The White Flag meeting
Part of this new Joelle girl’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made way sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it—sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window—but it’s also the veil, wondering what horrific contrast to the body’s allure lies swollen or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even more distracting
Context
The veil from the gazer's side: Erdedy at the raffle-break, three seats from brand-new Joelle. The veil doesn't stop the stare U.H.I.D. is built to escape — it eroticizes it, the imagined deformity ("swollen or askew") becoming part of the pull. The book's cleanest demonstration that concealment manufactures exactly the scopic appetite it hides from.