Pages 258–270
6 November, per the dateline — the day after the brothers' phone call. E.T.A. travels to the Port Washington Tennis Academy on Long Island for the annual meet: 108 matches on thirty-six sunken indoor courts, spectated through gallery glass; the losing academy has to sing a really silly song. But the scene spends most of its time backstage, in the cold tarp passage behind Court 1, where Ted Schacht holds Michael Pemulis's head while Pemulis vomits his pre-match nerves into a ball bucket. The point of view settles into Schacht, and the meet becomes a set of portraits: John Wayne, Hal, Pemulis, and Schacht himself — the book's first long look at all four as players.
Terms, in order of appearance
- A and B squads / best of 108 (pp. 258–259) — the meet's format: three age brackets, singles and doubles, everything counted.
- Montcerf (p. 259) — Wayne's Québec hometown, an asbestos-mining town; his father still works the mine.
- court-side oxygen (p. 260) — legal on the junior tour since a Raleigh embolism; endnote 86 has the story.
- revenant (p. 260) — real word: one who returns from the dead; Schtitt's new name for Hal.
- Head Master (p. 265) — real, discontinued racquet model; Schacht plays antiques and doesn't care.
- Free List (p. 265) — sponsorship argot: gear given gratis to ranked juniors; endnote 88 covers Pemulis's expulsion from Dunlop's.
- Crohn's Disease (p. 266) — real chronic bowel disease; with the knee, half of what remade Schacht at sixteen.
- neurasthenic (p. 267) — old medical word: nervous, weak-stomached; Schacht's read on Pemulis's gut.
After you read: three things
1. The undead vocabulary around the two best players (pp. 260–262). Wayne's game has "a kind of automatic beauty"; he's headed for the Show, "everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment." Hal, after his inexplicable leap to #4, is now Schtitt's "revenant" — returner from the dead. Nobody talks to Hal about the leap, "the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-hitter going." The scene keeps describing its finest bodies in mortuary terms; let that register.
2. Schacht is the scene's counter-example (pp. 262–268). Crohn's disease and a ruined knee "broke and remade him": he'd now call wanting to win "a preference, nothing more" — and his game improved once it stopped mattering. He mothers Pemulis's sick head "as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in Philly," diagnoses Pemulis's stomach as chemical dependence, and says nothing — "not his business." Against E.T.A.'s whole machinery of caring, here's a man conspicuously at peace, and the scene lets you wonder whether that's wisdom or surrender; Hal, "asymmetrically hobbled on the care-too-much side," wonders the same.
3. The last page names Hal's trajectory out loud (p. 270). Schtitt's official paradox — you must "care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all" (endnote 89 admits the it is deliberately unresolvable) — and then, in Schacht's silence, the quiet ledger: Hal's "devolution from occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive," and a "psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, somewhere, coming." The book rarely forecasts; this is as close as it comes.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.