Rapture (7 page)

Though sometimes he wished he were one of those assholes. He had once pictured himself married to Kay, and liked how he saw himself, hardworking, with Kay carrying their kid in one of those chest straps. But here, in this moment, he saw himself with Kay objectively, with her bare arms draped over him and the somewhat unnatural position of her face being sort of passively assaulted by him and he got the unnerving feeling that he was, in fact, another kind of asshole. Of what kind exactly, he couldn't say.

SHE COULD FEEL
the cleft on top with her tongue and the raised contour of the veins against her lips if she kept them soft.

Sometimes it put her off, doing this. Contrary to what she assumed she was supposed to feel, she did not always find the penis to be an object of fascination. When she was young, it had been foreboding. It had taken her years of familiarity to develop a fondness for it. For a long time it was out-and-out frightening. But like sex it had many aspects to it.

When she first became lovers with a man, it was the private thing she felt too shy to look at. She couldn't say why. Because there were other times when she didn't feel shy, when the man was familiar and easy and she very naturally held it warmly in her hand and felt how sturdy it was and how this was privately him and she'd feel protective and think how important a part of him this was, to him, and therefore to her, and how despite its sturdiness how it was also vulnerable. She liked how, by simply holding it, she could feel it grow, like a plant, slowly filling her palm, becoming bigger than it seemed it was going to. Then it would lose its vulnerability and become aggressive, weaponlike, something she very much wanted plunged into her. But it could also be something athletic, full of vigor, boyish. In a different mood, she saw it transformed again, into a kind of totem at the center of a ritual, almost sacred, with the power to bewitch.

It was curious, taking one form in repose, then quite transformed when activated. This activation, Kay had been told, was not necessarily even registered in a man's mind. She'd heard a man describe the surprise of looking down and seeing himself protruding. A man could become aroused and apparently not know it. It was like a separate creature. A woman did not have that. A woman's excitement traveled through her mind just as much as to the other parts of her body. While her temples were pounding, her wits were aware of it. On some level, the body knows that a woman is the one who carries the consequences of this excitement. A woman definitely knew if something was happening. She became it.

Kay took Benjamin in slowly, keeping her teeth back from the ridge of the soft helmet. If she took him in too far it'd make her gag. She'd learned to do a sort of flexed thing with her throat. She bumped him gently back there.

SO
—
TYPICAL
—just as he's finally adjusting to his decision to stay with Vanessa, just as he's finally making peace with it, Vanessa decides she's had enough.

She hits him with it on a Sunday night, a time when no people should ever try to talk about anything serious. She sat on the couch lighting one cigarette after another. ‘Is something bothering you?' he said. Actually, she said, there was. He'd changed. She no longer felt appreciated by him. He was no longer there, he was absent.

Come on, he told her. It was the movie. He'd been busy with the movie and the editing had taken longer and with him finally working she wasn't getting the attention from him she was used to getting and she— No, she said. It wasn't that. It was more than that.

She was right, of course, but how did she know? How do women know these things? He didn't even know it himself till he could look back on it and see she'd been right.

To top it all off, he was just starting to feel as if he were falling back in love with her. O.K., maybe it started when she said she wanted to split up, but the fact remained the same. That night in bed he held her tenderly and felt how precious the body in his arms was to him. He realized how deeply he loved her. He always had. He forgot that he'd stayed with her because he hadn't wanted to hurt her and saw now that it was because of his real true and abiding love—it just needed the threat of her leaving him to reveal itself to him.

He begged her for another chance. She didn't dismiss him completely. He paid extra attention—meeting her at work, enduring a dinner with some of her clients—but it didn't pay off. It was too late, she told him. She was fed up. She asked him to move out.

For a long time it'd been what he'd wished for, that Vanessa'd kick him out and he could go to Kay without feeling responsible and guilty. But now that she was doing it, he was consumed by jealousy. He was sure she'd met someone else. He finally got it out of her: No, there wasn't someone else yet, but there might be. Women had a way of putting these things.
Might be.
There definitely
was
.

He found a sublet in a basement full of some guy's knickknacks which he thought would be temporary but was where he still was now, a year and a half later. Kay saw it once and asked him how he could stand having all this other person's shit around and he said he didn't mind it. That was one thing which had unnerved him about Kay, she wasn't particularly tolerant when it came to other people's shit. Chances were she probably wouldn't've put up very well with his. Vanessa, however, had. Pretty much. While he and Vanessa were together, she had.

All of which further pointed to the necessity of getting Vanessa back. Vanessa had accepted him totally. If she wouldn't take him now, who ever would? He needed to prove to Vanessa that he had been worth sticking with this whole time.

SHE WASN
'
T
in love with him at the beginning. It had been a safe feeling when she wasn't in love with him. The safe feeling disappeared when he began to be necessary to her. What had happened to change him from a safe, unloved person into the dangerous, pain-inducing one she was in love with? As far as she could trace it, it happened one afternoon.

It was the afternoon she heard Dave Jacobs had died.

Dave was someone she knew from around town, a photographer who was always returning from some war-torn country or about to leave for another. He had a wide circle of friends, and was the sort of completely irresponsible guy who's expected for dinner but doesn't show because he's probably run off with someone's wife after which he'll make best friends with the husband, one of those guys irresistible to women despite a total disregard for personal hygiene. Years ago Kay had spent a long night dancing with him and whenever she saw him afterward had the feeling she'd been to bed with him, which she hadn't, but Dave Jacobs left her with that feeling.

Jane Warburg had been the one to tell her. Jane was one of those people who seem to know everyone, yet are oddly lacking in personality. Kay was irritated to answer the phone and hear Jane Warburg's droning voice. ‘Am I bothering you?' It was a typical Jane Warburg opening. Yes, she wanted to say, but instead acted as if she was busy. ‘Did you hear about Dave Jacobs?' No, said Kay, irritated Jane Warburg had gossip about someone for whom she had proprietary feelings. ‘He's been killed,' said Jane.

Kay felt the air retreat around her. She had a strange, wooden awareness of her hand holding the receiver. Dave Jacobs had been in Costa Rica, there was a bus accident, the bus slid off a mountain road, everyone was killed. Apparently some chickens survived, Jane said. It was odd the things people said around death.

When Kay got off the phone her heart was pounding in an irregular way. The apartment seemed relit, or tilted. At the corner of the table the tablecloth dropped with a weirdly angelic fold.

All the colliding thoughts she'd had moments before of whom she had to call and what bills she had to pay immediately lost their importance and she saw how transparent they'd been all along and how death was far more pertinent. She saw how within its pertinence there was also absurdity, the absurdity that this man who talked to dogs on the street and who grabbed girls solemnly by the hand to lead them away was no longer anywhere on the planet. He was simply gone. She felt a sob rising in her.

Then the phone rang. It was Benjamin. He was in the neighborhood.

It was during a
not supposed to be calling her
phase. During this ban she was trying not to expect anything. Only very tinily secretly did she. He was engaged, this guy. So things had been intense in Mexico. It was easy for things to be intense in Mexico. They were making a movie, they were in the bubble.

It was easy to feel joined with someone you didn't know very well if you were near him every day, working through the night in a jungle in a small area lit by lights, if you drove for miles on bad roads so there were hours for talk inside an enclosed space. And it was not hard to be in thrall with someone you'd just started sleeping with because when that went well, the thrall pretty much automatically increased, for a while at least. And with that joined feeling it would be easy to blithely accept that your time together was limited and that when you returned to your lives, you would return apart, and that it was possible to take what was good between you and to prize that and have no regrets. It was easy to believe all that in the jungle.

Back in New York, she was embarrassed by the direction her feelings had taken. She still had a small creeping desire for that joined feeling to continue.

When he called, she listened at first. She told herself she was being tolerant. When her feelings began to revive she told herself she'd better kill them. She said his name as if it were a hard nut and told him to leave her alone.

But the afternoon Benjamin called, Kay was not the least concerned with managing her feelings. Her little drama with Benjamin Young looked like a toy house compared to the cathedral of Dave Jacobs' death. Kay told Benjamin the news she'd just heard. Benjamin said, Could he come over? Why not? Kay thought. She didn't need to protect herself. On the contrary, she had that dulled feeling which comes in the wake of loss which made her feel: What more can one lose? Matters of fidelity and possession were small compared to the broader ones of friendship and admiration, some of the feelings she'd had for Dave Jacobs.

When she opened the door to Benjamin, seeing him didn't penetrate her in the stark way it usually did. She was numb. He put his arms around her; she stood limp. He led her to the one armchair in the corner (found on the sidewalk years before) and sat her on his lap. Resting her head against his chest, she listened to the vibrations through his shirt as he talked about some
project
he wanted to do and why he was doing it and the money blah blah blah and the experience etc. etc. etc. while in her throat she felt a nervy, hyped-up flutter.

When she started to cry he stopped talking. He stroked her head and the stroking was soothing and good. She turned her face up to him and his mouth was there, close, and when she kissed him it seemed as if his mouth was the perfect and probably only relief there was for this lost feeling of swirling in fog.

They didn't leave the armchair. Afterward when she pulled her skirt back down, she looked at his face and saw something new: she was in love with it.

He had to go. (He always had to go. In fact, Kay figured, even now, years later, on this Friday afternoon as she tended to him, he probably had to go.) But that afternoon, in the first moments of being in love with him, his having to go was all right, because he could never
really
go now, not after what had happened. Anything he did was all right. Now she was on his side. She was in love with him. She had truly believed then that everything would be O.K.

She had genuinely actually believed it.

What had made her fall in love with him then? Kissing him while thinking of someone she'd liked who'd died? Because he got inside at that lost moment? Didn't it have anything to do with his personality? Maybe that he'd made her laugh? Was it because she suddenly felt his gaze reach to the back of her skull?

For a short period after falling in love with him it was wonderful. She felt she was living straight from her soul. She was no longer alone. After a while though it turned, as certain types of love have a tendency to do, into a sickness, and she longed for the time before she'd ever laid eyes on him.

HE KEPT
his eyes closed. He felt as if he were whirling down a drain.

SHE PAUSED TO
take a breath, knowing that pauses interrupted the building of momentum, but her cheeks were being pulled in a way they were never pulled at any other time. They were a little strained. She didn't want to hurry. That could make it unpleasant. She rested her cheek against his thigh, flushed. Outside she heard the moan of air conditioner kicking on in the building across the back garden, if that's what you could call the lot full of weeds and warped pieces of plywood and bent lawn chairs. The vent let out high-pitched creaks. It sounded to her like a waterwheel creaking in a running river.

After she fell in love with him there was a brief attempt to see each other
on a friendly basis
. There was no poetry in the phrase
on a friendly basis
. He'd kiss her hello with dry, tight lips and hitch his chair away from her at the small marble table of the coffee place where they met. She was used to being close to him and had liked that. That was
how
she liked him: close. She was irritated how easily he seemed to be adjusting. He said he was just happy to see her. But then, he wasn't on his own. He had another person. He always had that other person.

She took him into her mouth again, keeping ahold of him with a hand, fingers encircling his base, rooting him down.

NOT ONLY
did he need to prove to Vanessa that he had been worth sticking with, but he needed to address the panic that this would, unless he put a stop to it, keep on happening. He would keep falling in love with women. He would love one woman for a few years like he had Vanessa till things got a little regular, then another woman like Kay would appear and he'd fall in love with her, and even if he never actually
fell in love
with any woman ever again, he was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to say no to the occasional temptation. He didn't see how he'd be able to help himself. He figured he'd better stop it now and try to stick with one woman. If Vanessa didn't take him back, he was sure he'd never maintain a permanent relationship with a woman. A wife, in fact, a person to grow old with, the thing his parents had. His parents had it effortlessly. Despite what his brother thought—his brother was more cynical about these things—he saw his parents as being still in love. So why couldn't he expect to find that?