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
“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.
“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.
—
