The "professional conversationalist" alleges an Incandenza-family liaison — the earliest dated attestation, inside a collapsing frame

pivotal · 1 April YTMP

• When: 1 April YTMP (Hal is ten; the "professional conversationalist" appointment)
• What: The earliest dated mention of Luria in the story comes from the "professional conversationalist" — a figure the scene itself unmasks as a disguise (Hal notes the askew mustache and that "your whole face is kind of running"). Claiming a full support staff that "delves," he asks whether Hal imagines he would "fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P———". Hal deflects — "I'm not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Québec or malevolent Lurias." — whereupon the conversationalist presses on, resuming with the claim that photos of that liaison, leaked to Der Spiegel, "resulted in the bizarre deaths" of an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian editor (alpenstock; cocktail onion). This is the only place in the book that links Luria to the Incandenza family, and it arrives already hedged twice over: "allegedly irresistible" inside the speaker's own sentence, and the speaker himself a costumed unreliable whose subsequent accusations escalate into open absurdity. Which Incandenza the "family's" liaison ran through, whether any of it happened, and what the deaths were, are all left exactly as printed: alleged, in a scene built to be unreliable. Nothing here is resolved.