Книга - Rapture

Rapture
Susan Minot


A powerful, sensuous new novel from the critically acclaimed author of ‘Evening’.'Mesmerising.' Vogue'The bedspread was sloughing off the foot of the bed, the white sheets were as flat as paper. This is not what she'd pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn't.'Taking one single interlude – two bodies entwined on a bed at midday, lovers rekindling an old affair – Susan Minot's new novel chronicles a relationship from the alternating perspectives of a man and a women.Thoughts cascade through Benjamin's mind, memories of the chest thumping moment when he first met Kay; of the night they shared under the mosquito net on the pink bed in Oaxaca; and of his fiancé, Vanessa, and the simple choices that face him. Memories unspool in Kay's mind too. She recalls the dangerous lure of Benjamin, the man who drove her scepticism away; the dread and the thrill of the first night they spent together; and now she asks herself, how has she let him slip back into her life like this?Graphic, provocative and reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi ‘Intimacy’, Susan Minot's striking novel dissects a love affair in breathtaking detail.









RAPTURE

SUSAN MINOT








This is for HF Moody III, earliest supporter




Contents


Cover (#u092a309a-5d4a-5905-bff1-b8aecd0b8666)

Title Page (#uea9ad8a5-7d4e-55d3-b079-adba2fd9c457)

Dedication (#u29537b36-2d7e-5347-af71-410ec92856c1)

Chapter One (#u50801687-3667-5a43-b6dd-0ffe846923e5)

Chapter Two (#u12843adb-aea4-5c4d-9691-18bc0473ca3d)

Chapter Three (#u2364f319-d69f-510e-9d9b-a0f80a9e06fb)

Chapter Four (#ueb4ff0ef-8c48-5322-9bbc-78b53010237d)

Chapter Five (#u45b32924-4136-56d6-864a-c8a2c1344080)

Chapter Six (#u18360a44-af59-59ba-bfec-8dad3f91fce9)

Chapter Seven (#u8925e74e-22aa-54cb-976f-d58d063a558c)

Chapter Eight (#u49081f74-ab22-5730-b0ee-3561469ae5f6)

Chapter Nine (#u7adfe445-4905-57c3-91e4-fd433a33dbca)

Chapter Ten (#uacf468ba-3392-5177-8f8b-b4aba672c578)

Chapter Eleven (#u4f8734ba-d818-5734-99f3-6462b026c5b5)

Chapter Twelve (#ucf1a882a-305a-5d93-8eab-d484bc508be3)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Susan Minot (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Chapter One (#ulink_9c4ad181-3dfa-5510-a362-13f0625455b9)


HE LAY BACK like the ambushed dead, arms flung down at his sides, legs splayed out and feet sticking up, naked. He lay in the familiar bed against the familiar pillows he’d not seen in over a year. Eyes closed, face slack, he might indeed have been dead save for the figure also naked embracing his lower body and swiveling her head in a sensual way.




Chapter Two (#ulink_1c603d23-eec3-5974-b7d4-7f93829709e5)


HE OPENED his eyes, barely, and looked down at her. He looked with cool, lowered lids at her mouth pressed around him. As he watched he felt the pleasant sensation, but it was not making it up to his head. The good feeling remained relegated to what was going on down there. It stopped in the vicinity of his hips. He did like it, though. Who wouldn’t? He especially liked seeing her down there after this long time.

He had no idea what had gotten her there.

He certainly wasn’t going to ask her about it. There was no way he was going to wade into those dangerous waters and try to find out why she’d changed her mind or what she was thinking or why she’d let him back in or even if she’d changed her mind. He didn’t want to jinx it, their being in bed together. Besides, he didn’t really want to know. If he’d learned only a few things in their long association—and he considered over three years to be pretty long—one of them was that when Kay did tell him what was going on in her mind, the report was usually not very good. I honestly think you don’t have any conception of what love is. She had a knack for being blunt in a way he didn’t particularly want to deal with at the moment. He preferred this side of her, her solicitous side, which he was getting the benefit of right now.

And even if he did want to know, he no longer trusted himself to ask her in the right way or have the right response ready for what she might say. He’d learned that, for them, there was no right thing to say. Plus, he didn’t want to risk the subject of Vanessa coming up. He couldn’t face that. Whenever Vanessa’s name came up, it always ended badly. Of course, it worked the other way around, when Vanessa brought up the subject of Kay Bailey. If Kay Bailey came up things were likely to take a turn for the worse. He might be dense about some things, but he’d learned that.

But wait, now that he thought about it, and being in this position allowed his mind sort of to drift and wander, Kay had already brought up the subject of Vanessa—earlier while she was making them lunch. She had her back to him, standing at the counter. She did not pause from slicing tomatoes in long, patient strokes when she half turned her face back to him. ‘How’s Ms. Crane?’ she said. A little alarm alerted him to check her face and he saw no clenched jaw which he interpreted as an encouraging sign and so told her that he and Vanessa were still talking, which was true, and that Vanessa had not ruled out the possibility that they get back together, which was somewhat stretching the truth. It was, instead, a reflection of what he hoped the truth might be, despite the fact that Vanessa had told him in no uncertain terms—that was the phrase she used—that it was finally and absolutely over and she could not imagine them ever repairing the damage he’d done. Except that she did happen to be saying this sitting on the edge of the bed where they’d just spent the night together. So all was not lost. She was still seeing him. He didn’t bother getting into these specifics with Kay. He wanted to be honest, but no one wants complete honesty if it’s going to rip open your heart.

Kay had simply nodded, uncharacteristically not reacting, and put the lopsided bread in the toaster. She was in one of her calm frames of mind. At one point while they were eating she looked at him in a pointed way and smiled, beaming.

‘What are you smiling at?’ he said, a little frightened.

‘It’s good to see you,’ she said. She looked genuinely happy. He did not understand women.

Like a draft in the room he could still feel how bad things had gotten and didn’t expect to see her beaming at him this way. He certainly hadn’t expected ever to be back in here either, in her small bedroom with the tall window and the afternoon light going along the long yellow curtain. He looked up at the ceiling. It told him nothing. But he kept his gaze there. If he was going to make sense of this it would be easier if he didn’t look at her or at what she was doing to him. Instead, he thought, he should just bask in the sensation and, if he was lucky, it would take over his mind.




Chapter Three (#ulink_52955fbf-1ab8-5275-aca8-0132341d8e6e)


GOD, he was lovely. God, he was sweet. God. God. God. This had to be the sweetest thing she’d ever felt, nothing had ever been sweeter. It was overwhelming, the feeling that this was pretty much the only thing that mattered, this being with him, this sweetness, this … communing … this … there was no good word for it.

Her fingers encircled the base of his penis and she ran her parted lips up and down him, introducing her tongue like a third lip. Her other hand traveled over his stomach, exploring. It stopped. It moved over his hips. Her palm rested lightly on his skin, as if she were testing the heat over an electric burner. The palm descended, flat. It was a wonderful feeling: skin. Her brushing back and forth was hypnotic and lulled her. With her head bowed she glanced to the side with blurred lazy vision and saw his arm lying there on the sheet. The veins were raised over the back of his hand. She liked seeing his hand there, the manliness of it, and liked the fact that it was his hand and certain, and love for his hand spread through her. It seemed so large for how narrow the forearm was. She closed her eyes and brushed over him, not hurrying. His hand was certain while he had always been uncertain. But this, she thought, this. It … was … really…




Chapter Four (#ulink_92d0ffe7-e236-5980-b1db-2957524c9d12)


BUT HE COULDN’T empty his mind. He hadn’t seen her in so long. He’d finally gotten used to not seeing her. When last had he? Once eight months ago. Probably not two or three times in the six months before that. Her refusal to see him had been part of the continual attempt to enforce something. Not that she wasn’t right to, not that he didn’t deserve to be barred and not that it wasn’t the best thing for her and, truth be told, for him. He had himself told her she was better off without him. He himself had admitted he was a sorry bastard and that she ought to have run away in the opposite direction the moment she saw him. He was the first person to own up to that. Not that he actually thought she’d believe him. It’s easy not to believe the bad things about a person when you first meet, particularly if you’re kissing that person. But he had warned her. He couldn’t be accused of trying to put one over on her, or of pretending to be something he wasn’t. He’d let enough people down recently not to be maintaining certain illusions about himself.

Still, he wasn’t going to take the blame for everything. Not everything was his fault. Some things a person can’t help. Was it a person’s fault if he fell in love with someone else? Could he have stopped that? He couldn’t’ve helped it. How does a person help falling in love?

Or, if you were going to take first things first, how does a person help falling out of love? That was the problem before anything. He’d fallen out of love with Vanessa. He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore. He’d just lost it. So was it not understandable if a person found it difficult to face the excruciating fact that the person he’d fallen out of love with happened to be his fiancée?

Well, he did face it. He hung in there. And, given his reasoning, he didn’t think it so outlandish to believe that if he just stuck with her anyway she hopefully wouldn’t notice that he, the guy who used to plead with her to marry him, to the point that it became a running joke, no longer felt the same lovestruck urgency. After all, they had been together for eleven years, which made the lack of urgency not surprising, but also in a way kind of worse.

So anyway you do your best. You continue with the plan to get married—fortunately no date has been set—figuring she’ll never notice the difference and will be spared the hurt. And it might haunt you a little, but you figure deep down that this is what was bound to happen over time anyway and that one can’t stay in love like that forever. So you are pretty resolved with the situation when into your preproduction office of the movie you’ve been trying to make for the last eight years, which is finally, actually, coming together, walks a production designer named Kay Bailey who has a way of frowning at you and looking down when you speak as if she’s hearing something extra in your voice. And slowly but surely is revealed to you your miserable situation in all its miserable perspective.




Chapter Five (#ulink_4a50a69f-aa2c-59e6-b85c-80c547ec9121)


THE BEDSPREAD was sloughing off the end of the bed, the white sheets were flat as paper. This is not what she’d pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn’t. She may have changed her shirt a couple of times dressing this morning and put on lipstick, then wiped it off. It was Benjamin, after all. But she was not planning on winding up in bed. She was well aware there’d been other times in the past when she’d met him ostensibly as a friend and it had been known to evolve that some admission like I think about youstill or the more direct I still want you would cause a sort of toppling of their reserve and before she knew it she’d find herself blurrily pushing him away at the same time that she was kissing him. When she finally managed to separate she would be half buttoned and unbuckled and the internal army which she’d had at attention to face him seemed to have collapsed into a dreamy, entwined heap. And, she had to admit, there’d been times when things had evolved a little further. She wasn’t perfect. But there definitely were plenty of times when she had remained polite and restrained, when they didn’t talk about matters of the heart or, to be honest, about anything important to either of them. That’s how it’d been recently, for over a year now. Or more, if she thought about it. It always helped to resist him if she were sexually in thrall with someone else. Then the troops would stay at attention, no problem.

But now, at this stage of things, she’d thought as she set out their lunch plates on the Indian bedspread which covered her plywood table, enough time had passed that she could feel safe whether there was another man or not. (At the moment, there was not.) Isn’t that what everyone said? That after enough time had passed you wouldn’t be affected anymore?

What did they know? Look at her now. With him. Time hadn’t protected her at all. Fact is, time had thrown her in the opposite direction. Look where it threw her: back in bed with the guy. And with fewer qualms about being with him than she’d ever had. Apparently time eroded misgivings, too. No one had mentioned that. No one mentioned how time saturated relations between people with more meaning, not less. None of this undressing would have happened without the passage of time.

It wasn’t exactly adding up as she’d figured.

Small tentative blips of danger appeared on her radar screen, but they were easy to ignore. The little alarms of the mind are less likely to be detected when the body is taken over by pleasure.




Chapter Six (#ulink_31a5f7a9-165d-5ad1-bd89-858f063cda18)


THE FIRST TIME he met her he was struck by something right away. She was leaning in the doorway of his office, a head with a fur-fronted hat like the Russians wear, talking to his assistant. He hardly saw her, a figure out of the corner of his eye, but that was enough. His chest felt a thump. When she walked in, he looked away. Not that she was so amazing-looking or anything, but there was something promising about her. His body felt it before he even knew what it was. Somehow his body knew she was going to change things.

She was wearing a blue Chinese jacket with all these ties on it, and when she sat down at the table she undid some of them but didn’t take off the coat. She sat and listened to him like a youth recruit listening to her revolutionary assignment. She even knew something about Central American politics. He gave her the usual spiel about the script, which of course she had read or she wouldn’t have been there applying for the job, but he had to rely on automatic because he was feeling strangely backed into himself. He felt as if most of what he was saying was ridiculous, but it didn’t really bother him because he was also feeling strangely vibrant. She stayed very still listening to him, frowning, businesslike which was in contrast to the flaps on her hat, which were flipped up kookily and trembled slightly when she moved. She kept her mouth pursed in concentration. Every now and then a twitch escaped from her mouth, as if it wanted to say something but was restraining itself. He told her about his struggles to get the movie made and cracked some usual jokes. He made her laugh. That was one thing he knew how to do, make a girl laugh. Her laugh had relief and surprise in it. It had a lot of girl in it. He wanted to keep making her laugh.

She asked him, ‘What was the first thing that made you want to make this movie?’ Her brow was furrowed. Her mouth twitched as if suppressing a smile. It was a normal, regular question, but it seemed as if no one had ever asked him it before, or, at least, not with the interest she had, and he felt as if she’d just inserted one of those microscopic needles into his spine to make an exploratory tap down into the deepest recesses of his psyche.

It was weird. He liked it.

He hired her. On her way out she surprised him by sort of lunging toward him as if she was about to fall over. She grabbed his arm and gave it a squeeze, not in a flirtatious way—he had made sure to mention Vanessa, the fiancée, all that—but it somehow hit him more than if it had been flirtatious. It was full of goodwill, and strong.

That night walking home he wondered about her, telling himself he was wondering about her the way anyone wonders about someone he’s just met and is about to work with. He wondered about where she lived and what her life was like and if she was involved with anyone and what she was like in bed, just normal idle thoughts.

He saw her again a few days later at Liesl’s loft, where they’d agreed to meet before an art opening. Liesl was a pot friend he’d met during his brief employment moving works of art, and she’d suggested her friend Kay for his movie. Kay was there already and opened the door to him and led him back into the gigantic room. As he followed her he could see her shape better. She was wearing jeans and a small sweater and giant boots. She had narrow hips without much of a waist, but with a sloping curve at her lower back. A strong urge to get near that body expressed itself in his becoming mute and planting himself by a window, a place he’d spent many hours, since there were no chairs in Liesl’s loft. Kay and Liesl were crossing back and forth in the narrow door across the room, still getting dressed. What were they doing? They looked ready to him. During one of his times of estrangement from Vanessa a few years before, he’d found himself back there in Liesl’s bed. Just that one time. Liesl had been his friend for a reason; she wasn’t his type. She looked too—how would he put it?—exhausted. You heard people say that whenever men and women were friends they secretly wanted to sleep with each other. But he never wanted to again. Just that once. Watching them arranging themselves in the mirror above Liesl’s paint-encrusted sink, he felt intuitively about this new woman Kay that she probably shared a lot of the same interests that he had. At least, more than Vanessa. Though he loved Vanessa. He told himself that. It was like a refrain, one he often returned to since he’d fallen out of love with her. It was his concession to fidelity to remind himself of his continual love for Vanessa in the presence of this new woman.

Later at the opening he glimpsed Kay across the crowded white room. There were people in bulky coats and a muffled din. He felt a sudden proprietary feeling when he saw her gaze up at a tall guy with a goatee. What was that guy saying to her to make her eyes shine that way?




Chapter Seven (#ulink_4624d9ef-3342-5a92-a74d-f72bae145246)


SHE SANK INTO the familiarity of him and let the mainline of sex do its work. Benjamin was like that, a drug. He was the lure of the abyss. She drank him in. He was like a strong liqueur trickling down, so warm inside you, you wonder, Have I been so cold until now?

Yes. It was starting again, the humming of the blood. She let it carry her. What was that Oscar Wilde quote?—how the advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray. The humming spread through her. She felt how wound up she’d been. What relief this was. She was tired of having to look out for herself, tired of beating through thick brush. She didn’t realize how tired. Trying to sort out the right way to behave if she was going to get where she wanted ultimately. Which likely wasn’t this. At least, that’s what she’d convinced herself of. The whirring in her ears seemed to indicate tanks receding, called off to fight other battles.

For a moment the rushing stopped like an engine switched off and her languorous feeling was suspended. She was momentarily stranded, staring at the soft bulging veins an inch from her face. It often happened at some point during sex: the oddness of what she was doing, in this case, swallowing a man’s private parts, pumping him up and down. He wasn’t making a sound or a movement. For an instant she felt the absurdity of sex like a wink from a wise man standing in the corner.

Then she saw herself and him as two soldiers, survivors on a battlefield, too exhausted even to moan, united by the fact that they’d both gone through the barrage and both were miraculously still breathing.

The thing to do was to press on. The sensation would come back again. Sometimes you had to help it with the right attitude.

So, pressing forward, she continued rhythmically tending to him, lips firm. An image appeared of an oil rig on a dusty Texan flatland. She let it fade. It became pistons in a factory assembly line. Neither was helping her to press on. She steered her attention out of the factory and into an alley behind a bar where a door was open to music playing and in the shadows were a man and a woman. The man’s back was against a wall and he was pulling up the woman’s short skirt. He told her to get down on her knees. The woman did what she was told. She was wearing high boots. She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants and began doing the same thing Kay was doing. Kay sort of merged with the woman. The ground was hard under her knees and the man’s hands were guiding her neck, binding her. She went over other details of what was going on in the alley, someone spying through the door, the man lifting her shirt to feel the woman’s breasts. Dwelling on this scenario intensified the less varied activity of what Kay was actually doing there, ministering to a silent Benjamin.




Chapter Eight (#ulink_b6447682-b9b8-5e79-8a9b-00d3195759d0)


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.




Chapter Nine (#ulink_15e10620-abe4-593f-acde-bcbff5360381)


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 when 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.




Chapter Ten (#ulink_6b9bb8ee-f632-59e5-8513-c17d2c641aa0)


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 flabber-gasted 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.




Chapter Eleven (#ulink_0be1c36e-8ead-5314-913b-68d7e400cadd)


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.




Chapter Twelve (#ulink_93f818cb-2263-5e72-9047-cd85752cd2bb)


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.)

But it wasn’t just the money that made him indebted to Vanessa. Everyone made too much of money, he thought. (He dimly acknowledged the fact that this assertion was usually made by those with not much of it.) The more important thing, though, with him and Vanessa was what went on emotionally. She had supported him in much more important ways. She encouraged him through those long deserted stretches when if he had to go out one more night and answer questions about what he did and have to say again working on an independent feature when he’d rather have put a bullet through his head. She’d stuck by him when even he didn’t think he was worth sticking by. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t love her for it. He did. She was … well, his best friend, he guessed. They’d been together since college nearly the whole time. With only a few on-and-off periods. Part of senior year was one. And after graduation when he needed to be on his own. He moved to Paris. He’d gotten a scholarship. The idea was to study film, but he dropped out of the school and used the money to watch two or three movies a day (easy to do in Paris), which he thought was as good a way as any of studying film, actually, but extremely lonely. He thought a lot about Vanessa, but was not ready to … to … what? To be only with her.

So he had little flirtations in Paris, mostly with other Americans at first. Then he branched out to the more adventurous Swedish hippie and eventually landed an actual Parisienne (though she was technically from Dijon). Vanessa came to see him once and they fought the whole time. They had agreed to be honest with each other about the other people they saw, despite the fact that it never made either of them feel better. But neither of them would admit to wounded feelings and instead tossed back and forth little grenades of amorous details—the length of hair of a girl he’d messed around with, the skiing weekend she ended up in bed with two guys but only kissed one of them. In telling the stories they’d begin tentatively, concerned with each other’s feelings, then, as the stings increased, would find it not so bad after all to divulge more. He remembered one fight (but not what it was about) walking by the Seine on some gray afternoon and how she stormed off and he waited for a few good hours before finding her again in the café near his apartment (belonging to friends of her parents). She stood out, a big-boned blonde, clearly American, at the corner table with a cup of coffee, scribbling furiously in a little book. When he approached, she reached for her cup and drained it, not looking at him. When she did look up, red-eyed, he saw she wasn’t mad anymore. ‘You had the keys,’ she said, suppressing a smile of relief. ‘So I had to wait.’





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