# Figurative Language Audit — Chapter 16 ("What Your Partner Is Afraid Of")

id: figuration_audit | chapter: 16 | stage: drafter | trigger: flag:figuration-heavy | source text audited: `output/chapters/chapter_16.md` (revised), checked against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_16.round_01.md` (raw provenance)

Stance: skeptical. Every image treated as guilty until it proves work. All figuration in the revised chapter is inventoried below; raw-draft images that were cut in revision are verified absent in the focused checks.

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## Per-image battery

### 1. "If you use a symbol, make it carry its own chair." (epigraph, assignment card)

1. Clarifies Odile's craft demand: a symbol must do literal compositional work, not borrow meaning.
2. Odile's register exactly — material, imperative, insult-adjacent; she is the one character licensed for aphorism.
3. Chairs are this room's furniture; Theo is counting fourteen of them four lines later, and the chapter's two strong symbols (outlet plate, blank ground) obey the card.
4. Sharpens: it is the rubric the whole chapter is then graded by, including by this audit.
5. Not portable — "chair" only lands in a class where someone hauls chairs; swapped nouns kill the joke.
6. A sharp reader admires it and reuses it.
`EARNED — "make it carry its own chair" — anchor: the craft rule governing the assignment; focalizer basis: Odile's documented card-tic (struck first line, material command).`

### 2. "holding it out to him the way you'd hand someone their own mail" (l.7)

1. Clarifies the social fact: the flyer is evidence about Theo being returned to him; he is its subject, not its recipient.
2. Theo runs the gallery's mail, shipping, and paperwork; mail-handling is his daily idiom.
3. Arises from gallery-admin texture and the flyer-as-document scene material.
4. Sharpens — establishes in one stroke why the public photo is a pressure object, before anyone says so.
5. Half-portable, but "your own mail" carries the chapter's documents-with-his-handwriting-on-them throughline; a swap loses that.
6. Accepted invisibly.
`EARNED — "the way you'd hand someone their own mail" — anchor: being handed evidence of oneself; focalizer basis: Theo's mail/logistics job. Note: this is the chapter's single recognitional "the way you'd" simile — the 1-per-chapter cap (tics, Ch10 row) is exactly met, not exceeded; I checked "the way a painting can let hands do" (l.55) and "the way she came at everything" (l.59) and neither is a recognitional you/people simile.`

### 3. "June's hand fisted in his jacket like she was keeping him from a curb" (l.9)

1. Clarifies what the photograph shows: a grip with urgency in it, which is why the flyer is dangerous — the kiss reads as real.
2. Theo's protective-logistics mind; pulling someone back from a curb is care rendered as pedestrian safety, his native channel.
3. NYC street body-knowledge; the photo is a fixed scene object from Ch13/14.
4. Sharpens — it names the specific quality (rescue, not pose) that the cohort also sees.
5. Closest to portable of the earned set (any city has curbs), but the grip-as-rescue reading is doing book-specific work: the fake kiss photographed true.
6. Accepted invisibly, possibly admired.
`EARNED — "like she was keeping him from a curb" — anchor: the grip in the photo; focalizer basis: Theo's safety-logistics noticing.`

### 4. "If you start wrong... Leave the wrong where I can find it." (l.33)

1. Clarifies a literal studio rule: visible pentimento, no scraping to canvas.
2. Odile; command register, no cushioning, insult-as-pedagogy adjacent.
3. Pure craft material — scraping, underpainting; it is also the mechanism Theo's canvas later obeys.
4. Sharpens: it is plot. The rule produces the boxes-under-the-wall image and Luis's "You left the underpainting."
5. Not portable as a beat — the chapter's central canvas is built on it.
6. Admired; it reads as teaching, not theme.
`EARNED — "Leave the wrong where I can find it" — anchor: literal no-scrape instruction; focalizer basis: Odile's rule/material pressure (her diagnoses target the work, never the sentence — compliant).`

### 5. "as if the evening were about jars" (l.35)

1. Clarifies Odile's performed indifference after detonating the assignment — she stages busyness instead of explaining.
2. Theo has watched her manage rooms his whole adult life; he reads her staging.
3. The jars are literal and present (she is decanting medium, eight of them); the irony grows from this scene's objects.
4. Sharpens — it shows the withholding without narrating "she refused to explain."
5. The structure is portable but the jars aren't; rewritten elsewhere it would have no prop.
6. Accepted invisibly; the "eight of them" count quietly rhymes with eight Tuesdays without being pointed at.
`EARNED — "as if the evening were about jars" — anchor: literal decanting used as deflection; focalizer basis: Theo's read of Odile's logistics-as-cover.`

### 6. "he had kept the fact as if correct custody could make it harmless" (l.39)

1. Clarifies Theo's failure mode: he stored June's lease fact like an archived object instead of acting on what it meant.
2. Dead-on focalizer fit — Theo logs catalogs out in his own handwriting, runs an archive, keeps custody of things professionally.
3. Arises directly from the live ledger object (the sign-out with no return date) that closes the chapter.
4. Sharpens — it converts "he knew and did nothing" into his specific self-deception in nine words.
5. "Custody of a fact" could survive a swap, but "correct custody" is the archivist's word; the figure is anchored to his job.
6. Accepted invisibly; possibly admired.
`EARNED — "as if correct custody could make it harmless" — anchor: the kept-but-unused lease fact; focalizer basis: Theo's archive/sign-out idiom. Close call — see chapter verdict; clerical-figure family pressure noted for the tic tracker.`

### 7. "The painting could hang in any hallway. That was the problem" (l.41)

1. Clarifies the genericness of his first fear-image — it is competent and belongs to no one.
2. Theo hangs work for a living; "could hang in any hallway" is a placement judgment, his professional reflex turned on himself.
3. Gallery-labor texture; also the chapter's own replacement-test performed in-scene.
4. Sharpens — this is the swap-test (Q5) applied diegetically to the wrong painting; the prose diagnoses portability with a literal hanging fact rather than narrator essay.
5. Not portable as written — the judgment only means something from a man who decides where paintings hang.
6. Admired; the raw draft's flabbier "Anyone's hallway... the generic article, the fear belonging to every tenant in New York" was correctly compressed.
`EARNED — "could hang in any hallway" — anchor: literal hangability = genericness; focalizer basis: Theo's installer/registrar judgment.`

### 8. "One of those facts had been sitting in the room for two weeks" (l.41)

1. Clarifies that June's wall story was delivered in this literal room, Week 5, and ignored since.
2. Theo's plain inventory register.
3. Half-literal: the telling happened in this room; "sitting" is the only figurative residue.
4. Sharpens — it locates his negligence in place and time rather than in adjective.
5. The idiom is common, but the literal anchor (the room, the two weeks) is this book's.
6. Invisible.
`EARNED — "had been sitting in the room for two weeks" — anchor: the Week 5 telling in this physical room; focalizer basis: Theo's date-and-place bookkeeping.`

### 9. "the green and the orange bleeding up through the primer together and going dead salmon, the whole interval surfacing one last time" (l.43)

1. Clarifies a real paint phenomenon: chromatic bleed-through under an insufficient first primer coat, two complements muddying to salmon.
2. This is June's telling held in Theo's memory; she names pigments and stage-by-stage process — her documented voice channel.
3. Pure trade material: primer coats, Decorator's White, the job-site labor of erasing your own best wall.
4. Sharpens — "surfacing one last time" makes the bleed-through legible as the wall's final appearance without editorializing.
5. Not portable: "salmon" only works where green-against-orange is established; the image is chained to this wall.
6. Admired. The raw draft's "as a bruise" and "the wall's last argument" stacked two more figures on the same beat; revision cut both and the survivor is stronger alone.
`EARNED — "going dead salmon, the whole interval surfacing one last time" — anchor: literal bleed-through; focalizer basis: June's pigment-naming voice, faithfully relayed.`

### 10. "The real wall had been waiting in the wrong pile." (l.45)

1. Clarifies the recognition beat: he possessed the needed material but had sorted it as anecdote, not fear.
2. Theo sorts — catalogs, crates, files; mis-piling is precisely how a registrar mislays a thing he never lost.
3. Anchored to the same ledger/stockroom texture as #6.
4. Sharpens — seven words replace the raw draft's overwrought "the specific nausea of a man who keeps very good records... filed it under anecdote."
5. Marginally portable, but only an inventory-minded focalizer earns "pile" as the unit of error.
6. Accepted invisibly.
`EARNED — "had been waiting in the wrong pile" — anchor: the mis-categorized Week 5 story; focalizer basis: Theo's sorting labor. Second member of the clerical family with #6 — flagged in verdict notes.`

### 11. "the boxes still ghosting at the bottom edge like furniture under a drop cloth" (l.47)

1. Clarifies the literal look of underpainting showing through a thin overlayer.
2. Theo: drop cloths are his and June's shared labor world (installs, job sites, this studio).
3. Doubly scene-grown: "ghosting" is paint-trade vocabulary and the drop cloth belongs to the room being painted in June's story.
4. Sharpens — it tells the reader exactly what Luis will later see and praise, in advance, visually.
5. Not portable: furniture-under-drop-cloth only resonates in a book about emptying and readying rooms.
6. Admired; it is the chapter's best simile.
`EARNED — "like furniture under a drop cloth" — anchor: visible pentimento; focalizer basis: shared install/job-site labor.`

### 12. "he let the colors bleed up through it, that drowned salmon" (l.47)

1. Clarifies that he reproduced the bleed-through stage deliberately in his painting.
2. "Drowned" is Theo's one-word intensification of June's "dead salmon" — a man repainting her loss would press on the word.
3. Grows from #9; the water logic (primer is liquid, the color surfaces, drowns) is internally coherent.
4. Sharpens — marks the transform from her documentary memory to his fear-painting of it.
5. Inseparable from the green/orange interval; fails the swap and therefore passes.
6. Admired.
`EARNED — "that drowned salmon" — anchor: deliberate reproduction of the bleed stage; focalizer basis: Theo intensifying June's own color name by one degree.`

### 13. "grayed it down with the green's complement like a first-year" (l.49)

1. Clarifies his loss of control: a technically correct fix executed remedially, twice.
2. Theo has sat adjacent to art instruction (Odile's cycles, six weeks of this class) without training of his own — "like a first-year" is exactly the insult a self-taught man borrows.
3. Complement-neutralizing is real craft; the class context supplies "first-year."
4. Sharpens — his shaking hand shown through mixing error, not through "his hand was not steady" (raw draft phrasing, correctly cut).
5. Portable to any art novel, but cheap to defend: it is self-assessment in the class's own grading idiom.
6. Accepted invisibly.
`EARNED — "like a first-year" — anchor: botched-then-corrected mix; focalizer basis: untrained man borrowing the school's insult for himself.`

### 14. "doing three jobs at once the way a painting can let hands do" (l.55)

1. Clarifies a literal property of painting: composite time, three actions held in one image.
2. Theo has handled and hung paintings for a decade; he knows what the medium permits.
3. Craft-true and required — June's canvas needs this license to indict him with one pair of hands.
4. Sharpens — without it the three-job description would read as continuity error.
5. Not portable as decoration; it is load explanation of the picture's mechanics.
6. Invisible.
`EARNED — "the way a painting can let hands do" — anchor: composite pictorial time; focalizer basis: career-long handler's knowledge. Not a recognitional you/people simile; does not breach that cap.`

### 15. "chairs in straight ranks... jars lidded; cords coiled; everything fed and watered and aligned" (l.55)

1. Clarifies what June's painting shows: a room whose every object has been maintained — the evidence of Theo's caretaking.
2. The idiom belongs to a caretaker; Theo glossing his own tending in tending vocabulary is fit, if soft.
3. Partially scene-grown: jars are literally filled and brushes literally watered in this studio (Odile decants medium in this very chapter); "fed" leans on the class's food economy (clementines, coffee). "Ranks" is a dead metaphor, checked and passed as invisible.
4. Sharpens the painting's argument — handled everything, touched nothing of his own — though "aligned" was already doing that literally.
5. This is the chapter's most portable phrase; "fed and watered" could describe any tended office in any novel. What saves it is that the literal list before it (lidded, coiled, counted) carries the specificity and the idiom only summarizes.
6. A sharp reader passes it as idiom; a very sharp one might register the cuteness for half a beat.
`EARNED — "everything fed and watered and aligned" — anchor: June's painted inventory of his maintenance; focalizer basis: caretaker's summary idiom over a concrete literal list. Closest call in the chapter — see verdict. Materially better than the raw draft's "The room glowed with attention. Every object in it had been touched by somebody who loved his job," which was narrator explanation and was correctly cut.`

### 16. "She'd put the room's one hanging bulb directly over the blank canvas, so the brightest light in the painting fell on the only thing in it he hadn't done." (l.55)

1. Clarifies the composition of June's painting — a literal painted light source aimed at the literal blank ground.
2. Theo reads pictures professionally; identifying the value structure and what it points at is his competence.
3. Entirely inside the book's central object; the bulb is studio furniture, the blank twelve-by-sixteen is the Ch14-chosen ground.
4. Sharpens — this is image-as-accusation with no narrator decoding beyond what the eye verifies; "the only thing in it he hadn't done" is perceptual fact, not theme statement.
5. Not portable: the sentence collapses without six weeks of Theo's usefulness and the specific blank panel.
6. Admired.
`EARNED — "the brightest light in the painting fell on the only thing in it he hadn't done" — anchor: painted compositional fact; focalizer basis: professional picture-reading. This is the chapter's one deliberate light image and it is legal precisely because the light is paint, inside June's canvas — see focused checks for the cap accounting.`

### 17. "Priya's clementine stop being peeled halfway through, the skin's small tearing quitting in the middle" (l.57)

1. Clarifies the room going still via a concrete interrupted sound — the packet's explicit requirement (no source-less "the room went quiet").
2. Theo, who tracks the room by its working noises, would register stillness as a sound stopping.
3. The clementines are planted twice earlier in this chapter and owned by Priya since Ch07.
4. Sharpens — the smallest possible unit of shock, audible.
5. Not portable; the fruit has a paper trail in this book.
6. Admired.
`EARNED — "the skin's small tearing quitting in the middle" — anchor: literal interrupted peeling; focalizer basis: Theo's room-monitoring by sound. "Quitting" is micro-personification of an action, not an object-as-agent figure.`

### 18. "her chin came down half an inch like she'd been handed something heavier than its size" (l.59)

1. Clarifies the moment June recognizes her own wall — recognition as received weight.
2. Theo and June both carry art for a living; deceptive weight is handler's knowledge, and she literally carried nine deceptively heavy catalogs home two chapters ago.
3. Art-handling labor texture; also quietly rhymes with the catalog stack the chapter ends on.
4. Sharpens — gives the reader the precise physical tell instead of "she was moved."
5. Not portable without the carrying-work substrate.
6. Admired.
`EARNED — "like she'd been handed something heavier than its size" — anchor: physical recognition tell; focalizer basis: handlers' shared weight-knowledge.`

### 19. "Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie." (l.79)

1. Clarifies Odile's literal curatorial ruling — the two canvases must be kept and hung as a pair — with the double meaning (hang/lie as placement verbs; pair as the two people) left entirely under the surface.
2. Odile; aphorism license, material vocabulary (varnish, hanging), no wink — compliant with her pre-reveal guardrail since the surface meaning is a complete instruction.
3. Grown from conservation and hanging practice, her trade.
4. Sharpens — it arms the December showcase and the rupture without explaining either.
5. Not portable: "lie" only doubles where paintings are hung and a couple is fake.
6. Admired; it will read differently on reread, which is its job.
`EARNED — "Pairs hang together or they lie" — anchor: literal varnish/hanging instruction; focalizer basis: Odile's diagnosis-as-logistics. Note: the raw draft echoed this in Theo's narration ("a pair now, hanging together or lying," raw l.103); revision cut the echo, so the aphorism stays in Odile's mouth once — correct.`

### 20. "He had a sentence ready behind that one." (l.93)

1. Clarifies that the confession exists, prepared and queued, while a different sentence is deployed.
2. Theo stages everything — chairs, layouts, sentences; readiness is his syntax of cowardice.
3. Grows from his documented prepared-speech habit (Ch14's rehearsed panel-size argument, at-ceiling and not repeated here — this is one line, not a speech).
4. Sharpens — sets up the swerve to "She wants the chairs in eights" with maximum economy.
5. Nearly literal; nothing to swap.
6. Invisible.
`EARNED — "a sentence ready behind that one" — anchor: the withheld three-word confession; focalizer basis: Theo's staging reflex.`

### 21. "it was the look from the painting, the one that had painted his hands accurately and left the blank ground in the light" (l.101)

1. Clarifies that June is now looking at him with the same exact seeing that produced the canvas — her stated honesty claim and the painting are the same act.
2. Theo, who has just spent an evening being read by that look, would identify it on sight.
3. Entirely from this chapter's central object; "look" as the agent of "painted" is metonymy for June's seeing, not an object-as-agent figure.
4. Sharpens — it fuses her line "the most honest you've ever been" to the painting's verdict without restating the verdict. This is the third touch of the lit-blank-ground image (after l.55 and l.57's "The blank ground stayed lit"), which is the maximum safe frequency — a fourth would turn the image into a slogan.
5. Not portable.
6. Admired, narrowly; a reader who noticed the image twice already will accept exactly one callback at the turn.
`EARNED — "the look... that had painted his hands accurately and left the blank ground in the light" — anchor: June's seeing as the painting's cause; focalizer basis: the painted verdict applied to its maker's face. Close call on Q4 (reprise frequency) — defended in verdict.`

### 22. "He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway." (l.107)

1. Clarifies the reactive-scene decision: delay, chosen knowingly — the plan to confess "after the show" is usefulness functioning as cover.
2. Perfect focalizer fit: "useful" is the exact word June's painting just convicted him with; he diagnoses his delay in the chapter's own established vocabulary.
3. Grows from the fear paintings and from Theo's central wound as carded (believes delay is kindness).
4. Sharpens — executes the packet's hardest order ("He can know he is failing and still delay," "not noble through self-condemnation") in eleven words, with no nobility and no melodrama.
5. Not portable: "making itself useful" is inert in any book where usefulness hasn't been weaponized for sixteen chapters.
6. Admired.
`EARNED — "the plan making itself useful" — anchor: chosen delay disguised as logistics; focalizer basis: Theo turning the chapter's verdict-word on his own next move. Personification of a mental object, not of paper/label/receipt — outside the banned family.`

---

## Focused extra checks (as ordered by the wrapper)

- **Images earned by paint/blocking vs. narrator explanation.** The chapter's meaning load is carried by paintable facts: ghosting boxes, loaded roller mid-job, outlet plate screwed down, blank ground under a painted bulb. The one residual explanatory gloss is l.49: "the wrong fear was still down there, the easy one, the one you could explain to a stranger. The real one went over it." This explains Theo's own canvas, not June's; it is the proactive-scene decision rendered in plain layer-language, and it stops short of decoding the symbols (it never says what the roller or plate mean). Borderline but inside the line. June's canvas is never explained in narration — Theo only reports what is visibly in it — and nobody in dialogue summarizes either painting's theme. PASS.
- **Hallway painting.** Audited as image #7; earned as a literal placement judgment. The raw draft's expansion ("the generic article, the fear belonging to every tenant in New York") was narrator essay and is confirmed cut. RESOLVED.
- **Baby-teeth hooks.** The raw draft's "picture hooks left in like the building's baby teeth" (raw l.45) failed focalizer-fit and the cringe test (cute, portable, writer-visible). Revision replaced it with literal process: "picture hooks left in for someone else to pull, fill, sand, and paint flat" (l.39) — which additionally forward-rhymes with June's wall being made ready for whoever came next. The replacement does more work than the figure did. RESOLVED; confirm absent: yes.
- **Drowned salmon.** Audited as #9/#12, earned. The raw draft's surrounding figure-stack ("as a bruise," "the wall's last argument" — the latter wall-as-agent) is confirmed cut, leaving the single controlling image. RESOLVED.
- **Outlet plate.** Carried literally in both appearances (l.43, l.47: "The only thing in the painting that stayed through every layer"). The narration states the fact and refuses the decode — the symbol carries its own chair per the epigraph. The raw draft's polished paradox ("the only thing... that was going to survive the painting") was flattened in revision; correct call. PASS.
- **Blank ground / light.** One deliberate light image (#16), legal solely because the bulb is paint inside June's canvas, which is the stated exemption — confirmed: no second light image exists; l.109's "turned off the lights, all but the one over the door" is literal action, and the raw draft's "even that felt like an exhibit now" (which would have been a second, illegal light image plus an object-as-exhibit figure) is confirmed cut. The painted image is touched three times (l.55, l.57, l.101); ruled one image reprised, not three images, but it is at ceiling — any later chapter that wants this image back must earn it fresh. PASS, at cap.
- **Hanging/pair language.** Odile's "Pairs hang together or they lie" (#19) earned and licensed; the narrator echo in the raw draft is confirmed cut, and the raw draft's paired-echo closer ("In paint," she agreed) is also cut — June now exits without the echo, complying with the paired-echo ban. PASS.
- **Final catalog/paper-slip close.** The raw draft closed on "a paper slip in it like a fuse he had measured and cut and laid himself, all care, every inch of it care" — an object-as-weapon-agent figure plus a polished aphoristic closer, both prohibited. The revised close (l.105) is bare inventory: stacked catalogs, his handwriting, no return date, "one of them still had a paper slip tucked inside." Literal precision does more dread-work than the fuse did. RESOLVED.
- **Object-as-agent paper/label/receipt family.** Sweep result: zero instances in the revised text. Flyer, cards, labels, catalogs, paper slip, and sign-out log are all handled as patients of human action. Raw-draft members of the family confirmed cut: "the painting liked him," "the room turned itself inside out," "Now it does the work" (Sam, about the flyer stack — revised to "Now people see it first"), the clementine "like a tip," the fuse. The two micro-personifications that remain (#17 "tearing quitting," #22 "plan making itself useful") act on a sound and a mental object respectively, not paper. PASS.

Watch notes for the tic tracker (non-blocking): clerical-sorting figure family at 2 ("correct custody," "wrong pile") — both individually earned and ledger-anchored, but this family has been repaired to zero twice before (Ch08, Ch13); Ch17 should add none. Recognitional simile cap 1/1 used (l.7). Odile aphorism-grade lines ≈ 3 (card, "Leave the wrong where I can find it," "Pairs hang together or they lie") — at the post-Ch03 target. Hands foreground confined to June's sanctioned fear canvas; no separate romantic hand beat found.

---

## Chapter verdict

`FIGURATION-EARNED`

The three closest calls, defended:

1. **"everything fed and watered and aligned" (#15)** — nearly failed Q5 (portability). Defense: the figure is a one-clause summary riding on a fully literal, non-portable inventory (fourteen chairs count-visible, jars lidded, cords coiled), and "watered" has literal studio referents in this same chapter (Odile decanting medium, brush water). It summarizes specificity already paid for rather than substituting for it. It is also the audited replacement for two cut narrator-explanation sentences, and is the weaker-but-legal end of that trade.
2. **"as if correct custody could make it harmless" (#6)** — nearly failed Q5 via family pressure (clerical figures repeatedly repaired to zero in prior chapters). Defense: this chapter is the one place the clerical register is the plot — the chapter ends on the sign-out entry with no return date, and "custody" names the exact mechanism by which Theo's care becomes harm. The family risk is span-level, not image-level, and is logged above for Ch17 enforcement.
3. **"the look from the painting, the one that had painted his hands accurately and left the blank ground in the light" (#21)** — nearly failed Q4 (third touch of one image risks slogan-hardening). Defense: touches one and two occur inside a single continuous viewing beat (l.55–57); the callback at l.101 is the chapter's hinge, converting June's spoken verdict into the painting's verdict without restating either, and the image is retired afterward — the close (l.105–109) is figure-free. One reprise at the turn is the image doing its job; the ceiling is now reached and recorded.

No revision orders. All twenty-two inventoried images pass the six-question battery; the unearned figuration this audit would otherwise order cut was already cut between the raw draft and the revised text, and this audit confirms none of it survived.
