by Susan Minot
AFTER THEY got back from Mexico, he couldn’t help calling her. ‘Why are you calling me?’ she’d say, and he would answer with the only lame answer he had: he was in love with her. He wanted to see her. You want to see a person when you’re in love with them. Since she wasn’t letting him see her, he said, at least she could let him hear her voice. That’s all he wanted, just to hear her voice. This explanation would be met with silence on the other end of the line.
He hadn’t figured out exactly what it was he did want from her, or how he could fit her into his life. He was merely expressing the immediate fact that he couldn’t bear not to have her in it.
One phone call stood out in his recollection, probably one of the last before a long stretch of no contact—that was their history: long stretches of no contact—when Kay lost it. She burst into tears. It was not what he’d come to expect from Kay; Kay was self-possessed. He’d watched her remain implacable on the set once after an actor threw a fit, picking up an overturned table while the rest of the crew watched with glittering eyes. It was more like Vanessa to cry. Vanessa expressed herself. She wept and yelled at him. She hurled videocassettes, which flew like hockey pucks across the polished floor.
Those were the worst days, sneaking out to buy cigarettes so he could call Kay from a phone booth. It was a bad movie. Rainy nights, getting drenched, around the corner from the apartment so he wouldn’t be spotted. There was a phone booth in a nearby pub and he called her with bad music playing in the background. Her voice, which had once been velvety and low, turned hard and unforgiving. I have a friend over, she said curtly. He kept trying. At least she was still listening. One time her voice was soft again. She listened to him say he was dying for her. He was. But there was nothing to add to that. They listened to each other waiting.
Then one time she told him to leave her alone. He felt it like a whip across his cheek. It didn’t stop him calling. She started hanging up.
He called only rarely then. He didn’t call as much as he wanted to. He made an attempt to restrain himself. It was agony. He often called after he’d had a few drinks when it was easy to drop one’s resolve. That was one of the beautiful things about drinking: it inspired one to drop resolves.
After a few hang-ups, which, let’s face it, are hard to take, he tried writing her letters. He wrote a couple, but it wasn’t so satisfying. He found he didn’t so much want to let her know things as he wanted her response to them. So he started sending her faxes. He struck a lighthearted tone. He was good at that. At first she answered lightheartedly back. He was encouraged. And with encouragement came a lapse back to his desperation. Her response to that came rolling down through the plastic slot on a piece of paper: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? He answered back in very small handwriting that he just didn’t want to lose her.
But hearing Kay weeping shocked him. ‘Please please leave me alone,’ she said. She sounded as if she really meant it. She sounded like a little kid.
He seemed to be surrounded by weeping women. That was when he was editing the movie, when watching the footage would bring back the very texture of the days in Mexico, the stale bread at breakfast and the slatted chairs on the terrace and a black dress Kay wore and the shape of her calf and tears would spring into his eyes. It was ridiculous. Everyone was crying. And, really, what was so bad about their lives? They were all pretty damn fortunate, if you looked at it on paper. The whole thing was pretty fucking pathetic.
Through barely open eyes he looked at the yellow tulip Kay had in a bottle on her thickly painted white bureau. He noticed a footprint on the wall a couple of feet from the edge of the mattress. It was hard not to think of the months he’d dreamed about being here in her bed with her doing to him what she was doing now. He touched her hair, affectionately, limply. Things had simply never lined up for them, that was the truth of it.
IT HAD BEEN a year since there’d been any actual sex between them. In the meantime, she’d had sex with someone else, which definitely put a dividing line down. During the brief periods of sex with someone else Kay was able to forget about Benjamin Young. She had someone else to be in thrall with. Mark the gaffer had a lot of physical ardor, though he wasn’t much of a talker. Kay thought his shyness was a reflection of a cautious heart, which meant that he was sincere, which after Benjamin Young was a welcome thing, till after three weeks of sleeping together, Mark suddenly went cold. Familiarity didn’t warm him up. Just the opposite. Mark turned out to be one of those guys who’d gotten so used to living alone he couldn’t adjust to having a person around. One night after making love he retreated to the other side of the bed and explained that he couldn’t sleep if he was touching someone. This hadn’t been a problem for the previous three weeks which she pointed out and he said he was aware of that and actually that had surprised him, too. This, needing to be apart, was how he really was. Kay didn’t take it too hard since she’d always felt like a sort of impostor with him, though it didn’t prevent her from taking great comfort in the way he wrapped himself around her.
Now that she was beside Benjamin again, it was hard to believe she’d been with anyone in between. But then it was pretty much impossible to think of how it was having sex with someone other than the person you were with. You could think of another person, but as long as your senses were occupied like this, you couldn’t really recall the details of another person, or really conjure up that other sex. It was like trying to remember an obscure melody with a marching band blasting in front of you.
She had to laugh at herself, though. A week ago when she ran into Benjamin she’d felt so unsusceptible. It had been a year since she’d touched him—a relatively long time. She’d run into him at a screening—that was how he got here. They had both come alone, to one of those converted buildings over by the river, so they sat together. She found with enormous relief that she was able to sit beside him and to watch the movie and to reflect on the fact that the man who had spent so much time occupying her mind was now sitting unthreateningly next to her, perfectly normal, wearing a sort of army jacket speckled with rain, not causing her distress.
The movie was one which left the audience feeling hopeful about life and it further buoyed her spirits. They walked out together, agreeing about the movie (which they usually did), about how the main guy was great but the woman miscast. They chatted like old friends.
‘So you’ve been good?’ he said.
‘I have, yah.’
‘Good. That’s good. Me, too. I’ve been pretty good.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘A little crazy maybe. But good.’
‘Crazy’s good.’
‘Can be. Unless it’s too crazy.’
‘That’s true.’
It was friendly and normal. She felt as if she were coming out of the other side of a tunnel with him. It was like the last scene in a movie when the two lovers meet again and show a tenderness for each other, despite all the hell they’ve been through, or in this case, the hell that their relationship was, and humanly accept each other’s imperfections and let bygones be bygones. He smiled at her with a full beaming smile, and instead of loathing him for it, as she certainly had in the past, she felt perhaps for the first time with Benjamin a grateful wave of goodwill toward him, an emotion untainted by lust or anger.
They walked a few blocks together, stopping and starting—they both had other dinners to go to—and nothing could have been more natural as they shuffled along smelling the river air and the rain on the tar than for her to suggest that maybe they should get together sometime and have him say yes right away. It reminded her of one of the things she’d always liked about him, that he didn’t hesitate, that when she invited him someplace he never said he wasn’t sure or that he was too busy or that he’d call her later, but always let her know right then and there if he could make it or not, and if he couldn’t make it, would immediately suggest a time he could. Not a few of her friendships in the city had languished, then dissolved for lack of that kind of attentio
n. So she asked him for lunch two days later at her place and he said he’d see her Friday. It had not been the last scene in the movie after all.
After they parted she walked to her dinner with a newfound energy. She felt she’d been given a tank of oxygen. And why shouldn’t she feel better? It was a lovely night and she’d salvaged something from a damaging, painful relationship which she’d been sure was lost and beyond hope. And she was not hoping for more than simple friendly relations. She passed by a building where she’d once worked years ago on a low-budget film. It looked bombed out and taped over and she had a momentary impression of walking in a city where there’d been a war and hostilities had recently ceased and the ruins were now peaceful. A soldier might have told her that this could be one of the more dangerous and vulnerable times in war, when things look serene, but before a truce has actually been signed.
IT HAD alife of its own. He didn’t need to be thinking of where it was or what was being done to him for it to respond independently. He didn’t need to be paying it any mind. In fact, he’d noticed that sometimes when he did think about it, the vibrancy in it would falter and wilt.
He watched Kay. She looked absorbed in a nice, slow way, applying herself. He felt oddly distant. He knew he’d once had a sharp, finely tuned feeling toward her, but he couldn’t locate it. Must be all the pollution of the last few months, he thought. Everything was corroded. It was impossible to think in a fresh way. He couldn’t imagine ever getting back to anything fresh.
He could remember about the sharpness of feeling, even if he couldn’t feel it at the moment. He remembered one time at the beginning when they’d met in her hotel room after a half day of shooting and how nervous he was to be with her and excited and full of fear and how he sat on the arm of a chair and pulled her over by the belt. His hands were shaking and he tried to hide it by clasping her around the waist. He pressed his head into her chest. She was wearing a shirt the color of lettuce and a little silver cross. She took off some heavy silver bracelets, clanging them on a glass table, her hands moving with the same efficiency he’d seen when she was arranging tiny Mexican figures in a crèche on the set, decisively, without a pause. She was smaller than the body he was used to. The white afternoon blazed silently outside the blue-trimmed windows and lying beside her he couldn’t remember having wanted anything as much as he wanted her. She made so much noise he had to clamp his hand over her mouth. No, it certainly was not like now. That day was like something murky at the bottom of the sea.
He’d never get to that again. Sure, he remembered it. Fuck if he couldn’t forget it. It would be better if he could. He would also just as soon forget that morning in the prop room with her in a Mexican dress up on the table, forget how they got no sleep, how in bed if they weren’t rolling around they were laughing or talking. What about? A lot. He couldn’t remember exactly what. The story of their lives? It seemed more than that, bigger. Whatever it was, he felt ridiculously close to her. But there were the other things that came along with it, which he would happily forget, too—the pit in his stomach, being unable to sleep, the worry. It was terrible being away from Kay and terrible feeling guilty about Vanessa. All those feelings in the past, he couldn’t forget them. But he wasn’t able, and probably frankly was too ruined, to actually feel them again.
So, now, cut to three years down the line. Him, here, with Kay again, but with his earlier self worn away. He felt snapped off, like a heavy branch creaking on a tree which one night just doesn’t make it through the storm.
IT WAS, from the start, perverse. She was aware of that. She was both drawn to him and repelled. She was attracted to the audacity of a man who could one night in a thatched bar tell her he was falling in love with her and the next day on the set be overheard, while she was hanging a crucifix to hide some wires, telling the script girl how much he missed his fiancée back in New York and how much he wished Vanessa were there with him. When Kay heard that, having slipped out of his arms only a few hours before, it repulsed her and, also, God forgive her, made her want to be with him immediately.
It got worse, the longing for him. It still filled her with dread to think of that period. She would fantasize about applying herself to something worthwhile and dutiful, welcoming derelicts into homeless shelters or cradling AIDS babies in preemie wards—anything the opposite of the self-absorption. (Now and then in her youth she had made small forays into public service, but after the initial charge of being part of a march or counting envelopes filled with checks, she grew discouraged by the bureaucratic busywork, the inept organizers, the sitting in windowless rooms. The suspicion grew that what she was doing was distinctly ineffectual, made worse by the expectation that it was supposed to be so affecting. That’s where the movies came in. In those windowless rooms she found dramas resolved and complexities explored. People had character and bravery in addition to beautiful faces. Things came together. Things made sense. And even if life wasn’t like that, it was consoling. It actually helped her live.)
Oh, Christ if she knew. She was tired of thinking. Tired of thinking about Benjamin. Tired of trying not to think about Benjamin. She was tired of trying to adjust to what she thought she was supposed to do, and of trying to work out whether something was against her better instinct, or if her better instinct ran counter to the better practical thing, only to find out when things didn’t work out, which was the only time you seriously analyzed your behavior, that an instinct which had appeared and been rejected turned out to be, at least to some degree, correct. With experience you were supposed to learn when to trust your instincts. For instance, you should not, as people were always advising you, against your instinct, give the guy a chance if you really had no interest in him. There’d better be something to start with. She’d learned, too, that it was not prudent to tell a new lover, in the early days of getting to know each other, details of your amorous past, as your instinct might be urging you to do in the spirit of trust and full disclosure. The lover is not to be believed when he reassures you that of course he can handle it. It is, he might argue, in the past. Don’t believe him. The only things truly in the past are things completely forgotten.
It was hard to recognize instincts. They got easily tangled up with desires and fears.
But on this sweet afternoon Kay felt mercifully lifted from those petty concerns. Sex, in the form of love—or love in the form of sex, it was hard to differentiate—had swept her up. This was real, this was the most real thing. (Sex made you think that. It blotted out logic. And thank god. What a relief. How did people do without it? They grew ill, they went mad, that’s what happened.)
Still, there were contradictions. That feeling of the most real thing was capable of suddenly vanishing. One could very well experience a giant lack of connection with the very person to whom moments before you were cosmically connected. In any event, if you’d felt that most real thing with someone, you, especially if you were a woman, were going to have a hard time forgetting about it.
Kay was still trying to figure it out. She was not prepared to give up her reverence for sex. It was too mysterious, too powerful, too magic. A kiss for instance. What was it? Two mouths coming into contact with each other, and yet a kiss had the power to make a person believe that not only was love possible, it was really quite likely, not only was life going to turn out all right, there was a very good chance it would turn out gloriously.
So it had its deceptive side. But sex inspired hope, the water we swim in.
Kay’s little bedroom was transformed and a strange silence encased it. She had left her petty self behind, and was given over, mind and body and spirit, to the mystery.
WHY WAS HE remembering all this shit? It was all flooding back to him and it wasn’t making him feel any better. But did thinking about the past ever make a person feel better? He doubted it.
He looked at the partially open door leading out to Kay’s little hall which led out to her little living room. He remembered one afternoon—it was always the afte
rnoons with Kay—when she must have been feeling all right about him because she’d let him come by and it was snowing and they sat on her couch holding on to each other and watching the snow and hardly talking. He thought of that afternoon often. He could feel that afternoon more than he could feel her here now, sprawled across his hips. Sitting with her that day, he’d felt weightless. The snow was coming down thick and every now and then a spasm of wind sent it spiraling behind the black fire escape bars. They didn’t have sex or anything, they were just peaceful. She’d made them tea and he remembered at one point she fished the tea bag out of a cup and squeezed the water, then flicked it into a wastebasket across the room, a fly dunk. Everything was lined up. Her hair was long then. She used to hang it over his face. She’d drag it back and forth over his chest, doing this playful thing, but with an absent sort of stern expression. He thought of kissing her in the cold outside her place on the East Village street with stray people walking by in the dark. Was that the first winter or the second? He couldn’t keep it straight, but he remembered the bulky coat around the body which he wanted to get at and only being able to touch the skin on her face and kissing her mouth which was warm and wet in the cold dry air and that her mouth tasted like milk and how her eyes stayed open just beneath the dark fur of her hat.
He knew more bad than good stuff had happened between them, but he blocked the bad details out. He remembered the good details better. One afternoon which he might have remembered as the day he told Kay that he had finally decided, ten months after Mexico, that he was not going to leave Vanessa—it was definite, they were discussing the wedding again—instead he remembered as being one of the days he and Kay ended up in bed. Once it was clear where things stood, going to bed wasn’t going to complicate things further. It was a way of saying good-bye. After they got dressed, she was in that lovely mood he hardly ever saw, when her eyes were soft and she laughed lazily and was relaxed in general and wasn’t reprimanding him for things he couldn’t help. She walked out of the apartment with him and for whatever reason (the sex probably—it usually had a pretty good effect on Kay) she was not morose or blaming. Maybe they’d been through enough of that. It was a nice evening in late September with the streets quiet and the shadows long. It was unusual for them to be out in daylight together. He felt between them an air of resolve and understanding, as if they were an old married couple who knew by now what was important and what lasted and what didn’t. They walked for a while together with her holding tight on to his arm till they came to Washington Square Park where the sky was lit up pink behind the church steeple and he felt as if all the people going about their business seemingly unconcerned were actually extras in a movie, having shown up for their benefit. He said good-bye to her and she smiled and kissed him on the mouth. She had her hair in a ponytail and he watched her walk away, the person he loved. The further she got away, the more the extras started to turn into actual indifferent people, college kids with backpacks, people taking little steps walking their dogs, lone men muttering spliff ludes uppers, and the pink sky spread above all of them and if he thought about it he could also say that that day might be remembered as the last time he’d felt anything close to being in love.