OCR Text |
Show 174 Saturday he and Paul pushed tables and chairs against the walls to clear a space on the floor and Lorin found the scratched recording of Rite of Spring among the Coach and Seven's slender stock and put it on for Natasha Wilkinson to improvise to. While Natasha thrashed on the floor in black tights and pummeled the air with her fists and knees he slipped through the crowd that stood watching her and went over to join Dennis McBride and his wife at a booth facing Paul's dead fish. Dennis was an old classmate who had switched to commercial art in his junior year and now designed training manuals for the phone company and was very happy. His wife worked at the counselling center on campus, and she and Lorin were old friends from the days when she had logged him into his counsellor's appointment book and told him he was her favorite misfit. She was wearing shorts tonight, and once before when she had done that he had impulsively put a hand on her golden leg under the table as he sat down to join them and she had grinned so broadly that Dennis, blinking at her across the candle flame, had asked her what was funny. Lorin had removed his hand immediately and sat in a cold sweat while she invented something and tried to keep her shoulders from shaking. Tonight as he sat down she put her purse between them on the padded seat of the booth. He stayed only a few minutes and then went back to watch Natasha. Gloriana was not there tonight, and when he went home he rummaged through his cardboard boxes until he found an old pair of pajamas which he put on before climbing into bed. Yvonne rolled over and looked at him. "Night sweats," he said. On Sunday the place was nearly empty, and he sat by himself at a corner table pecking out a letter on Noel's portable typewriter (kept there to do accounts) while Gloriana sunbathed naked under a blazing sky on the roof of her apartment buildng, stretched at ease on a white deck chair, now and then lifting the brim of her floppy hat to make |