Pemulis catches Avril and Wayne (pp. 552–553)

Gertrude caught, and the staging is merciless. Pemulis walks into the doorless office and finds "Hal's Mumsly-Wumsly" — Dr. Avril Incandenza, fifty-plus, Dean of Females — in a green-and-white cheerleader's outfit doing near-splits with a pellet-less whistle, while E.T.A.'s top boy John Wayne crouches near-naked in a football helmet and jockstrap in a three-point stance, growling. The mother's sexuality is exposed as grotesque pageant, but the specific pageant is the knife: cheerleader and football player is precisely the tableau that organized Orin's entire life, the twirler-and-punter romance at B.U. So Avril is staging, with a son-surrogate a third her age, the exact scene of her eldest son's one great love — the Gertrude figure discovered not just in a liaison but in a re-enactment of her child's. Wayne, the Canadian heir apparent who dresses "with no little dignity," is one more young man drawn into the black hole, playing Orin's position.