Rapture (2 page)

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?

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.

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.

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.