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Show 155 wearing it. Peter said the first time he put it on he got an erectiti on." "Fascinating," murmured the playwright. "I was just thinking if little prickly barbs can do that just think what a whole current could do!" She closed her eyes and hummed like a current. "I wouldn't want to be the one to disappoint you," said the playwright, puffing at his pipe and looking wounded. It was at this point that Paul asked Lorin about his fatuous smile, and shortly afterwards that Simon and his friends came in, the girl with the bangs among them. Lorin was watching a chess game at another table by then and nearly missed them. * * * * * * He did take his time getting to her table, having discovered business that took him away to the kitchen, where he could think. He reflected that he did not know anything about her, her name, who she was, how she happened to know Simon, whether she really had liked his painting. He was bemused to reflect that she didn't look exactly the way he remembered her. Her face was rounder, for one thing. His dream about her had evidently reshaped his memory. He counted the hamburger patties in the refrigerator and unplugged a gas jet in one of the burners on the stove with a broom straw and removed a clot of dust from the needle before putting the Resurrection Symphony on the hi-fi. These things done, he drifted out to the table, where he ignored her and said hello to Simon and the two friends who had come in with them. Lorin despised these two friends, but he despised one of them more than the other. Shannon was enormously tall, very thin, with a long upper lip and taffy hair, which he wore in bangs because he liked to look like a little English schoolboy. He sewed his own clothes, it was rumored, at least some |