Orin at B.U.: punting and Joelle (pp. 293–294)
the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin’s life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated—across grassy expanses, against stadiums’ monovocal roar—entirely through stylized repetitive motions—his functional, hers celebratory—their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both—in their different roles—trying to make as entertaining as possible.
Context
The theme's two poles fall in love, and even the love is spectation. Orin the punter and Joelle the baton-twirler — the athlete-as-content and the future star of the Entertainment — conduct "the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin's life" entirely across the field, "without one exchanged personal phoneme," a courtship transacted only in "stylized repetitive motions" performed for a stadium crowd. Their devotion is not to each other but "to the spectacle they were both … trying to make as entertaining as possible" — two performers whose whole bond is co-production for an audience, relation collapsed into performance. For these two, the ones the Entertainment will run through (its star, and the brother who becomes its samizdat-mailer), love itself arrives pre-converted into spectacle: they can only reach each other as things to be watched.