Rapture (6 page)

It was hard to recognize instincts. They got easily tangled up with desires and fears.

But on this sweet afternoon Kay felt mercifully lifted from those petty concerns. Sex, in the form of love—or love in the form of sex, it was hard to differentiate—had swept her up. This was real, this was the most real thing. (Sex made you think that. It blotted out logic. And thank god. What a relief. How did people do without it? They grew ill, they went mad, that's what happened.)

Still, there were contradictions. That feeling of
the most real thing
was capable of suddenly vanishing. One could very well experience a giant
lack
of connection with the very person to whom moments before you were cosmically connected. In any event, if you'd felt that most real thing with someone, you, especially if you were a woman, were going to have a hard time forgetting about it.

Kay was still trying to figure it out. She was not prepared to give up her reverence for sex. It was too mysterious, too powerful, too magic. A kiss for instance. What was it? Two mouths coming into contact with each other, and yet a kiss had the power to make a person believe that not only was love possible, it was really quite likely, not only was life going to turn out all right, there was a very good chance it would turn out gloriously.

So it had its deceptive side. But sex inspired hope, the water we swim in.

Kay's little bedroom was transformed and a strange silence encased it. She had left her petty self behind, and was given over, mind and body and spirit, to the mystery.

WHY WAS HE
remembering all this shit? It was all flooding back to him and it wasn't making him feel any better. But did thinking about the past ever make a person feel better? He doubted it.

He looked at the partially open door leading out to Kay's little hall which led out to her little living room. He remembered one afternoon—it was always the afternoons with Kay—when she must have been feeling all right about him because she'd let him come by and it was snowing and they sat on her couch holding on to each other and watching the snow and hardly talking. He thought of that afternoon often. He could feel that afternoon more than he could feel her here now, sprawled across his hips. Sitting with her that day, he'd felt weightless. The snow was coming down thick and every now and then a spasm of wind sent it spiraling behind the black fire escape bars. They didn't have sex or anything, they were just peaceful. She'd made them tea and he remembered at one point she fished the tea bag out of a cup and squeezed the water, then flicked it into a wastebasket across the room, a fly dunk. Everything was lined up. Her hair was long then. She used to hang it over his face. She'd drag it back and forth over his chest, doing this playful thing, but with an absent sort of stern expression. He thought of kissing her in the cold outside her place on the East Village street with stray people walking by in the dark. Was that the first winter or the second? He couldn't keep it straight, but he remembered the bulky coat around the body which he wanted to get at and only being able to touch the skin on her face and kissing her mouth which was warm and wet in the cold dry air and that her mouth tasted like milk and how her eyes stayed open just beneath the dark fur of her hat.

He knew more bad than good stuff had happened between them, but he blocked the bad details out. He remembered the good details better. One afternoon which he might have remembered as the day he told Kay that he had finally decided, ten months after Mexico, that he was not going to leave Vanessa—it was definite, they were discussing the wedding again—instead he remembered as being one of the days he and Kay ended up in bed. Once it was clear where things stood, going to bed wasn't going to complicate things further. It was a way of saying good-bye. After they got dressed, she was in that lovely mood he hardly ever saw, when her eyes were soft and she laughed lazily and was relaxed in general and wasn't reprimanding him for things he couldn't help. She walked out of the apartment with him and for whatever reason (the sex probably—it usually had a pretty good effect on Kay) she was not morose or blaming. Maybe they'd been through enough of that. It was a nice evening in late September with the streets quiet and the shadows long. It was unusual for them to be out in daylight together. He felt between them an air of resolve and understanding, as if they were an old married couple who knew by now what was important and what lasted and what didn't. They walked for a while together with her holding tight on to his arm till they came to Washington Square Park where the sky was lit up pink behind the church steeple and he felt as if all the people going about their business seemingly unconcerned were actually extras in a movie, having shown up for their benefit. He said good-bye to her and she smiled and kissed him on the mouth. She had her hair in a ponytail and he watched her walk away, the person he loved. The further she got away, the more the extras started to turn into actual indifferent people, college kids with backpacks, people taking little steps walking their dogs, lone men muttering
spliff ludes uppers,
and the pink sky spread above all of them and if he thought about it he could also say that that day might be remembered as the last time he'd felt anything close to being in love.

SHE SORT OF
lost respect for him when he wouldn't move out. Not that Kay understood all the complexities of his relationship with Vanessa Crane. She only knew some of the things which had gone on between them. But if he could be believed, which frankly, at this point, she had to admit he probably couldn't, his heart had been telling him to get out of this relationship for a while. But he wasn't listening to his heart. He was, as he said, taking other things into consideration. He called those things obligation and loyalty. To Kay they looked like avoidance and denial.

But Benjamin was not unlike many men. He would rather endure twenty years of misery than face ten minutes of discomfort.

But who was she to say?

She had purposefully not been encouraging about urging him to move out. She wanted him to make the decision himself. She saw him as being perched in one woman's nest and ready, with a signal from her, to fly into another's—her own. She feared the opportunist in him, the way his face would light up when he saw the prospect of a financial backer. Additional unnerving feelings no doubt sprang quite naturally from the singular fact that he was, after all, cheating on his girlfriend.

Then, at a certain point, her mistrust faded. Or, at least, her mistrust became diluted by empathy and something she could
handle
. She told herself things were more complex. This line of reasoning was introduced after she'd fallen in love with him. After she fell in love with him, his ambivalent feeling was a cause for sympathy. Frailties were a part of a person's character. His frailties made her love him more, in a way. Fact is, she could relate to his ambiguous feelings. She understood them. She had those feelings herself.

HE COULDN
'
T
leave her. When it came right down to it, he was simply unable. He tried. One time he really actually did try. He told Vanessa he was moving out. It was a Friday night. How he managed to speak the words still amazed him. They'd been in his head so long he supposed he just had to say them out loud. She wept uncontrollably. He comforted her and reassured her and they ended up talking about a lot of things, things which neither had dared admit before, and afterward felt much better and made up and went to bed. He never so much as packed a sock.

Besides, Kay had never actually asked him to leave. That might have helped, if she had.

What was his choice? On the one hand he had Vanessa, a woman with whom he'd once been in love, standing before him saying she wanted to marry him and be with him forever—as soon as a few more things were in place—and on the other hand Kay, a woman with whom he was in love now,
not
standing in front of him and
not
saying anything about the future, only conceding that she might
consider
him if he were free. Who would anyone say was better to bank on?

I mean, here Kay was now, performing fellatio on him when she'd told him a year ago she never wanted to see him again. He didn't get it. He couldn't piece it together.

So he thought of his grandmother's driveway. That's what popped into his head. The way it looked in the fall with orange leaves on the bright green grass. He thought of the model of a ship in her dining room. The
Flying Cloud
. It was always in the same place on the sideboard for as long as he could remember. But someone else lived in the house now, his grandmother was dead and the
Flying Cloud
must've been sold at the auction. At least, he never saw it again.

He looked down at Kay, thinking of the
Flying Cloud,
of his grandmother's dining room which she'd never seen, never would. Vanessa had been there, though.

Kay and Vanessa ran into each other another time, after the time on the office steps. He and Vanessa were coming out of a movie and there was Kay like an electric shock, in line for the next show. She said she was waiting to meet someone. It was during a separation period from Kay and he didn't trust himself to speak. He felt Vanessa watching him. Luckily the girls did the talking, about the movie mainly. Vanessa started to mention something about the plot, but stopped herself.

‘Oh wait,' she said to Kay. ‘I don't want to spoil it for you.'

‘That's O.K. That never bothers me knowing,' Kay said. Both of them being so nice.

Benjamin felt his face sort of puffed up with air and he got the dizzying sensation that he was a balloon hovering beside two of his selves in the form of these two women. He well knew that both of them had said not particularly warm things about the other, privately to him. Would that come out now? He was aware, too, that these women had the capacity to compare notes which would result in the uncovering of he could only begin to imagine how many lies.

‘Have a good movie then.'

‘I will. Nice to see you.'

After they walked away, Vanessa turned to him with slow, blinking eyes.

‘What?' he said.

‘That was interesting.'

‘What?' He pretended he didn't have a clue. So often he really didn't have a clue, he figured this could easily be one of those times now.

‘Your crush,' Vanessa said.

‘Sweetheart,' he said, as if this were a chuckle between them.

Vanessa arched her eyebrows, a sign of the loss of her sense of humor. ‘I can tell by the way you were acting,' she said, staying cool.

He told her, as was his habit, that she was ridiculous. He couldn't remember how the rest of the night went, but chances were: not so good.

He'd gone back and forth between them in his mind: Vanessa was his family, his comfort, something he could count on. And Kay, she was more like himself, but like a new self who wasn't such a failure, who had made a movie. Kay was a new vista. Sometimes you got that feeling when you met someone—the horizon widened. Most of the time, after you got to know the person, the widening feeling went away. You got used to the person's vista. But with Kay the feeling had lasted. In his better moments he could believe that with her, he might become the person he wanted to be. Then he would review all that would have to change and it would look impossible.

Anyway, all the weighing of considerations turned out to be beside the point. When it came down to the moment of truth, he simply couldn't leave Vanessa. So the decision got made by default. What it meant, though, was that he would have to forget Kay. Which he started to do. He applied himself to the project. But it took longer than he would have liked. It took too long.

SHE GLANCED UP
in the direction of his chest and shoulders, which was awkward with the position of her neck, and she saw him with his eyelids hooded, just barely looking down at what she was doing. Or was he looking past her? There he was, as close as could be, beside her and under her and even in her, and she hadn't the faintest idea what was going on in his mind.

Somehow she didn't want to know. Not if it wasn't good. And knowing Benjamin it could easily be not good. She hoped, at least, that he was in the same general arena of transport as she was. There were no guarantees, but she was doing her best in that department.

She zeroed all her attention in on him. Surely he must feel how she was worshiping him. It was a paradox that the more she focused on what she was doing the more she disappeared. Her mind drifted in a still way    if she thought too much about
his
thoughts she'd lose that drifting. Any practical thought that appeared was like a raised nail on a smooth wooden floor. Following a dreamy train of thought kept her in a voluptuous haze. She pictured him chasing her through a burnt, ravaged landscape and catching her and throwing her roughly down on a hill of dirt and pinning down her arms and brutally taking her. That was a nice thought. She stayed with that.

A PLANE FLEW
overhead, low, out the window. You didn't notice planes much in the city. When he was little, planes were so rare he and his brothers used to run outside on the lawn and point up when an airplane went by.

After he made the decision to stay with Vanessa, bleak months followed. The only time he wasn't miserable was when he saw how grateful she was. She dropped her chin and gave him her maternal, cherishing look and he was proud he'd stuck with her. People gave you a lot of credit for that, sticking together. They admired it. Apparently, sticking together was good, in and of itself. No matter what might be going on inside. So Benjamin hung on to that notion. At times it even seemed true.

He convinced himself he'd done the right thing. He certainly didn't believe in abandoning a person who'd been good to you. A lot of women wouldn't have put up with his unemployment, or helped so much with the movie, or thrown that party, or put him in touch with the guy who knew the guy who helped get him into the San Sebastián film festival which, even though it wasn't big, was a good one, and got him his foreign distribution. And even though
The Last Journalist
didn't have an American distributor yet, it did have its own little impact. After he screened it in Washington, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala had set up an investigation into the disappearance of Amy Anderson and the Red Cross workers with her that day. Of course, it had helped that Vanessa's mother knew the ambassador and helped arrange the screening. Still. So once things were happening for him he wasn't going to be one of those assholes who abandons the person who'd been there all along, in order to take up a new life with someone else.