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Show 103 dropped her off at the bookstore where she worked and from where she would walk up to the university after lunch for her classes. He returned home and spent the day staring at a canvas and drinking quarts of coffee and feeling his stomach turn rancid as the shadows of the pitosporum that grew just outside the screen crept from right to left across his slab floor. At five-thirty he picked her up from the women's gymnasium and they ate dinner by candlelight on whatever she was able to throw together out of what was left in the refrigerator from the night before or what they had picked up from the Village Delicatessen that afternoon. After that they went their separate ways again-she back to the university for a rehearsal, Lorin to the Coach and Seven where with his partners Noel and Paul he talked with customers, tended the espresso machine, sterilized cups, changed records on the hi-fi, made sandwiches, and kept an eye on the chessmen at various tables, because sometimes people put them in their pockets and walked off with them. They had been living together since October, and he had the guilt under control now. The Coach and Seven did not turn much of a profit, but with her small salary, supplemented by the pittance sent by her parents to an old address she did not tell them she had moved from (a friend lived there now), they might have been very comfortable in their little nest facing the cemetery, but Lorin knew the signs of a dissolving relationship when he saw them, and he watched them with gathering dread as week by week the particles floated away. She did not ignore him. On the contrary, she was becoming frenetically cheerful in his company. She laughed strenuously at all his jokes, sometimes leaning against a wall and throwing her head back. He might walk into a room and find her sitting on the floor looking grim and preoccupied, only to jump up when she saw him and with a bright smile ask |