“Sounds like the opposite of suicidal,” Rhodes says mildly. “Hyperconcerned about protecting herself, yes, but why would that mean—”
“You don’t get it. You never do, do you?”
“Isabelle—”
“She thinks that whatever precautions she takes will be entirely futile. She thinks she’s doomed, Nick. That we are on the threshold of the final apocalyptic environmental collapse, that she is living in the last generation of the human race, and that some hideous kind of gigantic eco-disaster is about to sweep down and destroy us all in the most awful possible way. She’s full of anger.”
“She has a right to be, I suppose. Though I think she’s a hundred years ahead of the time. But still—suicide—”
“The ultimate angry gesture. Spitting in the face of the world. Throwing her life away as a demonstration of protest.”
“You really think she will?”
“I don’t know. She very well might.” A new expression comes into Isabelle’s tense face: doubt, fear, uncertainty. Not her usual mode. She tugs unthinkingly at her hair, tangles it into knots. Pacing around the room, now. “What worries me, basically, is that this may be getting beyond my zone of professional capability. I’m a therapist, not a psychiatrist. I wonder if I should pass her along.”
She is debating entirely with herself. Rhodes is convinced of that now. But there is always the possibility that she may be expecting him to offer some indication that he’s listening.
“Well, certainly if you think there’s any risk—”
A softer voice. The therapist voice. “It would be a betrayal of trust, though. Angela and I have a covenant. I’m here to guide her. She has faith in me. I’m the only human being she does have faith in.” Then the tone hardens again. Instant switch: pure steel. Furious glare. Isabelle swings at the speed of light from mood to mood. “But why am I even talking to you about this? You couldn’t possibly understand the depth of her insecurities. Don’t you see, to send her for an outside consultation, to hand her off to some stranger at this delicate moment—”
“But if you’re afraid that she’ll kill herself, though—”
His mild words only heap more fuel on the fire. Isabelle is ablaze. “Look, Nick, this is for me to decide! There’s a transaction here that doesn’t involve you, that is utterly beyond your limited powers of comprehension, a complex personal transaction between this troubled girl and the one human being on Earth who genuinely cares for her, and you have no goddamned business sticking your uninformed opinion into—” She pauses, blinking like one who has suddenly awakened from a trance, drawing deep breaths, gulping the air in, as if even she has realized that she has gone a little too far around the bend with him.
A moment’s silence. Rhodes waits.
“This is all wrong,” she says.
“What is?”
“What we’re doing, you and I. We shouldn’t be getting into a fight over this,” Isabelle says, with a welcome softness coming into her voice.
“No.” In vast relief. “Absolutely right. We shouldn’t be getting into fights over anything, Isabelle.”
She seems genuinely to be trying to back off from her fury, her raging hostility. He can almost see the wheels shifting within her head.
He waits to see what’s coming next.
And then, without warning, what comes is a manic change of subject:
“Let’s talk about something else, all right? Did you know that Jolanda has been dating that Israeli? I thought that you had fixed her up with your friend Paul.”
Rhodes shifts his own gears as quickly as he can, happy to be released from contemplation of the despondent Angela. “Paul was just looking for a little amiable company that one night. Anyway, he’s off at sea now. —The Israeli, eh? How often has she been seeing him?”
“Every couple of nights ever since the Sausalito evening.”
Rhodes considers mat. He doesn’t care, basically, except that Jolanda and Isabelle are good friends, and this brings up the possibility that another disagreeable evening in Enron’s company may soon be forced upon him.
Isabelle says, “He’s invited her to take a trip with him, you know.”
“A trip? Where?”
“Some space habitat. I don’t remember which one.”
Rhodes smiles. “He’s a shrewd one, isn’t he? Jolanda’s been dying to go to the L-5s for years now. I thought that guy she knows in LA. was going to take her up there, but here’s Enron making his move first. —Of course, it’s never very hard for a man to get Jolanda’s attention.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Isabelle asks crisply.
Oh-oh.
The voice of cold steel has abruptly returned, and the basilisk eyes. Rhodes sees that he has stepped in things again.
He hesitates. “Well—that Jolanda is a hearty, healthy girl, full of robust appetites—”
“An easy lay, is that what you’re saying?”
“Look, Isabelle, I didn’t intend—”
“But that’s what you think she is, don’t you?” She’s off as fiercely as before, glaring, pacing, tugging. “That’s why you set her up with your old buddy Paul. A sure thing, a night’s fun for him.”
Well, of course. And Isabelle knows it too. This is a group of adults; Jolanda is no nun, and neither is Isabelle. It’s a lot too late to start praising Jolanda for her chastity. Isabelle, in defending her friend, is only looking for a fight. But Rhodes doesn’t dare say any of that.
He doesn’t dare say a thing.
Isabelle says it for him. “She’ll sleep with anybody, that’s what you told Paul. Right?”
“Not in so many words. But—for Christ’s sake!—listen, Isabelle, you know as well as I do that Jolanda gets around a lot. A lot.”
“Has she slept with you?”
“Isabelle!”
“Well, has she?”
In fact, she has. Rhodes isn’t sure whether Isabelle knows that Jolanda tells Isabelle all sorts of things, but perhaps has not told her that. He wonders what to say, not wanting events to escalate into real wildness tonight, but not wanting to get caught in a lie, either. He decides to temporize.
“What has that got to do with anything?” he asks.
“Has she or hasn’t she, Nick?”
A deep breath. All right, give her what she wants to know.
“Yes. Once.”
“Christ!”
“You were out of town. She came over. I don’t remember when this was. The day was really hot, a record breaker, and we went to the beach, and afterward—”
“All right. You don’t have to play back the whole video for me.” She has turned her back on him, and is standing like a marble statue by the window.
“Isabelle—”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“You want me to leave?”
“What do you think?”
“Are we going to break up over this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
He senses a wavering in her voice, a softening. The old approach-avoidance thing, one of her specialties. Rhodes goes to her sideboard and pours himself a drink, a stiff one. Only then does he realize that he already has an unfinished one on the table. He takes a deep pull from the new drink and sets it down beside the other one.
“You can stay if you like,” she says indifferently, from very far away, no energy in her voice. “Or not, whichever you prefer.”
“I’m sorry, Isabelle.”
“About what?”
“Jolanda.”
“Forget it What difference does it make?” He is afraid for a moment that Isabelle now is going to confess some outside affair of her own. Intending, by telling him about it, either to punish him or to help him ease his guilt. Either way, he doesn’t want to hear anything like that from her, if there is anything to hear. As for him, Jolanda had been his only lapse. Going to bed with her that time had been almost automatic, unthinking: she had seemed to regard it as no more than a nice thing to do at the end of the evening, that one time, a cheerful little social grapple, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. And he had gone tumbling right along.