Lyle's office hours: the always-wet boy who took up the sport as an alibi

Marlon, Orin's doubles partner, was so constitutionally, inexplicably wet — "it always looked like Marlon had been rained on" — that he "gone in for high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet as he was." Here the body chooses the sport, not the reverse: competitive tennis as a socially legible cover for a body that would otherwise just be shamefully, permanently dripping. The regimen's constant sweat is a place to hide a body's private excess.