The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room’s two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis’s jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet.
Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls;[209] the chassis of Alice Moore’s Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability; also Ms. Moore’s fingertips and lips. The E.T.A. Headmaster’s receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with another station’s airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour’s Jamaica Way six-laner below — had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side. So hence the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore. An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for whatever administrator’s summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on her chest and give imitations of her old Boston rush-hour traffic reports in a stuttered helicopterish reporter-voice. Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor Pemulis, scanning and bobbing, nor Ann Kittenplan nor Trevor Axford — about whom there was today not even a hint of the color blue — are in the mood for this right now, awaiting what they presume to be some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday’s horrendous Eschaton fiasco. The presumption is based on who’s been summoned here, to wait.
The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and only other door of which the dusky blue Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs. Avril Incandenza. Tavis’s office’s outer door is real oak and has his name and degree and title in (nonblue) letters so big that the total I.D. crowds the door’s margins. There’s also an inner door.
Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her office is bigger than C.T.’s, though, and has a seminar table it’s always been obvious he covets. Avril’s office’s blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room’s shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril serves (pro bono) as E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She’s in there unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen except Ann Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed in a dress and (nonblue) barrette. Avril has vividly white hair — as of the last few months before Himself’s felo de se — that looks like it never went through the gray stage (it mostly didn’t) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising with the frankness of adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar table, in full if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the waiting room.[210] Though it’s not technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt pen Avril taps professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is: blue.
Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies since the infamous case of coach R. Bill (‘Touchy’) Phiely at California’s Rolling Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny panties — discovered only after his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill country with a thirteen-year-old companion — created what might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the continent’s tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis Academy, for the last four years, Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff community meeting with all female players judged naive and mop-petish enough to be potential diddlees — the youngest of these is Rhode Island’s pint-sized Tina Echt, just seven but a true cannibal off the backhand side — to interface in a discreet but nurturingly empowering group setting, etc., and nip any potential Phielyisms in the bud. Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk’s contract because they’re in E.T.A.’s O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation-charter.
Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that it’s the Moms doing diddle-prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is maybe in there in the Headmaster’s office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary scene: C.T. would have to be really upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might be there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches.
Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium ‘Reflections on Refraction.’ Michael Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink2, which looks to be all math and spiky brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan’s murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upside-down and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis worries with Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk’s name but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and though he’d never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he’s going to get the lion’s share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson’s WhataBurger, or worse.[211]
Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, probing. The girls’ outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied combination. Avril Incandenza’s voice is higher on the register than one would expect from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever she hums along she sounds insane.
The absence of a door to the Moms’s office means you might as well be in there, in terms of being able to hear what’s going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo headphones she wears — entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received invitations to next week’s WhataBurger Invitational — are powder-blue. Her typing is clearly in synch with something’s backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin’s-egg of cyanosis.
Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason for being uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen, Rusk’s office door, the first door over in the other little hallway at the lobby’s NE corner, next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary, then exiting Rusk’s office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob, because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, and if the cleaning lady hadn’t been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady’s Ward Boss was upper Brighton’s infamous F. X. (‘Follow That Ambulance’) Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and the Academy’s Workman’s Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still in litigation.