Ts this to make me feel bad? Did this fuck you up, me probing for details after all this time? Did it reactivate the grief?’
‘Just one more confirmation. The trailer’s interior. There was some object or contiguous trio of objects with the following color scheme: brown, lavender, and either mint-green or jonquil-yellow.’
‘I can call back when you’re more yourself. The leg’s starting to prune a bit from the whirlpool anyway.’
Til be right here. I’ve got a whole foot to yield to the magic with. I’m not going to alter the smallest particular. I’m just about ready to bear down on the clippers. It’s going to feel right, I know.’
‘A throw. Like an afghan throw, on the chintz sofa. The yellow was more fluorescent than jonquil.’
‘And the word is asphyxiated. Kick some egg-shaped balls for all of us, O. The next sound you hear will be unpleasant,’ Hal said, holding the phone down right next to the foot, his expression terrifically intense.
6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
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 #l 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 227 — 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. Incan-denza hadn’t yet exploded, competitively. John Wayne, formerly of Mont-cerf, Quebec — 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 #l 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 #l.
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]