Fixture of the Incandenza orbit: Family Trivia, the driveway, the "cross-section" verdict on C.T., the porn-film circle

texture · UNDATED (Weston and E.T.A. years, B.S.)

• When: UNDATED (standing presence across the Weston household and early-E.T.A. years)
• What: The archive of family memory keeps finding Bain already in the frame. Hal remembers "Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year’s blizzard," Orin doing his impression of the Moms and never tiring of it (scene 179). The brothers' late-night reminiscence has "Orin and Marlon" in the driveway the day Orin answered the phone Avril kept out for the dog S. Johnson and barked into it — "The joke that Orin thought was such a good one" (scene 155). When Himself discovered the boys' plan to screen a smuggled hardcore film, his one condition was discretion: "just Bain and Smothergill and Orin’s immediate circle, nobody younger" (scene 179 — Bain named first in the immediate circle). And the family's standing gloss on Charles Tavis is a Bain co-production: "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" (scene 102) — a verdict Bain still runs in YDAU, recommending Steeply spend time with Orin's Uncle Charles — a.k.a. "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" Tavis — to see "real openness in motion" (n269).