the staged legend in the rented room

The rented room comes pre-dressed. Along the dresser stand "the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed" — the husband and children whose existence gives the hand-model a plausible life, props set out in a room she is renting by the hour to seduce a stranger. That the photographed family smiles "trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right" quietly gives the game away: they are stock legend-dressing, a paper household deployed to make the cover breathe, aimed at nobody. Orin sees them and reads domesticity; the reader sees set decoration for an operation.