love as a face pressed flat against yours
assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and your breaths mingle
Context
Orin's party-piece impression of Avril is the family's love rendered as suffocation: the warm smile advancing until the face is mashed flat to yours and the breaths mix, closeness so total it abolishes the space any actual exchange would need. Bain sets it beside the philanthropist who needs recipients to prize his own virtue, and the horror is that the warmth is genuine — the smothering and the love are not opposed but identical, a mother (and a son doing her) whose approach is all approach and no room, contact that arrives as a seal over the mouth. It rhymes exactly with Orin splayed face-flat against the tumbler glass (184).