“Listen, Isabelle—”
Rhodes goes across the room to her and reaches toward her, letting his fingers come lightly to rest on her shoulders.
His hands are trembling. The muscles of her back are knotted. They feel like slabs of cast iron.
“I’d like to stay,” he tells her.
“Whatever you want.” Same distant tone.
“You knew, didn’t you? About Jolanda and me?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then why—”
“To see what you’d say.”
“I get a gold star for being honest, at least.”
“Yes,” she says. “I guess you do. Look, I’m going inside to finish what I was doing, okay?”
She walks away from his touch. Rhodes returns to the middle of the room, to his two drinks, finishes one, then the other, and after a while pours himself a third. It is terrible rotgut: Isabelle has some perverse fondness for the worst brands. But he drinks what she has, anyway. No doubt this is one of the cheap algae-mash kinds, a real scandal that they dare to call it Scotch. Still, though: given a choice between bad liquor and no liquor, he will uncomplainingly drink bad, and plenty of it. Sometimes his own capacity amazes him, these days. He hears Isabelle getting ready for bed, eventually, and goes in to join her. It is past midnight and he is exhausted. Despite the air-conditioning the hot, stale night air from outside somehow has invaded her apartment, ghostly tendrils of smelly crud gliding right through the walls, filling every room from floor to ceiling with a heavy choking fug.
She faces away from him in the darkness. Rhodes strokes her back.
“Don’t” Sepulchral voice.
“Isabelle—”
“No. It’s late.”
He lies there stiffly, wide-awake. He can tell that she remains awake too. Time goes by: half an hour, an hour. A siren wails somewhere along the freeway. Rhodes thinks back over the evening, wondering why it had worked out this way.
She’s upset about the girl, Angela. That’s it. A threat to her sense of professional competence. And she’s probably fond of the girl, too. Countertransference, they call that. Not surprising. But then, the whole Jolanda business—
He reaches for her, touches her again.
Iron muscles. Rigid body.
He wants her desperately. Always does, every single night. His hand curves around past her arm and comes to rest on the soft mound of her right breast. Isabelle’s breasts are the only soft things about her: her body is lean, taut, athletic. She doesn’t move. Gently he caresses her. Breathes on the nape of her neck. No response. She could almost be dead.
Then she says, finally, “All right, if you want it so badly. Let’s get it over with!”
Rolls over, turns around. Glares at him, spreads her legs.
“Isabelle, for God’s sake—”
“Come on! What are you waiting for!”
Of course he doesn’t want it to be like this, not at all. Except that he is helpless with her, and when she tugs him brusquely into place on top of her, he is unable to resist. Quickly, miserably, he enters her—despite everything, she is lathered and ready—and her hips begin to move, driving him remorselessly onward toward a speedy finish. He covers her face with grateful kisses; but at the same time he is shocked, horrified, stunned by what they are doing. It is an angry, murderous fuck, the death of love. When he comes he bursts into tears.
She embraces him then, cradles him against her breasts, strokes his hair, whispers soft words. Making it all good again. My God, he thinks, my God, my God.
Rhodes hears Paul Carpenter’s voice, suddenly, in his mind.
—She’s a disturbed woman, Nick.
—No, she’s simply deeply committed to—
—Listen to me. She’s emotionally disturbed. So is her friend Jolanda, who you were kind enough to toss into my bed the other night. These are very sexually gifted women, and we who wander around looking for the solace of a little nookie are highly vulnerable to the mysterious mojo that throbs out at us from between their legs.
Right. Right. If he had any courage, he’d flee. He knows that. But such things have never come easily to Rhodes. He is fiercely retentive, desperately eager to hang on to anything that gives even the promise of some sort of solace.
Eventually Rhodes drifts off into troubled sleep. About five he awakens, kisses the sleeping Isabelle lightly on the tip of her nose, and goes home.
By a couple of minutes after eight he is in the office. The miasma of the night still hovers over him, but he hopes somehow to lift himself out of grim depression through a hard day’s work. At least, Rhodes thinks, in all of last night’s horrors they hadn’t gotten into yet another brawl over his research. But that was a very small comfort at best.
He held off Van Vliet as long as he could, well into mid-morning. Van Vliet gave him a headache in his gut. The authorization for upgrading of Van Vliet’s hemoglobin-research budget had gone along to New Tokyo four days ago, and in all likelihood it would sail through without any objections, given Rhodes’ high standing with upper-level Company management.
Until it did, though, Van Vliet would just have to sit tight. But the kid didn’t seem capable of sitting tight. Two or three times a day he was on the horn to Rhodes, wanting to tell him about this or that exciting new corollary to his preliminary theoretical statement. Rhodes didn’t have much appetite for another dose of that just now, not after last night, at least not so early in the day.
He killed as much time as he could, rummaging doggedly through both his virtual desks and all the clutter on his real one, signing papers without even reading them, flipping some documents down into dead storage unsigned, working mindlessly, shamelessly. Gradually Rhodes began to feel some of the newer abrasions in his soul starting to heal a little.
A couple of drinks helped him get through the bad time. The first one tasted strangely tinny—some residue from the evening before, he thought, damage to his palate from drinking too much of Isabelle’s God-knows-what brand of algae-mash Scotch—but the second drink made things better. And the third went down without any problems at all.
Finally, feeling reasonably well fortified and aware he could duck his meeting with the younger man no longer, Rhodes thumbed the annunciator and said, “I’m available to talk with Dr. Van Vliet, now.”
“Does that mean you’ll be taking calls again, Dr. Rhodes?”
“I suppose. Have there been any for me?”
“Just one,” the android said.
Isabelle! She’s sorry that everything became such a mess last night!
No. Not Isabelle. “A Mr. Nakamura called,” said the android.
“Who?”
“Mr. Nakamura, of East Bay Realty Associates. About the house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.”
Rhodes didn’t know anyone named Nakamura. He wasn’t planning to buy a house in Walnut Creek or anywhere else.
“It must have been a wrong number,” Rhodes said. “He’s looking for some other Nicholas Rhodes.”
“He said that you were likely to think so. But he said to tell you that it was no mistake, that you would understand the terms of the offer right away and would be very pleased by them if you spoke to him.”
Nakamura?
Walnut Creek?
It made no sense. But all consideration of the matter would have to wait. Van Vliet was on the line again, now.
He wanted to bring some new charts to Rhodes’ office, right away. Big surprise, Van Vliet coming up with yet another batch of charts.