The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18’s and the cream of the 16’s are all at the best table. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, E.T.A.’s 16’s A-l, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.’s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the way to 7–5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement Schtitt had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned down. The match’s audience had grown steadily as other challenges got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very nearly beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila sweats with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.
Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant. The only sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on their trays while still in line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer’s eyes are half closed as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players’ inclined heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He’s discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing baby-boileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they’re by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling’s full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer pressure can break him of it.
Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he’d gotten up to the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents’ epic rows. His parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms’ flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn’t jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They’d toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They’d been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice — whom both Mr.
Stice and The Darkness called ‘The Bride’ — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she’d feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as ‘The Brood’) and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride’s own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.’s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. Hal’s making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice’s tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in admiration.
‘I’m just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that’s gone down the disposal.’ Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. ‘Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.’
‘The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,’ Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it’s a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It’s like Pemulis can’t really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy’s wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it’s got to be not only sugarless but low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating than like somebody miming eating. Hal’s made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he’s not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players’ different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line, different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford’s expression and Hal’s excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees[259] taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.