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.
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
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
