the I.-Day-Eve call: the Helen aria
I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.
Context
The call's unguarded breaches land like cracks in the armor, and this is the widest. Orin, ostensibly calling to extract political patter, instead delivers a real, un-strategized aria on the Helen Subject's bigness — "a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome" — feeling with no Strategy behind it, the genuine article breaking through his entire seduction-apparatus for once. And the scene's cruelest irony is the object: the "girl and a half in all directions" Orin is helplessly, sincerely moved by is Steeply, a disguised man. Real sincerity finally leaks out of Orin exactly where it can ruin him — aimed at a fiction more total than any fake wife the Strategies invent. The one time he means it, he means it at a decoy.