Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 72

Gerhardt Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA, was wooed fiercely by E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. James Incandenza, just about begged to come on board the moment the Academy’s hilltop was shaved flat and the place was up and running. Incandenza had decided he was going to bring Schtitt on board or bust — this even though Schtitt had then just lately been asked to resign from the staff of a Nick Bollettieri camp in Sarasota because of a really unfortunate incident involving a riding crop.

By now, though, pretty much everybody now at E.T.A. feels as though stories about Schtitt’s whole corporal-punitive thing must have been pumped up out of all sane proportion, because even though Schtitt still does favor those high and shiny black boots, and yes the epaulets, still, and now a weatherman’s telescoping pointer that’s a clear stand-in for the now-forbidden old riding crop, he has, Schtitt, at near what must be seventy, mellowed to the sort of elder-statesman point where he’s become mostly a dispenser of abstractions rather than discipline, a philosopher instead of a king. His felt presence is here mostly verbal; the weatherman’s pointer has not made corrective contact with even one athletic bottom in Schtitt’s whole nine years at E.T.A.

Still, although he now has all these Lebensgefährtins^[31]and prorectors to administer most of the necessary little character-building cruelties, Schtitt does like his occasional bit of fun, still.

So but when Schtitt dons the leather helmet and goggles and revs up the old F.R.G.-era BMW cycle and trails the sweating E.T.A. squads up the Comm. Ave. hills into East Newton on their P.M. conditioning runs, making judicious use of his pea-shooter to discourage straggling sluggards, it’s usually eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza who gets to ride along in the sidecar, carefully braced and strapped, the wind blowing his thin hair straight back off his oversized head, beaming and waving his claw at people he knows. It’s possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can’t even grip a stick, much less flail at a moving ball with one, is the one kid at E.T.A. whose company Schtitt seeks out, is in fact pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt speaks candidly, lets his pedagogical hair down. He’s not close to his prorectors, particularly, Schtitt, and treats Aubrey deLint and Mary Esther Thode with a formality that’s almost parodic. But often of a warm evening sometimes Mario and Coach Schtitt will find themselves out alone under the East Courts’ canvas pavilion or the towering copper beech west of Comm.-Ad., or at one of the initial-scarred redwood picnic tables off the path out behind the Headmaster’s House where Mario’s mother and uncle live, Schtitt savoring a post-prandial pipe, Mario enjoying the smells of the calliopsis alongside the grounds’ quincunx paths, the sweetish pines and the briers’ yeasty musk coming up from the hillside’s slopes. And he actually likes the sulphury odor of Schtitt’s obscure Austrian blend. Schtitt talks, Mario listens, generally. Mario is basically a born listener. One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and brady-kinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.