The professional conversationalist
I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out.
Context
The screen's catch (plan marks it weak/texture): ten-year-old Hal's capsule biography of his father, delivered to the disguised father himself. It's the anthology's earliest naming of the double career — "optical and avant-garde film circles," one breath, one figure — and the raw bundles it in the same sentence with the drinking and with the delusion "about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out," i.e. the exact perception this whole conversationalist charade was built to disprove. The sentence states as delusion what the scene performs: a father who can't hear his son speaking.