Pages 565–567

Randy Lenz, out at night · first-time reader guide · all scenes

Endnote 234 arrives on page 565 — it gets its own page.

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

A rented room in Phoenix, present tense. The calendar has stepped back four days: this is 7 November, the day Orin volunteered to drive "Helen" Steeply — the oversized Moment reporter you've known from the desert scenes — down to Sky Harbor airport, and the woman now in his arms is a "putatively Swiss hand-model" who approached him at the Delta gate afterward. Just the two of them, and a mirror. The scene barely moves: it's mostly the narration dissecting one embrace, in one very long paragraph, a parenthesis, and a coda — analysis as action, deliberate.

Terms, in order of appearance

Sky Harbor Int. Airport (p. 565) — Phoenix's real airport.
Subject (p. 565) — Orin's standing word for the women he pursues, in use since pp. 42–49; here it covers the reporter in the car too.
endnote 234 (p. 565) — keyed to Steeply's "family-linen inquiry": transcript excerpts from the interviews themselves; a long flip.
Hallie (p. 565) — Orin's name for his brother Hal.
Cardinal-souvenir football (p. 565) — Arizona Cardinals, the team Orin punts for.
hand-model (p. 565) — real profession: hands photographed for ads; hers are "professionally lovely."
endnote 235 (p. 566) — three lines on who arrayed the family photos along the dresser; worth the flip.
the punter (p. 566) — the narration's standing name for Orin.
jitterbug (p. 567) — the 1940s American swing dance; hence "100% New World."

After you read: three things

1. One sentence corrects itself mid-flight. Orin stands smarting from the airport goodbye "with his forehead against the glass of the Weston back door—or rather the Delta gate window" (p. 565). Weston is the family's first house (pp. 10–11). The book doesn't explain how an old back door got into an airport; it just lets the slip stand. Register that it happened.

2. The sex is defined almost entirely by negation. Not consolation, not conquest, not glands — "Not and never love, which kills what needs it" (p. 566). What's left is hope: that for one second her interior is "vacuumed of all but his name: O., O." Then a parenthesis says, once and plainly, that a real We existed for Orin exactly once — he "felt that once and has never recovered" (pp. 566–67). The book has already shown you those years, pp. 283–299.

3. Weigh the airport encounter yourself. The narration says "putatively Swiss," gives the souvenir football "right there (!) in her bag," the passport produced unasked, and — flip to endnote 235 — the family photos on the dresser and how they got there. Orin reads all this as the universe extending a steadying hand. The scene lets you read the same props and decide whose hand it is.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.