‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’
Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.
‘This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn’t just them and Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’
DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint’s been laying for him ever since the incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis’s deal, if anybody’s Troeltsch’s, but the cortex couldn’t nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a ‘drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson’s eyes had almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division in the papers deLint held.
‘Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’
‘My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the speaker’s Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis.’
It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girclass="underline" this was adolescent Tavis asking her for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn’t exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which Wayne’d clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible excuse — though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.
‘Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations of his various peers and instructors.’
‘I’ve got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, was my impression.’
‘Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —’ pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis’d have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle.
‘I believe the expression was “a palsied twit,” ‘ Nwangi said to deLint.
‘Yes “palsied twit.” And Francis Unwin quote “has the on-court look of a cornered rodent.” And Disney R. Leith: the quote “sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions.” Ms. Richardson-Levy-o’Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of committee dealing with the topic of the quote “Itty Bitty Titty.” On Coach Schtitt, quote, seeming as if he’d been “denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward.” Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I’ve got it quote “the sort of fellow who’ll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won’t even share food or trade food.” ‘
‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — chillingly — he hadn’t shut up.
‘— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette Long-ley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.” ‘
‘I’m remembering the word as insertable.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.
‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attache case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ‘
‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’
Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.
Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’
‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.” We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine” in lieu of higher cortex function.’