Hal, Mario, Coyle; the Weston memories (p. 957)
John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. […] He ate dinner with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made little attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. […] I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival.
Context
This is the Wayne liaison delivered in a single Hamlet-shaped flat sentence, dropped without heat into the inventory of Hal's horizontal drift. The dating is clinical ("since roughly the second month after his arrival"), the affect nil ("I hadn't yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison"). The adulterous mother and the imported surrogate-son are simply logged, the way Hal logs everything today, and the flatness is the point: the Gertrude fact that would organize a tragedy is here just another datum the paralyzed prince cannot bring himself to feel about. Faithful dead father, unfaithful mother, son who registers it and does nothing — the triangle stated and immediately set back down.