Rapture (8 page)

‘Because you're not your parents,' Kay had said to him once. He'd ended up talking about that sort of thing with Kay, about his ambivalence, more than with Vanessa. When you meet a new person, you sometimes get an urge to explain yourself. He told Kay he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to find something like his parents had, maybe it was outside of his personality. He was not as good as they were. And Kay, who usually argued with fervor when she didn't agree with something, must have grown weary by then, weary of his hopelessness, of their hopelessness. ‘You're not that bad, Benjamin,' she said, looking pained, as if this were a harder thing to admit than his being a complete catastrophe.

He glanced down at her now resting against his leg and figured she must be getting tired. He better stop his mind from wandering. He didn't have forever. He better concentrate.

SHE SPENT
more time trying to forget him than she ever did actually being with him. Obstacles fed the longing. She grew impatient at work, distracted when she was out with friends. Returning home late at night, she'd think, Has he called? She'd told him not to, but one section of herself still pictured him calling, with a miraculous message which would somehow change everything. She knew that for this to happen
he
would have to change, totally, his whole personality. But it consoled her to imagine him suddenly otherwise than he was.

One night she dreamed of a cheetah pacing silently on a long veranda outside windows where she slept. Suddenly it leapt at her window, crashing through the glass and attacked her, biting her throat. When she told him about the dream, he said, unembarrassed, ‘That's me. Cheater, cheat-ah.'

IT WAS NICE,
though, no question, seeing Kay again, seeing her naked. The last time they'd had sex was in the dark so he hadn't been able to look at her. They'd kept most of their clothes on anyway, ending up in a contorted position in her hall just inside the door. Fuck that seemed like a long time ago. When was it. After the wedding of Margaret, his costume designer. They hadn't really spoken to each other till the very end of the evening. He hadn't been sure if Kay'd be there or not. She was. And he was there alone. They ended up walking out together and went for a drink. At the bar he told her he'd moved out from living with Vanessa and she didn't ask him anything more because, if she'd asked, he
would've
told her he was back in love with Vanessa. But she didn't ask. She was relaxed and inviting, the way she got after a few drinks, and sitting beside her on the dark ruby banquette he felt the old urges.

They rode silently home in a cab and he took her hand. She didn't respond, but she didn't move it away. She looked as if she was sleepwalking. So he was surprised when they pulled up in front of her building where the tree branch shadows were projected by the streetlights, that building where so much emotion had once been, and she asked him did he want to come up. It took him aback. ‘Do you want me to?' he said. She shook her head, not at him but at the question, and got out of the cab, dropping some bills on his lap. He paid the driver and followed her in.

Walking up the stairs, she didn't speak. They stepped inside the apartment and she shut the door but didn't turn on the hall light the way she usually did automatically. She turned around and pushed him back against the door and pressed against him with her face an inch away so he could see the dark shape where her eyes were, but not the eyes themselves. They stood with their mouths an inch from each other with her champagne breath on him, not moving for about a minute and a half, which is a long time to be standing in the dark that close to someone with your heart pounding. Out the open window a car went by blasting music which they could hear at the other end of the apartment and she finally moved the inch forward and mashed her lips against his and murmured something which he thought was, I love you so, then thought that maybe it was, I love this song, because the car was still down there waiting for the light to change, but he didn't want to move his lips to ask. It was that Bob Dylan song “One of Us Must Know.”

He didn't understand women. He'd only grown accustomed to expecting certain types of inexplicable behavior. For instance, if you told a woman she looked beautiful it immediately cheered her up, no matter how much she was ragging on you or how pissed off she might be. Tell her she was beautiful and it genuinely seemed to make her feel better. Or, he'd observed, women spent long periods of time exchanging obscure information with each other which, if you listened to what they were saying, you could not figure out the important part.

But he didn't need to understand Kay in that dark hallway to like being with her as much as ever and to feel excited when he lifted her sweater and felt the skin on the small of her back and she sank heavily against him.

He looked down at Kay now, and in that coincidental way of two people separately occupied happening to glance at one another in the same moment, she looked back at him, her gaze sweeping sideways, eyes at a low burn, hardly registering him there.

He reached down to her face and gave her cheek an affectionate little slap.

IT WAS AMAZING
how much things could change between two people. That you could feel a person was your eternal mate one day and three months later bump into him in, say, the flower district and hardly know what to say.

It was months after she'd fallen in love with him and weeks after they'd not been able to see each other
on
a friendly basis
, so it was disorienting to see his figure standing there on the sidewalk, purporting to be like anyone else's.

The weather had changed the way it does in the fall, suddenly cold from one hour to the next. She was walking home from an interview, tired and underdressed, carrying too much in her bag. The wind was smacking into people when they hit the corner, thumping their shopping bags like drums, making their hair fly. She spotted him outside a florist's pointing to a bucket of flowers.

He noticed her and smiled; he was slow, staring.

He gestured toward the flowers. ‘For a show in Vanessa's gallery,' he said, and named the artist, as if Kay would be interested. He seemed proud to be doing this errand for his girlfriend. Why was he staring at her that way, straight on?

None of her self was there as they smiled. They nodded. They pointed in different directions. She left with his
Great to see you
ringing in her ears. She walked away, rattled. She felt as if God were watching and testing her—not that she actually believed in God, it was more like a concerned third party—overseeing what was going on between her and Benjamin, watchful of her progress. She didn't know exactly what she was expected
to
do, or what the test was, but instinct told her that walking away from him on her own was the beginning of passing it.

It gave a person a chill thinking about it, how much things could change between people. It only confirmed her impression that the bottom was constantly dropping out of human relations.

So now, here, reunited and joined, that was being on the right track, wasn't it? Wasn't this the state to which all aspired? The forgiving accepting attitude. The dropping of all one's restraint and reservation and mistrust, no longer subject to a back-and-forth, the seizing ahold of something and holding fast to it and giving all to that whether or not you've determined if it was
safe
or promising or even wise. There'd been so many days of saying no to him, then weeks, then months—all those days lay piled in a useless heap. What had they taught her? Anything?

The fact that they were here seemed to render those days worthless. Something had endured and brought them together again. She relaxed into letting go of all that worry. Things certainly could never be as bad as they'd been. She was sure of that. She felt a strange thing happening: the evaporation of all that old hideousness. This late afternoon of this particular day in June she was getting the distinct, golden feeling that now was their time. Here, in her bedroom with the window open to the feathery trees growing alongside the barbed wire spirals, no one knowing where they were (at least no one knew at that moment where she was), certainly no one knowing what they were doing (
she
hardly knew what they were doing). They had survived something. It was a turning point.

A tiny little pang disturbed her inside. Hadn't she felt this turning point feeling before? Perhaps, said the little dinging pang, perhaps nothing had changed, he was still Benjamin and this was just another version of the same thing. She shook off the thought like a chill and followed the warm expanding feeling instead. She was opening up. That was the better feeling. Maybe something would even come of it. She felt airy hope gathering in her, some impending thing    something beautiful waiting over the hill   

HE HAD
fucked it up. He was well aware that he had done a good job of majorly fucking it up.

SHE WAS
full of revelation. In this sultry flexible state she was seeing clearly: all the frustration and sobbing and feeling worthless was the road they needed to travel to get where they were now. That they'd made it to here meant that he was, well, something like her fate. Meant for her after all. The only way to process it was to forgive. Everything. Him. Herself.
That's
what she was feeling, a voluptuous letting go.

She felt strong and direct. She no longer needed to feel like an idiot for enduring the humiliations, for being locked in self-absorption. It was all needed to get her here. It had led to this union. And she could forget it now.

What were once big trees towering over her, the warnings against Benjamin (none of her friends had touted him as a particularly good idea) now looked like wiry needles in the distance. What did other people know about what really went on inside a person? About what a person needed beyond the practicalities? Not that
she
knew precisely what she needed, but she knew what she was drawn to, and those things were not always in her practical best interest. They were the things which made her
feel
. In them was allure and wonder and something which made her marvel at the world, and if there was defiance in them, well, then she'd stick up for it. It made her feel like a scout. Love, as far as she could see, had little to do with reason and practicality, unless you were lucky and happened to be built that way. The choices she made were mysteriously directed and she might as well accept them and not fight them. With her senses hazy from his skin and body, it seemed very likely Benjamin was the ship the gods had sent for her to sail. It was sort of mythical. He may not have been the ship she or anyone else might have envisioned for herself, but that must have been what people meant when they said the person you ended up with was very often
not
the one you would have expected. She seemed to recall that it was usually happy, satisfied people who said that.

IT WAS FUNNY
the things that came into your mind during sex. That Lou Reed song with the line
playing football for the coach
. The street in Providence where he'd gone to college. He thought of the green where they used to throw Frisbees, the girls reading on the grass, lying on their stomachs with their backs bent and long hair spilling down their arms. And for no reason he could explain, he thought of one night he'd climbed up the fire escape into a girl's room. He hadn't thought of that in years. It was before he'd started going out with Vanessa (though he already had his eye on her, as a lot of people did. Vanessa stood out on campus—a blonde not just tall but bigger than other girls, one of those girls
involved
in college, but who also liked to get high). The time he was remembering was before Vanessa. He'd gone to a party where it was dark and narrow and smoky and music was pounding, where he'd talked to this brown-haired girl he knew liked him because she'd written him a note after he'd said something in political science. Her name was Libby. He hadn't found her that attractive. At the party she was wearing a striped shirt which followed the curves of her breasts and he still didn't make a pass or anything. He left without saying good-bye. He prowled around campus with some guys, and after they'd said good night in that abrupt unceremonious way, he found himself, fuzzy with beer, scanning the windows of her dorm—she lived next to a girl he knew—and looking up at the beckoning ladder of a fire escape zigzagging up its side. When he climbed up and knocked on her window, the girl Libby, much to his amazement, let him in (women never ceased to amaze him) and practically immediately made room for him in her single bed, slipping in alongside him wearing underwear and a T-shirt which he promptly and with her assistance removed. He felt more pleasure in the fact that he'd been let in than in Libby herself, who a few days later left in his mailbox a rather long
note
accusing him of
using her
. She seemed surprised by this, further amazing him. What else did she think he was doing, climbing into her room at
2
a.m.? He hadn't, as far as he could see, from the outset, given her any other impression. This was another amazing thing about women: they didn't seem to want to face some basic facts about men. (Which was probably just as well. They were better off not knowing.) But how deluded do they have to be not to realize that when a boy who never speaks to them and practically doesn't know them knocks on their window in the middle of the night there's pretty much only one thing on his mind and if the girl lets him in, then that's her decision? He's not going to be the one to point out why she shouldn't. He wants to get in! She can be the one to say no. She has a mind of her own.

It wasn't that men and women were completely different in what they wanted, but they were different enough. They had different attitudes. He'd learned some things after thirty years of trial and error. A man had to hide some of those attitudes if he was going to get close to a woman. If a woman knew everything about you, you weren't ever going to make any headway.