From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [145]
“I have to ask you for the money,” Lorene said awkwardly.
“Oh. Sure,” he said. “I forgotten it.” He got his wallet out and gave her Stark’s fifteen dollars. Not even your fifteen dollars, he thought, this time.
She tried to hide her awkwardness that surprised her, by getting a couple of cheap quilts out of the high cupboard and tossing them on the bed.
“There. Minerva’s Corps only fixes the beds for the transient trade. But we’ll need covers,” she said gayly, but it was a false attempt that could not be distilled off of her awkwardness and Prew’s granite face that could not smile just now, the Great Stone Face, somebody wrote a story about the Great Stone Face.
“All right,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
“I wasnt hurrying you. I thought you didnt hear,” she said, noticing curiously how he was not awkward at all getting out of his clothes, which was the time when even the hardest of them were always awkward. But he was not awkward. He was not hard. He just did not even seem to be there, and she felt her bowels stir suddenly.
It was, he thought, like water which, when dammed, creates a pressure, a pressure of power that will pour out flooding, from any little channel it can find, from any little opening, flooding forth roaring with a long dammed slowly risen energy of pressure that obliterates the earths and moons and stars and suns, subsiding finally into a ridiculous little trickle that will not even roll a pebble, and you wonder foolishly how this thin trickle ever could have generated power and maybe it was all in your own imagination and your eyelids did not really crumble away the firmament into the one single Sun, the one undying Principle. That, he thought, was what its like.
They lay side by side, not touching, in the bed under the two separate quilts and the window was wide open on the night outside and they heard footsteps sound heavily far off like a cop and a streetcar screeked into action against time and somewhere a bus hissed its air brakes menacingly at them. They did not talk because knowing she did not care one way or the other, to talk or not, he did not want to talk, he did not even want to think, of anything but this that had just gone away and he looked out under the crack below the lowered blind at the roofs across the street and wondered dimly if Angelo was in the middle room and if he had the bottle or Stark had it and whether he should get up and put his pants on and see if he could find it because, very badly, he wanted a drink now.
He did not know exactly how long, it seemed a very short time, it also seemed a very long time, before there was a light knock on the door and without waiting the door opened a little and Angelo Maggio’s grinning head (preceded by a naked disembodied arm whose hand had a deathgrip around the neck of a long brown bottle) appeared, and Prew noticed, somewhat absurdly, that Lorene jerked the covers up over her breasts and clutched them daintily about her shoulders.
“I dint hear no sounds of combat,” Angelo’s head grinned. “So I figured you are taking ten.”
“Restin,” Prew said.
“I brung you a drink. Or otherwise old Longlegged Sandra would of drank it all by herself clear up. She’s a good girl,” he said, “a fine girl. But she drinks like a fish. Is it all right I can come in?”
“Sure, come ahead,” Prew said. “I been needin a drink.”
“Are you sure you decent? You wont embarrass me?”
“Quit clowning and bring the bottle.”
Angelo was barefooted, his narrow pigeon breasted shoulders fully exposed, wearing nothing but the civilian slacks that he had bought secondhand from somebody in the Company and that were so much too big for him that his other hand had to clutch them around the scrawny waist to keep them up. He sat down on the bed beside them grinning happily like an amateur conspirator and handed Prew the bottle.
“Thanks,” Prew said dryly, finding himself grinning, as he always found himself grinning, whenever little Angelo showed up someplace. “You want a drink?” he asked Lorene.
“No thanks.”
“Whats a matter?” Angelo