From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [85]
But it was the back cover of that same issue of the Post that really caught him, really took him outside of now. It was a Chesterfield Merry Christmas ad of a young woman holding up a carton of them as she zoomed up over a snowy hill, her skis clear off the ground and shot snow in the air about her feet. She had on red pants with white stripes down the sides that fit her hips and long lined thighs very closely and wrinkled cunningly across the crotch. A red and white striped long sleeved sweater with a white pullover vest over that, as she bent forward slightly, suggested loosely the pendulous breasts underneath. He looked at the photograph quite a while, his eyes working along the shadowed wrinkles, trying vainly to get underneath, before he rolled the old Post up and stuck it back behind the seat, happy with a new idea.
For Christ’s sake, Prewitt, he told himself, here you been looking at these magazines a half an hour without ever going through the cunt-pictures; and he got up to go and get the Ladies’ Home Journals.
There were lots of them, old ones of the Company’s subscription around the Dayroom, because no matter what the Dayroom orderly thew out he always saved the Journals, until they had been worn completely out.
He went through several magazines from front to back, not bothering with the idiotic stories, looking for the ads. Most of them had women in them and these were what he looked for. The colored photographs were the best for reality in picturing the women, but on the other hand they usually put a few more clothes on these than they did the drawings. The small drawn ads in the back, down the outsides of the pages, the ones with the slightly oversized breasts and the collection of fanning wrinkles around the crotch, with the moulded, deep, fleshly look; these were the best.
There was a Mum ad that said “A girl can be too trusting at times!” with the big firm legs and flat belly that no woman ever had, the girl in underwear and a filmy negligee sitting on a stool, shoving a big powder puff up under her arm, and the long underside of her thigh and buttock and that little curve that joined them all hanging pendulously waiting for a hand. It was more than fair, that one.
Then there was a Treeburn’s Facial Soap ad, of a long-lined blonde lying on a beach robe being kissed by a handsome head and shoulder of a man, a painting with a kind of unreal fuzzy outline, she lying there full length, stretched out, turned on one hip, her arms above her head, wearing a bathing suit that looked like a leopard skin, a tight little bra over the small snub breasts and the brief pants wrinkled enticingly across the crotch between the close-together legs. There was the heavy-lidded, full-pouting-lipped look on her face that women get when they really want it bad. This one was a fine one, better than the others, in fact, the best one yet.
And last, of the three best, there was this small one, a shaded drawing of a dame in a sort of T shirt and soft shorts. Duchessa Lazidays, Sleep in ’em Play in ’em Laze in ’em, Duchessa Underwear Corp. and the T shirt fell lightly, swelling under the pressure of the perfect breasts. Shaded half circles and points of light hinted at the rubbery red nipples underneath. The clothes really made no difference; if the artist had left out two dozen lines it would have been a nude. Yet Prew found himself staring and staring, trying vainly to penetrate beneath the plane of the attire to the plane of the figure under it, as if it were three-dimensional. Funny how just a few pencil lines adroitly arranged could suggest the swelling, deep-blooded, pulsating life of a lovely woman.
He could feel his hands beginning to sweat and the muscles along the insides of his thighs begin to tremble. That woman was too good to be true, he told himself, no woman ever lived with an ass and tits like that. Maybe that was why it was more appealing than the color photographs. And that curly headed son of a bitch in the painting, getting ready to lay his long blonde on the beach, just as natural, just as easy, taking all that he had there so much for granted. God, he thought, imagine a man that had a woman there, like that, and then taking her for granted.
You better lay off