the locker room: Freer at the mirror

Freer is the scene's professional cynic, and the register is all in his relation to the mirror. Complexion-obsessed, Pledge-peeling, "ministering to his skin" at the plate-glass throughout, he answers a child's real grief with mirthless contempt — "Let baby have his dinkle," "Thirteen: pain's a rumor," "genuine-article angst" as something the kid couldn't recognize — and he heckles Pemulis's sermon as mere entrapment ("this is your boring man's true talent: the talent for ensnaring" […] "Flee while you can, kid"). His "chuckle tends to be mirthless": cynicism as a settled disposition, contemptuous of both the crying and the consoling. He's the pole opposite Pemulis here — the ironist who uses his intelligence only to belittle, a man who can't watch either sincere suffering or a sincere response to it without sneering, and who can't stop watching himself do it in the mirror.