Rapture

by Susan Minot

  When Kay got off the phone her heart was pounding in an irregular way. The apartment seemed relit, or tilted. At the corner of the table the tablecloth dropped with a weirdly angelic fold.

  All the colliding thoughts she’d had moments before of whom she had to call and what bills she had to pay immediately lost their importance and she saw how transparent they’d been all along and how death was far more pertinent. She saw how within its pertinence there was also absurdity, the absurdity that this man who talked to dogs on the street and who grabbed girls solemnly by the hand to lead them away was no longer anywhere on the planet. He was simply gone. She felt a sob rising in her.

  Then the phone rang. It was Benjamin. He was in the neighborhood.

  It was during a not supposed to be calling her phase. During this ban she was trying not to expect anything. Only very tinily secretly did she. He was engaged, this guy. So things had been intense in Mexico. It was easy for things to be intense in Mexico. They were making a movie, they were in the bubble.

  It was easy to feel joined with someone you didn’t know very well if you were near him every day, working through the night in a jungle in a small area lit by lights, if you drove for miles on bad roads so there were hours for talk inside an enclosed space. And it was not hard to be in thrall with someone you’d just started sleeping with because when that went well, the thrall pretty much automatically increased, for a while at least. And with that joined feeling it would be easy to blithely accept that your time together was limited and that when you returned to your lives, you would return apart, and that it was possible to take what was good between you and to prize that and have no regrets. It was easy to believe all that in the jungle.

  Back in New York, she was embarrassed by the direction her feelings had taken. She still had a small creeping desire for that joined feeling to continue.

  When he called, she listened at first. She told herself she was being tolerant. When her feelings began to revive she told herself she’d better kill them. She said his name as if it were a hard nut and told him to leave her alone.

  But the afternoon Benjamin called, Kay was not the least concerned with managing her feelings. Her little drama with Benjamin Young looked like a toy house compared to the cathedral of Dave Jacobs’ death. Kay told Benjamin the news she’d just heard. Benjamin said, Could he come over? Why not? Kay thought. She didn’t need to protect herself. On the contrary, she had that dulled feeling which comes in the wake of loss which made her feel: What more can one lose? Matters of fidelity and possession were small compared to the broader ones of friendship and admiration, some of the feelings she’d had for Dave Jacobs.

  When she opened the door to Benjamin, seeing him didn’t penetrate her in the stark way it usually did. She was numb. He put his arms around her; she stood limp. He led her to the one armchair in the corner (found on the sidewalk years before) and sat her on his lap. Resting her head against his chest, she listened to the vibrations through his shirt as he talked about some project he wanted to do and why he was doing it and the money blah blah blah and the experience etc. etc. etc. while in her throat she felt a nervy, hyped-up flutter.

  When she started to cry he stopped talking. He stroked her head and the stroking was soothing and good. She turned her face up to him and his mouth was there, close, and when she kissed him it seemed as if his mouth was the perfect and probably only relief there was for this lost feeling of swirling in fog.

  They didn’t leave the armchair. Afterward when she pulled her skirt back down, she looked at his face and saw something new: she was in love with it.

  He had to go. (He always had to go. In fact, Kay figured, even now, years later, on this Friday afternoon as she tended to him, he probably had to go.) But that afternoon, in the first moments of being in love with him, his having to go was all right, because he could never really go now, not after what had happened. Anything he did was all right. Now she was on his side. She was in love with him. She had truly believed then that everything would be O.K.

  She had genuinely actually believed it.

  What had made her fall in love with him then? Kissing him while thinking of someone she’d liked who’d died? Because he got inside at that lost moment? Didn’t it have anything to do with his personality? Maybe that he’d made her laugh? Was it because she suddenly felt his gaze reach to the back of her skull?

  For a short period after falling in love with him it was wonderful. She felt she was living straight from her soul. She was no longer alone. After a while though it turned, as certain types of love have a tendency to do, into a sickness, and she longed for the time before she’d ever laid eyes on him.

  HE KEPT his eyes closed. He felt as if he were whirling down a drain.

  SHE PAUSED TO take a breath, knowing that pauses interrupted the building of momentum, but her cheeks were being pulled in a way they were never pulled at any other time. They were a little strained. She didn’t want to hurry. That could make it unpleasant. She rested her cheek against his thigh, flushed. Outside she heard the moan of air conditioner kicking on in the building across the back garden, if that’s what you could call the lot full of weeds and warped pieces of plywood and bent lawn chairs. The vent let out high-pitched creaks. It sounded to her like a waterwheel creaking in a running river.

  After she fell in love with him there was a brief attempt to see each other on a friendly basis. There was no poetry in the phrase on a friendly basis. He’d kiss her hello with dry, tight lips and hitch his chair away from her at the small marble table of the coffee place where they met. She was used to being close to him and had liked that. That was how she liked him: close. She was irritated how easily he seemed to be adjusting. He said he was just happy to see her. But then, he wasn’t on his own. He had another person. He always had that other person.

  She took him into her mouth again, keeping ahold of him with a hand, fingers encircling his base, rooting him down.

  NOT ONLY did he need to prove to Vanessa that he had been worth sticking with, but he needed to address the panic that this would, unless he put a stop to it, keep on happening. He would keep falling in love with women. He would love one woman for a few years like he had Vanessa till things got a little regular, then another woman like Kay would appear and he’d fall in love with her, and even if he never actually fell in love with any woman ever again, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to say no to the occasional temptation. He didn’t see how he’d be able to help himself. He figured he’d better stop it now and try to stick with one woman. If Vanessa didn’t take him back, he was sure he’d never maintain a permanent relationship with a woman. A wife, in fact, a person to grow old with, the thing his parents had. His parents had it effortlessly. Despite what his brother thought—his brother was more cynical about these things—he saw his parents as being still in love. So why couldn’t he expect to find that?

  ‘Because you’re not your parents,’ Kay had said to him once. He’d ended up talking about that sort of thing with Kay, about his ambivalence, more than with Vanessa. When you meet a new person, you sometimes get an urge to explain yourself. He told Kay he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to find something like his parents had, maybe it was outside of his personality. He was not as good as they were. And Kay, who usually argued with fervor when she didn’t agree with something, must have grown weary by then, weary of his hopelessness, of their hopelessness. ‘You’re not that bad, Benjamin,’ she said, looking pained, as if this were a harder thing to admit than his being a complete catastrophe.

  He glanced down at her now resting against his leg and figured she must be getting tired. He better stop his mind from wandering. He didn’t have forever. He better concentrate.

  SHE SPENT more time trying to forget him than she ever did actually being with him. Obstacles fed the longing. She grew impatient at work, distracted when she was out with friends. Returning home late at night, she’d think, Has he called? She’d told him not to, but one section of herself stil
l pictured him calling, with a miraculous message which would somehow change everything. She knew that for this to happen he would have to change, totally, his whole personality. But it consoled her to imagine him suddenly otherwise than he was.

  One night she dreamed of a cheetah pacing silently on a long veranda outside windows where she slept. Suddenly it leapt at her window, crashing through the glass and attacked her, biting her throat. When she told him about the dream, he said, unembarrassed, ‘That’s me. Cheater, cheat-ah.’

  IT WAS NICE, though, no question, seeing Kay again, seeing her naked. The last time they’d had sex was in the dark so he hadn’t been able to look at her. They’d kept most of their clothes on anyway, ending up in a contorted position in her hall just inside the door. Fuck that seemed like a long time ago. When was it. After the wedding of Margaret, his costume designer. They hadn’t really spoken to each other till the very end of the evening. He hadn’t been sure if Kay’d be there or not. She was. And he was there alone. They ended up walking out together and went for a drink. At the bar he told her he’d moved out from living with Vanessa and she didn’t ask him anything more because, if she’d asked, he would’ve told her he was back in love with Vanessa. But she didn’t ask. She was relaxed and inviting, the way she got after a few drinks, and sitting beside her on the dark ruby banquette he felt the old urges.

  They rode silently home in a cab and he took her hand. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t move it away. She looked as if she was sleepwalking. So he was surprised when they pulled up in front of her building where the tree branch shadows were projected by the streetlights, that building where so much emotion had once been, and she asked him did he want to come up. It took him aback. ‘Do you want me to?’ he said. She shook her head, not at him but at the question, and got out of the cab, dropping some bills on his lap. He paid the driver and followed her in.

  Walking up the stairs, she didn’t speak. They stepped inside the apartment and she shut the door but didn’t turn on the hall light the way she usually did automatically. She turned around and pushed him back against the door and pressed against him with her face an inch away so he could see the dark shape where her eyes were, but not the eyes themselves. They stood with their mouths an inch from each other with her champagne breath on him, not moving for about a minute and a half, which is a long time to be standing in the dark that close to someone with your heart pounding. Out the open window a car went by blasting music which they could hear at the other end of the apartment and she finally moved the inch forward and mashed her lips against his and murmured something which he thought was, I love you so, then thought that maybe it was, I love this song, because the car was still down there waiting for the light to change, but he didn’t want to move his lips to ask. It was that Bob Dylan song “One of Us Must Know.”

  He didn’t understand women. He’d only grown accustomed to expecting certain types of inexplicable behavior. For instance, if you told a woman she looked beautiful it immediately cheered her up, no matter how much she was ragging on you or how pissed off she might be. Tell her she was beautiful and it genuinely seemed to make her feel better. Or, he’d observed, women spent long periods of time exchanging obscure information with each other which, if you listened to what they were saying, you could not figure out the important part.

  But he didn’t need to understand Kay in that dark hallway to like being with her as much as ever and to feel excited when he lifted her sweater and felt the skin on the small of her back and she sank heavily against him.

  He looked down at Kay now, and in that coincidental way of two people separately occupied happening to glance at one another in the same moment, she looked back at him, her gaze sweeping sideways, eyes at a low burn, hardly registering him there.

  He reached down to her face and gave her cheek an affectionate little slap.

  IT WAS AMAZING how much things could change between two people. That you could feel a person was your eternal mate one day and three months later bump into him in, say, the flower district and hardly know what to say.

  It was months after she’d fallen in love with him and weeks after they’d not been able to see each other ona friendly basis, so it was disorienting to see his figure standing there on the sidewalk, purporting to be like anyone else’s.

  The weather had changed the way it does in the fall, suddenly cold from one hour to the next. She was walking home from an interview, tired and underdressed, carrying too much in her bag. The wind was smacking into people when they hit the corner, thumping their shopping bags like drums, making their hair fly. She spotted him outside a florist’s pointing to a bucket of flowers.

  He noticed her and smiled; he was slow, staring.

  He gestured toward the flowers. ‘For a show in Vanessa’s gallery,’ he said, and named the artist, as if Kay would be interested. He seemed proud to be doing this errand for his girlfriend. Why was he staring at her that way, straight on?

  None of her self was there as they smiled. They nodded. They pointed in different directions. She left with his Great to see you ringing in her ears. She walked away, rattled. She felt as if God were watching and testing her—not that she actually believed in God, it was more like a concerned third party—overseeing what was going on between her and Benjamin, watchful of her progress. She didn’t know exactly what she was expected to do, or what the test was, but instinct told her that walking away from him on her own was the beginning of passing it.

  It gave a person a chill thinking about it, how much things could change between people. It only confirmed her impression that the bottom was constantly dropping out of human relations.

  So now, here, reunited and joined, that was being on the right track, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the state to which all aspired? The forgiving accepting attitude. The dropping of all one’s restraint and reservation and mistrust, no longer subject to a back-and-forth, the seizing ahold of something and holding fast to it and giving all to that whether or not you’ve determined if it was safe or promising or even wise. There’d been so many days of saying no to him, then weeks, then months—all those days lay piled in a useless heap. What had they taught her? Anything?

  The fact that they were here seemed to render those days worthless. Something had endured and brought them together again. She relaxed into letting go of all that worry. Things certainly could never be as bad as they’d been. She was sure of that. She felt a strange thing happening: the evaporation of all that old hideousness. This late afternoon of this particular day in June she was getting the distinct, golden feeling that now was their time. Here, in her bedroom with the window open to the feathery trees growing alongside the barbed wire spirals, no one knowing where they were (at least no one knew at that moment where she was), certainly no one knowing what they were doing (she hardly knew what they were doing). They had survived something. It was a turning point.

  A tiny little pang disturbed her inside. Hadn’t she felt this turning point feeling before? Perhaps, said the little dinging pang, perhaps nothing had changed, he was still Benjamin and this was just another version of the same thing. She shook off the thought like a chill and followed the warm expanding feeling instead. She was opening up. That was the better feeling. Maybe something would even come of it. She felt airy hope gathering in her, some impending thing something beautiful waiting over the hill

  HE HAD fucked it up. He was well aware that he had done a good job of majorly fucking it up.

  SHE WAS full of revelation. In this sultry flexible state she was seeing clearly: all the frustration and sobbing and feeling worthless was the road they needed to travel to get where they were now. That they’d made it to here meant that he was, well, something like her fate. Meant for her after all. The only way to process it was to forgive. Everything. Him. Herself. That’s what she was feeling, a voluptuous letting go.

  She felt strong and direct. She no longer needed to feel like an idiot for enduring the humiliations, for being locked in self-absor
ption. It was all needed to get her here. It had led to this union. And she could forget it now.

  What were once big trees towering over her, the warnings against Benjamin (none of her friends had touted him as a particularly good idea) now looked like wiry needles in the distance. What did other people know about what really went on inside a person? About what a person needed beyond the practicalities? Not that she knew precisely what she needed, but she knew what she was drawn to, and those things were not always in her practical best interest. They were the things which made her feel. In them was allure and wonder and something which made her marvel at the world, and if there was defiance in them, well, then she’d stick up for it. It made her feel like a scout. Love, as far as she could see, had little to do with reason and practicality, unless you were lucky and happened to be built that way. The choices she made were mysteriously directed and she might as well accept them and not fight them. With her senses hazy from his skin and body, it seemed very likely Benjamin was the ship the gods had sent for her to sail. It was sort of mythical. He may not have been the ship she or anyone else might have envisioned for herself, but that must have been what people meant when they said the person you ended up with was very often not the one you would have expected. She seemed to recall that it was usually happy, satisfied people who said that.

  IT WAS FUNNY the things that came into your mind during sex. That Lou Reed song with the line playing football for the coach. The street in Providence where he’d gone to college. He thought of the green where they used to throw Frisbees, the girls reading on the grass, lying on their stomachs with their backs bent and long hair spilling down their arms. And for no reason he could explain, he thought of one night he’d climbed up the fire escape into a girl’s room. He hadn’t thought of that in years. It was before he’d started going out with Vanessa (though he already had his eye on her, as a lot of people did. Vanessa stood out on campus—a blonde not just tall but bigger than other girls, one of those girls involved in college, but who also liked to get high). The time he was remembering was before Vanessa. He’d gone to a party where it was dark and narrow and smoky and music was pounding, where he’d talked to this brown-haired girl he knew liked him because she’d written him a note after he’d said something in political science. Her name was Libby. He hadn’t found her that attractive. At the party she was wearing a striped shirt which followed the curves of her breasts and he still didn’t make a pass or anything. He left without saying good-bye. He prowled around campus with some guys, and after they’d said good night in that abrupt unceremonious way, he found himself, fuzzy with beer, scanning the windows of her dorm—she lived next to a girl he knew—and looking up at the beckoning ladder of a fire escape zigzagging up its side. When he climbed up and knocked on her window, the girl Libby, much to his amazement, let him in (women never ceased to amaze him) and practically immediately made room for him in her single bed, slipping in alongside him wearing underwear and a T-shirt which he promptly and with her assistance removed. He felt more pleasure in the fact that he’d been let in than in Libby herself, who a few days later left in his mailbox a rather long note accusing him of using her. She seemed surprised by this, further amazing him. What else did she think he was doing, climbing into her room at 2 a.m.? He hadn’t, as far as he could see, from the outset, given her any other impression. This was another amazing thing about women: they didn’t seem to want to face some basic facts about men. (Which was probably just as well. They were better off not knowing.) But how deluded do they have to be not to realize that when a boy who never speaks to them and practically doesn’t know them knocks on their window in the middle of the night there’s pretty much only one thing on his mind and if the girl lets him in, then that’s her decision? He’s not going to be the one to point out why she shouldn’t. He wants to get in! She can be the one to say no. She has a mind of her own.