Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,100

stated her intentions to bring us more snack mix. ‘Father’’s advanced age and physical senescence, in other words, making the frankness of his gaze—which, in Wilkes Barre during my own youth, was termed ‘Look[ing] her over’—appear ingenuous, child-like and apparently almost ‘innocent’ or harmless to young women instead of salacious or lewd. This was a quality (or, as it were, lack of it) which I myself was, of course, all too conscious or aware of, since, as our own Audrey had entered the adolescence whose onset, in contemporary times’ girls, seems to become earlier all the time, and had physically ‘matured’ or (in my wife’s phrase) ‘fill[ed] out,’ so also, of course, had the other members of the peer group whom she ‘hung’ around with or brought to the house or along on seaside vacations and\or inland canoe trips in June, July or early August; and, in the case of some of the more prematurely ‘mature’ or voluptuous of these peers, the conflict between the natural urge or instinctual drive to look at them as would any adult, ‘red-blooded’ man, v. the obvious social restrictions erected by my role as their friend’s adoptive father, became, in some cases, so awkward or painful that I could scarcely bring myself to look at or scarcely even to acknowledge them at all, a phenomenon which our Audrey, not surprisingly, rarely even noticed, but which sometimes vexed Hope to the point that once or twice, during marital arguments, she would mock my pained confusion, and would aver that she’d prefer it—or the term she used might more aptly have been that she would ‘respect’ it more—if I would simply, openly ogle or leer rather than the stricken, affectedly casual avoidance which I feigned as if I expected it to fool anyone with eyes in their head as they watched my sad pantomime with pity and disgust. Because of the severe sleep disturbance, discord with Hope and trouble in my Dept. of the company for which I served as Assistant Systems Supervisor (which provided out-sourced data and document storage facilities and systems for a number of small- and mid-sized insurance providers in the Mid-Atlantic region), my chronic distress had reached the point at which sometimes I felt near tears, which, of course, in the 19th Hole with Hope’s stepfather, would be an unthinkable happen-stance. Sometimes, often while driving, I feared that I was going to have an infarction. Next, in a predictable yet far more disturbing stage of the wave of disorientation, came the appearance of a strange, static, hallucinatory tableau or mental ‘shot,’ ‘scene,’ Fata morgana or ‘vision’ of a public telephone in an airport or commuter rail terminal’s linear row or ‘bank’ of public phones, ringing. Travelers are hurrying laterally past the row of phones, some bearing or pulling ‘carry on’ luggage and other personal possessions, walking or hurrying past while the telephone, which remains at the center of the view of the scene or tableau, rings on and on, persistently, but is unanswered, with none of the ‘bank’ of phones’ other phones in use and none of the air travelers or commuters acknowledging or even so much as glancing at the ringing phone, about which there is suddenly something terribly ‘moving’ or poignant, forlorn, melancholic or even foreboding, an endlessly ringing and unanswered public phone, all of which appears or seems to occur both endlessly and in, as it were, ‘no-time,’ and is accompanied by an incongruous odor of saffron.

Hope’s stepfather, a career Medical executive for Prudential Insurance, Inc.—or, ‘The Rock,’ as it is often popularly known—as his own father before him evidently was, as well, as well as being a ‘Fourth Ward’ historical district native born and bred, knew Feigenspan lager by its original trademark, ‘Pride of Newark’ (or, ‘P.O.N.’), and made rather a point of referring to it in no other way, also affecting to brush across his upper lip with a knuckle after drinking, in the way of the city’s ‘working-’men, reaching then into a pocket of his vest and producing his cigar case and clip, as well as his slim, modernistic gold lighter, a gift from his wife (and accordingly inscribed), and commencing the ritual of preparing to smoke an expensive Cohiba cigar with his draft lager, gesturing peremptorily in the direction of the bar for an ash-tray, at which juncture I noted once more how exceedingly thin, sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and hand in the air appeared.