Avril's letter portrait — the bumblebee, the cholesterol, the fish-liver oil

texture · 20 June YWQMD (2006)

• When: 20 June YWQMD (2006), dated in Avril's letter to Orin
• What: In one of the chirpy quotidian letters Avril mails Orin (who never answers but has a PR flunky send form-replies), Tavis appears as the beloved obtrusive fixture of "Mount Gawdforsaken": "your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee" so enormous "it sounded like a tuba," and he dispatched the grounds crew with skeet rifles to "bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down"; his blood-cholesterol comes back "Normal to Upper-normal," triggering "much pacing and high-decibel whingeing," vows of xerophagy, and the nightly three teaspoons of fish-liver oil that "Your brothers have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow... purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward." The affectionate register that balances Orin's contempt. The cholesterol thread has hardware: Tavis's office exercise machine is a CardioMed "fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of r.p.m.s," so the exerciser must "run climbing for his life" — hence the big weight-room mat fixed to the office wall behind it; he "had moved up to [it] from his StairMaster after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with at first, once requiring a back-brace" (n220 p. 1036).