Bunny assaults a dying woman in Mary Armstrong’s home

Bunny’s assault on a dying woman in Mary Armstrong’s home is a turning point in the sales journey because it makes his predatory conduct impossible to disguise as flirtation or salesmanship. He arrives looking for someone else, finds an unnamed young woman in a severely impaired condition, and projects a fantasy onto her. His familiar commercial identity remains in place, but it offers no protection to the person before him: Bunny sexually assaults her when she is unable to consent.

Arrival at the bungalow

Bunny approaches the house after a chaotic morning on the road. He has left his sample case in the Punto and drinks the Scotch from his flask before discarding it in the overgrown yard. The practical purpose of the visit is to find Mary Armstrong, but the setting immediately frustrates the ordinary rhythm of a sales call. The bungalow is dilapidated, its windows shattered; inside, the kitchen is dark, the refrigerator stands open, and a motionless dog lies near the sink. Bunny notices these signs of neglect without turning back. Even his scraped palms, slick with blood after his fall, do not interrupt his progress through the house.

His response is to repeat his sales identity to himself: he deals in beauty products. The claim sounds increasingly detached from the circumstances around him. He has entered a place of disorder and apparent crisis, yet continues to frame the encounter as a possible customer visit. When he hears a high, persistent sound from deeper in the house, he calls again for Mary and moves toward it. His expectation of a sale and his unease coexist; neither leads him to leave.

The woman and the mistaken image

The sound comes from an electric guitar feeding back in a room at the end of the hall. There, beneath a bare bulb, Bunny finds a very thin young woman sitting on a ruined settee. Her condition is grave: she is barely responsive, and the scene includes signs of drug use. She tells him that Mary no longer lives there and asks whether he wants to see Mushroom Dave. The exchange establishes that Bunny has not found the person he came to visit, but it does not give him a reason to remain.

Bunny switches off the amplifier. In the sudden quiet he approaches the woman and recognizes her resemblance to a poster of Avril Lavigne on the black-painted door. The image has already shaped his perception: before he understands who the poster depicts, he has addressed it as Avril. Once he sees the young woman clearly, he treats the likeness as more than coincidence, joining the poster and the person in a private chain of association. The resemblance is his projection, not a relationship or identity established by the woman herself. His grief and sexual fixation make the real person before him recede behind an imagined figure.

Assault and immediate circumstances

The young woman’s frailty and limited responsiveness are evident before Bunny touches her. He removes a cigarette from her hand and brushes ash from her clothing, actions that briefly resemble care, but they do not change what follows. He then sexually assaults her. The scene makes clear that she is gravely ill and unable to give meaningful consent; Bunny’s conduct is an exploitation of that vulnerability, not a mutual encounter. His own emotion does not alter the imbalance between them or make the assault less deliberate.

The passage presents the event without allowing Bunny’s fantasies to stand as an explanation that excuses him. He has come to the house as a travelling salesman, and he has just repeated the language of his trade, yet his practiced ability to present himself cannot turn this encounter into a legitimate transaction. The sales case is still in the car; the person he seeks is absent; the woman he finds is in no condition to be a customer or a willing partner. The gap between his role and his action is central to the scene’s moral force.

Narrative significance

The episode brings several elements of Bunny’s conduct into one room: compulsive sexual appetite, alcohol use, a commercial persona, and grief that distorts what he sees. The poster of Avril Lavigne provides a visible hinge between fantasy and reality, but the text preserves the difference between them. The woman is not Avril, and the imagined resemblance does not grant Bunny access to her. His inability or refusal to keep that distinction meaningful is part of the event’s horror.

The scene also turns the familiar sales language of beauty and persuasion against itself. Bunny’s work depends on approaching strangers and offering them products, but here the sales identity is reduced to a phrase he repeats while moving through a house that plainly calls for attention to another person’s condition. Instead of responding to that vulnerability, he subjects the woman to further harm. The action therefore marks more than another instance of sexual misconduct: it exposes the violence beneath Bunny’s self-presentation and shows how far his desire has displaced judgment and responsibility.

The encounter does not establish that the woman dies, nor does it resolve what happens to her afterward. Its outcome within the supplied scene is the assault itself, set against her critical condition and Bunny’s projection of an imagined identity onto her. That limit matters: the event leaves the woman’s subsequent fate unreported while making Bunny’s responsibility unmistakable.