the simultaneity montage — "his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle…"

And here, in the same montage-instant, is the private Tavis the parents never see: alone between appointments in an office whose windows give no view of the match, head mashed against the sofa rail, arm swept blindly under the ruffle groping for the bathroom scale he hides under the couch. The master charmer of n.266, off-duty, is a small anxious man secretly weighing himself, his compulsions (the hidden scale, the cholesterol dread, the sadistic StairBlaster he runs on) requiring their own concealment. The juxtaposition is the whole point of the montage placing them a breath apart: the fluidless-seduction public face and the man on his knees fishing for a scale under the sofa are the same Charles Tavis, and the theme keeps insisting you hold both.