Pages 574–575
One paragraph, a page long: still 7 November, a few hours further into Orin's Phoenix afternoon. He has left the hand-model's hotel room and is alone in his car, driving west toward Sun City, "ruminating as he drove." Nothing happens on the road; the whole scene is Orin slowly re-processing the day you read on pp. 565–567 — plus pieces of that day the book itself hasn't shown you, which is worth knowing going in.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Junoesque (p. 574) — real word: statuesque, imposing, like the goddess Juno.
- Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle (p. 574) — Orin's seduction arc, here given its four-word name.
- Sun City (p. 575) — real Phoenix-area retirement suburb.
- kertwanged (p. 575) — sudden reversal or realization; E.T.A. slang (Pemulis was "kertwanging" on p. 568), here inside Orin's narration.
- surveyer (p. 575) — spelled that way in the text; a legless man with a survey, part of the afternoon described below.
After you read: three things
1. You haven't skipped a page. The paragraph refers to "the handicapped man at the hotel room's door" and a "legless surveyer" as if you'd seen them — you haven't. The book gave you only the hand-model part of this afternoon (pp. 565–567); Orin is remembering an encounter it never narrated. Read the allusions as exactly that, and don't flip back hunting for them.
2. Watch the tide-table. Orin's own observation: the wheelchairs around him vanished the day before "Moment's Junoesque Ms. Steeply" came up and were back, "with their shy ruses," within hours of her leaving (p. 574). His explanation is that shy punting-groupies fear lady journalists. You hold better information on both ends of that sentence — what Steeply actually is, and what organized wheelchairs looked like on pp. 484–487. The noticing is left entirely to you.
3. The cycle gets a name — and a cost. "Excitement-Hope- Acquisition-Contempt" compresses the whole anatomy of pp. 565–567 into four words, and the same sentence says its aftermath leaves Orin "stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake" (p. 574). So when the closing clause notes the surveyer "had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model" (p. 575) and Orin just keeps driving, the scene has already told you why.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.