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Show 211 but Andy wanted to see the place that day if possible and had offered to drive her home for lunch. She didn't know quite how to put this, but she and Andy had been talking for some time about moving in someplace together, and it was sort of coming to a head since the lease on her present apartment ran out at the end of the month, and actually they had rather hoped she would just be able to move in here rather than both of them picking out an entirely new place, and all things considered (a pause here while Yvonne looked down at the table top and then back up) this seemed perhaps a good time to begin making the necessary arrangements, if those could be done in a day or two. Andrea sat smiling at him, her hands folded on the table among the saffron crumbs. He rather liked Andrea. She was unprincipled, and would be party to any program of lies required of her, just to see how it turned out. She wore electric blue contact lenses, and her hair hung in two long black braids down the front of her shoulders. Her chin was weak, but in a black leotard and tights she looked elastic and as strong as a tentacle. Her fiance had been killed a year ago in a motorcycle accident near Palmdale, and Yvonne had worried aloud to Lorin that she seemed not to have had a sex life since, nor wanted one. She had given him a pleasant jolt once; the three of them had been walking to her apartment building along a sidewalk covered with crushed St. John's breadfruit pods and she had remarked that they smelled like sperm, much to Yvonne's embarrassment. Yvonne thought they smelled like earwax. Lorin said he would see what he could do, and went back to his screened porch. He heard them leave a short time later. He spent the afternoon carrying his boxes of clothes and books, his portfolios, his paintcases and canvases and other effects out to his car, where he stuffed what he could into the trunk and piled everything else in the back seat. Tears burned in his throat when he saw how little difference |