Hal supine, the blizzard, Accomplice!, the fatherly talk (pp. 951–952)
this silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically.
Context
Watching his dead father's cruelest film — a razor-blade sodomy melodrama — Hal runs straight into the wall scene 138 named: he cannot get from the gentle, slumped, finger-in-his-drink father he remembers to the sensibility that made this. The two won't reconcile, and Hal can't imagine the interior that would bridge them. What's quietly devastating is that the raw shows the bridge is right there and Hal just can't cross it — the film's whole subject is intimacy poisoned into predation, sex as "emotionless, terribly lonely," which is exactly the loneliness the father will turn out to have been trying to warn Orin away from. Hal watches the father encode his deepest fear about human connection and reads only "sodomy and razors," a technique he can't source to any feeling. The son is looking directly at the man's interior and calling it impossible to imagine.