Rapture (4 page)

So in all the time they'd known each other he and Vanessa had always been somehow in each other's lives. In a way, she already was his wife.

And it wasn't as if he didn't love her anymore. He incessantly repeated this fact to himself because frankly he was appalled at how these other feelings could have developed. He'd fallen in love with someone else and suddenly
she
was crucial to him.
Her
body was what he needed. He couldn't help it. What he could help was not leaving Vanessa. So he didn't. After Mexico, he stayed. He stayed despite the fact that he grew more and more depressed. He thought obsessively of the one he was in love with, the one who wouldn't see him, who wasn't even going to
consider
him until he moved out. He'd wake in the morning lying next to Vanessa and think of Kay first thing and make love to Vanessa before she had to get up for work and while she was in the shower he'd think of Kay again and of the time they stayed on the beach till it got dark late and how she had that purple thing wrapped around her chest and how the whites of her eyes looked and how they had to climb back over some wall and the way she stepped around the green glass shards sticking up in the cement along the top like shark fins, moving as if she were a tightrope artist. The thought came to him then very naturally and without hysteria that he could see having a child with her. He had not had that thought before. Not with Vanessa. Then he remembered being under the mosquito net in that pink bed in Oaxaca and how soon after that she'd gone off with Johnny. Hearing the apartment door close behind Vanessa and the bolt click, he'd ask himself, lying there in Vanessa's bed, if he was really in love with this other person who no longer was giving him the joyous feeling he'd gotten at first in that country far away, who instead was sinking him into a quagmire of suffering and agony. The answer bled out in front of him as an unfixable blot of doom, the same answer each time: yes.

The sun had moved into the room so it was brighter. He preferred rooms dark. He looked down at Kay, as if to remind himself where he was, and thought there was a time he would have been dying for this.

IT WAS HARD
to believe she was here with him again, naked. What had happened to that last ironclad resolve, supported by the other ironclad resolves before it, not to see him again, or more importantly, at least never to touch him?

She'd not seen it coming. Then suddenly there he was, touching her.

They had finished their sandwiches. The water was heating for tea. He came up behind her at the sink washing dishes and put his arms around her. It was a friendly clasp, one he might have given her in the past, affectionate, not as an overture, but holding on tight and firmly as if to keep her from floating up. At first she felt it in that friendly way. Then the pressure of his arms and their insistence made her feel more.
You matter to me.
She had felt that insistence before and knew that it was possible for it to take her off down a road at first wonderfully lush and appealing which very quickly deteriorated into an impenetrable mass of brambles. But not being angry at him anymore, she wasn't looking to him to soothe her. She had let that go. She felt his breath on her neck. An unnerving susceptibility moved through her. His breath on her skin. That was not false, that was    she felt unsteady. Small disturbances went off inside her. She put the plate down in the sink with the water running over it and stood unmoving, holding her breath like a person staying still so as not to be detected by an intruder. He was slumped against her, his head dropped fecklessly on her shoulder. She stood paralyzed, feeling his lips resting on but not kissing her neck. She had no thoughts, but felt as if she were barreling toward a revelation.

She was aware that she was responding, in part, to the effect of touch. Touch had a particularly compelling quality when it came from a person who'd been away for a long time. But it was more than that. This physical reminder was conjuring up remnants of their whole history together. The familiar smell of his hair and skin dusted off an array of feelings and thoughts—the uneasy exhilaration, the longing, the shocks, the scorn usually followed by understanding. In encountering these phantom feelings again she found her eye could pass over pretty much all of them, but stopped staring at one: his body against hers.

This bodily fact purported to be the truth.

The moment was split for an instant by the future. It was always an unnerving sight, the future. It was uncertain. But during revelatory moments like this, the future asked for quick consideration to test her orientation. Would this revelation take her where she hoped to go?

Eventually, at some point, Kay figured, probably, she would, most likely, have children and that a man would, in all probability, be a part of it (which was not necessarily a given these days). She had always allowed herself a certain fuzziness on the subject of her ultimate future. She didn't see herself walking down the well-trod path of domesticity. She sort of sidewise conjured up a semidomestic arrangement tilting away from the
totally
conventional one she'd experienced with her parents. She hadn't exactly worked out the details. Her vision was a little spotty. The persistent but dim notion of
finding someone
had blotches around it of suspicion. What she had observed of family life and lasting love seemed to support the despairing conclusion. She looked for models, but what she saw was either unsuitable to her temperament—she couldn't imagine catering to
that
husband—or unattainable—she wouldn't know how to keep that more desirable one happy.

She had not, however, given up hope that she would work it out when the time came.

Every now and then that hope would solidify into a certainty. It would happen while she was watching a movie and the hero or heroine would make a decision—usually to
choose love
or, at least, to leave a life of habit behind. Those were the moments she wanted to be living all the time, decisive moments, moments when she was doing life justice. Now as she stood there pressed against the kitchen sink with a man hanging around her with a kind of desperation, she realized that this
was
one of those moments. A bulletlike thing shot through her long-held refusal to consider Benjamin Young and she was hit with the distinct possibility that Benjamin Young, wayward and indeterminate as he was, might very well turn out to be the person destined for her.

But wait. The past was speaking: she had left this guy over and over. What was the difference now? She had it; he was no longer attached. He was not living with Vanessa. He was living alone. Her body did know something after all. Benjamin was free. It was a start. In truth, it was the start she'd asked him for at the beginning. She had the feeling she'd walked into a house she thought she knew well and discovered a room she hadn't seen before. Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe they did have a chance. She was overcome with the same fateful feeling she'd had the night of the art opening when she stood next to him in the elevator, that there was something of herself which had suddenly leaped over, into him, and was now located inside his body.

She reached for the faucet and turned off the water. Without leaving his arms, she took his hand and led him past the stove, switching off the burner with a flick, down the hall and back to where he'd not been for some time into her bedroom.

HE LOOKED AT
her bare back with the vertebrae pressing through the skin below her neck and at her shoulder blades like the base of wings. He was always surprised by how small her bones felt when he touched her. She looked the same; her hair was shorter. He liked it better long, but it looked all right short.

The strongest impression he'd gotten when he'd first walked into her apartment was how much it smelled the same, like woodsmoke and a sort of flower smell, he didn't know what it was, but for a moment he didn't just remember the emotions he used to have there, for a moment he actually felt them. Her apartment still had amorphous shapes of piles of things covered with fabric and tucked in the corners. It was how Kay stored her shit, the opposite of Vanessa, who was always throwing things out. Vanessa kept her surfaces clean and liked her edges sharp and colors this side of gray or beige. It was funny how different they were, Kay and Vanessa, but also the same. They were both willful and both had a softness which came out in sex. But where Kay whispered, Vanessa cooed baby talk. Where Vanessa stamped her foot and shouted when she was angry, Kay clenched her jaw and became stonily silent.

The women had met once, before Mexico, on the stairs of the production office. Benjamin was walking Vanessa out because she liked to be looked after and put into cabs, and as they came down, Kay was coming up. He introduced them, feeling strangely excited, and they both gave each other big smiles.
Oh great to meet you,
they said, and
Finally.
Vanessa towered over Kay. Even one step down, she was taller. They both waved good-bye warmly and Benjamin thought it had gone well till he opened the taxi door for Vanessa to get in and she said, ‘You want to fuck her,' before ducking into the backseat. He laughed at her, a sort of choke-laugh, and told her she was being ridiculous. It was the same thing he was still telling her to this day.
You're being ridiculous.

Wasn't that right? Why cause the woman more pain than he already had? Vanessa had a pretty good idea
something went on,
but at this point in time would it really do any good for her to know exactly what? Not as far as he could see. There was rarely any good in telling. In fact, he had pretty much adopted it as a general policy to never, if you could help it, admit anything. It had never helped, in his experience, to admit anything. You just got punished for it. His male friends all corroborated this: never tell. That is, except for Jeffrey and Andre, who believed in full disclosure. But they were gay, which explained their different perspective. He could not remember a time it would have made things better to tell—his few experiments (O.K., when he was caught) led him to precisely the opposite conclusion: to tell made things decidedly worse.

Anyway, aside from his time with Kay in Mexico, what was there to tell Vanessa? Most of it went on in his head anyway. Vanessa didn't need to know that Kay refused to see him. Or that the few times she did see him—well, Vanessa would have blown that way out of proportion. From the start Vanessa had a little radar thing about Kay, which was, at that point, based on nothing. Just imagine if he'd given Vanessa even a little something to go on. She would have run with it. Women always blew these things way out of proportion.

SHE SHIFTED
up on one elbow and resettled around him. She tended to him with reverence. The more she lavished attention on him, the more her self seemed to fade. That's what she wanted, selflessness. She wanted to forget that self which lay awake at night full of dread, wondering,
What is going to become of me?

When she was a kid she used to lie on her lawn staring up at the herring gulls riding the airwaves. She wished with all her little being to be a bird, off the ground, swooping.

So much of the world didn't add up. So much of it was a disaster area. And so much of that had to do with being earthbound and made of flesh. That she was able to transcend the world through that very flesh—to find relief as she did now in sex—was one of the many paradoxes in life. It was little twists like that, when the problem could also be the solution, which made her almost believe in God.

It was one thing to touch a person for the first time. It was one of the headier things in life. But to touch a person one has known, after a long time has passed, that was even headier. And if that person was never actually yours to begin with, then the combination was overpowering.

What a relief it was. She felt anonymous. She imagined herself doing the job of a whore. This was a whore's job, after all. The more degraded she felt, the more saturated with sex, and happier. Her personality was dissolving into a sex personality, there to be used by him however he wanted. She was not particularly feeling his manly strength at the moment, he was not even moving, but she was aware of it in him. It was in him somewhere, that driving urge to overpower her. She'd felt it before. And there was some evidence of it here. As an animal might, she was finding the evidence with her mouth.

She ran her fingers lower on him. She flicked him softly.

She felt as if she were climbing soft steps, building on the last sensation. A hot wind seemed to blow through her, expanding her volume but not her weight.

Was this going to take her where she hoped to go? Well, for the moment it was definitely putting her where she wanted to be: out of herself. And it wasn't complete obliteration since she was turning herself over to another person. She liked to think of it as devotion. It even felt religious. Though it wasn't exactly the devotional sort of selflessness they were talking about in Sunday school.

Her thoughts drifted to the other times they'd been together like this. Those scenes were fixed there, unchanging. The time he steered her over broken glass in that seedy bathroom in Oaxaca with the turquoise floor, the time with the heart carving over the bed and the couple shouting through the wall. She liked thinking of the time she started to unzip her dress and he stopped her.
No leave it on.

Then there was the time, it was many times, of her with crossed arms, telling him to go away. These images were less distinct, overlapping. Then another image of them standing outside her building, breaths showing. She was slouching against him. And the conversations on the phone, the hours eaten as she stared at the things in front of her on her desk, her jar of colored pencils, her piles of clippings, the snapshot of her sister, the alabaster snail, the red jackknife, the eagle feather, hearing his voice but stuck with these things and wanting to be where he was and enduring long silences and telling him to go away. God, it was sweeter now to be feeling instead, Take me. She flung herself into it. It was like throwing herself onto a bonfire.