From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [417]
It made quite a sensation. Not many white men could dance the hula at all, let alone dance it well. But he had learned well, what old Tony had taught him better. And he had the figure for it, if I do say so as shouldnt.
And then when he came back grinning and put the gardenia in her hair, just as a gesture, just to carry it on out. And the fat-faced tourists whispering to each other about the crazy haole wondering who he was must be from old Island family who appeared to be more savagely Hawaiian than the Kanaka natives. Natives, he grinned, who would go back tomorrow morning to their jobs as waitresses at Walgreen’s and mechanics in some auto paint-and-body shop on Nuuanu with very unnative haole hangovers and the tourists if they went into Walgreen’s for a coke or stopped to get their carburetor fixed would not even recognize them.
“You’re always full of surprises,” she had smiled. “You’re always coming up with something. You just love to shock people, dont you? Where on earth did you ever learn to dance like that?”
And when they got back to the hotel—inn, they called it—that night it was again like it had once used to be, hot biting wiggling sweating savage, her playing the White Goddess again and him the savage. Like he liked it. But like it had not been very often lately now for a long time, and like it was not to be again, after that one time, during the rest of the last two days.
“My savage,” she had whispered biting gently. “My primitive crazy savage.”
The next night, the last but one, he made the mistake of trying to get it back again. He called her His Chippy, My Chippy, as he had done before; but this time she not only pushed him off but flounced out of the bed crying and after a seeming endless period of name-calling in which the worries about the kid came out again (“What if he should get sick? How would I find out? Here, shacked up with another man in a hotel like a common whore? What if he died? Would you care? Yes, a lot you’d care!”) ended up by sleeping in the other bed. Just like bundling in the old days, he had thought wanting to beat his fist into the wall, bite blood from his knuckles with the frustration of being unable to say one word that did not sound guilty and apologetic, except that now instead of a board inbetween we have this rocklike silence.
It was during those last two days, when he had been very angry about his slacked Morning Report, that he had told her the full story of Prewitt including Fatso Judson and the whore Lorene from Mrs Kipfer’s with whom he was in love, to let her know for once how the other half lived. And even he was surprised at how greatly concerned she had been, concerned enough to cry, which only made him love her, goddam it, that much more.
My point, his mind said, the apex of my conclusions, is that the illusion of romantic love, being an illusion grounded on the principle of you build me up and I build you up, cannot last through the years of you tear me down and I tear you down. Thats why the men step out and the women take to religion.
But as long as you can keep the illusion, he argued grimly, you can love. And if you’ve got the illusion, then by god you do love. Reality or no reality.
True, his mind said, coolly. And marriage is the great illusion breaker. You dont believe me, try it.
I intend to, he told it.
You see, it said, the foundation principle behind the illusive principle of Romantic Love—the Reality, in other words, behind the Fantasy—is Love of Self; which, up to the time of this paper, has remained undiscovered.
Probably, Warden said, thats because the illusion has received such general recognition and acceptance through the medium of commercial advertising?
Yes, it said indifferently. Now, to get back. What you really