Dancing

Dancing figures the novel's charged pairings and devotions — above all the opponent as "partner in the dance" (p. 84), which is where the image enters the book's index. Tennis is repeatedly choreographed (Kent's modern-dance passion, Wayne's "balletic winner" and "dancerly flourishes"), but the motif's darker registers are the demimonde and the near-motionless: the Minimal Mambo "just this side of standing still" (p. 229), later parodied by Poor Tony's gurney dance, and the flat command "Look at that fucker Dance." (p. 184). Devotion, too, is choreography — Orin and Joelle's "respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle." The motif tracks sobriety as well: Gately, who has never "danced" sober, and the closing image of the Swim danced over the dying, with a figure "moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall." Across these, dance names any relationship — combat, worship, addiction, care — conducted as a paired, patterned motion.