Gately's residency: the nervous bride

The dinner-table coda maps the whole House's register onto Gately's terrible cooking. He serves his boiled-to-death spaghetti and cornflake-topped meatloaf in total earnestness, "a nervous bride" hovering "lunarly" over the pans hoping everyone enjoys it — and the residents, unable to be cruel and unwilling to be plain, can only love him "extremely oblique[ly]": Lenz says the food "helps you really appreciate whatever you're drinking along with it," Day praises the "refreshing change" of leaving the table "not feeling bloated," McDade and Glynn run their "extra-fine spay-ghetti" bit — always, tellingly, "while Gately's still in the kitchen." Irony is the only register in which these ruined men can express affection, a tenderness that can only travel disguised as a dig. And the exceptions prove the rule: Ewell, April Cortelyu, and the handless Burt F. Smith, the least defended people in the room, thank him straight.