Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 918
David Foster Wallace
Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me to wonder why this was so.
I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin when he met the Moms in his late thirties. I find this pretty hard to believe. Orin will also grant that there’s no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms right up to the end, that his attachment to Orin’s fiancee was not sexual. I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn’t yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.
It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual together. I bet most children have this difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms’s eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing — these encounters were imaginable but somehow generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, different configurations of limbs, the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or passion. I tended to imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings throughout. The complicit passion would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the encounter was hidden. Peterson-allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled