From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [339]
It was only later on, after the others had all finally gone off to sleep, that he was not sleepy any more and began to think of Alma Schmidt whom he had almost believed he had forgotten and, trying The Malloy’s black dot system again here in the bunk and failing miserably, lay for a long time wide awake, and thinking of her.
Everything you swear you will not do you always end by doing, he thought sleepy again now finally. I remember distinctly you swore once you would never lay in your bunk and jackoff, and so now you can add this one to the still growing list. At least this is one degradation Bloom didnt have to suffer.
Or maybe Bloom was in love with someone, too. Maybe that was why he killed himself.
The more he thought about it, sleepily again, the more he was quite positive that that was it, that Bloom had killed himself for love.
Chapter 40
MILTON ANTHONY WARDEN, on the other hand, having been out with Karen Holmes every afternoon since he had closed out Prewitt’s trial, did not speculate on why Bloom killed himself. It was enough for Warden, more than enough, that he had done it. It put the quietus on Milt Warden’s private life as effectively as if the Third Reich had invaded New York City, or the Japanese tried to attack Pearl Harbor in broad daylight, or the Martians captured California.
He had started seeing her in the afternoons after the Hickam problem. They had decided on that as being the best time for her to get away with the least amount of risk. They both felt the need of a plan that would give their deception dailyness and regularity and at the same time still be foolproof. This was, and under it they both had blossomed. The days had arranged themselves into a comfortable pattern that seemed to have been like this always and promised to go on like this forever. If there was work in the afternoons he let Mazzioli do it and to hell with it. It was all routine stuff and he could always straighten it out later and the kid was supposed to be in there to learn. Leva could handle the supplyroom, and he did not have to worry about Stark’s kitchen. He would meet her in town along the bright hot tourist-crowded streets and they would drive her husband’s battered old Buick club coupe around and around the Island, him in trunks and barefooted, her in a legless briefbra-ed swimsuit that was as sensual as her bare pointed toenails, taking every new back road they had not driven, stopping to swim whenever they felt like swimming. They stopped to love whenever he felt like loving, although Karen felt he was inclined to stop too often and insisted that while sometimes she liked it it had no place in her love and she could have done as well, or better, without any of that which was such a vulgar way of proving your love; but still she did not try to dissuade him from stopping, and those afternoons, like all the rest of the time he spent with Karen Holmes, seemed to elongate themselves into infinity like a backward telescope until nothing else existed. If there was anything lacking that kept them from being absolute perfection, it was that her husband’s Buick was not a convertible.
There were no stormy sessions, not a single argument, because they had already settled it between them (the day they came back together hungrily after the two weeks at Hickam Field) that Milt would put in for officer’s extension course. They settled it in the following manner:
Karen made it plain that she would never ask it of him. He then volunteered it. Karen said no, understanding and sympathizing with the way he felt about Officers, she could not ask or expect it of him, that he was not to do it on her account, ever, even if it meant her losing him. Whereupon Milt insisted he would too do it, and do it on her account, and only on her account, and nothing she could say would deter him. She cried, and he almost cried, and that was how they left it. He did not do anything about putting in the application.
When she asked him about it later on, he told her it was already in the mail (he would have told her a lot worse things than that, to keep those afternoons) and made a mental note to make it out and have Holmes sign it and get it in the mail tomorrow, but he did not get around to it. It would have been easy, because after they decided it she had started working on Holmes some at home and Holmes had started urging him to put in for it, but he could not get around to it. He did not intend to undertake a course of stupid lessons that might interfere with those afternoons, those hot bright swim-cool afternoons, that seemed to be more dream than reality and that he wanted to go on like that forever. The future was too vague of an investment to risk all the capital he had. Let the future look out for itself, like everybody else. It was of age, wasnt it? To hell with the future, as long as these afternoons go on like this forever.
And for a wh