by Susan Minot
SHE SORT OF lost respect for him when he wouldn’t move out. Not that Kay understood all the complexities of his relationship with Vanessa Crane. She only knew some of the things which had gone on between them. But if he could be believed, which frankly, at this point, she had to admit he probably couldn’t, his heart had been telling him to get out of this relationship for a while. But he wasn’t listening to his heart. He was, as he said, taking other things into consideration. He called those things obligation and loyalty. To Kay they looked like avoidance and denial.
But Benjamin was not unlike many men. He would rather endure twenty years of misery than face ten minutes of discomfort.
But who was she to say?
She had purposefully not been encouraging about urging him to move out. She wanted him to make the decision himself. She saw him as being perched in one woman’s nest and ready, with a signal from her, to fly into another’s—her own. She feared the opportunist in him, the way his face would light up when he saw the prospect of a financial backer. Additional unnerving feelings no doubt sprang quite naturally from the singular fact that he was, after all, cheating on his girlfriend.
Then, at a certain point, her mistrust faded. Or, at least, her mistrust became diluted by empathy and something she could handle. She told herself things were more complex. This line of reasoning was introduced after she’d fallen in love with him. After she fell in love with him, his ambivalent feeling was a cause for sympathy. Frailties were a part of a person’s character. His frailties made her love him more, in a way. Fact is, she could relate to his ambiguous feelings. She understood them. She had those feelings herself.
HE COULDN’T leave her. When it came right down to it, he was simply unable. He tried. One time he really actually did try. He told Vanessa he was moving out. It was a Friday night. How he managed to speak the words still amazed him. They’d been in his head so long he supposed he just had to say them out loud. She wept uncontrollably. He comforted her and reassured her and they ended up talking about a lot of things, things which neither had dared admit before, and afterward felt much better and made up and went to bed. He never so much as packed a sock.
Besides, Kay had never actually asked him to leave. That might have helped, if she had.
What was his choice? On the one hand he had Vanessa, a woman with whom he’d once been in love, standing before him saying she wanted to marry him and be with him forever—as soon as a few more things were in place—and on the other hand Kay, a woman with whom he was in love now, not standing in front of him and not saying anything about the future, only conceding that she might consider him if he were free. Who would anyone say was better to bank on?
I mean, here Kay was now, performing fellatio on him when she’d told him a year ago she never wanted to see him again. He didn’t get it. He couldn’t piece it together.
So he thought of his grandmother’s driveway. That’s what popped into his head. The way it looked in the fall with orange leaves on the bright green grass. He thought of the model of a ship in her dining room. The Flying Cloud. It was always in the same place on the sideboard for as long as he could remember. But someone else lived in the house now, his grandmother was dead and the Flying Cloud must’ve been sold at the auction. At least, he never saw it again.
He looked down at Kay, thinking of the Flying Cloud, of his grandmother’s dining room which she’d never seen, never would. Vanessa had been there, though.
Kay and Vanessa ran into each other another time, after the time on the office steps. He and Vanessa were coming out of a movie and there was Kay like an electric shock, in line for the next show. She said she was waiting to meet someone. It was during a separation period from Kay and he didn’t trust himself to speak. He felt Vanessa watching him. Luckily the girls did the talking, about the movie mainly. Vanessa started to mention something about the plot, but stopped herself.
‘Oh wait,’ she said to Kay. ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’
‘That’s O.K. That never bothers me knowing,’ Kay said. Both of them being so nice.
Benjamin felt his face sort of puffed up with air and he got the dizzying sensation that he was a balloon hovering beside two of his selves in the form of these two women. He well knew that both of them had said not particularly warm things about the other, privately to him. Would that come out now? He was aware, too, that these women had the capacity to compare notes which would result in the uncovering of he could only begin to imagine how many lies.
‘Have a good movie then.’
‘I will. Nice to see you.’
After they walked away, Vanessa turned to him with slow, blinking eyes.
‘What?’ he said.
‘That was interesting.’
‘What?’ He pretended he didn’t have a clue. So often he really didn’t have a clue, he figured this could easily be one of those times now.
‘Your crush,’ Vanessa said.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, as if this were a chuckle between them.
Vanessa arched her eyebrows, a sign of the loss of her sense of humor. ‘I can tell by the way you were acting,’ she said, staying cool.
He told her, as was his habit, that she was ridiculous. He couldn’t remember how the rest of the night went, but chances were: not so good.
He’d gone back and forth between them in his mind: Vanessa was his family, his comfort, something he could count on. And Kay, she was more like himself, but like a new self who wasn’t such a failure, who had made a movie. Kay was a new vista. Sometimes you got that feeling when you met someone—the horizon widened. Most of the time, after you got to know the person, the widening feeling went away. You got used to the person’s vista. But with Kay the feeling had lasted. In his better moments he could believe that with her, he might become the person he wanted to be. Then he would review all that would have to change and it would look impossible.
Anyway, all the weighing of considerations turned out to be beside the point. When it came down to the moment of truth, he simply couldn’t leave Vanessa. So the decision got made by default. What it meant, though, was that he would have to forget Kay. Which he started to do. He applied himself to the project. But it took longer than he would have liked. It took too long.
SHE GLANCED UP in the direction of his chest and shoulders, which was awkward with the position of her neck, and she saw him with his eyelids hooded, just barely looking down at what she was doing. Or was he looking past her? There he was, as close as could be, beside her and under her and even in her, and she hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on in his mind.
Somehow she didn’t want to know. Not if it wasn’t good. And knowing Benjamin it could easily be not good. She hoped, at least, that he was in the same general arena of transport as she was. There were no guarantees, but she was doing her best in that department.
She zeroed all her attention in on him. Surely he must feel how she was worshiping him. It was a paradox that the more she focused on what she was doing the more she disappeared. Her mind drifted in a still way if she thought too much about his thoughts she’d lose that drifting. Any practical thought that appeared was like a raised nail on a smooth wooden floor. Following a dreamy train of thought kept her in a voluptuous haze. She pictured him chasing her through a burnt, ravaged landscape and catching her and throwing her roughly down on a hill of dirt and pinning down her arms and brutally taking her. That was a nice thought. She stayed with that.
A PLANE FLEW overhead, low, out the window. You didn’t notice planes much in the city. When he was little, planes were so rare he and his brothers used to run outside on the lawn and point up when an airplane went by.
After he made the decision to stay with Vanessa, bleak months followed. The only time he wasn’t miserable was when he saw how grateful she was. She dropped her chin and gave him her maternal, cherishing look and he was proud he’d stuck with her. People gave you a lot of credit for that, sticking together. They admired it. Apparently, sticking tog
ether was good, in and of itself. No matter what might be going on inside. So Benjamin hung on to that notion. At times it even seemed true.
He convinced himself he’d done the right thing. He certainly didn’t believe in abandoning a person who’d been good to you. A lot of women wouldn’t have put up with his unemployment, or helped so much with the movie, or thrown that party, or put him in touch with the guy who knew the guy who helped get him into the San Sebastián film festival which, even though it wasn’t big, was a good one, and got him his foreign distribution. And even though The Last Journalist didn’t have an American distributor yet, it did have its own little impact. After he screened it in Washington, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala had set up an investigation into the disappearance of Amy Anderson and the Red Cross workers with her that day. Of course, it had helped that Vanessa’s mother knew the ambassador and helped arrange the screening. Still. So once things were happening for him he wasn’t going to be one of those assholes who abandons the person who’d been there all along, in order to take up a new life with someone else.
Though sometimes he wished he were one of those assholes. He had once pictured himself married to Kay, and liked how he saw himself, hardworking, with Kay carrying their kid in one of those chest straps. But here, in this moment, he saw himself with Kay objectively, with her bare arms draped over him and the somewhat unnatural position of her face being sort of passively assaulted by him and he got the unnerving feeling that he was, in fact, another kind of asshole. Of what kind exactly, he couldn’t say.
SHE COULD FEEL the cleft on top with her tongue and the raised contour of the veins against her lips if she kept them soft.
Sometimes it put her off, doing this. Contrary to what she assumed she was supposed to feel, she did not always find the penis to be an object of fascination. When she was young, it had been foreboding. It had taken her years of familiarity to develop a fondness for it. For a long time it was out-and-out frightening. But like sex it had many aspects to it.
When she first became lovers with a man, it was the private thing she felt too shy to look at. She couldn’t say why. Because there were other times when she didn’t feel shy, when the man was familiar and easy and she very naturally held it warmly in her hand and felt how sturdy it was and how this was privately him and she’d feel protective and think how important a part of him this was, to him, and therefore to her, and how despite its sturdiness how it was also vulnerable. She liked how, by simply holding it, she could feel it grow, like a plant, slowly filling her palm, becoming bigger than it seemed it was going to. Then it would lose its vulnerability and become aggressive, weaponlike, something she very much wanted plunged into her. But it could also be something athletic, full of vigor, boyish. In a different mood, she saw it transformed again, into a kind of totem at the center of a ritual, almost sacred, with the power to bewitch.
It was curious, taking one form in repose, then quite transformed when activated. This activation, Kay had been told, was not necessarily even registered in a man’s mind. She’d heard a man describe the surprise of looking down and seeing himself protruding. A man could become aroused and apparently not know it. It was like a separate creature. A woman did not have that. A woman’s excitement traveled through her mind just as much as to the other parts of her body. While her temples were pounding, her wits were aware of it. On some level, the body knows that a woman is the one who carries the consequences of this excitement. A woman definitely knew if something was happening. She became it.
Kay took Benjamin in slowly, keeping her teeth back from the ridge of the soft helmet. If she took him in too far it’d make her gag. She’d learned to do a sort of flexed thing with her throat. She bumped him gently back there.
SO—TYPICAL—just as he’s finally adjusting to his decision to stay with Vanessa, just as he’s finally making peace with it, Vanessa decides she’s had enough.
She hits him with it on a Sunday night, a time when no people should ever try to talk about anything serious. She sat on the couch lighting one cigarette after another. ‘Is something bothering you?’ he said. Actually, she said, there was. He’d changed. She no longer felt appreciated by him. He was no longer there, he was absent.
Come on, he told her. It was the movie. He’d been busy with the movie and the editing had taken longer and with him finally working she wasn’t getting the attention from him she was used to getting and she— No, she said. It wasn’t that. It was more than that.
She was right, of course, but how did she know? How do women know these things? He didn’t even know it himself till he could look back on it and see she’d been right.
To top it all off, he was just starting to feel as if he were falling back in love with her. O.K., maybe it started when she said she wanted to split up, but the fact remained the same. That night in bed he held her tenderly and felt how precious the body in his arms was to him. He realized how deeply he loved her. He always had. He forgot that he’d stayed with her because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her and saw now that it was because of his real true and abiding love—it just needed the threat of her leaving him to reveal itself to him.
He begged her for another chance. She didn’t dismiss him completely. He paid extra attention—meeting her at work, enduring a dinner with some of her clients—but it didn’t pay off. It was too late, she told him. She was fed up. She asked him to move out.
For a long time it’d been what he’d wished for, that Vanessa’d kick him out and he could go to Kay without feeling responsible and guilty. But now that she was doing it, he was consumed by jealousy. He was sure she’d met someone else. He finally got it out of her: No, there wasn’t someone else yet, but there might be. Women had a way of putting these things. Might be. There definitely was.
He found a sublet in a basement full of some guy’s knickknacks which he thought would be temporary but was where he still was now, a year and a half later. Kay saw it once and asked him how he could stand having all this other person’s shit around and he said he didn’t mind it. That was one thing which had unnerved him about Kay, she wasn’t particularly tolerant when it came to other people’s shit. Chances were she probably wouldn’t’ve put up very well with his. Vanessa, however, had. Pretty much. While he and Vanessa were together, she had.
All of which further pointed to the necessity of getting Vanessa back. Vanessa had accepted him totally. If she wouldn’t take him now, who ever would? He needed to prove to Vanessa that he had been worth sticking with this whole time.
SHE WASN’T in love with him at the beginning. It had been a safe feeling when she wasn’t in love with him. The safe feeling disappeared when he began to be necessary to her. What had happened to change him from a safe, unloved person into the dangerous, pain-inducing one she was in love with? As far as she could trace it, it happened one afternoon.
It was the afternoon she heard Dave Jacobs had died.
Dave was someone she knew from around town, a photographer who was always returning from some war-torn country or about to leave for another. He had a wide circle of friends, and was the sort of completely irresponsible guy who’s expected for dinner but doesn’t show because he’s probably run off with someone’s wife after which he’ll make best friends with the husband, one of those guys irresistible to women despite a total disregard for personal hygiene. Years ago Kay had spent a long night dancing with him and whenever she saw him afterward had the feeling she’d been to bed with him, which she hadn’t, but Dave Jacobs left her with that feeling.
Jane Warburg had been the one to tell her. Jane was one of those people who seem to know everyone, yet are oddly lacking in personality. Kay was irritated to answer the phone and hear Jane Warburg’s droning voice. ‘Am I bothering you?’ It was a typical Jane Warburg opening. Yes, she wanted to say, but instead acted as if she was busy. ‘Did you hear about Dave Jacobs?’ No, said Kay, irritated Jane Warburg had gossip about someone for whom she had proprietary feelings. ‘He’s been killed,’ said Jane.
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Kay felt the air retreat around her. She had a strange, wooden awareness of her hand holding the receiver. Dave Jacobs had been in Costa Rica, there was a bus accident, the bus slid off a mountain road, everyone was killed. Apparently some chickens survived, Jane said. It was odd the things people said around death.