Lyle and Himself in the weight room

The one hard datum the book ever gives on the Incandenza marriage from the inside, and note the address: Himself grades the marriage a C– out loud, in the weight room, to Lyle the sweat-guru, with a half-asleep son propped nearby — anyone in earshot but the wife. The whole shape of the marriage is in that routing. A man who could pour "his heart's thickest chyme" to a confidant and a bottle of Wild Turkey at all hours, and who apparently never took the same audit to Avril herself, so that the assessment reaches us only because a child sitting vigil overheard it. The marriage the rest of the theme reconstructs from outside — Joelle's testimony, Orin's theories, the Hamlet frame — is here graded once, mediocrely, by the husband, to a guru, in a basement.