From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [354]
“I think the best thing is to plan to have it sometime soon,” he insisted, “even if it is the next time your brother’s on a trip.” That meant have it the next time there was a stag. He felt it was obscure. “You understand?” he said carefully. “Even if he is off on a trip?”
“I understand,” the voice said, coolly, “but the trouble with that is I have no idea of when he will be going. And of course, theres no way I can get in touch with you.”
That meant she was refusing to call him.
“Well, maybe I could find out from him and get in touch with you,” he said desperately.
“But how will you know where to reach me?” the cool voice said.
And that, of course, meant she did not want him to call her. Even if it meant she would not see him for a month, she still did not want him to call her. That anybody could be that cold-bloodedly calculating about love made him want to shudder. Who the hell ever said it was the men who were tough.
“God damn it!” Warden said angrily, finally giving way. “You dont understand about this party. I owe this party. Its an important party. I owe it to a lot of people.”
“And do you think I’m not disappointed too?” the voice said angrily.
If there is an operator listening, he thought bitterly, he sure as hell will think he’s listening to a couple crazy people when he hears this gibberish. Warden found it absolutely impossible to believe that any operator listening in on them could gossip enough to cause the kind of scandal Karen was afraid of, even if he spoke to her in nothing but four-letter words.
“If you try to give your party,” the again calm collected voice was saying irreconcilably, “when you are up to your ears in work like this, you will only spoil it anyway, you know that. You dont want to spoil your party, do you? Isnt there any possible way you could hurry the job through? so that it wouldnt take a whole month? There are other people,” the cool voice said, “looking forward to your party just as much as you are. I’ve talked to some of them. But I’m sure they wouldnt want you to rush your party out against all these handicaps, and then spoil it.”
The muffled faroff inflection was so intensely familiar he could look into the black much-perforated funnel and almost see her. She would be sitting there in the hot booth with the door tight shut for secrecy, her face flushed hotly as she brushed back the damp hair from her forehead but still icily cool and logical in the mind while the beads of sweat welled under her drawnup knees which seemed to be the only place she ever sweated and trickled down the long skislide of her calves as she thought on detachedly, with that calm objectivity that infuriated him with his own outraged admiration. She would be wearing one of those square-wide-necked prints that were so absolutely female without ever being fluttery or fluffy.
Didnt she know what she did to him? She always said she didnt, but he always disbelieved it. She must know.
Warden wanted to tear Al Chomu’s phone out of the wall and smash it. At that moment he would have gladly emasculated Alexander Graham Bell for inventing this instrument of torture that was emasculating him.
“All right,” he said, “all right. I’ll see if I cant step it up and get it done in a week. Will that satisfy you? Will that be better?”
“It would be wonderful, if you could. But, darling,” the cool voice said, carefully using the word darling only as a sophisticated form of address, “it isnt me. Its your party. Dont be angry.”
“Angry!” he snarled. “Who’s angry? I’ll have it done in a week,” he promised, knowing it was impossible, “and then give the party one week from today, at the same old place. You’re invited,” he snapped, wanting to hang up on that triumph of abbreviated sarcasm.
But he didnt.
“Have you got that?” he asked anxiously. “One week. At the same place. The same place, see?”
“I have it,” the cool calm voice that was still way ahead of him said in the same indifferent tone that had so surely manipulated everything, including him, so logically and objectively that it was coming