IJ study archive

Scene 102: tavis waiting room

Scene
102
Pages
508–527
When
10 Nov YDAU (2009), ~48 hours after the I-Day Eschaton debacle; long analepsis to late August YDAU (Tina Echt's intake) and to earlier this day (Zegarelli's dental chair)
Where
E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. building — the Headmaster's blue waiting room, Avril's adjacent doorless office, then C.T.'s double-doored office; flashbacks to the same waiting room in August and to Zegarelli's dental office, Enfieldin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. building
POV
Hal (3rd person, free-indirect, present-tense frame with past-tense flashback)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

Two days after the Eschaton debacle, Hal — fresh from a tooth extraction, half his face dead, obsessively checking for drool — waits in Tavis's compulsively blue waiting room with Pemulis (rehearsing a Pink2-embedded defense), Axford, and Kittenplan, while Avril runs the under-13 girls' "diddle-check" in her doorless office next door and an O.N.A.N.T.A. urine doctor waits unseen inside. The wait opens into a deep tour of E.T.A.'s administrative family: Lateral Alice Moore's helicopter-crash laterality, Pemulis's Delco-doorknob prank and his terror of expulsion, disciplinary "Pukers" disguised as conditioning, Hal's eerie blankness about his family qua family, and Charles Tavis entire — SkyDome disgrace, pathological openness, and the second, quiet, perspectivally growing Tavis who is "not to be fucked with." An August flashback gives Tavis's intake of seven-year-old Tina Echt ("we will take apart your skull very gently...") and a long two-hander with Avril — the Granny Smith, Politeness Roulette, the "clinkers" etymology routine — during which Hal clocks his own addiction by realizing he'd rather get high alone in the Pump Room than eat with Stice. The summons finally comes: inside sit Rusk, poor Otis Lord with the Hitachi monitor still impaled over his head, Clenette emptying wastebaskets — and the hidden urologist, whom Tavis quietly asks to close both doors.

What to notice

The opening sentence — "The following things in the room were blue." — is symptom, not scene-setting: a mind waiting on discipline copes by audit, and the audit never stops, resurfacing all scene long (Axford's left sock but not his right; Kittenplan showing "not even a hint of the color blue"; Avril's tapping pen held back a full clause before the color drops). Notice the acoustics as a power map: Avril's office has no door, so the diddle-check plays as open broadcast; Tavis is double-doored, reduced to "whistly fricatives"; and nineteen pages resolve into one quiet stage direction — the hidden urologist asked "very quietly please to close both doors", the first sealed room in the scene and therefore the real verdict. The August flashback runs on counterpoint: Tavis's skull-reconstruction aria drifts out of his jaw-like vestibule between the lines of the Granny Smith duel, so that "Want my Mommy and Daddy" lands as chorus to Politeness Roulette — a seven-year-old howling the exact plea Hal's family idiom exists to make unsayable. The body keeps its own ledger meanwhile: the anesthetized half-face "ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli" of the very wallpaper Hal loathes (the decor absorbing him), the unmoored military joke — Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core — cycling without meaning, and the hallucinated handshake after which "Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind". Watch Kittenplan exit the comedy: she alone goes in "like someone stepping down off a dais". And the scene's coldest line is a three-word paragraph-closer delivered like a threat, right after Lateral Alice stops meeting anyone's eye: "One big family."

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 508: (after the displaced Marathe/Steeply tail — see Connections) section header 10 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.; the inventory of everything blue in the waiting room begins.
  • p. 509: Pemulis bobbing in his chair over the ESCHAX directory printout — "a kind of rapid rodential squeaking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods"; Hal post-extraction at Zegarelli's, left face "big and dead," drool anxiety; the sky-and-cloud wallpaper (same as the dentist's) that makes Hal feel "high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting."
  • pp. 509-510: Lateral Alice Moore — traffic-helicopter collision, chronic oxygen debt, side-to-side movement only; the summoned four (Hal, Pemulis, Kittenplan, Axford) presume Eschaton fallout.
  • p. 510: the two offices; Avril's doorlessness (her "feelings about enclosure"); her hair vividly white "as of the last few months before Himself's felo de se"; Axford frankly appraising her legs (n.210: she's still "endocrinologically compelling" at 50+, which Hal and Mario "accept").
  • pp. 510-511: diddle-check history — coach "Touchy" Phiely of Rolling Hills, the telephotos and tiny panties, hence mandated monthly checks; Avril presiding because Rusk may be inside with Tavis, which bodes ill.
  • p. 511: Pemulis's defense scroll; n.211 — his deepest dread is expulsion back down Comm. Ave. to Allston, hence the precautions and the YES, I'M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH? poster from Hal and Schacht.
  • p. 512: the Pemulis-Rusk loathing and the Delco battery wired to her office doorknob at fifteen — the electrocuted Brighton-Irish cleaning lady (permanent perm, crossed eyes), ambulance-chaser F. X. ('Follow That Ambulance') Byrne, litigation ongoing.
  • pp. 512-513: Axford profile — sinistral, fireworks-mangled right hand, Yale-or-bust family pressure; n.213: he and Hal share a constitutional inability to call "a little help" for errant balls; Pemulis banters with Moore, probing the WhataBurger invitation stack for initials M.M.P.; the DANGER: THIRD RAIL name plaque.
  • pp. 513-514: the overheard diddle-check — Avril's gentle script ("touched by a tall person in a way that's made you uncomfortable?") versus the girls' actual grievances: Gramma's cheek-pinches, head-pats "like I'm a schnauzer," dads' little back-shoves, Kittenplan's post-lights-out Indian rub-burns; "she's subtle and very good with small children."
  • p. 515: Kittenplan's "serious Pukers" prediction; the anatomy of punishment-as-conditioning — drills with all sadism sub rosa (n.214: the lob-sprint pain-fest; n.215: the YWQMD D.S.S. complaint legend and deLint's confinement-level fury); why Schtitt and the prorectors are feared more than any academic.
  • p. 515: the strategy — Pemulis talks (Eschaton's "extracurricular impulse and structure" predates them; he merely codified, Hal merely wrote the manual), Hal interjects as reasonable voice, Axford counts carpet fibers; n.212: everyone but Kittenplan is keenly aware whose Little Buddies the casualties were.
  • pp. 515-516: Hal's family-blankness — relatives' names like words on the tongue's tip; "some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to himself"; the exception is Mario; he avoids Rusk and her "Coatlicue Complex" (n.216, in full: "No clue.").
  • pp. 516-517: Tavis's C.V. — engineer of "patterned dispersal" for spectatorial crowds; the Toronto SkyDome disgrace (hotel-bedroom sex visible from the foul lines; the disgruntled scoreboard cameraman's 75-meter replays); his market killed off "as more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing."
  • pp. 517-518: the three readings of Tavis's pathological openness (Hal: excruciating camouflage of shyness; Mario: vulnerability impossible not to feel for; Orin and Marlon Bain: "less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person"); Avril's anecdote of the child C.T. loudly announcing his own creepy fringe-lurking.
  • p. 518: August flashback opens — Tavis's earlier summons: orienting the legally blind, multi-eyed, crab-skulled Ticonderoga prospect (evacuated too late; the rolling halo-brace IV-stand) who deferred to spring; Hal hungry at dusk, ankle at its worst (n.217: Wayne always got the one Jr. Slam nod).
  • pp. 518-519: kids who just get dropped off — gravel thrown by barely-stopping parents' cars; Jim Struck's arrival and the tarantula-Simone expulsion backstory; Tavis foreshortened behind his vast desk with tiny Tina Echt (n.218: JOI's Meniscus Optical wide-angle mirrors — "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" — postulated to be inspired by the always-receding Tavis).
  • pp. 519-520: Stice's banned Tavis-impression (hand shielding eyes, scanning the horizon as Tavis "heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down"); The Darkness enters in sweaty black Fila, takes the AC downdraft: "The little guy going to be a long time in there?" — "You have to ask?"
  • pp. 520-521: Tavis's intake speech to a seven-year-old: "we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be"; Tina howls; Tavis's mortified backpedaling and the offer of "a totally unthreatening lap" (n.219: Mr. Bouncety-Bounce; n.220: the sadistic StairBlaster).
  • p. 521: the tell Hal reads in himself: he never thought to arrange supper with Stice — because he was already planning to get high in secret in the Pump Room; Orin's line that Avril is "The Black Hole of Human Attention."
  • pp. 522-523: Avril enters, establishes herself at the room's exact center; the ankle exchange (Hal hates himself for exaggerating the limp); Tavis in the background talking Tina off the ledge ("There There There"; "Want my Mommy and Daddy").
  • p. 523: the Granny Smith and Politeness Roulette — "to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her"; Orin's image: she carries her feelings "with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot"; Hal eats the apple, "pretending to pretend his reluctance... was a pretense."
  • pp. 523-524: the Echt dossier (Pawtucket; unleavened-baker father; Hal's "Triple-A. Not A.A.A." correction); Hal's burnout prophecy for a seven-year-old starter — "by fourteen she'll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill."
  • p. 524: the "clinkers" routine — Avril's staged aphasiac finger-snapping, Hal's instant etymology, and the bind: "Is it showing off if you hate it?" (n.221 hangs a page on, off Slobodan at p. 525 — the Latvian Satellite pro who thought Hal's name was All.)
  • p. 525: Tavis winding up with Tina — E.T.A. as where the resources come from, the player as "a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations"; Hal dodges the family dinner for "blasting down the hill" with Stice and maybe Pemulis; Avril: "Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself."
  • p. 526: the Echt-Tavis handshake hallucination (jacking off / Sieg Heil — "Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind"); snap back to today's dental chair — Zegarelli's olive eyes, medieval halo, infamous breath, the counselled synchronized breathing.
  • pp. 526-527: the two Tavises — when genuinely threatened he goes very quiet and very still and "seems, perspectivally, to grow... dopplering in at a whisper"; the second alert: Lateral Alice formally buzzed to usher you in without meeting your eye, "as if there's shame. One big family."
  • p. 527: inside — Clenette Henderson, nine-month temp "from down the hill," emptying Tavis's wastebaskets, her cart with a crazy wheel "like poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart"; Rusk on the ottoman, hose laddered; Otis Lord slumped with the Hitachi monitor still over his head, glass shards pointing at his throat, the nurse holding it steady; Tavis coolly bending a giant paper clip "into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle"; and behind them, hidden by the open inner door, the scrubbed young O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist "severely underdue at E.T.A." — whom Tavis, seeming "direly to rise from his chair without getting up," quietly asks to close both doors (runs to p. 528).

Themes in this scene

  • Family and Hamlet: the scene is a taxonomy of the Incandenza/Tavis family system — Politeness Roulette, the Black Hole of Human Attention, Hal's creaky-machine blankness about kin, domestic and vocational authority bleeding together ("One big family" as threat).
  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal's secret-Pump-Room realization is the scene's diagnostic core — preferring solitary highs to companionship is the textbook tell his Ennet House counterparts would name instantly; plus the apple-saliva, Kodiak logistics, compulsive Oral-B.
  • The Body and Tennis: discipline as conditioning (Pukers, Tap & Whack), the chronic ankle, and Tavis's skull speech — the academy's explicit project of disassembling children and reassembling them as players.
  • Communication and Solipsism: a scene conducted almost wholly by overhearing (doorless offices, audible smiles, fricatives through oak) while Hal sits with a numb face he must check manually for drool — involuntary expression he can't feel or control, the YG horror in miniature.
  • Entertainment and the Self: Tavis's pitch makes the player "a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto"; his own career was killed by cartridge home-viewing — spectation economics frames even the discipline meeting (and the hidden urologist guards the purity of the performing bodies).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The squeak chain from scene 099: Pemulis's "rodential squeaking" chair (p. 509) lands three scenes after JOI's father's "gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats" (p. 492) and gives the memoirist's son the same fantods — an inherited-phobia relay these scenes perform silently; cf. Hal's squeaking ankle (p. 514) and Tavis's squeaky drawers/Nunn Bush (pp. 519, 524).
  • Clenette Henderson "from down the hill" (p. 527) closes these scenes' Brighton loop opened by Roy Tony at the NA meeting (scene 100): both figures from her scene-008 monologue world are now inside the recovery/E.T.A. orbit — the novel's two institutions literally share staff.
  • n.218's "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" is JOI optics money (cf. n.24) repurposed as a Tavis joke — and as fair warning about the quietly growing second Tavis of pp. 526-527.
  • Tavis's SkyDome backstory (pp. 516-517) is the comic-history counterpart of scene 087's media arc: live spectation dying into cartridge dissemination, the precondition of the Entertainment economy.
  • The August intake of Tina Echt pairs with the other child-formation scene nearby — JOI's 1963 memoir (scene 099): two children being shaped by institutional/parental will, forty-six B.S.-and-Subsidized years apart.
  • Hal's drool-and-numb-face anxiety — expression escaping his control — prefigures the YG opening (scene 001), where exactly this nightmare comes true; likewise the wallpaper's "plummeting" feeling and his "maybe starting to lose my mind" flash.

Forward

  • Direct fallout of scene 073 (Eschaton, pp. 321-342): Lord's head through the monitor glass, Possalthwaite's nose, Penn's leg; n.212's Buddy-accounting and Pemulis's n.211 expulsion-dread set the stakes that pay off in the urine-test crisis — the hidden urologist here begins the thread that surfaces in n.324's locker-room aftermath (the Avril-blackmail reveal, p. 1068) and resolves in Pemulis's quiet expulsion (n.332).
  • n.210 (Avril still endocrinologically compelling) and the separate-bedrooms detail (p. 519) feed the Avril threads: her affairs per Marlon Bain's letter to Steeply (pp. 1048ff, n.269 — Bain: "not from Orin but from an innocent female relative"; Orin's own account is n.234) and the John Wayne liaison Pemulis walked in on the night before this scene (scene 108, 9 Nov).
  • Temporal slip, flagged as written: Moore types RSVPs to "next week's WhataBurger Invitational" (p. 511) on 10 Nov, though the Tucson tournament runs Thanksgiving weekend — n.110 (p. 1009; covered at scene n110) has Orin able to "be down there by midday Sunday" after the Patriots game of "the 27th or -8th." Cited as written per convention; ~2.5-week discrepancy.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (48) · Connected from (21) · Passages quoted here (54) · Motifs (7)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs