Rapture (10 page)

Sometimes she felt clear and focused and smooth, like a paperweight. Or she was exhausted and flattened.

Sometimes she could not get enough and was unable to stop and her exhausted greedy arms would reach for him again.

Or she'd be satiated utterly, drowsy, full.

She might want to weep uncontrollably.

She might want to laugh.

She might feel at peace with the world, deeply connected to him, and therefore to all humanity. Or want only to crawl off under the nearest rock and die.

She could gaze at a lover sleeping and feel gratitude and adoration. Or fume with frustration. Sometimes even after a lover's tender attentions, she might feel ignored or bereft.

If things lined up she'd feel secure. Or sore. She might be overwhelmed by an urge to embrace everything (the first thing would be him) or a desire simply to sleep. She might want, for a moment, to be left alone. But more often, she wanted to swim up into his arms and stay there forever.

THAT BEAUTIFUL TIME
she stood near him in the dark    Well, he thought, that's over now.

WHAT DID SHE
really want anyway? Could she picture settling down with one man for the rest of her life? It was a nice idea, but were people built that way?

She hadn't been able to stay with her longtime boyfriend, Angus. After six years, when it came time to decide if they were going to get married, she just couldn't do it. She was twenty-eight. Angus loved her; she loved him, but it was in a certain way, not in the
total
way that her instinct (there it was again, that instinct) told her did exist.

Her difficulty envisioning a life with Angus probably had more to do with her own failings, but it
felt
like it was something missing in him. She met Angus in New York after college. He was the friend of her friends Tamara and Gary, who lived down the block (she was living in Brooklyn then, the third of her so far ten apartments) so Angus was around a lot. She probably wouldn't have gotten together with him if they hadn't inadvertently spent so much time together. Her main boyfriend in college had been totally different. Jake was seductive and druggy, and gave her intense, possessive attention when he wasn't giving it to someone else, i.e. sleeping with her roommate. He had such a hold on Kay that she continued to see him, through rehab and even on and off afterward when he'd moved in with an older woman who was supporting him. Angus, in other words, was a hero in comparison with Jake. He paid for dinner and called when he said he would. He was never jealous. He worked as an editor of business pamphlets and was diligent but had quirky taste in shoes and from the start treated Kay as if they would always be together. Initially she liked thinking that way, too. It was a nice idea. But after a few years of domesticity, she found herself looking at Angus with expectation. She waited for him to say something more at the breakfast table. More and more she was waiting for him to turn over to face her in bed. Once, returning from visiting his parents in Pennsylvania, she had the claustrophobic feeling sitting next to him as he drove that the two of them had nothing in common and that her real self was the one at work who blushed when the lighting technicians flirted with her. She knew the value of Angus. He had patience and steadfastness and she used to cling to his long back as if it were a life raft. Their life was tranquil and their bed, one might say, was becalmed. Angus thought she was too concerned with sex.

‘You focus on it too much,' he said. ‘It's overrated.' They were at an inn in France on vacation, a time Kay felt was rather conducive to sex. Angus wanted to rest. It made it hard for her to picture a future with him. When they were first together, exchanging stories of their sexual past during that limited period when lovers feel free to disclose anything, a period of time which definitely ends, Angus told her about sleeping with the Panamanian maid of a friend of his. He'd met her in the pantry in the middle of the night and they did it on the floor. Kay was thrilled to hear he had it in him. But he must have seen Kay in a different light, and though she waited for it, she never got that sort of treatment from Angus.

Kay used sex as a gauge, despite its paradoxes. She found it easier to read the signals she got from touching someone than to make the more complex discernments of character having to do with responsibility and honor. Those qualities mattered to her, but overshadowing them was the vague but weightier notion of the life force in a person, a person's bigness of heart. A person willing to make contact with other people—that was one of the most appealing things. And people who were struggling. They were appealing, too. Usually the people struggling happened to be messes, but that was because they were taking in more of life. Intact people had ruled a lot of things out. They were less open. It was easy to see the openness in people who were wrecks. And, she had noticed, wrecks were often more likely to give a high priority to sex.

So she'd left Angus. She continued to envision a lifelong situation with another person, just not with someone she actually knew. It was easy to envision it with an unknown person. And children, she figured, would come eventually. She just didn't have the urge yet.

At the moment, sex with Benjamin was putting her in a very receptive state of mind. Was he what she really wanted? The answer was simple and immediate: yes. An image came to her, of the concentrated look he used to get on the set attempting to answer three questions at once, staring down penetratingly at his sneakers. Yes, she was sure of this. The intensity of her conviction was so strong she felt it must be making her body glow, like something radioactive.

IT WAS
a disturbing change, Vanessa keeping him at arm's length. His Vanessa. She became the aloof one, and the aloof person has the power. Vanessa was acting as if she didn't even care she had the power, that's how aloof she was.

But she still was permitting him to see her. They had dates. If it was a Saturday night date, he was pretty much guaranteed to spend the night back in his old bed. One Saturday night she told him, her eyes going a little cross-eyed, which happened when she was being intent, that she was getting serious about this guy she'd been seeing. Some joker who worked with her father. Benjamin didn't eat for a week.

He caught a bad flu. He lay in his basement sublet surrounded by this other guy's knickknacks, delirious, with visions of Vanessa's long legs hooked around another man's back. He called her repeatedly on the phone. Sometimes she'd talk to him nicely and sometimes not. It was Kay all over again.

It was around that time that Patty, the editing assistant with the shiny black hair, came and brought him soup, and they'd had that little thing. And around then was when he asked out Olga who worked at the Cuban place where he had breakfast every morning and suddenly like spring bursting into leaf all these girls started to appear, girls at casting calls, girls he met at parties of people he sort of knew. He was still preoccupied with Vanessa, but a new world of girls was opening up. It was a consolation. There were some very nice girls out there, sweet girls. He didn't stop wanting to be with Vanessa, but thoughts of her pained him and it was a relief to forget her for moments here and there. The moment he stepped out of these girls' beds the thought of Vanessa would return, but he would've had an hour or two, or maybe a night, of not feeling like such a disappointment. He liked seeing these girls who weren't talking about the future or commitments or
working it out
or
working on it,
but instead were opening the shadows at the front of their shirts. They drew close to him. They were smiling and unworried. Each different pair of eyes had a different level of brightness or sadness or sophistication and was always interesting. And all these girls—where had they come from?—seemed to share a total lack of qualms about unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his pants. It seemed as if every girl was willing to do that. One girl told him she didn't really consider it sex. What Kay was doing to him right now. Another girl said she thought it was intimate, like dancing is intimate. It was something romantic.

He felt these girls
accepted
him. They were sympathetic. They slapped his arm in a frisky way, they rolled their eyes as if to say, Aw you, nothing matters that much, we're all friends here. But best of all, in their faces he saw no signs of hurt he might have caused. After a while, hurt was all he saw on Vanessa's face in the form of a bruised childish expression. He shuddered to think of it. And on Kay's face—well, it had been there practically from the beginning, the tight jaw, her lowered gaze. It seemed the longer you were with a woman the more hurt you put in her expression. He was tired of seeing it. He didn't need to be reminded what an asshole he was.

What might be more helpful to address was his trying to be with just one woman. It's what he wanted eventually, but it was becoming more and more apparent that he would always
like
knowing other women. He couldn't help it; it was biological. Maybe he was incapable of loving only one woman the way she deserved to be loved. The way his mother, for instance, was loved. If that were true, then he should just take himself out of the race. He shouldn't be with anyone. He told each woman he slept with as much. He even sort of meant it.

HER SLAVELIKE
posture was arousing to her. She imagined him saying crude things. That aroused her further.

Though he wasn't saying anything. He was silent. He was slumped back against the pillows, his arm still lay to the side. His posture seemed to say, I am only being temporarily detained. In the past, he had conveyed to her how much he liked this, but he did not look overwhelmed.

But then, Kay had never heard a man say he didn't like this. Even the evocation of a blow job would, in conversation, invariably elicit bluster, or a leering look. And yet she'd been with men who grew skittish when she moved down there. There was often more awkwardness than enthusiasm. It could undermine a girl's confidence. It was easy for confidence to be undermined in sex. People got very shy doing this intimate thing, and no one seemed to want to face the fact that sex was complex. They had a hard time talking about it. Lust was simple; it just happened and grew, and if nothing interrupted it, all went smoothly. But personalities were full of interruptions.

People were surprisingly inarticulate on this subject they were supposedly so interested in. That was one of the alluring things about having sex with someone, you got to find out his attitudes. You got to experience a hidden part of that person. It was like getting near the source.

It was rare, the person with a lot of ease in sex. You needed to think for yourself, and not be tangled in preconceptions and misinformation which might have gotten lodged in your psyche way back. It also helped to have a doctor's knowledge of the body, if not a prostitute's.

Kay understood the shyness. She was prey to it, too. Apparently Catholicism could take some blame. But she was working on it. She was trying to pry herself open. She discovered, though, there were certain things you could learn only in bed. Once when she was waitressing, she had a flirtation with a guy she worked with. He had a gruff brutish manner. They ended up in bed one night and everything was going along liquidly and smoothly and she pushed against him and he pushed back and at one point she sort of ground her cheekbone against his cheekbone and he cried out,
Ouch
. And she thought, Oh guess not. You had to get close to find these things out. And even then you learned just a fraction of the whole unexplored vastness of what went on inside a person.

To Kay it seemed impossible to learn a lot of these things about sex if you were with only one person.

That had been one of her attractions to Benjamin. His boldness looked to her like a fresh natural attitude. He just grabbed the girl. That was nice and straightforward.

On one level, at least.

In bed you imagined scenarios. She imagined now she was being forced by him to do this. She was doing what he had ordered her to do. She was eager to please. Though it wasn't always like that. She didn't always feel the same eagerness to obey, the same zest. Sometimes it was distasteful, the exact thing she didn't want to do. Sometimes she'd do it purely for his sake, a treat for him, and sometimes the sweetness of it would miraculously gather in her. She'd met a makeup girl on a job once who said she reached orgasm doing this. Another girl she knew liked doing this better than anything else in sex and had managed to find a boyfriend who didn't like it at all.

Sometimes being far from the person's face, she got a sort of alienated feeling. But at other times, like now, she felt minutely close to him, close to a crucial part of him.

Kay was always surprised when she heard other women (those waitresses had really had some mouths on them) talking about size and prowess and lusting after penises because, really, in and of themselves, how desirable were they as separate entities? It depended a lot on whom they were attached to. The rare glimpse of a penis when she was young—a teenage boy at a pool house, her father coming out of the bathroom and rewrapping his towel—had been fascinating, but not particularly titillating. It was scary. That is, men were. She was right to be scared. Look how much damage men could do. And they didn't even have to know it. They could really ruin a person.

HE LOOKED
down at Kay. Hair lying across one cheek, bare shoulder. Her eyes were open a slit and glazed. She looked as if she were on opium.

Kay didn't like drugs particularly. She drank, not a lot, wine usually. When she drank she became more amorous. He'd only seen her what could barely be called drunk a few times. The same could not be said for Benjamin, particularly lately. Fact is, he'd probably done more drugs in the last six months than in the previous six years.

After the broken-down mournful period when he'd moved out of Vanessa's, he began to get his strength back. If nothing else, he was free to do as he pleased. And if that meant imbibing chemicals and giving himself the impression that he was launching on a great adventure, then what was to stop him? There was no Vanessa waiting to get mad that he was out late. He didn't have to think about pacing himself or to hold back having another vodka tonic. He could be himself.