Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 982

‘Why do I suspect it’s simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can’t-miss nail-interval you were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.’

‘Hallie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I’m sick?’

‘You said she was obese.’

‘I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.’

‘And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring, and you came to attention.’

‘With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty girls get.’

Tm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he’ll go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps until we’re all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever you meant was not lissome.’

‘The reserve QB who’s next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides said something I liked. Helen passed him in the locker room and he — do you want to hear this?’

‘She was in the locker room?’

‘It’s the law. The pros aren’t a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that’d break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.’

‘That is a pretty good one, O.’

‘But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec loose from Canada still, and that’s always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence is declared? ‘ce pas?’

‘I’d rather just agree it’s a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.’

‘Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist flanges?’

‘Not according to Poutrincourt they don’t.’

‘So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?’