The Avril orbit: best friend, reassurer, and Tavis's sounding board

texture · standing (attested YDAU, incl. Nov YDAU)

• When: standing relationship across the YDAU present (attestations: undated YDAU exposition, scene 013; the Moment interview-fragments, "NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.," n.234; the 11 Nov YDAU Avril-Mario conversation, scene 154)
• What: Scorned from below, Rusk sits close to the Academy's administrative-familial center. Per Orin (to "Helen" Steeply, defending his estrangement from his mother): "One of her best friends is the E.T.A. counselor, Rusk, with doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she think the Moms is bats?" — the degrees as Orin sarcastically renders them, as printed. The friendship works in both directions of reassurance: it is Rusk's professional assurance that lets Avril accommodate Hal's drinking — "there’s no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part" — an assurance the novel's whole Hal arc quietly detonates; and Avril has "told Drs. Rusk and Tavis" her trusting-mother philosophy. Rusk also confers about Avril rather than with her: "Dr. Tavis and Dolores Rusk have privately discussed the fact that not least among the phobic stressors Avril suffers so uncomplainingly with is a black phobic dread of hiding or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons." And Avril retails Rusk's theory in conversation with Mario on 11 Nov — "Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment," she says of people terrified to feel their own sadness, adding "Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always" (the bare first name is Avril's; the identification of "Dolores" as Rusk rests on the name plus the attested best-friendship — see Dating notes). The one Rusk theory the book records at second hand is thus aimed, with heavy dramatic irony, straight at the Incandenza household.