IJ study archive

Scene 065: port washington meet

Scene
65
Pages
258–270
When
6 Nov YDAU (2009) (dateline, p. 258)
Where
Port Washington Tennis Academy, Long Island NY — 36 indoor courts in a pit under tri-domed Lungs; the gallery glass, the tarp passage behind Court 1, Courts 9 and 12in: Port Washington Tennis Academy, Long Island
POV
roving 3rd person settling into Ted Schacht (with one Pemulis-angled paragraph, p. 267)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

The annual 108-match E.T.A.–Port Washington meet on Long Island, rendered through the gallery glass and the cold tarp passage behind the courts. The scene profiles the academy's two top guns — John Wayne, the disowned Québecois #1 whose game has "a kind of automatic beauty" and whose manner is "less alive than undead," and Hal, whose unexplained competitive explosion this year has made him #4 in the nation and Schtitt's "revenant" — then drops backstage, where Ted Schacht holds Michael Pemulis's head as Pemulis vomits his pre-match nerves into a ball bucket. Schacht, remade by Crohn's disease and a ruined knee into someone who no longer needs to win, is the scene's moral center: through him we get the academies' gear-sponsorship economy, Pemulis's probable 'drine dependence, and the worry that Hal's "subterranean compulsive" substance life has a psychic bill coming. Mario lurks in the passage framing shots for his fundraiser documentary; the meet itself, by the fourth game, is carnage in E.T.A.'s favor.

What to notice

The venue is a diagram of the book's spectation problem before anyone names it: players compete in a dug pit behind aquarium glass that traps all sound, so the gallery watches "72 well-muscled children" perform in silence while its own applause reaches the court "like the trapped survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth" — watchers and watched sealed off in both directions, and the watchers costumed in "the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play." Notice the grammar of Wayne's lob-chase: he sprints "for the spot where it will land fair. Would land." — the narration slides into the ball's future tense and then corrects itself, automaticity rendered as a tense error; Wayne is described the way you would describe a machine, and all the scene's human warmth happens out of sight behind the tarp, where one boy cradles another's vomiting head the way his own mother once cradled his. The structural wit is the choice of eyes: the meet's great spectacle — Hal's and Wayne's twin ascents — is routed through Schacht, the one player with nothing at stake, peering at the Show Courts through slits in a curtain; the book lets its least hungry character take the measure of everyone else's hunger.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 258-259: The venue and format: sour-apple halogen, 36 sunken courts, A and B squads in three age brackets, best of 108; pairing exceptions glossed — the Vaught twins (first seen in scene 057 — the room-draw aside ~p. 214, full dossier p. 218; here invoked as the standing doubles exception) and Schacht/Troeltsch, a doubles team "since they were incontinent toddlers back in Philly," playing #2 dubs on the 18's A despite B-squad singles rank; the losing academy sings a really silly song; last year's 57-51 loss and C.T.'s silent bus ride.
  • pp. 259-260: John Wayne's CV: Montcerf asbestos-town origins near the Mercier Dam, recruited by Schtitt and deLint with the go-pro-at-nineteen argument, Canada disowning him; #1-in-effect among U.S. juniors with Veach the Florida Independent (n.85) sitting on his ranking in Pompano Beach.
  • p. 260: Hal's "quantumish competitive plateaux-hop" — from 43rd to 4th nationally at seventeen; nobody talks to him about it, "the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-hitter going"; the attrition game, opponents going to court-side oxygen (n.86); Schtitt now calls him his "revenant."
  • pp. 260-261: Wayne runs down a perfect lob — the backpedal, the blind sprint, the half-pirouette winner — applause through the aquarium glass "like the trapped survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth."
  • pp. 261-262: Wayne hits the tarp; behind it Schacht hauls Pemulis clear of the bulge, stroking his head "as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in Philly"; Wayne's all-business profile: scrupulous score-cards, the asbestos-miner father in triple-thick masks holding on until John can "take him away from all this," the hypertonic mask, "everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment."
  • pp. 262-265: The tarp-passage walk: Pemulis's self-disgust ("This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize," pp. 263-264), Schacht's stomach-men taxonomy ("Cisne, Yard-Guard, Lord, you: stomach men," p. 264) and damage control (the Atlanta stomach-incident precedent; a Big Buddy will empty the bucket on the sly); gear sociology — Schacht's discontinued Head Masters, racquet-cover antifashion (only gut-stringers like Pemulis, Rader, and Unwin carry covers, p. 265), P.W.T.A. as Wilson's de facto subsidiary, Pemulis off Dunlop's Free List (n.88) but stencilling their logo on anyway, "touchingly insecure."
  • p. 265: Mario — in little Audern Tallat-Kelpsa's borrowed drill-sweats — lurching ten meters behind, framing Schacht's back with thumbs and fingers, solving the lighting problem of the doomed gladiatorial passage for his annual fundraiser documentary (his post-match answer: a Marino 350 with diffusion filter winched on overhead cable, or fast film and a receding "doomed mist of low exposure").
  • pp. 266-267: Schacht's remaking: since the Crohn's and the knee he'd describe his desire to win as "a preference, nothing more"; his game improved once purposeless; Schtitt warms to him as a peer; the committed future dentist interning at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation; his read of Pemulis as physically 'drine-dependent ("It's not his business").
  • pp. 267-268: Pemulis's reciprocal read of Schacht: substances as "a kind of tourism," no relief-need; Schacht "one of these people who don't need much, much less much more"; the lyric Lung-inflation anticipation — barn-raising communality, the ATHSCME helicopter mounting the Effectuator on the nacelle, the post-Inflation all-night high pizza session.
  • pp. 269-270: Schtitt's paradox via Schacht: "to win enough of the time… you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all" (n.89 expands: the un-resolvable it is pedagogically deliberate); Hal v. Schacht on the care axis — Hal "asymmetrically hobbled on the care-too-much side," privately fearing Schacht's equanimity as doom-gray surrender yet half envying it; Schacht's silence about Hal's "devolution from occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive," the Pump Room and Visine, and the "psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, somewhere, coming."
  • p. 270: Carnage on the Show Courts ("at a certain point it becomes like Romans applauding lions"); "Schacht and his man play."

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the fullest match-day canvas yet — Wayne's automatic beauty, Hal's plateaux-hop, Schacht's volleyball knee, plus Schtitt's care/not-care paradox (p. 269, n.89) as E.T.A.'s official metaphysics.
  • Addiction and Recovery: a quiet substance census — Pemulis's probable 'drine dependence and ritual pre-match abstinence, Troeltsch's 'drines, Schacht's take-it-or-leave-it tourism, and Hal's compulsion gone subterranean with its bill in the mail (p. 270).
  • Entertainment and the Self: Wayne as finished product — "destined for the Show… an all-business entertainer, citizen of the world, everywhere undead" (p. 262): the player perfected into pure spectacle, at the cost of aliveness.
  • Fathers and Sons: Wayne's father in the asbestos mine holding on for his son's pro money; JOI as the man who first spotted Wayne at six; Schacht mothering Pemulis's sick head as his own mother had.
  • Film and Optics: Mario working a real cinematography problem (light vs. doom in the tarp-tunnel, the Marino-350/diffusion solution, p. 265) inside a scene that opens with JOI's lens on six-year-old Wayne — the inheritance practiced and its origin cited within five pages.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The WhataBurger Invitational (pp. 259, 265, 267) is the novel's offstage terminus (late Nov, Tucson) — Pemulis's "vested emotional interest" in attending links straight to the DMZ dosing window set for 11/20-21 in scene 057. Internal snag (Carlisle): p. 259 says Veach will show "in a couple weeks" but p. 267 puts the tournament "over Thanksgiving," three weeks out — authorial, as printed.
  • Mario's documentary needs WhataBurger "final footage" (p. 265) yet is distributed at the pre-Thanksgiving fête — a quiet production-schedule contradiction (Carlisle catch; as printed).
  • Schacht's diagnosis of Pemulis carries its own irony, worth preserving exactly: Pemulis "never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any kind of withdrawal or dependence" (p. 267) — the pharmacologist in denial about his own pharmacology; Schacht diagnoses but rules it "not his business."

Forward

  • n.87 routes the 'Homo' John Wayne film to the filmography — it is Homo Duplex (n.24 p. 988; see scene n024), and the main text here already carries the punchline: Wayne's "not-to-be-fucked-with papa eventually litigated the kid's segment out" (p. 260). JOI's lens on Wayne eleven years before Wayne reaches E.T.A. (and before Wayne's eventual entanglement with Avril, p. 552 ff.).
  • The Lung-inflation set-piece (p. 268) fixes Inflation day at the fourth Monday of November = 23 Nov YDAU — i.e., the warm communal future it imagines sits just past the book's 20-Nov blizzard endgame; the E.T.A. Lung covers only the sixteen Center Courts (vs. P.W.T.A.'s 36), with Otis P. Lord among the tech-wonks mounting heaters.
  • "Revenant" (p. 260): Schtitt's affectionate epithet for Hal lands differently after the wraith chapters — the ghost-vocabulary attaches to Hal long before the Year of Glad husk we met in scene 001.
  • Schacht's "psychic credit-card bill" for Hal (p. 270) is the same deferred reckoning as the face-in-the-floor dream (scene 064, p. 253); it comes due in the withdrawal/Eschaton/DMZ cascade of late November.
  • Wayne's Montcerf/Mercier Dam origins and revoked citizenship feed the Québec-separatism web (and the question of Wayne's loyalties, kept alive by the Steeply–Poutrincourt courtside talk during the Hal–Stice exhibition — "A fellow compatriot of Terry here," p. 681, scene 130 — and by the Year-of-Glad flash of Wayne "standing watch in a mask" at the head-dig, p. 17, scene 003).
  • Mario's documentary-in-progress is for the pre-Thanksgiving fundraising fête; his filmmaking continues the JOI inheritance (film-optics) and recurs at the I-Day gala screening (scenes 081 ff.).
  • Schacht's match outcome and Pemulis's "mysterious" win are reported in scene 067 — including the strong implication Pemulis chemically assisted his opponent's default.

Notable passages (8)
  • p. 260: "the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-hitter going" — E.T.A.'s superstitious silence around Hal's explosion.
  • p. 262: Schacht "lightly strokes the sides of Pemulis's head as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in Philly" — the book's gentlest sentence about Pemulis; care passed down a generation and sideways.
  • pp. 263-264: "This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize." — Pemulis's pre-match self-estrangement; the swagger's underside, in his own voice.
  • pp. 260-261: Wayne running down the lob — the book's purest piece of tennis choreography; "he comes around the side of the bounced ball's second ascent the way you come up around the side of somebody you're going to hurt."
  • p. 261: applause behind the glass "like the trapped survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth" — spectation as entombment.
  • p. 262: "everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment" — Wayne as the Show's finished, hollowed product.
  • p. 268: the Lung-inflation passage — communal, warm, one of the book's few unironic happiness set-pieces.
  • pp. 269-270: Schtitt's care/not-care paradox and the Hal-Schacht comparison — core the-body-tennis material.

What links here Timeline events here (47) · Connected from (7) · Passages quoted here (36) · Motifs (6)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs