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Show 217 hung on a feeler of the television set. He was about Lorin's height, could not have been more than a year or two older, and was if anything thinner. The wrinkled forehead and flared nostrils were the accidental stresses on a man who doesn't like what he finds when he comes home, but it was the fixed units of his person that most arrested Lorin, the pale eyes, the thin nose, the long bony face, the heavy lower lip and receding chin, the unstable adam's apple. No one but himself knew what Lorin looked like from the cheekbones down, but the other correspondences were stark and merely waited for somebody to notice them. Lighten Floyd's hair, force him to grow a beard that looked too heavy for his skinny body and accentuated the forward thrust of his head, dress him in baggy denims and a fatigue shirt whose collar was frayed nearly off, and i t might have been himself that Lorin stared at and felt disliked by. As i t was, they might have shared the same gene pool. "There's some soup left if you're interested," Gloriana was saying. She hadn't moved. She s t i l l sat at her end of the couch with her legs under her, her elbow on the armrest, her soup mug held over the napkin on her lap lest the gentle swirling she gave it spill some. "I've eaten," Floyd said. "Harold took us all to the Nickleodeon." "That was nice." "I've been there," said Lorin. "After the third martini we decided lunch could wait and after lunch nobody felt like going to work, so here I am." "That's a lot of martinis," said Gloriana. "I've never had their martinis," said Lorin. "Mail come yet?" "The Newsweek came, and a letter from your mother. Otherwise just throwaways." |