the challenge-match endnote: the Viking ministering to his skin
Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning.
Context
The body as a grooming-project. Freer stands at the mirror "ministering to his skin," and the athletic instrument is inventoried admiringly and cruelly at once — "superb latissimal definition" mottled by his own Pledge-abuse, the complexion-obsessed Viking defoliating his back to fight a peel. The tennis body isn't just conditioned here; it's fussed over, creamed, tweezed, a vanity as central to locker-room culture as the drilling.