From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [356]
Warden was trying to divide his dream down by three. It was a hard job. You couldnt even spend $600 in ten days. He did not answer.
“Oh, Milt,” she said, “dont you see how it is? I’d love it. I’d do anything to have the chance. But not for thirty days, Milt, dont you see? I just cant.”
“I guess thats right,” he said. “I guess it was only a pipe-dream anyway.”
“Oh when?” she said. “Oh, Milt, when? Are we going to have to go on like this forever? Wont we ever be able to do things without being afraid? without having to calculate and scheme and hide out like criminals? When, Milt, when?”
“There now,” Warden said. “There, baby, there now. Ten days is all right. Ten days is fine. It’ll work out, you’ll see,” he said, stroking the back of the small fragile head that always made him feel loutish and clumsily dangerous as if he were handling eggs. “Ten days? Hell,” he said, “ten days is a lifetime. You’ll see.”
“I cant take it like this much longer, Milt,” Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
“I cant take it much longer,” she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated under his improper liberties, the eternally imprisoned under his lead-heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect. “I cant even walk over to the Commissary without feeling all their eyes on the back of my neck. I’ve never been so openly degraded in my whole life,” she said, savoring it. That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they—just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? “I cant take it much longer, Milt,” she whispered.
“There,” Warden said, feeling the blood come up chargingly into his eyes and turn everything red like a mountain twilight, and not knowing why, “there, there. You wont have to, baby. You wont have to take it. Come on,” he said, “lets go down to the beach and have a good hard swim and then go someplace and have a party.” The second it was out he knew he shouldnt have said it.
Karen sat up and stared at him piercingly with eyes like a cat’s, the tears still dribbling out of them.
“It isnt just sex, is it, Milt?” she asked, with the ringing tension of a rockcrystal that too heavy a touch will crack all apart. “It isnt just animal sex, is it? You want more than that, dont you? Theres more to it than that, isnt there, Milt? I know theres more to love than that. Isnt there, Milt?”
Warden held his love up by one corner and inspected it under the magnifying glass of animal sex.
“Isn’t it, Milt?”
“Of course it is. Its a lot more than that.” There was no use trying to argue it, or explain it again. He had wanted her badly, there for a moment; now he didnt care much. You had to work so hard to get it that finally, when you did get it, it was a letdown. The peak, like the first day there at the house, was already passed and the starch was all gone out of you for it.
“If it wasn’t,” Karen said, “you’d never see me again.”
“It’s just a whole hell of a lot more than that,” Warden said. “You just can’t put it into words, is all. Come on, let’s go have that good hard swim down on the beach. Did you know Hanauma Bay was the Company CP when we’re out on Invasion Maneuvers?”
If you couldnt have 30 days, you would settle for ten. If you couldn’t have it when it was right, you would wait until it was right—unless in the waiting it got to be hot for you to handle and then you would take one and crawl off and go back to sleep, just like any