From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [430]
“After you got out, you didnt even call me up,” Alma said. “You were out nine whole days, without coming up to see me or even calling me up.”
“I was trying to protect you, goddam it!”
She did not laugh. She felt more like you feel with a child. Since he had got well from the knife wound he did not give her the chance to feel like you feel with a child any more.
“Prew, Prew, Prew,” she said and came over to him and pulled his head against her. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”
Prew got up and followed her.
She went into the bedroom.
But it was like too many other times, when they had fought, and made up, and then gone warmly to bed. Your ad and my ad, and every day a Millennium. He could not keep himself from remembering how he was not a thirty-year-man any more. Then, after he had remembered it, he re-remembered it. About the only time he was not remembering it any more was when he was reading a book with three or four drinks in him for convincingness.
Alma knew it. They both knew it. The transparent wall of the trance was back down, and apparently the only way to get under it was to get so mad that the anger cut through it. It was a hell of a way to get close together. They heard Georgette moving around getting up and, afterwards, went back out to the kitchen. Neither one of them cared much about lying in bed, afterwards, any more. They sat in the kitchen and drank the coffee and in the loss of the desire and the superimposed silence they could not break through suddenly felt very old and, in feeling very old, suddenly were much closer and warmer to the other, who was also very old, than they had either one ever felt before in the desire that neither one had any more.
Then Georgette came in friendlily like a big overgrown puppy, but with the big body like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection and that was covered with only the thin print wrapper whose powder smudges, strangely, instead of being distasteful were rut-and-crotch-sexily enticing.
Alma looked at Prew and then looked away coolly.
Prew tried not to look at Georgette. Even when he talked to her he looked at Alma, or at the stove, or at the tools his hands.
After half an hour of this Georgette got up, looking puzzled and hurt, and went to her room to get dressed. She went out early. She had some shopping to do, she said, and would not be back before two o’clock so she would just go on down to work.
Alma went out early too and ate lunch downtown.
He tried to read after they were gone, but the morning had exploded the myth that was already getting threadbare anyway, and he could not get back inside the book. He could only read it. Even after five or six drinks, he could still only read it. He could not forget to remember how he was not a thirty-year-man any more.
Well, what do you plan to do?
Alma had a .38 Police Special Smith & Wesson which one of the local cops had given her for a present that she kept loaded in a drawer of the desk along with a box of cartridges, and he took it.
Whatever else, he did not intend to ever go back to no Stockade no more. Go back to the old Stockade, with Angelo and The Malloy and Blues and the rest of them all there like they had been before—yes. But he was not going back to any new Stockade, where they were all gone and there was doubtless a new Fatso Judson, and everything else was changed, except perhaps Major Thompson.
He removed the old cartridges that had probably been in it for years and reloaded it with new ones from the box and put some more of them in his pocket. Then he helped himself to the money that Alma also kept in the desk, and walked down the hill to Kaimuki and caught a Beretania streetcar to town to pay a visit to Rose and Charlie Chan at the Blue Chancre.
It was wonderful to be outdoors