Pages 121–126
Mid-October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — a step three weeks back from the 3-November scenes around it — about 1900h., on the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside tree-line. Mario is out on a post-prandial stroll with Hal, who melts off into the pines; out of the underbrush comes Millicent Kent, the academy's #1 Girls' 16's singles player (a first appearance), enormous and determined, who has found a brand-new camera tripod standing in a thicket with no footprints around it and wants a witness. The scene announces itself in an all-caps heading as Mario's first even remotely romantic experience.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Empire Waste Displacement (p. 121) — a waste-shipment vehicle whistling overhead "in the start of its arc"; first sighting, and the name plus the arc is all you get (cf. "waste-exporting," p. 83).
- Husky VI (p. 121) — the tripod's make; Mario's late dad used "a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky" in his early art-film days.
- police-lock (p. 122) — Mario's vest; a police lock is the floor-braced bar that props a door shut, which tells you what the vest does for him.
- Con-Edison (p. 123) — the real New York utility; her mother left with its home-energy auditor.
- Ice Capades (p. 125) — real touring ice-skating extravaganza.
- Titian (p. 125) — real Renaissance painter, famous for reclining figures.
After you read: three things
1. The comedy is two sincere monologues missing each other completely. Millicent unspools her actual inner life — interpretive dance over tennis, the vanished mother, and finally finding her morbidly obese Old Man in her violet leotard, "capering" ("that was the exact creepy word for it: capering," p. 124). Mario responds with tripod model-spec questions and "Golly Ned." Neither is being evasive; neither is received. The ambush ending — his head crushed to her thorax, his catastrophic ticklishness as alarm-system — resolves it as farce without mocking either of them.
2. Notice what quietly frames the romance. The stroll exists because Hal "wanted to be able to go off by himself briefly," and Mario "contrived... to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig ensemble" so his brother could slip away — fifteen secret minutes in the fragrant pines, gear bag along. You know Hal's routine from pp. 101–102; here you see the other half: Mario's practiced, wordless enabling. The brothers never discuss it. That tact is the scene's saddest and tenderest fact.
3. The scene plants two small mysteries and one koan. A gleaming new tripod in the middle of a thicket, no footprints; and crackling from another thicket that Mario is certain isn't Hal (p. 123) — the scene explains neither. Then the koan: after all three give up searching, the tripod turns up on the dark walk home, "just like when there was a word on the tip of your tongue" that pops in "the exact second you stop trying" (p. 126). Wanting-less-hard as the working method — file it next to Schtitt's doctrines.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.