From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [406]
He navigated the three steps down to the living room shakily, and found that Alma had moved a sheet and pillow onto the divan and was sleeping there where she could hear him if he called. He had assumed she was sleeping with Georgette in the other bedroom, and it hit him hard. So hard that tears came into his eyes and he remembered, again, suddenly, how much he loved her, and went over and sat down and kissed her and put his hand on her breast solid-soft under the silk pajamas.
She woke immediately, and was as immediately angrily horrified to find him out of the bed. She not only insisted he go back to bed but insisted on helping him.
“Come on,” he grinned from the bed, “lie down here for a while. Its a lot more comfortable than out there.”
“No,” she said irrefragably, more shocked than angry. “Absolutely not. You know what’ll happen if I do, and you’re in no condition for any parties.”
“What the hell,” he said, “sure I am. Its my side thats sore,” he grinned. “If I lay on my back and dont have to do any of the work, I be as good as I ever was.”
“No,” she said angrily, she was always angry at him afterwards, whether it reached the plane of action or not, as if he had deliberately degraded her. “You need to save your strength.”
He could have argued that one, but it was useless to argue once it was gone, argument only drove it further away, he knew from experience you could not arouse whatever it was by argument and the best he would get would only be the ice statue again all locked up inside, and the ice statue wasnt worth even the argument let alone the energy, so he did not argue; instead he lay in the bed while she went out to fix breakfast, feeling a hot fever all over that had absolutely nothing to do with the sore side and that greatly colored the mental movies until they had nothing to do with love at all, this fever that burned up all the meat (called Love) and left only the bare bones (called whatever it was the Hays Office called it, Rut maybe, Lust probably, raw hot bloody Lust) that were the skeleton under the meat of every man’s love no matter how much they denied it, and that could be satisfied anywhere anyway anywho (although the women always stoutly refused to believe this and were therefore the Board Founders and Charter Designers of the whorehouse male and female that they decried), but that he could not get up and go satisfy now, so he just lay in the bed with the burning hot fever that had nothing to do with his sore side, and listened to her fix breakfast.
That afternoon they finally changed the tight bandage and put on a looser. The compress was incorporated into the scab by the coagulation so they left it on. They took it off two days later, amid much cursing and sweating, and exposed the lumpy corrugated wet pink new scar tissue beginning to fill in at the edges and bottom, before they put on a new one. But that time the ice statue, because of his increasing insistence which he had sworn he would not voice but still had voiced anyway, had suffered him once.
They kept him in the bed for a week. They even changed the sheets with him in it, pushing the slack of the clean sheet up against him on one side and having him roll over onto it while they pulled the slack out the other side and tucked it in in the accepted hospitalnurse manner. And on the faces of both, the brilliant crystal-hard Georgette, and the opaque thoughtful absolute-realist Alma, was the some beaming lambency like on some painter’s St Anne and Madonna cuddling St John and Jesus, the same smile of the first day that he had never seen on either of them before then: maternal, solicitous, very happy, infinitely protective, such a bottomless flood