He would have kissed her now, but that was hard, wearing a face-lung. He settled for a hug instead. She was a strong woman, Oriental in some fashion on her mother’s side but no hint of Oriental fragility about her, and she held him tightly, a good hearty squeeze.
“Come on,” she said. “You need a shower in the worst way. And then something to eat, right?”
“You bet.”
“God, it’s good to see you again, Paul.”
“Me too.”
“Things must be bad, though. I’ve never seen you looking this way.”
“Things aren’t very good,” he said. “For sure.”
Jeanne entered the car on the driver’s side and told it where to take them. As it slid into the traffic flow she said, “I checked with Personnel and Records. You don’t seem to be with the Company any more.”
“I was terminated.”
“I never heard of them doing that except for cause.”
“There was cause, Jeannie.”
She glanced across at him. “For God’s sake, what happened?”
“I screwed up,” Carpenter said. “I did what I thought was the right thing, and it was wrong. I’ll tell you all about it, if you’re interested. The main thing is, it was lots of bad publicity and it got the Company in trouble with Kyocera, and so they threw me out on my ass. It was a political thing. They had to let me go.”
“Poor Paul. They really stuck it to you, didn’t they? What will you do now?”
“Take a shower and have some sort of meal,” he said. “That’s as much of a plan as I have, right now.”
She lived in a two-room flat—a sitting room with kitchen, and a bedroom—somewhere off in one of Chicago’s western suburbs. The rooms were sealed so tightly that they felt practically airless and the cooling system was an ancient clanker, inefficient and noisy.
There wasn’t much space for guests in the little apartment. Carpenter supposed he would have to find a hotel room for the night if he didn’t want to sleep in the car again, and wondered how he was going to pay for it. Maybe Jeanne would let him sleep on the floor. He took the longest shower he dared to allow himself, perhaps six or seven minutes, and changed into fresh clothes. When he came out, she had two plates of algae cakes and soy bacon on the table, and a couple of bottles of beer.
As they ate, he told her the story, quietly and dispassionately, beginning with the distress call from Kovalcik and ending with his final conversation with Tedesco. By now it all seemed to him more like something he had seen on the evening news than anything that had actually happened to him, and he felt almost nothing as he laid out the sequence of events for her. Jeanne listened virtually without comment until the end. Then she said simply, “What a shitty deal, Paul.”
“Yes.”
“Have you thought about appealing?”
“To whom? The Pope? I’m out on my ass, Jeanne. You know that as well as I do.”
She nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s so. Oh, Paul, Paul—”
Indoors, in the hot hermetic atmosphere of the flat, they were wearing no masks. She turned toward him and he saw a look in her eyes that was bewildering in its complexity: expectable things like sorrow and compassion, and behind that what appeared to be a soft gleam of pure love, and behind that—what? Fear? Fear was what it looked like, Carpenter thought. But fear of what? Fear of him? No, he thought. Fear of herself.
Carefully he poured more beer into his glass.
She said, “How long do you plan to stay in Chicago?”
He shrugged. “A day or two, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t want to be any kind of burden for you, Jeannie. I just needed to get the hell away from California for a little while, to find some sort of safe harbor until—”
“Stay as long as you like, Paul.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I feel responsible, you know. Inasmuch as I was the one who got you that gig on the iceberg trawler.”
“That’s bullshit, Jeannie. You were the one that got me the job, sure, but I was the one who turned those people away. All by myself, I did it.”
“Yes. I understand that.”
“Tell me about you,” he said. “What have you been up to, anyway?”
“What’s there to tell? I work, I come home, I read, I sleep. It’s a nice quiet life.”
“The kind you’ve always preferred.”
“Yes.”
“Do you miss being in Paris?”
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Let’s go there,” he said. “You and me, right now. You quit your job and we’ll get a little place near the river and we’ll sing and dance in the Metro for money. It won’t be much of a living but at least we’ll be in Paris.”
“Oh, Paul. What a great idea!”
“If only we could, eh?”
“If only.” She took his hand in hers and gave it a quick little squeeze; and then she pulled back, as though the gesture had seemed too bold for her.
Carpenter realized that he knew nothing about this woman at all, actually. She was warm and good and kind, but she had kept herself sealed behind glass at all times: a friend, a chum, but always a boundary rising between her and the outside world. And here he was within the perimeter.
They talked for hours, as they had done in the old days in St. Louis: gossip about mutual friends, and Company rumors, and rambling discussions of world affairs. She was trying to put him at his ease, he knew; and probably herself as well. The undercurrent of tension in her was easy to detect. He was demanding a great deal of her, Carpenter realized— showing up out of nowhere like this, moving in on her, dumping the fragments of his shattered life at her feet, presenting himself without explicitly telling her what it was that he wanted from her. Which he could not do, because he didn’t know.
About half past ten she said, “You must be very tired, Paul. After driving all the way from California practically nonstop.”
“Yes. I’d better find myself a hotel room somewhere.”
Her eyes went wide for an instant. Another enigmatic look flickered across her face, that same uneasy mixture of warmth and uneasiness.
“I don’t mind if you stay here,” she said.
“But there’s so little room.”
“We can manage. Please. I’d feel like a shit, sending you out into the night.”
“Well—”
“I want you to stay,” she said.
“Well,” he said again, smiling. “In that case—”
She went into the bathroom and was in there a long while. Carpenter stood by the narrow bed, not knowing whether to undress. When Jeanne came out she was wearing a long robe. Carpenter went in to wash up, and when he emerged, she was in bed and the lights were out.
He dropped his clothes, all but his underwear, and lay down on the floor in the sitting room.
“No,” Jeanne said, after a little while. “Silly.”
Gratitude and excitement and something that might almost have been remorse flooded through him all at once. He moved through the darkness, stumbling over furniture, and got delicately into bed beside her, trying not to brush up against her. There was barely enough room for them both.
Then as his eyes adjusted he saw that her robe was open, and she was naked beneath it, and she was trembling. Carpenter slid his shorts off and kicked them aside. Gently he put his hand on her shoulder.
She shivered. “Cold,” she said.
“It’ll warm up.”
“Yes.Yes, it will.”
He moved his hand lower. Her breast was small, firm, the nipple quite hard. The beating of her heart was apparent behind it, so thunderous that it startled him.