the weight room: Pemulis's whisper
Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’ […] Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’
Context
Pemulis is the room's irony-engine, and irony is literally what his face does — facial isometrics, the "deLint-jerking-off face" on demand, the mouth "all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon's popes," a whole repertoire of mimicry performed while eavesdropping on Lyle's earnestness and wincing at Freer's noise. Its payoff is the whisper: the same confidential lean Lyle uses for wisdom, Pemulis uses to plant one contemptuous word in an exhausted kid's ear. The scene sets the two quiets against each other — Lyle's never-whispering counsel and Pemulis's actual whisper — and the ironist's version turns out to be cruelty wearing intimacy's posture, sincerity's body-language emptied of sincerity.