Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 917

But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin’s father — though he wouldn’t forbid it — would rather Orin didn’t watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn’t ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he’d personally prefer that Orin wait until he’d found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he’d wait until he’d experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.

What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself’s assumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin. I’d never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt’s pipe.

I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Our room’s door remained ajar from Mario’s exit with Coyle to find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht’s heads popped in briefly and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness’s ruined map and withdrew when they got no response. The second floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Québecois squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a kind of whistle out of one corner of the subdorm building, and the whistling came and went.

Then I heard John Wayne’s stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors, the stride of a guy with stellar calf-development. I heard his low sigh. Then, though the door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell for sure that John Wayne’s head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I could feel my throat’s equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. There wasn’t even hostility between us. He ate dinner with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made little attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light and very even. No waste, complete utilization of each breath.[382]