From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [50]
He woke once in the middle of the night. The storm was gone and the moon shone in brightly through the open window. Violet lay with her back to him, head pillowed on bent elbow. From the stiffness of her body he knew she was not sleeping, and he put his hand on her naked hip and turned her toward him. In the deep curve of her hip and the indented juncture of ball and socket underneath there was an infinite workmanship of jewel-like precision that awed him, and called up in him an understanding that was like a purge and awakened liquid golden flecks within his eyes.
She rolled willingly, unsleepily, and he wondered what she had been thinking of, lying there awake. As he moved over her, he realized again that he did not know her face or name, that here in this act that brings two human fantasies as close as they can ever come, so close that one moves inside the other, he still did not know her, nor she him, nor could they touch each other. To a man who lives his life among the flat hairy angularities of other men, all women are round and soft, and all are inscrutable and strange. The thought passed quickly.
He awoke in the morning on his back, uncovered. The door was still open, and Violet and her mother were moving around in the kitchen. He smothered an impulse to grab up the covers over his nakedness and rose and donned his trunks, feeling deeply shamed, embarrassed by his own pendulous existence which all women hated. The old woman took no notice of him when he entered the kitchen.
After the morning cleaning was done and the old people had padded silently away to visit neighbors, Prew thought the whole thing over and finally, characteristically, just came out with it.
“I want you to move to Wahiawa and shack up with me,” he said bluntly.
Violet sat in her chair on the porch, half-turned toward him, her elbow on the arm, cheek resting on a half closed fist. “Why, Bobbie?” She continued to stare at him curiously, the same curiosity with which she always watched him, as if seeing for the first time the subtle mechanism from which she got her pleasure, and that she had always thought was simple. “You know I cant do that. Why make a showdown of it?”
“Because I wont be able to come up here any more,” he said, “like I used to. Before I transferred. If we lived in Wahiawa, I’d come home every night.”
“What is wrong with living this way?” she asked him, in the same odd tone. “I dont mind if you only come up on weekends. You dont have to come every night like you used to do, before you transferred.”
“Weekends aint enough,” he said. “At least not for me.”
“If you break off with me,” Violet said, “you wont get it even that often, will you? You wont find any woman who will shack up with a private who makes twenty-one dollars.”
“I dont like being around your folks,” Prew said, “they bother me; they dont like me. If we’re goin to be shacked up, we might as well be shacked up. Instead of this half way stuff. Thats the way it is.” He said it flatly, like a man enumerating the faults and values of a new spring coat.
“I’d have to quit my job. I’d have to get another job in Wahiawa. That might be hard, unless I took a job as waitress in a bar, and I cant do that.
“I quit my job in Kahuku,” she said indifferently, “and left a nice home where I was one of the family—to come back here to this rotten place—against my parents’ wishes that I not leave my higher position. I did it so I could be near enough for you to come up every night. I did it because you asked me to.”
“I know you did,” he said, “I know you did. But I didnt know it would be like this.”
“What did you expect?” she said. “You dont make enough to pay for shacking up, Bo