From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [414]
Perhaps if they had had more time then . . .
But no, it wasnt the time either. If anything they had had too much time. Before the third day was over it was all both of them could manage to do just to keep from suggesting that it was time to go home. It had been hard work, it had been labor, for him to keep from paying the bill and packing them up and going home early from what had turned into the debacle of the annual vacation, just like a husband.
What had happened, ironically, was that the fact that they had had to stay hidden for fear of meeting somebody who knew them, had, without their realizing it, approximated on this honeymoon the situation that would exist when the honeymoons were all over, just like a husband and wife.
They were always making each other pay for something. You hurt my pride and I hurt your pride. It use to be you build me up and I build you up, but once the masterpiece had been made it was you tear me down and I tear you down.
She made him pay for having made her love him so much that she had gone off and left her son in the care of a gook maid.
He made her pay for having made him love her so much that he had run out and left his Company in the sausage fingers of Dhom.
She made him pay for having made her a whore.
He made her pay for having made him an officer.
The eight luxurious walls of the two luxurious rooms were still eight walls and two rooms. And sixteen walls and four rooms, or thirty-two walls and eight rooms, even with a furnace, even with an American Kitchen, garbage disposal unit, automatic dish washer, fully equipped bar, glassed in breakfast nook, even with a Bendix washing machine and a rumpus room, it would not in the end really make a whole hell of a lot of difference.
No matter how often you changed that part, the rest would always still be the same forever and ever amen if there be any man present who can show just cause why this man and this woman should not be united in holy matrimony let him speak now or forever hold his peace.
So this is what married life is like, hunh? his mind said.
The masterpiece was made, created. When you go on creating on a masterpiece that is already created you dont make it more of a masterpiece, you unmake it. You go on spending the rest of your life changing semi-colons to commas and commas to semi-colons.
So this is what you are condemning us both to? his mind said. Me, your best friend?
They both knew it. It was just that neither wanted to be the first to admit it because they both felt too guilty about always making each other pay for something. Besides, they didnt have any other blueprint to go by. They told you love was the end. But love wasnt the end. But they didnt tell you where to go next. If only they could stop and not go on creating. But who ever saw a human being who could stop and not go on creating?
Married life, his mind told him indignantly, appears to be vastly similar to the bracketing in of a battery of 155’s. First a long that goes over, then a short that goes under, then a long and a short and a long and a short, a see and a saw and an up and a down, each a little bit closer to target, until finally we are in and we lay down our barrage and we’re married. A constant roaring, marriage, in which the individual explosions are no longer even distinguishable so that it itself even finally tapers off into monotony and boredom, leaving only a charred churned-up countryside in which there is nothing alive anymore. Not even the parakeets that once rose up in white clouds screeching out of the jungle, every time a bracket shell dropped. The bracketing-in always use to be fun, remember? But laying a barrage, that begins to wear after a while. Whether you’re the Artilleryman on the guncrew, or the Infantryman lying out under it. Even the excitement of almost dying loses its appeal after a while and subsides into just gloom.
The only real relief either one of them had got from the other in the whole 10 days was the night they went in town to the luau.
That was, of course, if you