From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [353]
“And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after,” Karen said bitterly.
“Amen,” he said.
“You think its easy,” Karen said, “you think theres nothing to it. Your mistake was that you ever let me trust you. How many times I’ve seen you mentally undress every young flip we pass on the street—even if we shoot past her at fifty in the car, while I sit there knowing as well as I know my name you’ve forgotten me entirely and are mentally taking her to bed.”
“But Jesus Christ!” Warden protested horrifiedly, “I dont do that!”
Karen smiled.
“What I mean, its not the same thing at all. Honest. The two things have nothing to do with each other. With them its like going to a whorehouse, like a—”
“I dont know what going to a whorehouse is like,” Karen said acidly.
“Its like riding a horse,” Warden said earnestly, with sudden inspiration. “I mean you see a bright sharp new filly in a pasture, and you want to throw a saddle on her and see what she can do. Thats all it is. With you its like going out to ride your own pert three year old mare that you are used to and that knows your every touch exactly so that the two of you arent horse and rider but one single animal.”
“It makes me want to tear your eyes out,” Karen said. “And I dislike being compared to a horse, no matter how much of a privately owned thoroughbred.”
“Oh,” Warden said. “You dislike it, hunh? It pains you. How many times do you think I’ve watched you drive off home knowing you were going to sleep in the same room with that son of a bitch, maybe in the same bed for all I know? While I go home to my bunk and imagine every last little physical detail and picture? I dont guess you got to worry much about being privately owned.”
“Why, you silly damned fool,” Karen raged, “how could you of all people ever think I’d have anything to do with Dana again? I dont feel that way about him. I dont know if either of us ever did. I could be friends with him, close friends, if he’d let me; but as for that—why its just out, I never go back to a man once he’s let me down. If I’m not chaste, at least I have that much pride. The thought of another man makes me physically sick.”
“And that makes it a lot easier on me, dont it?”
“I dont think your lot with me is too very much harder on you than my lot with you is on me,” Karen said precisely.
“And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after,” Warden grinned at her viciously.
“Yes,” Karen said. “That seems to be the traditional procedure.”
They sat looking at each other absolutely inarticulately furiously, every argument that could have been offered already postulated, every protest that could be framed already charted, overwhelmingly aware that they had reached the absolute end of sane verbal conversation without having explained a single damned thing to the other, overwhelmed by the eternal semantics of the sexes.
They must have sat that way for almost half an hour, each wanting sympathy but refusing to give sympathy and boiling indignantly at the other’s lack of sympathy, as if there were at least one room between them and they were lying each in his own bed in the darkness tensely, until finally the indignation of not being understood boils over into another emotion which is the tragic sorrow of not being understood. And all around them the yelling haole highschool boys ran on chasing the shrilling haole highschool girls who also ran on.
“You know what?” Warden said stifledly, “we’re just exactly alike. We’re absolute opposites; and yet we’re just alike.”
“We both imagine the other one’s trying to throw us over,” Karen said, “and neither one of us thinks the other appreciates us as much as we appreciate him.”
“We curse and storm at each other for doing the same identical things,” Warden said, “and we’re both of us so goddam jealous we cant hardly stand it.”
“We imagine all sorts of horrible things,” Karen said, “and we know the other one isnt near good enough for us.”
“I’ve never been so miserable in my life as I have since I met you,” Warden said.
“Neither have I,” Karen said.
“I wouldnt trade a minute of it