From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [139]
“I know it,” he said. “But he had to have a brass gut to even ask you a thing like that. These people who have always done everything—surfing, mountain climbing, flying, deep sea diving, anything you mention they’ve done some of it—that kind always got a pure brass gut. And they’ve never done anything. I’ve seen them before.”
“Well he knows surfboarding. Because I’ve seen him on his board at Waikiki, and he’s good. He spends all his money on surfing and spear fishing, and to stay in the Outrigger Club. He’s always in debt three months ahead. Thats another reason I couldnt loan it to him.”
He was getting tired of Bill the surfboard rider.
“Sandra said to tell you they were goin around back, over the outside stairs. She said you’d know. Angelo sneaked in a bottle and we all want to use it.”
Lorene looked at him steadily, her eyes very cool, and very serene. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I know where. Come on.”
“Wait,” Prew said. “Are you still mad at me about this other?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not mad.”
“I think you are. And I had to ask you. Because if you’re still mad I’d just rather we called the whole thing off.”
She looked at him again, steadily, then she smiled. “You’re a funny one. No, I’m not mad. I was, but I got over it.”
“I dint want you to be mad at me. I had to ask you.”
It was hard to say these things, without feeling foolish, hard to make them seem believable. So many fellows probably said them without meaning them.
“Flatterer,” Lorene said coquettishly. It was the first time he had seen her be coquettish and it startled him.
She took his hand and swung their arms together gayly, coquettishly, as they walked across the entryway and around the double corner to the hallway that went back over the stairs, and that had still more doors of tiny bedrooms. She led him gayly, him embarrassed by her sudden gaiety, along the worn carpeting down the narrow dimness that was lighted by a single bare bulb in the ceiling halfway down, to the third door from the end on the street side.
“We never use this part except on Payday,” she told him gayly, “when the big rush is on. The rest of the time we keep it for the all night—friends,” she said, “those of them who are very special. Nobody walks by here at night and it is quiet and the street is outside where you can hear the buses sometimes through the window. The rooms back there dont have any of that,” she said, “and theres no fear of someone barging in on us, like sometimes happens back there.”
“Am I one of your specials?” he asked her thickly.
She stopped at the door and laughed back at him over her shoulder. “Well,” she said, coquettishly, “you’re here, arent you?”
“Sure I’m here. But that could be because of Angelo and Maylon, and the bottle, that they wanted me cut in on,” he said, noticing how very feminine she was when she was coquettish. “Billy and Sandra brought them here, not me.”
“Is it so important?” Lorene teased.
“Yes, its important,” he said urgently. “Important because there are so many of us; thats just faces, to you. So many of you that aint even faces, only just bodies, to us. Do you want to be just a unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we’re remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being always all alike, always unremembered. They die inside. Wives earn their money that way just as much as whores do, with this crappy imitation that aint no good but has to work because usually its all there is. But it dries up the well and leaves it nothing but a mudhole, makes it just rich blood poured down a strawy rathole that stinks afterwards, unless you are remembered. We dont ask to be needed, all we ask is to be remembered. Just to be remembered is . . .”
In the dim halflight he could see her looking at him, very surprised, and he shut it off, the little opening that was his mouth from which th