Marathe and Steeply compare fatal-beauty myths
When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d’Amherst outdoor rink, M. Marathe’s breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.
Context
Dawn on the Tucson outcropping, mid-exchange about the blond-downed temptress-myth, and the narration drops for one sentence into Marathe's sleep: the legless assassin's recurring dream is a boy with legs, on ice, with his father alive. "When now he dreamt" quietly marks it as the current edition of an evolving recurrence; two paragraphs later the insect-noise makes him think of "playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs" — the dream's waking echo.