From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [140]
In the silence Lorene laughed self-consciously.
“If it is so important to you as all that,” she smiled, “then you are one of my specials.”
Prew shook his head. “Thats no answer,” he said doggedly, and closed it up again with his tongue, the little hole, the little leak, the small Achilles heel.
“Well, what other answer do you want?”
“I dont know,” he said, listlessly. “Forget it. Is this our room?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she put her fine-boned, woman’s hand on his arm and said, “Listen!” half-jokingly, and he could hear the springs squeaking rhythmically in the next room.
“At work already,” she joked, trying to erase the page and write it her way, but the uncertainty in her made it fail, fall flat.
“Work, all right,” Prew said stonily, listening to the hard, unvarying rhythm. “Hard work.” The fine-boned, woman’s hand was on his arm, so delicate to hold such power, and he wanted to grab the thinness of her and constrict the breath out of her kissing her, bring her alive to what he knew, make her feel it. But the tabu said you never kissed a whore, you only fucked them, all you want, and can pay for, but you never kiss them, it was a rooted Law, and she would not feel it, she would only see the broken Law and be angry at the liberty.
“I was joking,” Lorene said apologetically.
She turned on the light then, suddenly showing all of it, baring it to the sight: the thin mattressed bed, the stand in the corner that is just as important here as the broom is in the factory because the assembly line must above all always be kept clean or there might be a breakdown in production. He stood looking at it, time honored by tradition like the memorials to dead veterans that are always the same the cannon on the courthouse lawn whether its the Civil War or the World War or this coming war or any future war and you always knew why they were there By their Cannon Ye shall know Them on the courthouse lawn, and he almost felt like he was coming home.
“I have to ask you for the money,” Lorene said awkwardly.
“Oh. Sure,” he said. “I forgotten it.” He got his wallet out and gave her Stark’s fifteen dollars. Not even your fifteen dollars, he thought, this time.
She tried to hide her awkwardness that surprised her, by getting a couple of cheap quilts out of the high cupboard and tossing them on the bed.
“There. Minerva’s Corps only fixes the beds for the transient trade. But we’ll need covers,” she said gayly, but it was a false attempt that could not be distilled off of her awkwardness and Prew’s granite face that could not smile just now, the Great Stone Face, somebody wrote a story about the Great Stone Face.
“All right,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
“I wasnt hurrying you. I thought you didnt hear,” she said, noticing curiously how he was not awkward at all getting out of his clothes, which was the time when even the hardest of them were always awkward. But he was not awkward. He was not hard. He just did not even seem to be there, and she felt her bowels stir suddenly.
It was, he thought, like water which, when dammed, creates a pressure, a pressure of power that will pour out flooding, from any little channel it can find, from any little opening, flooding forth roaring with a long dammed slowly risen energy of pressure that obliterates the earths and moons and stars and suns, subsiding finally into a ridiculous little trickle that will not even roll a pebble, and you wonder foolishly how this thin trickle ever could have generated power and maybe it was all in your own imagination and your eyelids did not really crumble away the firmament into the one single Sun, the one undying Principle. That, he thought, was what its like.
They lay side by side, not touching, in the bed under the two separate quilts and the window was wide open on the night outside and they heard footsteps sound heavily far off like a cop and a streetcar screeked into action against time and somewhere a bus hissed its air brakes menacingly at them. They did not talk because knowing she did not care one way or the other, to talk or not, he did not want to talk, he did not even want to think, of anything but this that had just gone away and he looked out under the crack below the lowered blind at the roofs across the street and wondered dimly if Angelo was in the middle room and if he had the bottle or Stark had it and whether he should get up and put his pants on and see if he could find it because, very badly, he wanted a drink now.
He did not know exactly how long, it seemed a very short time, it also seemed a very long