‘Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’
‘Chu man I wouldn’t even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.’
Blott’s footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.
Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. ‘OK. Somebody farted.’
‘What’s this up next to it, Sleeps?’ Chu backing up to widen his light’s beam on something broad and squat and dark.
‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’
‘Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated space?’
‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’
‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’
‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’
‘It’s in-between.’
‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’
‘There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’
‘Otherwise it’s a smell.’
‘ Don’t try to describe it.’
‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’
‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’
‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’
Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t possibly think…’
Chu says ‘No way. No way.’
‘What?’ Blott says.
‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says.
‘I don’t even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.’
Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No way somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food out.’
Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’
‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’
Sleepy T.P. turns around. ‘Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?’
Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands.
‘Quorum on decay-type odor.’
‘Should we check?’ Chu says. ‘Blott’s hamster might be in there.’
‘Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.’
‘You mean open it?’
‘Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’
‘Open it?’
Chu scratches behind his ear. ‘Me and Gop’ll light it up, Peterson opens it.’
‘Why me?’
‘You’re closest, Sleeps. Hold your breath.’
‘Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’
‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’
‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.
‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’
‘This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’
‘Now look out… ready?… hummph.’
‘ Ow! Get off!’
‘Put the light ov— oh my God.’
‘Eeeeeeeyu.’
‘Hhhhwwwww.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘ Bllaaaaarrr.’
‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’
‘There’s mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.’
‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’
‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’
‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’
‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’
‘Maggots?’
‘Maggots!’
‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’
‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’
‘The smell’s expanding!’
‘I can smell it from here!’: Whale’s tiny distant voice.
‘I’m not enjoying this at all.’
‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’
‘What’re maggots?’
‘Should we just run really fast the other way?’
‘Second that.’
‘This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,’ Blott ventures.
‘Run!’
High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale’s light way out front.
After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint’s place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist’s hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist.
‘James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himself. He is a strange and unhappy,’ Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe’s. ‘When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.’ Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. ‘My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.’
Steeply’s pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth, originating possibly in adolescence. ‘Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’
‘DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.’ Poutrincourt’s right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue.
‘Why the instructions to be unfriendly?’
Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. ‘You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our étoiles, 273 and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ‘
‘Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’
‘No. …’
‘Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’
‘Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.’ A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #12’s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings’ pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing with Stice at the edge of the transom’s shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players’ racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry Poutrincourt said ‘And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with cologne on their pages say this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’
‘I’m here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don’t see what’s quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.’ The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a phone tucked
under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that’s a technical interviewer’s worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man’s monologue had done to Steeply’s brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he’d explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he’d worn Steeply down.
There was the slight shaken-saw wobble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, stacked charts against his chest like a schoolgirl’s books, his smile at the Québecois player in his seat as if he’d never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply’s other side, glancing down at where the profiler’d bracketed notes on the possible sounds a string-hit ball sounds like in cold air: cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat.
The samizdat Entertainment’s director’s other son chipped a return that caught the tape and sat there a moment and fell back.
“Veux que nous nous parlons en français? Serait plus facile, ça?’ This invitation because Poutrincourt’s eyes had gone hooded the minute the de-Lint person joined them.
Poutrincourt’s shrug was blasé: Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French. ‘Very well then look:’ she said (Poutrincourt did, in Québecois), ‘pubescent stars are nothing new to this sport. Lenglen, Rosewall. In A.D. 1887 a fifteen-year-old girl won Wimbledon, she was the first. Evert in the semifinals of the US Open at sixteen, ’71 or ’2. Austin, Jaeger, Graff, Sawamatsu, Venus Williams. Borg. Wilander, Chang, Treffert, Medvedev, Esconja. Becker of the A.D. ’80s. Now this new Argentinean Kleckner.’
Steeply lit a Flanderfume that made deLint’s face spread with distaste. ‘You compare it is like gymnastics, figure skating, competitive to-swim.’
Poutrincourt made no comment on Steeply’s syntax. ‘Just so, then. Good.’
Steeply was adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away from deLint, gazing at a kind of translucent mole on Poutrincourt’s long cheek. Poutrincourt’s thick rimless specs were like a scary nun’s. She looked more male than anything, long and hard and breastless. Steeply tried to exhale away from everyone. ‘The world-plateau tennis not being required to have neither the size and muscle of the hockey nor the basketball nor the American football, for example.’
Poutrincourt nodded. ‘But yes, nor the millimetric precision of your baseball’s hitting, nor how the Italians say the senza errori, the never-miss consistency, that keeps the golfers from true mastery until they have thirty or more years.’ The prorector switched for just a moment to English, possibly for deLint’s benefit: ‘Your French is Parisian but possible. Me, mine is Québecois.’
Steeply now got to give that same sour Gallic shrug. ‘You’re saying to me serious tennis doesn’t need of an athlete anything already adolescents do not possess, if they are exceptional for it.’
‘The medicinists of sports science know well what top tennis requires,’ Poutrincourt said, back in French. ‘Too well, which are the agility, the reflexes, 274 the short-range speed, the balance, some coordination between the hand and the eye, and very much endurance. Some strength, with particular importance for the male. But all these are achievable by the period of puberty, for some. But yes, but wait,’ she said, putting a hand on the notebook as Steeply started to pretend to inscribe. ‘The thing you have put as the question to me. This is why the quandary. The young players, they have the advantage in psyche, also.’
‘The edge of mentality,’ Steeply said, trying to ignore the boy speaking into his hand several seats over. DeLint seemed to be ignoring everything around him, engrossed in the match and his statistics. The Canadian prorector’s hands moved in small circles out front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans’ conversational hands sit like lumps of dough most of the time, Rémy Marathe had pointed out once.
‘But yes, so, the formidable mental edge that their psyches are still not yet adult in all ways — therefore, so, they do not feel the anxiety and pressure in the way it is felt by adult players. This is every story of the teenager appearing from no location to upset the famous adult in professional play — the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can play with abandon, they are without fear.’ A cold smile. Sunlight blazed on her lenses. ‘At the beginning. At the beginning they are without pressure or fear, and they burst from seemingly no location onto the professional stage, instant étoiles, phenomenal, fearless, immunized to pressure, numb to anxiety — at first. They seem as if they are like the adult players only better — better in emotion, more abandoned, not human to the stress or fatigue or the airplaning without end, to the publicity.’
‘The English expression of the child in the store of candy.’
‘Seemingly unfeeling of the loneliness and alienation and everyone wants a thing from the étoile.’
‘The money, also.’
‘But it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent. You remember Jaeger, burned out at sixteen, Austin at twenty. Arias and Krickstein, Esconja and Treffert, too injured to play on by their late teenage years. The much-promising Capriati, the well-known tragedy. Pat Cash of Australia, fourth on earth at eighteen, vanished by the twenties of age.’
‘Not to be mentioning the large money. The endorsings and appearings.’
‘Always so, for the young étoile. And now worse in today, that the sponsors have no broadcasting to advertise with. Now the ephebe who is famous étoile, who is in magazines and the sports reports aux disques, he is pursued to become the Billboard Who Walks. Use this, wear this, for money. Millions thrown at you before you can drive the cars you buy. The head swells to the size of a balloon, why not?’
‘But can pressure be far behind the back?’ Steeply said.
‘Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so loved, so many talking to you as if there is love. But always the same, then. For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed unrecognized before these upset wins. The from-noplace winning created you. You must keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines wanting your profile.’
‘Enter the pressure,’ Steeply said.
‘Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you, wanting to be exist above and not below. Or the others, wanting from you, and only so long as you play with abandon, winning.’
‘Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage.’
‘What is the instruction if we shape the ephebe into the athlete who can win fearlessly to be loved, yet we do not prepare her for the time after fear comes, no?’
‘Therefore the terrible pressure here. They are being tempered. Oven-toughened.’
Hal served wide and this time followed it in, the serve, taking a stutter-step at the service line. Stice’s body seemed to elongate as he reached and got the stick up over the return, driving a forehand. Hal volleyed it too short and took a couple steps off the net as Stice came in, winding up for an easy pass. Hal guessed a direction and started to his left, and The Darkness chipped a lob right over him and hit the heel of his hand against his strings as Hal gave it up halfway back, Stice not rubbing it in but exhorting himself. Hal’s sweat was way heavier than the Kansan’s, but Stice’s face was almost maroon with flush. Each player twirled his stick in his hand as Hal walked back to retrieve the ball. Stice took his position in the deuce court, pulling up his socks.
‘Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,’ deLint said into Steeply’s ear.
And irritating throughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at the very end of the top bleacher, speaking into his fist, coming at the fist from first one angle and then another, pretendin
g to be two people:
‘Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician.
‘Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he’s just finally started establishing control from the baseline.
‘Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The chilly blue eyes.
‘The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim.
‘The Halster’s been having some trouble controlling his volleys.
‘Personally, Jim, I think he’d be better off with his old midsized graphite stick than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to.
‘Stice being the younger player out there, he’s grown up with the extra-large head. A large head is all The Darkness knows.
‘You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza’s a man who’s adapted his game to a large head.
‘Hal’s career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole power-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim.
‘And what a day for tennis.
‘What a day for family fun of all kinds.
‘This Bud’s for the Whole Family. It’s the Bud Match of the Week. Brought to you.
‘Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large head.
‘And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray.
‘Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head.
‘It’s all they know, these kids.’
DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch suffer.
Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance, lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and shallow. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking somehow insectile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle cross-court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the angle allowed.
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