
Homo
in the title.
⁸⁷

On 1, with John Wayne up at net, Port Washington’s best boy throws up a lob. It’s
a beauty: the ball soars slowly up, just skirts the indoor courts’ system of beams
and lamps, and floats back down gentle as lint: a lovely quad-function of fluorescent
green, seams whirling. John Wayne backpedals and flies back after it. You can tell—if
you play seriously—you can tell just by the way the ball comes off a guy’s strings
whether the lob is going to land fair. There’s surprisingly little thought. Coaches
tell serious players what to do so often it gets automatic. John Wayne’s game could
be described as having a kind of automatic beauty. When the lob first went up he’d
backpedaled from the net, keeping the ball in sight until it reached the top of its
flight and its curve broke, casting many shadows in the tray of lights hung from the
ceiling’s insulation; then Wayne turned his back to the ball and sprinted flat-out
for the spot where it will land fair. Would land. He doesn’t have to locate the ball
again until it’s hit the green court just inside the baseline. By now he’s come around
the side of the bounced ball’s flight, still sprinting. He looks mean in a kind of
distant way. He comes around the side of the bounced ball’s second ascent the way
you come up around the side of somebody you’re going to hurt, and he has to leave
his feet and half-pirouette to get his side to the ball and whip his big right arm
through it, catching it on the rise and slapping it down the line past the Port Washington
boy, who’s played the percentages and followed a beauty of a lob up to net. The Port
Washington kid applauds with the heel of his hand against his strings in acknowledgment
of a really nice get, even as he looks up at Port Washington’s coaching staff in the
gallery. The spectators’ glass panel is at ground level, and the players play below
it on courts that have been carved out of a kind of pit, dug long ago: some northeast
clubs favor courts below ground, because earth insulates and keeps utility bills daunting
instead of prohibitive, once the Lungs go up. The gallery panel stretches overhead
behind Courts 1 through 6, but there’s a decided spectatorial clumping at the part
of the gallery that looks out over the Show Courts, Boys’ 18’s #1 and #2, Wayne and
Hal and P.W.T.A.’s two best. Now after Wayne’s balletic winner there’s the sad sound
of a small crowd behind glass’s applause; on the courts the applause is muffled and
compromised by on-court sounds, and sounds like the trapped survivors of something
tapping for help at a great depth. The panel is like an aquarium’s glass, thick and
clean, and traps noise behind it, and to the gallery it seems that 72 well-muscled
children are arrayed and competing in total silence in the pit. Almost everyone in
the gallery is wearing tennis clothes and bright nylon warm-ups; some even wear wristbands,
the tennis equivalent of a football fan’s pennant and raccoon coat.

John Wayne’s post-pirouette backward inertia has carried him into the heavy black
tarpaulin that hangs several meters behind both sides of the 36 courts on a system
of rods and rings not unlike a very ambitious shower-curtain, the tarps hiding from
view the waterstained walls of puffy white-wrapped insulation and creating a narrow
passage for players to get to their courts without crossing open court and interrupting
play. Wayne hits the heavy tarp and kind of bounces off, producing a boom that resounds.
The sounds on court in an indoor venue are huge and complex; everything echoes and
the echoes then meld. In the gallery, Tavis and Nwangi bite their knuckles and deLint
squashes his nose flat against the glass in anxiety as everyone else politely applauds.
Schtitt calmly taps his pointer against the top of his boot at times of high stress.
Wayne isn’t hurt, though. Everybody goes into the tarp sometimes. That’s what it’s
there for. It always sounds worse than it is.

The boom of the tarp sounds bad down below, though. The boom rattles Teddy Schacht,
who’s kneeling in the little passage right behind Court 1, holding M. Pemulis’s head
as Pemulis down on one knee is sick into a tall white plastic spare-ball bucket. Schacht
has to haul Pemulis slightly back as Wayne’s outline bulges for a moment into the
billowing tarp and threatens to knock Pemulis over, plus maybe the bucket, which would
be a bad scene. Pemulis, deep into the little hell of his own nauseous pre-match nerves,
is too busy trying to vomit w/o sound to hear the mean sound of Wayne’s winner or
the boom of him against the heavy curtain. It’s freezing back here in the little passage,
up next to insulation and I-beams and away from the infrared heaters that hang over
the courts. The plastic bucket is full of old bald Wilson tennis balls and Pemulis’s
breakfast. There is of course an odor. Schacht doesn’t mind. He lightly strokes the
sides of Pemulis’s head as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in Philly.

Placed at eye-level intervals in the tarp are little plastic windows, archer-slit
views of each court from the cold backstage passage. Schacht sees John Wayne walk
to the net-post and flip his card as he and his opponent change sides. Even indoors,
you change ends of the court after every odd-numbered game. No one knows why odd rather
than even. Each P.W.T.A. court has, welded to its west net-post, another smaller post
with a double set of like flippable cards with big red numerals from 1 to 7; in umpless
competition you’re supposed to flip your card appropriately at every change of sides,
to help the gallery follow the score in the set. A lot of junior players neglect to
flip their cards. Wayne is always automatic and scrupulous in his accounts. Wayne’s
father is an asbestos miner who at forty-three is far and away the seniorest guy on
his shift; he now wears triple-thick masks and is trying to hold on until John Wayne
can start making serious $ and take him away from all this. He has not seen his eldest
son play since John Wayne’s Québecois and Canadian citizenships were revoked last
year. Wayne’s card is on (5); his opponent has yet to flip a card. Wayne never even
sits down to take the 60 seconds he’s allowed on each change of sides. His opponent,
in his light-blue flare-collared shirt with WILSON and P.W.T.A. on the sleeves, says
something not unfriendly as Wayne brushes past him by the post. Wayne doesn’t respond
one way or the other. He just goes back to the baseline farthest from Schacht’s little
tarp-window and bounces a ball up and down in the air with the reticulate face of
his stick as the Port Washington boy sits in his little canvas director’s chair and
towels the sweat off his arms (neither of which is large) and looks briefly up at
the gallery behind the panel. The thing about Wayne is he’s all business. His face
on court is blankly rigid, with the hypertonic masking of schizophrenics and Zen adepts.
He tends to look straight ahead at all times. He is about as reserved as they come.
His emotions emerge in terms of velocity. Intelligence as strategic focus. His play,
like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than undead. Wayne tends to
eat and study alone. He’s sometimes seen with two or three expatriate E.T.A. Nucks,
but when they’re together they all seem morose. It’s wholly unclear to Schacht how
Wayne feels about the U.S. or his citizenship-status. He figures Wayne figures it
doesn’t much matter: he is destined for the Show; he will be an all-business entertainer,
citizen of the world, everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment.