From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [68]
Karen Holmes emptied her glass and set it on the table, with finality. “Useful. Now we’re getting into dialectic.”
“Dont such talk always?”
“And I do not believe in dialectic. I dont want to listen to your definition of what useful means.”
She put one hand behind her and flipped the snap of her halter and tossed it to the floor. Staring at him with eyes of liquid smoke in which there was a curious and great disinterest she unzipped her shorts and shucked out of them without moving from the chair and dropped them with the halter.
“There,” she said. “That is what you want. Thats what all the talk’s about. Thats what all you virile men, you intellectual men, always want. Isnt it? You big strong male men who are virile and intelligent, but who are helpless as babies without a fragile female body to root around on.”
Warden found himself staring at the twisted navel and the ridge of scar-tissue that ran down from it, disappearing in the hairy mattress, and that was so old now as to almost be a shadow.
“Pretty, isnt it?” she said. “And its a symbol, too. A symbol of the waste of energy.”
Warden set his glass down carefully. He moved toward her on the chair, seeing the nipples wrinkled tightly like flowers closed for night, seeing the feminine grossness that he loved, that was always there, that he always knew was there, hidden maybe behind perfume, unmentioned, unacknowledged, even denied, but still always there, existing, the beautiful lovely grossness of the lioness and the honest bitch dog, that no matter how much, shrinking, they tried to say it wasnt so, in the end always had to be admitted.
“Wait,” she said. “Not here, you greedy little boy. Come in the bedroom.”
He followed, angry at the “greedy little boy” but knowing it was true, and wondering wonderingly what kind of creature this one was with all the buried darknesses.
He wasnt wearing anything under his CKCs and she shut the door, turning to him blindly, her arms out, raising the roundnesses of her breasts, making hollows beside her arms.
“Now,” she said. “Here. Now. Here and now and now.”
“Which bed is Holmes’s?” he said.
“The other one.”
“Then you just move over there.”
“All right,” she said. She laughed, the first time, richly. “You take your cuckoldry seriously dont you, Milt?”
“Where Holmes is concerned I take everything seriously.”
“And so do I.”
As he moved nearer and nearer to the center of the redness which contained himself, and which he never reached, feeling it blinding him with the light he hungered after and bringing the purring deep down in his throat, the screendoor in the back slammed loudly.
“Listen,” Karen said. “Theres someone. Listen.” They could hear the footsteps coming phlegmatically, not slowing, not turning, sounding heavy through the walls. “Quick. Take your clothes and get in the closet there and shut the door. Quick. Hurry up. For God’s sake, hurry, man.”
Warden vaulted the other bed, scooping up the uniform and stepped inside and shut the door. Karen was wrapping on a Chinese silk kimono and sitting before her dressing table by the window that looked through the truckway to the barracks. By the time the bedroom door was knocked on she was brushing calmly at her hair, but her face was very white.
“Who is it?” Karen called, wondering if the trembling in her voice was noticeable.
“Its me,” a boy’s voice said. “Its Junior.” He knocked again, demandingly. “Let me in.”
“All right,” she said. “Come in. It isnt locked.”
Her son, a nine-year-old miniature of Dana Holmes in his long pants and Aloha shirt, came in, wearing the unholy sullenness that is in the faces of so many holy offspring of duly sanctioned misalliances.
“They let us out of school early,” he said sullenly. “Your face is white. Whats the matter,