From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [142]
“God damn,” Stark said, “if you two dont look like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.”
“We had a gook waiter tonight,” Angelo explained, laughing. “This gook waiter stood around behint me all a time like he was scared I’d pick up the wrong fork and shock the customers. So when he brought this pa-pa-ya with a slice of lemon I whispered to him what this was? and he says, ‘Why, thats papaya, Sir.’ So I whispered to him, ‘Angelo Maggio tries anything once,’ and ast him was this how you did it? and squeezed the lemon on it.
“‘Oh, yes, Sir,’ he whispers back.
“‘Odd,’ I whispered to him back, ‘but when you put lemon juice on this pa-pa-ya it smells just like vomit, dont it?’ He just stares at me without a word and I whispers, ‘Its a good thing I’m crazy about vomit, aint it?’”
All of them, excepting Prew, laughed, even Billy laughed, and Angelo seated on his perch grinned as smugly as the parrot who has just four-letter-worded the old maid out of the room in the cartoon.
“I thought old Hal would bust his gut from laughin,” Angelo grinned. “This old waiter dint hover at this elbow no more, after that.”
Little Billy got up from Stark’s lap suddenly, as if the laughter had released her from a hypnotism. She stretched her small voluptuous body feverishly, the firm small uptilted breasts that many a virtuous woman would have envied and considered a rank malfeasance of her office leaping tautly into prominence, their nipples darkly visible under the thin material, almost in Stark’s face.
“Well, how about it, Maylon?” she whispered huskily. “There wont be no more stragglers now, and if there was its too near two o’clock for an all night job like me to take them on.” She arched her back toward him thirstily, proudly. “How about a trip around the world, honey?” she said silkily, “to start off with?”
“I thought that was ony for the pay as you go customers?” Stark said thickly.
“It is,” Billy said.
“Its five bucks, aint it?”
“Thats right. Five extra. But its worth it, Maylon, it is truly worth it.”
Stark sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said, “you made a sale.” His eyes were blooded and very deep and he got up, turning away from all of them toward the jukebox, bending over at the waist to fumble with his fly and adjust himself inside. Then he turned around, grinning sheepishly, to follow her.
“You people comin?” Billy said to Maggio and Sandra. “You got the bottle.”
“Shhh,” Maggio said.
“Nuts,” Billy spat. “To hell with the old bitch.”
“We’re coming,” Sandra grinned at her. “We’re coming, kid.”
Billy laughed feverishly.
“I don’t see how she does it,” Sandra said to Maggio. “It would kill me, or any other normal woman.”
As she passed Prew, Sandra leaned down and spoke. “When Lorene comes back, tell her we’re going across the entryway and back around to the rooms on the hallway above the outside stairs. She’ll know where.”
“Okay,” Prew said indifferently, and watched them all go on across the entryway and disappear around a corner laughing. What the hell, he told himself, it isnt two o’clock yet; Stark is having to pay five bucks extra for that Trip; Angelo aint getting a price reduction for his bottle but them two whores will drink most of it; so what the hell; you got no complaints, he told himself.
He told it to himself repeatedly. But he was alone in the silent waiting room with the darkened Wurlitzer, and there is nothing in the world so lonesome as a silent, darkened Wurlitzer, when the people and the nickels have all gone, and he kept losing count of how many times he said it and having to start over.
When he finally heard Lorene’s low, poised voice out in the hallway he got up quickly. Too quickly, he thought angrily, you better sit back down, you want her to think you’re anxious?
But he did not sit back down. Lorene said goodby to the Fort De Russy surfboard rider friendlily out in the hall. It seemed to him that it took her a very long time, more time than necessary, and that she was very friendly, much more friendly than seemed natural, and he wondered