by Susan Minot
ONE MINUTE he was watching Kay’s shiny eyes in a mob of people and six weeks later he was knocking on the ocher door of that modern run-down hotel in Mexico City in the middle of the night, having called from two floors above, waking her, to ask if he could come down and talk to her. The next day was their first day of shooting and he was nervous, he told her. He couldn’t sleep. Would she mind if they went over a few things? He still had some worries. All of which was true, but also true which he didn’t say was the fact that he couldn’t stay away from her. Some dogged animal instinct was propelling him those two flights down to her in her room.
When she opened the door he could see she’d been asleep. She squinted at him sideways. ‘I’m glad you have no qualms about letting me know how I can be of service,’ she said, which didn’t necessarily mean defeat, but it wasn’t what you would call a shoo-in. She was wearing a long-sleeved Indian thing reaching to her knees which would have been see-through if the thin fabric had actually hit her body anyplace, but it fell around her, loose, white, fitting only at her shoulders.
He looked at her shoulders now, with nothing on them. They were the same, so why did he feel so different? A woman’s body always looked different before you got it into bed. Sometimes when he’d gotten too used to a body, like Vanessa’s, he would trick himself into imagining that he was conquering it for the first time. But it was hard to conjure that up with Kay now. All his conquering in the past had just resulted in a lot of misery. He’d sort of lost his appetite, at the moment, for conquering.
SHE WASN’T in love with him at the beginning, that didn’t happen till she was well into it. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She wouldn’t have let him into her hotel room that night in Mexico if she thought he was someone she might fall in love with. They were working together.
She let him in that first night because there was no way she would fall in love with the guy. Besides he had a fiancée back in New York. That made it safe. Nothing would come of it.
So she let him in that first night. Later she wondered, was that her first mistake? No, she decided. One way or another they would’ve ended up here, here in her bedroom in New York on an afternoon in June, having traveled more than three years from that couch in the room of a Mexican hotel.
She had let him in. It was no one’s doing but her own.
He went straight for the minibar and extracted little bottles of rum and whiskey and mixed them with Pepsi and sat cozily beside her, joking about his worries for filming the next day. He made her laugh. He was not unflirtatious. She didn’t stop him. She was trying, at that particular junction, to do some forgetting of her own.
He made her laugh. That was the main point. Though later she wondered whether anyone would have made her laugh. She was sort of ripe for it.
It had been late when he knocked and now it got later. She told him she was exhausted and needed to sleep. He ignored her and kept talking. She was tired, but she liked his talking.
For the third time she said, ‘Really, I’ve got to go to bed.’
He flopped forward into her lap. ‘Can I come?’
‘You are insane,’ she said, but she was laughing.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me stay. I’ll keep very still and lie very quietly beside you.’
They were both laughing. Laughing made everything harmless and carefree and sweet. That’s the sort of idiot she was, taken in by an easy laugh. Laughter took the danger out of it. It was one way to get a woman: make her laugh. It disarms her and distracts her from the perils that may, and most likely do, lie ahead. Laughing throws a person’s balance off, and in that state she is more easily toppled.
Why not laugh with this guy? she thought. Maybe her recent bad luck was the result of being too serious. The animal trainer she’d met when he brought in the lions for that car commercial had said she was too rigid. (This was a man who hadn’t wanted any major thing.) Maybe here was a time to loosen up. If she continued to steer herself too stiffly, she’d never grow or expand. One shouldn’t try always to be certain and sharp and right. It probably did a person good to go slightly against her principles. A person could maybe learn something. Maybe in certain situations it could do both people good. And how would she know till she tried? This was her chance to branch out. Though this rather drunk, boyish, groping man might not look on the surface to offer her expansion, Kay saw there was, tucked inside him, a call to adventure.
But she was still on the fence.
Then he pulled a guerrilla tactic. Into the joking and the laughter he introduced a serious tone.
‘The first time I saw you I knew my life was going to be different.’
She held the smile on her face, waiting for the punch line. She would have rolled her eyes at him if he’d looked at her, but his head was bent forward.
‘I know that sounds like a line and you’re probably thinking, Who is this asshole?’
Her smile sagged. He was sounding different and his face was changed. His face was not looking happy.
‘And I thought, I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. Because I already have someone in my life.’
Kay had the ghost of a smile.
He looked down into the can of Pepsi between his hands. ‘The only reason I’m saying this is because I’m drunk.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Isn’t that ridiculous? And want to know something even more ridiculous?’ He looked at Kay, angry, as if this were her fault. She had stopped smiling now. She was doing her best to make her face placid and not reveal the strange physical effect his words were having on her. ‘I kept thinking about you and I thought to myself, If she asked me to throw everything away for her, I’d do it.’
Kay got the same disconcerting feeling one has listening to the ravings of some lunatic on a street corner when, in the midst of the screaming, one hears a profound truth.
Despite her appreciation for loosening up, Kay had not, since the moment she’d first let him in the door, since the first moment she met him for that matter, abandoned the deep and hidden skepticism which underlay all her relations with men. That part of her remained as alert as a watchman, quick to spot strange movements and to anticipate possible strategies. Of course, the fact that she was giving him so much attention should have been the first indication that she was letting her guard down.
She had learned that when you believe everything a man tells you, you are lining yourself up for a direct hit of disappointment and heartbreak, so it was best not to believe certain grand pronouncements. But she was human. And there was still an unjaded place in her thirty-four-year-old self that allowed for the slight tiny possibility that what he was saying might turn out to be real and that this might, in fact, be big. You never knew when the big thing might happen. It might happen anytime. (That it would happen was a given. You never heard anyone say, ‘You know what? In some lives the big thing just never happens. Some lives simply miss it.’ No, the big thing was like death, it happened to everyone.)
Somehow she relocated herself to the bed—she had an overwhelming urge to lie down—and somehow he had followed her. She was under the sheet and a flimsy blanket. She allowed him to lie on top, but she kept the sheet taut over her chest, barring him. He managed to nudge himself under the bedspread. They were laughing again. They were chummy, cozy.
Then he did something. He proprietarily wrapped his arms around her and drew her close to him. He did it in a way that was nonchalant and robust. She was shocked how nice it felt. She was always surprised how good a person felt. It was shocking. It was one of those rare instances when reality outstripped imagination. Up to that point in their acquaintance he’d been very much a foreign entity, a person making her laugh, a person she did not, in any great degree, fathom—i.e., what was he doing in her bed at four o’clock in the morning, with a fiancée back in New York? No, he was not understood. But once he put his arm around her, he became inexplicably familiar. She’d had a preview of this feeling that night at the opening with Liesl wh
en she stood next to him in the crowded elevator. She felt something radiating from him. For a fleeting moment she had the strange sensation that she was standing next to herself.
You couldn’t be sure which way it would go, the first time you touched someone. Either the person would be familiar and the way he held you would sort of take your breath away, or he would remain a stranger and though your breathing would be affected, the way he held you would be odd and unknown, like arriving in a foreign country and being hit with its smells, which are intoxicating but about which you remain uncertain. It was not the all-consuming feeling which comes when you arrive at a place you’ve known well, after being away a long time, so that some things are changed, giving you a new thrill, and since you see it with new eyes, it is both old and new, both familiar and strange. That is always more powerful. Benjamin was like that to her. Familiar and strange. But powerful things usually contain complications and with complications come trouble, trouble of the sort that certain people spend their whole lives avoiding, or, if they were like Kay and most of the human race, looking for.
His arms were around her and she felt stilled, like a glass of water. Did a man feel that, too, the slow melting of the self? Did a man get the same orders? Not likely. A man had a different drive.
Even now, here in her bedroom where the light had spread into a glow across the wall, lighting up the room indirectly so it was like being in a yellow tent, even now she could remember that first night and how the dawn showed up glass-blue by the black wilting palm trees and was cut into long strips by the dangling metal blinds.
His putting his arm around her had been the real start. That was the bolting from the quiet house, the setting off on a sudden journey. That was the physical decision which got made on its own.
There was no subtle prod toward love. People would never get together without some kind of hydraulic urging. Without strong physical insistence, would people ever dare?
She could remember that first night in Mexico vividly, the way one always remembers a first night or a first impression or a first kiss. He was trying to pull back the covers in the gray darkness, trying to get in. Now they were laughing again. After the serious moment, it was a game again. She remembered his insistence; she felt it was proof of something. He kept asking her questions—Where are you from? What is it like there? What is it like to walk around and be you?—without waiting for answers. She kept laughing. He kept tugging. He made it under the blanket. She asked him, ‘What are you doing here with a fiancée somewhere else?’ He didn’t laugh at that. He sort of flopped back and stared at the ceiling (much like he was doing now, she thought, at least as far as she could see out of the corner of her eye with her head bent like this, though she couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. That night they were open, staring up, worried.) ‘I don’t know, Kay,’ he said. The room was suddenly quiet with only the air conditioner humming. ‘I’m here to find out.’ He looked at her. She felt dread. She felt a thrill.
He pulled the last cover back with an impatient sweep and settled in beside her. His face was stern. He reached down and encountered fabric and pushed it aside and encountered more and pushed that away and finally got through and touched her. He rose up on one elbow to look at her. He had an amused, revelatory expression, as if to say, I have been given the impression all night that you have wanted to keep me out and now I am finding evidence quite to the contrary. It was hard to forget the expression on that face.
AT LEAST they’d had Mexico, he thought. At least, that.
But he could not recall the enchantments of Mexico without being reminded of the night of her desertion, near the end of the shoot when he’d stayed in the hotel to wait for Vanessa’s call. Back in New York Vanessa was entertaining one of her artists, a guy from San Francisco who seemed to Benjamin to be gay but about whom Vanessa made a point of relating that he was always hitting on her. Kay knew why he was staying in the hotel and went defiantly off to a club with some of the crew. When the group returned very late, bursting into the lobby and streaming into the bar where Benjamin waited over his vodka, Kay was not with them. Neither was Johnny. Johnny, his DP, for chrissakes, the man shooting his movie, the person other than Kay closest to him in these last two months. Kay and Johnny were notably absent. The next morning Kay left early for Miami, as planned, having gotten a commercial for a couple of days which meant money, something Benjamin couldn’t offer, and he hadn’t seen her before she left and had to endure the cracks on the set that day about Kay and Johnny disappearing from the theme brothel they’d gone to after the disco, not knowing, or at least pretending they didn’t know, what had been going on between Kay and himself. He felt sick all day.
He finally reached her on the phone in Miami and confronted her. She didn’t admit or deny anything, but flabbergasted him by saying she hadn’t thought he expected exclusivity. Her voice was cool and he wondered with panic if this was the woman he’d allowed himself to fall in love with. Just the other night they’d stayed in that thatched place in the jungle, and under that pink mosquito net he’d felt that he’d very possibly found the woman of his life. She was good and reasonable and skeptical and true and whenever he rolled over and looked at her another surge of love, or lust at least, would sweep through him and he’d reach for her again and each time she was drawn easily and willingly into his arms.
‘What about the other night?’ he screamed. He was losing his voice, he was a wreck. ‘Weren’t you exclusively mine the other night?’
‘Would that have been the night,’ she said, ‘you were waiting for a certain phone call?’
He hated when they weren’t direct. If she were just direct and came out and said what she meant, then he would be able to respond to her, but this half-insinuating, half- accusatory it bugged him. ‘I’m talking about three days ago,’ he said. ‘In that pink bed.’
‘Right.’ It was a whisper.
‘What about that? What about then?’
‘That was lovely.’ She sounded uncertain.
‘I thought you were mine then,’ he said.
‘I was.’ She was barely audible. She was far away. In Miami. Who was she, anyway? Did he even know her?
There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘But I’m not the only one, am I?’
The thing was that during those last few weeks in Mexico he had seriously been thinking about leaving Vanessa and seriously been trying to figure out how he could do it. But that had been when he was certain of Kay. Now he wasn’t so sure. And with his uncertainty came the end of the short period of happiness they’d had, and the beginning of the misery.
GOD, men were nice.
He was nice. When she thought of all the time she’d spent agonizing over him and thinking about him and fighting the idea of thinking about him and dreading him, she felt how truly sweet it was to accept him now with an open heart. She thought, This is what it must feel like to be a saint. Full-hearted and ecstatic. Though no saint she could imagine would have been in precisely the same position she was in at the moment.
THEN HE GOT back from Mexico and watched Kay withdraw. He had loosened his grip for a moment after the Johnny incident and she stepped back. And why wouldn’t she, really? He wasn’t offering her anything. At least, not yet. He needed to figure things out. But he still wanted to see her while he was doing that. He could only offer her the fact that he loved her, which he did and which he told her whenever he managed to convince her to see him. But by then her reaction to him had changed. She wasn’t listening to him anymore with the same attention she’d once had, looking like someone with earphones on, watching his face at the same time she was listening for confirmation from somewhere else, from a voice in those earphones.
No, after they were back in New York in their old lives, by then she was sort of scoffing at him. One time standing awkwardly in her small kitchen when she was impatient to have him go—she explained with very female logic that it was because she wanted him to stay—he told her he wished he could be
with her and her response came through her nose in a little snort. She wasn’t buying it anymore. She had started to buy it, she told him, for a while, in Mexico. But it was different back in New York. Nothing had changed in his life. He tried to explain it to her: things were complicated. She nodded. She regarded him with a blank expression which was worse than scorn. He could see how maybe it didn’t look as if he loved her, but his hands were tied. What could he do? He had other people to consider. Another person, that is. He’d been in this thing too long a time to just walk away. He owed that person too much. He really did.
Kay didn’t argue with him. She just listened, arms folded, standing against the stove. Her expression said, You’re full of shit. But she was still listening and as long as she was listening he was going to keep talking. He needed her to understand: Vanessa had saved him. He didn’t put it that way to Kay, but tried to convey how Vanessa had stood by him all those years while he was struggling to get the damn movie made. Truth be told, she’d supported him for a solid year in there. Then on and off for a few more. How did you repay someone for that? At least now he was pulling his own weight. (Though it did help that he didn’t have to pay rent. Vanessa’s owning the apartment was a definite plus. He saw it as a matter of good luck, for the both of them. She had the good fortune to have family money and it was no skin off her back and they both benefited. She was starting actually to make money with her gallery and that money he considered distinctly different from the family money. The money she earned, he’d never take that money. She worked hard, and even if it was her family money which she’d used to back the gallery in the first place, she was now earning it herself. A lot of girls wouldn’t have bothered working at all. He admired Vanessa for that. But he wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t like the fact that she had money. A woman with money was less helpless. A woman with money could choose. She had power. So, because Vanessa did happen to have money, she ended up, he admitted it, taking up a lot of financial slack. But a lot of it was out of his control. She was the one who wanted to be by the sea in the summer, so she took the share on the North Fork. He would have been perfectly content to slump his way through the summer in town stringing together visits to air-conditioned movie theaters, but if they were going to spend time together, then he had to go out there and when he did there was bound to be the inevitable mortifying moment when he didn’t have enough money to chip in for the tuna or the booze or whatever it was they were all madly consuming in that disorganized house. What else could he do? He was broke.)