Odd hesitations came over him. Going to bed with strange women was nothing unfamiliar for Carpenter, but Jeanne Gabel was not exactly strange to him, and yet she was. He had known her so long, and he hadn’t known her at all, and they had been such good friends, and they had never in any way been intimate. And now here he was in bed with her with his hand on her breast. She was waiting. But she plainly seemed frightened. She didn’t seem any more sure of what to do than he was. Carpenter feared that she might be doing this out of nothing more than pity for him, which he didn’t like at all. And the wild thought struck him also that she might be a virgin: but no, no, that had to be impossible. She was at least thirty-five. Women who stayed virgin that long, if there were any such outside the convent, would probably want to stay that way forever.
She moved against him, awkwardly indicating her willingness for him to go further. Carpenter’s hand slid to the juncture of her thighs.
“Paul—oh, yes, Paul—yes—”
The staginess of her words, her breathy tone, what seemed like a forced theatricality, upset him a little. But what else was she supposed to say? What else could she say, in this tense and strange situation, except “Paul” and “yes”?
He caressed her carefully, tenderly, still not fully believing that this was happening, that after all this time he and Jeanne were really in bed together. Nor was he entirely convinced that it ought to be happening now.
“I love you,” he whispered. They were words he had said to her many times before, in an easy bantering way, and there was something of that banter in his tone now. But also there was something else—guilt, perhaps, for having crashed in on her orderly solitary life like this, in his mindless desperate panicky flight from the chaos that had enfolded him upon his return to San Francisco. And then there was that component of gratitude, also, the thankfulness he felt toward her for the surrender she was making. Banter, guilt, gratitude: not very good reasons for telling someone you loved her, Carpenter thought.
“I love you, Paul,” she told him in a barely audible voice, as his hands roamed the secret places of her body. “I really do.”
And then he was inside her.
Not a virgin, no, that seemed pretty certain. But it was a long time, he suspected, since she had been with a man this way. A very long time.
Her long muscular arms enfolded him tightly. Her hips were moving in what seemed like eager rhythms, though they were different rhythms from his and that made matters a little tricky. She was out of practice at this. Carpenter brought his weight to bear on her, trying to get things better synchronized. It seemed to work: she was deferring to his greater technical skill. But then, suddenly, whatever skill he had amassed over the years in these activities was swept away by a turbulent mass of dark emotion that came roaring up from the depths of him, a fierce access of desperate terror and loneliness and the awareness of the chaotic free-fall descent that his life had so unexpectedly become. There were wild windstorms in his head, howling Diablos hurling hot raging gusts through his soul as he toppled endlessly through a realm of swirling poisonous gases. He clung to her, weeping and gasping, like a small boy in his mother’s arms.
“Yes, Paul, yes!” she was whispering. “I love you, I love you, I love you—”
When he came, it was like a hammer battering from within. Carpenter cried out hoarsely and burrowed against the side of Jeanne’s face, and tears flowed from him as they had not done for so many years that he could not remember the last time that it had happened. For a time afterward they lay still, saying nothing, scarcely moving. Then she kissed him lightly on his shoulder and slipped out of the bed, and went into the bathroom. She was in there a long while. He heard water running; and he thought he heard what could have been a sob, though he wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to ask. If it is, let it at least be a sob of happiness, he thought.
When she returned, she got back into the narrow little bed and pressed herself up very close to him. Neither of them spoke. He gathered her in and she huddled against him; and after a while he realized that she was asleep. Eventually, so was he.
23
isabelle said, “have you heard from Paul at all, Nick?”
“He called a few days ago,” Rhodes said. “From somewhere in Nevada, I think. Told me that he’d been let go by the Company, and left a message saying he was going to Chicago, but no return number. Nothing since then.”
“Why Chicago?” Isabelle asked. “Of all awful places.”
“He said he had a friend there. I don’t know who he was referring to.”
“A woman, do you think?”
“Very likely,” Rhodes said. “Paul has always tended to turn to women for comfort when he’s under stress.”
Isabelle laughed and rested her hands on his shoulders, digging her fingers firmly but gently into the thick, bunched muscles. “Two peas in a pod, you two are. Things get too hot for you, you want to put your heads on Mommy’s bosom. Well, why not? That’s one of the things it’s there for, I suppose.”
They were in Rhodes’ hilltop flat, close to midnight, after a late dinner in Sausalito. Isabelle was staying the night. Rhodes felt calm and expansive, for a change. Tonight everything was the way he always wanted things to be: soft lights, soft subtle music floating in the air, a glass of his best brandy in his hand. And Isabelle. The relationship had been in one of its up modes for the past few days, Isabelle being relatively benign, accommodating, even tender.
He had just about made up his mind to accept the Kyocera job, despite lingering and troublesome hesitations, bouts of anguished ambivalence. Sixty-forty to take it, he thought. Seventy-thirty, some days. Some days it was seventy-thirty the other way, but those were few. Tonight it was about eighty-twenty in favor of going over to them. Isabelle wasn’t even aware of the offer, yet. She knew that he had been in some sort of inner crisis for a while, but had been too tactful to probe. And with everything tranquil between them for the moment, Rhodes felt no desire to stir her to new wrath, as Kyocera’s offer of greatly expanded technical facilities for adapto research was almost certain to do. Especially with Jolanda coming back from her visit to the L-5s in the morning, as Isabelle had learned earlier today: Jolanda would surely be stirring Isabelle’s political fervor back to its usual degree of intensity after this brief period of quiescence.
Rhodes finished the last of his drink. “How about bed?” he asked.
“Yes,” Isabelle said. But she made no move to leave the living room. Going to the window, she stood staring out at the broad view of the Berkeley hills sloping down to the bay, with San Francisco still gleaming brightly on the far side of the water. The night was clear and dry and hot, the recent heavy rains only an improbable memory now. By the light of a full moon distinct bands of greenhouse gases could be seen cutting across the sky even in the darkness, with patches of stars peeking out between them, shimmering, dancing in the night.
He came up behind her and slipped his hands under her arms, cupping her breasts.
She said, still looking outward, “I feel so sad for him. I hardly know him at all and yet it’s just as though it’s some dear good friend of mine that has run into terrible trouble. His whole life tumbling down in a single moment. Is there anything you could do for him, do you think?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.”
“A job in your department somewhere?”
“He’s been dismissed for cause. No division of Samurai could possibly hire him now.”
“Under some other name?”
“I wish,” Rhodes said. “You can’t just make up an identity for yourself and apply for a job, Isabelle. You need to have a plausible vita to show them. There’s no way he could conceal what happened from any megacorp’s personnel scan.”