Orin and the Swiss hand-model (Film and Optics)
the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see past her head the large hanging mirror and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser below the window, the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right. […] They are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug that is 100% New World, uses O.’s uneven shoulders as support to leap and circle his neck with her legs
Context
The screen's catch, both halves. The room is staged so that Orin faces the mirror over the woman's shoulder: the seduction that the narration keeps insisting is about being seen (that he "is what she sees and all she sees," a Subject met "with a sexual face for his sexual face") is literally conducted in front of a reflecting surface, and the striptease is narrated as happening not in the room but in the mirror ("(his shirt off now, in the mirror)" a paragraph earlier, then "They are stripped in the mirror"). Orin, the one Incandenza who fled the family's cameras, builds himself a private spectation rig out of hotel furniture: he is both performer and sole audience, watching the proof that he "has her." The framed Swiss family on the dresser below the mirror — still photos "smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right" — sit right under the glass as the watched-without- knowing-it counterpoint. An [n.235] sits mid-passage (marker stripped); n.234 earlier in the raw hangs off Steeply's "family-linen inquiry."