From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [368]
“But that would mean taking her in on it!”
“Okay, so what?”
“Milt!!”
“Well? In the game we play you got to utilize everything.”
“You dont know her. I couldnt do that. I just couldnt!”
“All right then, you wouldnt have to,” he said stubbornly, looking with wonder at her who could be so spine-chillingly calculating about that it frightened him. Gag at a gnat and swallow a camel. “Just write her and have her forward your mail. She wouldnt have to know who you were with, or if you were with anybody. Let her think it was a family row. She’d keep her mouth shut if she thought it was a fight with Dana, wouldnt she?”
“Of course she would,” Karen said loyally. “She doesnt like Dana any better than I do. But we couldn’t get by with it, Milt. Dont you see? Not for thirty days. Maybe for ten. I could probably get away for ten days. But not thirty. You could take your furlough and then a week later I could leave and meet you somewhere for ten days and then come home early, before you did.”
Warden was trying to divide his dream down by three. It was a hard job. You couldnt even spend $600 in ten days. He did not answer.
“Oh, Milt,” she said, “dont you see how it is? I’d love it. I’d do anything to have the chance. But not for thirty days, Milt, dont you see? I just cant.”
“I guess thats right,” he said. “I guess it was only a pipe-dream anyway.”
“Oh when?” she said. “Oh, Milt, when? Are we going to have to go on like this forever? Wont we ever be able to do things without being afraid? without having to calculate and scheme and hide out like criminals? When, Milt, when?”
“There now,” Warden said. “There, baby, there now. Ten days is all right. Ten days is fine. It’ll work out, you’ll see,” he said, stroking the back of the small fragile head that always made him feel loutish and clumsily dangerous as if he were handling eggs. “Ten days? Hell,” he said, “ten days is a lifetime. You’ll see.”
“I cant take it like this much longer, Milt,” Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
“I cant take it much longer,” she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated under his improper liberties, the eternally imprisoned under his lead-heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect. “I cant even walk over to the Commissary without feeling all their eyes on the back of my neck. I’ve never been so openly degraded in my whole life,” she said, savoring it. That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they—just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? “I cant take it much longer, Milt,” she whispered.
“There,” Warden said, feeling the blood come up chargingly into his eyes and turn everything red like a mountain twilight, and not knowing why, “there, there. You wont have to, baby. You wont have to take it. Come on,” he said, “lets go down to the beach and have a good hard swim and then go someplace and have a party.” The second it was out he knew he shouldnt have said it.
Karen sat up and stared at him piercingly with eyes like a cat’s, the tears still dribbling out of them.
“It isnt just sex, is it, Milt?” she asked, with the ringing tension of a rockcrystal that too heavy a touch will crack all apart. “It isnt just animal sex, is it? You want more than that, dont you?