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Show 173 * * * * * * As it happened, Gloriana was not at the Coach and Seven that night. Lorin spent most of the evening at tables from which he could watch the door without craning his neck so that people would notice. Simon wasn't there either, to be asked. He had to satisfy himself with a sequence of nude mime shows with Gail, both of them in whiteface. Gail herself was at the large table near the fireplace rattling on to a party of regulars, including the bald playwright and a beautiful dark-eyelashed fairy named Victor who wore carmine nail, polish and always came in with a girl friend named Desiree. The mime shows did the job, and after he had said something sarcastic to Noel for coming in late again and to Paul for not protesting he went home, arriving in time to catch Yvonne in the kitchen eating an enormous sandwich. He said something oblique about little pigs who had none and little pigs that said wee wee wee all the way home, upon which she told him she was unusually tired, and washed and pinned up her hair. This was Thursday. On Friday he confined his whole attention to a girl who was a graduate teaching fellow in the anthropology department at UCLA (they had taken a class together once, which Lorin had flunked). She had slim suntanned legs, and she sat at one end of the long blue couch playing her guitar while Lorin sat at the other end and helped her with the words to a Theodore Bikel song she was trying to remember- Gloriana was there tonight, sitting across the room at a table with Simon and a graduate student in theater arts named Drury, but to punish her he had not gone over to join them, even when he noticed the candle on their table had burned down and needed replacing. At home he asked Yvonne while she was undressing if all dancers had big ugly knots in their rectus femoris. On |
