Hal supine, the blizzard, Accomplice!, the fatherly talk (pp. 956–957)
It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin. I’d never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself.
Context
This is the triangulation the whole scene has been building toward. The one time Himself opened all the way up, it went to Orin — who, Hal notes with pity, entirely misheard it, moved only by the assumption that he was still a virgin rather than by anything the father was actually reaching for. So the openness was doubly wasted: spent on the son who couldn't receive it, and never once offered to Hal at all. And then the raw sets down what Hal did get, his "most intimate memory" of his father: the scratch of the man's jaw and the warm meaty smell of his neck as Himself carried him upstairs, asleep, from the supper table. Not a conversation — a smell, from a time before Hal could talk. The father's words went to Orin; Hal's whole inheritance of intimacy is a scent he associates, now, with Schtitt's pipe. The substitute already bleeding into the space where the father should be.