Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,101

His ears, which had always been quite large or protrusive, were flushed from recent exertion. When asked if, upon reflection, he thought a cigar this early in the day was perhaps such a good idea, Dr. Sipe, who was due to turn age 76 this coming July 6th (his birth stone was known to be ‘the Ruby’), responded that the sole indicator of his desiring my input on his personal habits would consist in his explicitly coming to me and requesting it, at which I cleared my throat slightly and shrugged or smiled, avoiding Audrey Bogen’s dark (our own Audrey’s being grey-green or, in certain lights, ‘Hazel’) eyes as she placed on the table a small bowl of very shiny nuts and an ash-tray of clear glass on whose bottom was reproduced the Raritan Club’s escutcheon, which Dr. Sipe pulled closer and rotated slightly to satisfy some obscure criteria in his ritual for enjoying a cigar. Twice already, I had yawned so violently that a popping noise and sudden, as it were, ‘stabbing’ pain manifested just beneath my left ear. ‘Father,’ whose physical health’s minutiae were a topic of endless colloquy among his different children, had apparently suffered a number of tiny, highly localized strokes over the previous several years—or, in the language of Health Plan underwriting, ‘Transient ischemic accidents’—which Hope’s younger brother, ‘Chip’ (whose actual given name is Chester) had confirmed, in the bland, almost affectless or subdued way evidently characteristic of practicing Neurologists everywhere, were almost ‘Par’ for the ‘course’ for a septuagenarian male of Dr. Sipe’s history and condition, and were, evidently, individually of little account, producing little more in the way of symptomology than transient dizziness or perceptual distortion. Empirically, the evident result of this was that ‘Father’ was now one of the particular sort of well to do elderly (or, as some prefer, ‘Senior’) men who appear well preserved and even still somewhat distinguished from a certain distance away, but whose eyes, on closer proximity, reveal a subtle lack of focus, and whose facial expression or affect appears to be, in some subtle but unmistakable way, ‘off,’ resulting in a perpetual ‘queer look’ or mien which sometimes frightened his younger grandchildren. (This notwithstanding the fact that our own Audrey, now 19 and Dr. Sipe’s second oldest grandchild, had, on the other hand, never once reported being frightened of or by her ‘Greatfather [a childhood sobriquet which had stuck],’ who had, in turn, addressed Audrey as—sans any detectable trace of irony or awareness—‘My little Princess,’ and had, together with his wife, ‘spoiled’ Audrey with such lavish and excessive indulgence as to sometimes arouse tensions between Hope and this latest Mrs. Sipe, the two of whom were not [as Hope would have it] the ‘closest of friends’ to begin with. [By mutual and unspoken consensus, our Audrey customarily addressed Hope as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’ and myself as ‘Randall,’ ‘Randy,’ or, when angry or trying to make some ironic point in the perennial struggle for youthful control v. independence, as ‘Mr. Napier,’ ‘Mr. and Mrs. Napier’ or (with decided sarcasm) as ‘the Dynamic Duo.’]) Besides his forehead’s four distracting, pre-cancerous spots, or lesions or ‘keratonesis,’ it was only in recent years, too, that Hope’s stepfather’s mouth had developed the habit of continuing to move slightly after he had ceased speaking, either as if savoring the words’ taste or silently reprising them, and these movements sometimes reminded one of some type of small animal which has been struck or run over and continues to writhe wetly in the road-way, which was, to say the least, disconcerting. There is also the issue or matter of ‘Father’’s bowed upper back and consequent jutting head, which causes him to appear to be thrusting his face and mouth forward directly at one in an aggressive, almost predatory fashion, which is also disconcerting, which may be a matter of geriatric posture or disc compression or else the beginning of an actual ‘hunch-back’ or ‘hump,’ which he is evidently very vain and sensitive about and which no one in the ‘family’ is ever under any circumstances permitted to mention except his wife, who will suddenly touch or push at his jutting head impatiently and tell him, ‘For God’s sake, Edmund, straighten up,’ in a tone which makes everyone at the table uncomfortable. Then an extremely brief and almost ‘strobe’-like associative tableau in which Hope’s stepfather and herself, at some past or distantly prior point in time, are seated together in an unfamiliar coupe or sports