The marriage's weather: "a C–," never a fight, Avril as the family's emotional sun

texture · UNDATED (the marriage's span, ~18 years to YTSDB)

• When: UNDATED (the roughly eighteen married/Academy years, ending at JOI's 1 Apr YTSDB death)
• What: JOI, drunk and injudicious with Lyle in the weight room, said "that if he had to grade his marriage he'd give it a" C-minus. Orin's counter-report: "I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years." (The endnote apparatus complicates the never-a-fight report: "Some of her and Jim's best arguments had been over the connotations of 'Everybody's a critic,' which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge" — n306 p. 1062; arguments vs. "never once saw the two of them fight" carried as printed.) To the children (via Orin, to Joelle) Avril was "the family's pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate," his "emotional sun," the mediator through whom the blank, "Le Masque"-faced JOI could be reached at all; Joelle found the Incandenzas "the second-saddest family" she'd ever seen. The same interview voice's darker verdict — the speaker of the "eighteen domestic and Academy years" line, i.e. Orin: "The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion" (unspecified; feeds the paternity/infidelity cruxes).