Scene n269: marlon bain letters

• p. 1047: The apparatus: Saprogenic Greetings letterhead with motto ("WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU"), addressee "Ms. Helen Steepley," salutation reduced to "And So On," November YDAU. A lettered sub-footnote off the letterhead identifies Saprogenic as "a proud member of the ACMÉ Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises" — outsourced emotion as Bain's actual profession, and "Wacky Disguises" winking at his cross-dressed correspondent.
• p. 1047, answer (1): the history. Bain and Orin, the two best 10-year-olds in Boston, drilled together at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton; after Bain's parents were "horribly killed on the Jamaica Way... in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter" he became "a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston" and one of E.T.A.'s first matriculants. Inseparable until 15, when early-blooming Bain started beating Orin ("He took it hard"). A shared drug phase at ~16; Orin quit for puberty and "the weaker sex," Bain because methoxy-psychedelic disasters at "a sort of larval psychological stage" left him with capital-D "Disabilities" that drove him out of E.T.A. at 17 and out of "contemporary life as we know it."
• p. 1047: the football excursus: "A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on my view" — codpieces, ass-whacking, "like Swinburne sat down on his soul's darkest night and designed an organized sport"; he dismisses Orin's ritualized-warfare defense (real armed conflict being available in Roxbury and Mattapan). Dramatic irony: a lecture on repressed homoeroticism delivered to a 100+-kg male operative in drag.
• p. 1047, answer (3c): JOI's suicide, secondhand: "I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way"; in his last year JOI was "abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis" and working on "a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was driving Dr. Inc insane."
• p. 1047, answer (3e): the Orin-Joelle separation: its supposed cause was JOI using Joelle "in his work more and more extensively," finally asking her to perform in "the prenominate completely radical new type of filmed entertainment"; "They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though Orin in my judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship."
• pp. 1047-1048: the Volvo window. Bain's one independent fact, sourced not to Orin but to "an innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our punter in an intimate and unguarded way" (the "innocent younger sister" of pp. 1050-1051, by implication): in the days before the felo de se a "word" appeared on a "fogged" "window" of Mrs. Inc's pale yellow Volvo, "and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it." The word itself is never given — the novel's most tantalizing withheld datum about the Avril-JOI marriage.
• p. 1048, answer (5): the "vailed warning" (Bain: "(typo?)") from his earlier unseen postal response unpacked: take Orin "in a fairly high-sodium way." Not a classic pathological liar — rather "there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive." Exhibit: Orin's fail-safe pick-up Strategy ("Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man"), anatomized in the giant one-word hyphenated chain ("Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process..."): "it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know." Counter-exhibit: Uncle Charles, "'Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow' Tavis," proof that "genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome." Bain predicts: "if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong."
• p. 1048: the diagnosis under the diagnosis: Orin "has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported. He came by this idea educationally" — "almost eighteen years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met" (Avril, unnamed), whom Orin thinks he escapes "through renunciation and hatred." "Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?" Caveat noted: Orin and Bain are currently "on the outs a bit," so charity may be short.
• pp. 1048-1049: anecdote one — the babysitting debacle. On Mrs. Clarke's day off, Orin (supposed to supervise toddler-age Hal and Mario) and Bain smoke Bob Hope in the Weston garage loft and vanish into "the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are always wandering into" (sub-footnote a, marked here: "Marijuana Thinking," with the argument that "Amotivational Syndrome" is a misnomer — the smoker isn't apathetic but "trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth," the munchies being the brain's last practical-function defense). The whole afternoon passes unsupervised; Orin's phone-call alibi explodes when Avril blinks and says "the phone had not been busy, it had just rung and rung and rung"; Orin's entire salvage effort, "as if from the Rose Garden": "I have no response to that." Avril "never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility... and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie."
• pp. 1049-1050: anecdote two — S. Johnson. An idle August day (early loss at Longwood; Hal still in Boys' 10's, so most of E.T.A. including Avril and Mario still at the tournament — Avril having been driven down by "a sort of swarthily foreign-looking monilial-internist medical resident" introduced only as a "dear and cherished friend"; see Connections). Orin and Bain, severely impaired, blast the Volvo down Commonwealth Ave. for more substances, baffled by pedestrians waving and holding their heads — having never checked whether Avril's beloved dog S. Johnson was leashed to the rear bumper. "Let's say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin." Five or six blocks of fur and "material" down the inside east-bound lane. Sub-footnote b (marked here): Orin had never once walked S. Johnson, wasn't keen on him (the dog kept trying to mate with his left leg); the dog was Avril's, walked by Avril, at rigidly specific times.
• p. 1050: the HmH living-room performance: Orin, holding up leash, collar, and nubbin "like Exhibit A," spins the lie of the demure dog-walk interrupted by "a hit-and-run driver... so more like a pulverize-and-run driver" who swerved onto the sidewalk and ran S. Johnson over repeatedly — while the prone, piteously weeping Avril ("there's something surreal about a very tall woman on her knees") nods "in confirmation at every syllable," and Bain wishes "the immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor would swallow up the whole scene in toto."
• p. 1050, answer (7): the abuse essay. "The word 'abuse' is vacuous... The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse." Against the clear ACOA/AlaTeen taxonomies, three hypothetical fathers: the bedridden neurasthenic who cleans his revolver at any opposition; the mathematician who does the algebra himself so the child "gets an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions"; and the handy father who never explains his projects before being "crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way" — Bain's own father, smuggled in as hypothesis, leaving the unhandy son feeling "a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle" for even wondering if it was abuse.
• p. 1050: the riddle of the unimpeachable parent: Bain has seen "parent after unimpeachable parent" raise children who are emotionally retarded / lethally self-indulgent / depressed / borderline psychotic / narcissistically self-loathing / driven-addicted / psychosomatically Disabled "or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a)... (g)." "Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes... he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not. But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that's the child's view of himself?"
• pp. 1050-1051: the pivot to the named target: not his own mother ("decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade long before she could have much effect... on my older brother and innocent younger sister and me"), but "Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface."
• p. 1051: Avril's "bizarrely furcated" response to the dog's death: lavish secret mourning (cherrywood coffin, weeks of audible private crying) elaborately hidden from Orin, while the visible half is an increased "love-and-support-bombardment" — favorite foods, tennis appurtenances appearing magically in bed and locker with loving notes, "the thousands of little gestures by which the technically stellar parent can make her child feel particularly valued" (sub-footnote c, marked here: "Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not 'valuable' but 'valued'") — even oblique suggestions that life is better without the dog, "some kind of unrecognized albatross... removed from her neck."
• p. 1051: the indictment sharpened to a question: "was this generosity for Orin's sake, or for Avril's own? Was it Orin's 'self-esteem' she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?"
• pp. 1051-1052: Orin's old party-stopper impression of Avril: "an enormous warm and loving smile" while moving steadily in "until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and your breaths mingle." Which is worse — "the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with which it's effected?"
• p. 1052: the philanthropist figure: repellent "not in spite of his charity but because of it," viewing recipients "not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue," needing privation and suffering to continue. Appended: "Everything Orin's mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up."
• p. 1052: the closing warning, addressed to "Ms. Bainbridge" (the misnaming series collapsing addressee into writer): if you have yielded to Orin and he seems a wonderfully gifted, giving lover who "does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure," then "reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling."

Backward

• n.234 (pp. 1038ff) is this correspondence's parent: in that Orin-"Helen" interview Orin refers Steeply to Bain as "a secondary source," supplies the exact Saprogenic address ("Marlon K. Bain... BPL-Waltham Bldg."), and gives the full clinical picture this note's "Disabilities" only gestures at — impairing O.C.D. (washing rituals, T-square on the racquet strings, doorway-checking, three-hour showers plus two hours to get out the shower door, cotton gloves the summer before he left E.T.A., being bodily carried out of locker rooms), "the single sweatiest human being you'd ever want to get within a click of," the sweat dating from his parents' death, the one-room home (the converted Children's Reading Room of the old Waltham Public Library — n.269's "my own one-room home," p. 1050), the company's purchase by "a huge novelty concern" (= the ACMÉ family on this stationery), and his phobia of the number 2. n.234 also gives Orin's counter-portrait of Avril's high-functioning O.C.D. (no first-floor doorways at HmH, monitor walls), which n.269's "terribly well-ordered," "immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor" corroborates from outside.
• n.110 (the Orin-Hal phone call, scene n110): Hal's testimony locks onto Bain's. At pp. 1014-1015 Hal catalogs Orin's Avril-pathology — "sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her... resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog" — and Orin interrupts to re-assert the lie: "—a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I told you rep—." Years on, to his own brother, Orin still runs the pulverize-and-run fiction: Bain's constructed-truth diagnosis demonstrated live. Hal's list (the Jethro Bodine PR replies to Avril's letters, the married-mother Subject fetish, defining himself against the Moms) is the same anaclisis Bain names at p. 1048.
• JOI cast Bain's sweat as itself: n.24 — Death in Scarsdale (p. 987, credited "Marlon R. Bain"; initial discrepancy vs. "Marlon K." at pp. 663/1043 — both authorial), the boy treated for excessive perspiration; and As of Yore (p. 991), Bain as the weeping, perspiring son monologued at by the drunk tennis-instructor father — i.e., JOI re-staged his own father's garage monologue (pp. 157-169, scene 049) with his son's best friend in his own role. The E.T.A. V.R. photo of Bain "at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him" is in n.209 (p. 1034).
• C.T.'s "pathological openness": pp. 517-518 (scene 102) gives the main-text twin: "Orin and Marlon Bain's view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person" — this note's "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" is that view in nickname form.

Forward

• Apparatus / callout: main text pp. 663-665 (scene 128): Steeply's Moment letterhead, Bain's two-word reply ("Fire away," signed "V.D., MK Bain"), and the all-Qs questionnaire whose endnote callout at p. 665 is this note. Bain answers only Q1, two sub-parts of Q3, Q5, and Q7 — the skipped Qs are part of the joke.
• The Moms-Orin estrangement main-text thread: Orin's B.U. years, the Joelle courtship, and the estrangement's onset are at pp. 283-299 (scene 068) — which also corroborates (1) tennis-wise (Orin and Bain as marginal counterpunchers with phenomenal Eschaton-honed lobs) and (3e) (Orin wiring Marlon Bain that he was in love); deeper estrangement material falls later in the book.
• Joelle corroboration: Bain's (3e) — JOI using "Jo-Ellen" more and more, the final radical entertainment, their closeness, Orin unreliable on it — squares with Joelle's own retrospective (pp. 219-240, scene 058, 060, 062) and anticipates Molly Notkin's full (and differently slanted) account to U.S.O.U.S. (pp. 788-795, scene 159). Bain knew the circle firsthand as Orin's doubles partner; his "supposedly... supposedly" hedging is more honest than either principal.
• The monilial-internist = the medical attaché (strongly implied, never stated): the "swarthily foreign-looking monilial-internist medical resident" whom Avril introduces as a "dear and cherished friend" (p. 1049) matches the Entertainment's first victim point for point — the attaché's expertise is Candida/monilial sinusitis (the "DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast"), and he did his medical residency stateside, "completing his residency eight years ago" relative to YDAU (scene 007, pp. 33-37). If the identification holds, the unlabelled cartridge "postmarked suburban Phoenix area" with "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" in the return-address box (p. 36) went to one of Avril's old intimates from the city where Orin lives — the strongest single support for the Orin-as-samizdat-mailer reading, and it makes n.269's S. Johnson day (the "dear and cherished friend" chauffeuring Avril at Longwood) a quiet origin point of the novel's whole catastrophe.
• Steeply soft-profile thread: the "Helen Steeply"/Moment cover runs through Orin's YDAU sections (scenes 077ff) and the Marathe-Steeply mountainside debriefs (every installment 30 Apr-1 May YDAU per ruling); Bain's prediction "I can predict your feelings for him will be strong" and the closing seduction-warning land on an operative who is assigned to be seduced — and U.S.O.U.S. is reading these answers as profile data on the auteur's family.
• The Bain family elsewhere: "my older brother" (pp. 1050-1051) is Kevin Bain, whose Inner-Infant meeting Hal stumbles into at pp. 795-808 (scene 160) — same swart troll build, same "constant incredible sweating" (Marlon "like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade"), and per that scene "Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly tight" (cf. the archive's Lyle entry: Lyle's nutrition source and Bain's affliction are a made marriage). n.336 (p. 1076) cites "his sudoriferous and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain" as the source on Kevin. The "innocent female relative" who slept with Orin and reported the Volvo word is by implication the "innocent younger sister" — Orin seducing his best friend's sister being left tactfully unstated.

• p. 1047: "WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU" — the stationery motto; outsourced sincerity as a going concern, the irony-sincerity theme as letterhead.
• p. 1047: "I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way." — suicide in the novel's map-idiom, from a witness who never met an A.F.R. member.
• p. 1048: "Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man." + the full hyphenated "Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere..." chain — worth quoting whole; it is the book's anatomy of weaponized sincerity.
• p. 1048: "it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know."
• p. 1048: "he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported... Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?"
• p. 1049: "I have no response to that." — Orin's Rose-Garden alibi-collapse; runs straight into n.110's live re-assertion of the dog lie.
• p. 1049: "treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie" — Avril's regime in one clause.
• p. 1050: "Let's call it a nubbin." — the S. Johnson set piece's pivot from slapstick to horror; quote with the leash-collar-nubbin sentence.
• p. 1050: "The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse."
• p. 1050: "Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love...?" — the riddle the whole Incandenza plot keeps answering.
• p. 1051: "so multileveled and indictment-proof... Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface."
• p. 1051: "Was it Orin's 'self-esteem' she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?"
• p. 1052: "pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue" — the philanthropist passage; the bridge from Avril's mothering to Orin's lovemaking.
• p. 1052: "a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling." — final line; Avril's impression, Orin's seduction, and (for the reader) the Entertainment's lethal maternal embrace, in eight words.
• sub-footnote a (marked p. 1049): the Marijuana Thinking footnote — "Amotivational Syndrome" as misnomer, the labyrinth, the munchies as "natural defense mechanism"; the analytic companion to Erdedy (pp. 17-27) and Hal's secret smoking.