Hal and Mario on liars (pp. 770–771)
she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during […] and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson […] would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?
Context
The whole family's love-economy, displaced onto a dog. Avril was "unbent where that dog was concerned" — the special Fisher-Price car seat, the esoteric food, the constant bathing, the blind-dog harness smuggling S. Johnson into a no-dogs film premiere — and when she had to travel she'd leave the dog tied to the Volvo with a phone propped antenna-up beside it so she could ring it and let it hear "her unique personal ring" and know it was cared about from afar. It's surveillance-love in its purest, most tender-absurd form: love administered remotely, as signal, so the beloved knows it's being thought about even when untouched — which is precisely the register in which the children get loved. The ferocity Avril can't quite aim straight at her sons lands, unbent and unembarrassed, on the dog.