From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [353]
She was less angry when she learned that he had called from Kemoo, which had to go back through the Wahiawa civilian circuit before it could reach the Post, but even so she made him hang up and wait until she could go out somewhere and call him back. It was just one more of the little things about being in love with a married woman that you had not envisioned when you started it.
He waited, of course—having a couple of quick nervous drinks with Al Chomu who wondered unnervously where he had been for so long—until she called him back from a booth in the main PX.
It was hard trying to explain what had happened because the secret language had never made allowances for suicides or for Isaac Nathan Bloom. When he finally got it across, he could hear her become suddenly cool and fully collected, almost in mid-word in that wholly admirable but almost frightening way she had, as she realized it was really an emergency. The anger disappeared, replaced by an absolutely cold-bloodedly calculating calmness that never failed to put his much-prided realism to utter shame.
“Well, what are we going to do?” the muffled unreal phone voice that never sounded human asked him coolly. “Have you thought about what to do?”
“Yes. This new job will take almost a full month of my time. I’m afraid I’ll have to postpone the party. Will your brother have to be going to the Mainland on business again soon?” he said carefully.
Translated, that meant would Dana Holmes be going to a stag.
“You know how his business is,” the cool voice answered. “He never knows just when he’ll have to go. He hasnt had to go for some time now, so they’re liable to be calling him. But of course,” the cool voice said carefully, “you know it all depends on just when his superiors get in a new shipment, and have enough material on hand to need him.”
He had to stop a second to translate this, and it made him mad; all this childish conspiracy; it was damn near as bad as being in the Elks or the Masons. What she meant was that while Holmes had not been to a stag recently, and so would probably go to one soon, still she could not say with accuracy when he would go. She was refusing to use that as a time for meeting him.
“I do not want to postpone the party,” Warden said savagely.
“Neither do I. But of course,” the cool voice reminded him, sounding incredibly unbelievably indifferent, “my brother’s daily work here never amounts to enough to keep him from making it.”
That would mean his usual evenings at the Club for poker and bar-flying, or wherever the hell it was he went, could not be counted on to give her a chance to get away.
“Then maybe we could make it some night, some evening maybe, before he has to leave. You know how much I’d hate to have him miss it,” he grinned into the blind funnel furiously, unable to resist the opportunity. Her coolness that he admired so much was making him madder than the conspiracy business.
“No,” the cool voice that was not Karen said unsmilingly, “I’m afraid that would be impossible.”
“Then the only other thing I know is just to have the party some night when he’s gone on his next trip. We’ll have to give the party,” he repeated, anxious that she not misunderstand, “the party, you understand, we’ll—“
“I understand,” the voice reproved him warningly.
“—we’ll have to make the party some night when your brother’s gone, and he’ll just have to miss it,” he finished doggedly angrily, to prove she need not have been so afraid he would make a slip.
“If you could have it some afternoon,” the cool voice said, “while he’s still here.”
“I told you,” he said, trying to rein in the exasperation, “I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it in the afternoon. You dont understand. This work just has to be done.”
“Then I think,” the cool voice said very logically, “that the best thing is just to postpone it, until you get your work done, dont you?”
“But its liable to take a whole month,” he told the blind unfeeling funnel. It was easy for her, she wouldnt care if they carried on their love affair entirely by correspondence.