"Not 100% exempt": Lyle's memory of Marlon Bain, the always-wet boy

texture · UNDATED (past; recalled in the present)

• When: UNDATED — a memory of "an E.T.A. player from several years back," Orin's Academy doubles partner (i.e. c. Orin's E.T.A. era, B.S.); recalled in the storm-night present
• What: Framed by the narrator's caveat that no guru is "100% exemption from the human pains of stunted desire," Lyle recalls Marlon Bain, whose "omniwetness" had "a lemony, low-cal taste" and "wasn't exactly sweat, because you could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you'd taken" — none of real sweat's "frustratingly gradual accretion." Bain shared extensively; "Lyle had told this boy everything he had to tell." The memory carries "a tormentingly unspecific hope in the air" — Lyle's own registered longing. Corroborated in scene 160: "Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly tight, Hal recalls" — the same scene noting that "I Don't Know (How to Love Him)" is "from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people's players and listened to at night in the weight room" (a rare glimpse of Lyle's private after-hours life).