Mario's night walk: God with a straight face
once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
Context
Ennet House is the one place in the book's world where the ironic tax is suspended. Here "God" can be said plainly and nobody flinches, rolls their eyes, or covertly worries for the speaker — and Mario feels good there "because it's very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy." The recovery house is the novel's utopia of single-entendre speech, the room where sincerity carries no penalty and earnestness isn't embarrassing. It is not an accident that this straight-face zone and the tax-everywhere-else world are separated by the width of a street Mario totters along, looking in: the whole book's geography of register, drawn as two kinds of lit window. (The AA/recovery content is addiction-recovery's; OURS is the straight-face register.)