Bain's testimony: football-as-homoeroticism, "the least open man I know," truth-as-constructed

texture · Nov YDAU

• When: November YDAU (Bain's letter to Steeply, n269; frame-correspondence scene 128)
• What: Marlon Bain — writing from his one-room retreat, on the outs with Orin — supplies Steeply the fullest outside read of Orin: football is "A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism"; Orin's fail-safe pick-up line "Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man" is "a pose of poselessness"; "Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know"; and "It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported," a habit learned "at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met." Bain closes on the theory that "men who believe they hate what they really fear they need are of limited interest." More of the family lattice (Orin's anaclitic hatred of Avril/JOI).