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Show 167 her and couldn't see her now without turning his head. "I think I came in too late," said Paul, sitting down. "That one went right past me." "The Resurrection Symphony, Paul," said Lorin, who hated conversations like this. "A convert's testimony." "What Resurrection Symphony?" said Paul. "Oh Lorin, you're ^ o b l i q u e , " said Shannon. "When you call me oblique, smile," said Lorin, and withdrew into silence He had better things to do anyway than construct learned jokes for people he disliked. Slouched in his chair between Paul and girl with the bangs, glowering at his coffee cup, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched, he listened sullenly to an argument between Paul and Shannon on the relative and absolute architectural awfulness of the Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard (they didn't ask his opinion), and waited for her to lean over and brush the side of his face with her hair. He was still waiting when Noel came in and spoiled everything. "We'd given up on you," Paul said. "I was attacked by a Coke machine," said Noel, standing behind Harry's chair, his hands behind his back, smiling mysteriously. Lorin did not want to hear the rest of it but had no choice short of leaving the table, and he wasn't through with her yet. She l i t t l e imagined as she sat smiling over the cup she held in both hands that she had just wakened from untroubled sleep to a bright morning between warm, fragrant sheets, or that inches away they were twisted and sodden from a night of thrashing; or that she had stretched and yawned, and turned to discover the radiant tool where she had left i t , offered good morning to its glassy-eyed owner; or asked for (and gotten) a chaste kiss to the left of her navel |