From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [144]
“We never use this part except on Payday,” she told him gayly, “when the big rush is on. The rest of the time we keep it for the all night—friends,” she said, “those of them who are very special. Nobody walks by here at night and it is quiet and the street is outside where you can hear the buses sometimes through the window. The rooms back there dont have any of that,” she said, “and theres no fear of someone barging in on us, like sometimes happens back there.”
“Am I one of your specials?” he asked her thickly.
She stopped at the door and laughed back at him over her shoulder. “Well,” she said, coquettishly, “you’re here, arent you?”
“Sure I’m here. But that could be because of Angelo and Maylon, and the bottle, that they wanted me cut in on,” he said, noticing how very feminine she was when she was coquettish. “Billy and Sandra brought them here, not me.”
“Is it so important?” Lorene teased.
“Yes, its important,” he said urgently. “Important because there are so many of us; thats just faces, to you. So many of you that aint even faces, only just bodies, to us. Do you want to be just a unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we’re remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being always all alike, always unremembered. They die inside. Wives earn their money that way just as much as whores do, with this crappy imitation that aint no good but has to work because usually its all there is. But it dries up the well and leaves it nothing but a mudhole, makes it just rich blood poured down a strawy rathole that stinks afterwards, unless you are remembered. We dont ask to be needed, all we ask is to be remembered. Just to be remembered is . . .”
In the dim halflight he could see her looking at him, very surprised, and he shut it off, the little opening that was his mouth from which this torrent he did not know was there had leaped out at her. Flash and fadeout of boy with tongue in dike, he thought. Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. HERO HOLDS BACK FLOOD THAT THREATENS TO DROWN EARTH!!
In the silence Lorene laughed self-consciously.
“If it is so important to you as all that,” she smiled, “then you are one of my specials.”
Prew shook his head. “Thats no answer,” he said doggedly, and closed it up again with his tongue, the little hole, the little leak, the small Achilles heel.
“Well, what other answer do you want?”
“I dont know,” he said, listlessly. “Forget it. Is this our room?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she put her fine-boned, woman’s hand on his arm and said, “Listen!” half-jokingly, and he could hear the springs squeaking rhythmically in the next room.
“At work already,” she joked, trying to erase the page and write it her way, but the uncertainty in her made it fail, fall flat.
“Work, all right,” Prew said stonily, listening to the hard, unvarying rhythm. “Hard work.” The fine-boned, woman’s hand was on his arm, so delicate to hold such power, and he wanted to grab the thinness of her and constrict the breath out of her kissing her, bring her alive to what he knew, make her feel it. But the tabu said you never kissed a whore, you only fucked them, all you want, and can pay for, but you never kiss them, it was a rooted Law, and she would not feel it, she would only see the broken Law and be angry at the liberty.
“I was joking,” Lorene said apologetically.
She turned on the light then, suddenly showing all of it, baring it to the sight: the thin mattressed bed, the stand in the corner that is just as important here as the broom is in the factory because the assembly line must above all always be kept clean or there might be a breakdown in production. He stood looking at it, time honored by tradition like the memorials to dead veterans that are always the same the cannon on the courthouse lawn whether its the Civil War or the World War or this coming war or any future war and you always knew why they were there By their Cannon Ye shall know Them on the courthouse lawn, and he almost