Rapture (9 page)

MEETING AN OLD
lover could be a kind of ambush. You wouldn't know till it happened how out of your system he was. Or wasn't. No matter how grounded you were in the present, your body could send you into the past. Even if all feeling was gone and the person no longer held the tiniest glimmer of fascination, your body could still react and you'd feel it, like the vibration of an old land mine, long forgotten, being tripped and exploding miles away. The jolt got registered in the body. Benjamin gave her that: the jolt. One got the jolt when, in a mild state of mind in an anonymous crowd of people filing into their seats in a movie theater, one recognizes among the other silhouettes one head with its particular brow and particular bristling unbrushed hair bending down to pick something up off the floor as belonging to the body of the person who had once sent wonderful voltage through one's own. Only, now, the voltage received is one of adrenaline and fright.

She'd not seen Benjamin for many months and had moved away from him and the island on which she'd sat stupefied with love for him was now very small and far off in the distance. Enough time had passed that she imagined him vastly changed, so it was a shock when he appeared in front of her with the same translucent skin and the same long hands buttoning his coat and she saw again the shifting of his eyes back and forth on their internal search. His jaw had the same shape. She looked at the area near his ear and saw it as a place she used to kiss. His voice was exactly the same.

A strong jolt alerts one to danger and she got a strong jolt. She was still under his sway. She ought to have removed herself from his presence immediately. But she had not suffered enough. She lingered. She responded to the jolt in another way. He walked her home. They kissed outside in the cold and the drug of him slipped in. She was firm about not letting him come up. It took willpower, but at least that time, she held firm. It hadn't made her feel better. She did the
right
thing and still she felt pain.

HE DIDN
'
T WANT
to think too much about what time it was, but he did have Vanessa waiting for him. Kay didn't need to know about that.

BUT
she wasn't firm about not letting him up that other time, months later, after Margaret's wedding. She'd practically dragged him upstairs.Was it the champagne? He did mention he'd moved into his own apartment. Though that apparently didn't make a difference after they lay panting in a dark tangle in the hall: he still left.

He didn't have another woman to get back to, but he still wasn't going to spend the night. He said he was sorry. He made out as if there were all sorts of complications, things he didn't have time to explain. He promised he'd come back the next day and explain them.

He did. He came back the next afternoon. His explanation was the usual. Too much had happened. He was still getting over Vanessa. He wasn't in any shape to be in
any
relationship. He loved her. She must know that by now. But he was too messed up. He just couldn't   

As he continued talking, Kay stopped listening. This, she told herself, was the last time she wanted to hear this, to hear a man say he loved her, then enumerate all the reasons he couldn't stay with her and couldn't choose her and point out how actually she was better off without him. She wouldn't listen to this again. She felt hard at the edges and hateful toward him. She looked at the worn spots on her Turkish rug. Doom. Out the window the quiet afternoon moved away as if on a ramp.

He put on his coat and draped around his neck was a new plaid scarf she'd not seen before. Her first instinct was to hug him good-bye, but she stopped herself. She had to stop behaving as if certain things weren't true. They weren't together. They were separating. The air seemed to be draining out of the room. After he left, she knew how it would be: there'd be no air left. Standing beside him she tried to trick herself into imagining they were shouldering this load together, that they were joined somehow, joined in facing their separation, but it was like trying to find oxygen in a vacuum.

HE LOOKED
at one of the paintings on Kay's wall, of a greenish sea and two figures about to dive into the waves. When he'd first seen that painting in her bedroom it had seemed so full. Everything to do with her was full. Now the painting looked cracked and unfinished.

Everywhere he looked there was damage. He'd done his fair share of ruining it. He'd lied too much and fucked up too badly and he couldn't change that and basically could never make it up to either of them. Though he was still trying with Vanessa. He hadn't completely given up. Still, there were only so many times you could say you're sorry to someone and be believed and be forgiven and only so many times you could say it and not get sick of it yourself.

HER MOUTH
was clamped around him and stretching awkwardly. Odd that this was a pleasure, this odd configuration.

Her first impression of him came back to her. He had not been unappealing. He had a nice smooth face and a sort of shy way of ducking his chin. Certain qualities struck her: he did not press his ideas, which was unusual in a director. He had been unassuming and natural when he stood near her in the elevator that night with Liesl, as if he was accustomed to being close to people. But there were also unnerving qualities. Something about him was not quite intact. She wondered about his sexuality. It seemed sort of blasted. There was an intensity in him, but he didn't seem to know how to manage it. His spirit seemed to be sort of careening. She was surprised to hear he was engaged, involved in such a normal thing.

She used to enumerate those unnerving qualities to herself in an attempt to stop her longing. She focused on his chronic distraction, on how he didn't seem to have a core he might draw on in times of duress, on his ambivalence. After she fell in love with him, however, those things became interesting. They became fascinating human things to ponder.

PEOPLE SAY
first love is the strongest. Benjamin hadn't found that. And he'd definitely been in love with Sandy Palmetti in high school in Rhode Island. For years he lay in bed thinking about her, aching. She had a way of biting her lower lip so it sprung out. They used to cling to each other for hours with her sitting on his lap in her cutoff shorts. But his feelings for Kay Bailey had more layers. Knowing more of life made your feelings more dense. Those feelings had survived life's onslaught. The more jaded and protective and disillusioned you became with age, the bigger love would have to be to generate life out of those ruins.

Maybe it was a wonderful thing, falling in love. He'd thought so at times. But that seemed another lifetime. He must've had another mind then. Falling in love with this mind in this lifetime turned out not to be a wonderful thing. It turned out to be a disaster.

THEY SPENT
far more time keeping away from each other than they ever did together. She figured it was about a ten-to-one ratio, if that. She could have catalogued each meeting and each good-bye because they were so few and at which ones they'd had sex, which were even fewer.

Meeting in public was the most rare. The night at the Christmas party had been a low point. He stood with her out on a shallow balcony while she smoked a cigarette (she'd started again). The music behind them was pounding and they faced out to hundreds of lit windows and black towers making glowing wedges in the tissuey air. He volunteered that it had gotten easier not seeing her. ‘At least I'm more used to it,' he said flatly.

‘What happened to it?' she said.

‘To what?'

‘To that—' she could barely cough out the word, ‘love.'

He was drinking vodka and she noticed it made his lips move in a rubbery way. His tone was matter-of-fact as he looked out at the gauzy night. ‘I guess it just withered,' he said.

THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL,
he thought, the time she stood near him in her dark hallway, standing so close without kissing him. He liked thinking of it.

It was nice, too, that time in Mexico in that bar when he followed her to the bathroom and she sat up on a sink and he undid her shirt and pulled her bra aside. A pink nipple sprung up and he sucked on its softness till it became hard. There was broken glass grinding under his shoes. The vibration of it went up his spine and met his mouth, sucking on her. His arm encircled her tightly and his hand pressed on the curve of her back.

AFTER TWO YEARS,
she figured it was safe to go to his office and pick up her drawings from the film. There'd been a long period of separation when she'd not even run into him and she was curious to see him.

Initially it was fine. She purposely did not wear anything special, just her usual black pants, thin sweater. She walked up the steps which had their same tin ring. The office rooms were the same, too, with his secretary Andrea still there, though her hair wasn't navy blue anymore, now it had crimson tips, like something dipped in paint. The desks were in the same place. She did notice a new couch. Benjamin was behind his desk and when he saw her he got up quickly to greet her. He looked thinner and healthy. She remembered right away why she liked him, seeing the planes of his face. Her portfolio was right there leaning on the coffee table, ready to be let go of. She looked at a new picture on the wall. It was by an artist of Vanessa's, a brown and yellow scuttled painting she didn't like, but which she said was nice. He suggested they go out for a cup of coffee and she checked herself internally and found she felt O.K. and was handling it, so they went down.

They sat at the counter of a crowded place where people kept knocking her coat on the floor and he grew distracted with the clattering dishes and orders being shouted and milk being steamed. They talked, as they usually did, about the work he was doing and why he was doing it (still temporary, still just for the money) and about other people they knew and what those other people were doing. Other people were easy to discuss and analyze. He said he'd heard that she was seeing someone and she said she'd just started and he said he was happy for her. Vanessa's name did not come up. Kay didn't ask. Kay knew he was seeing her again—Liesl had told her—though he hadn't moved back in with her. Kay didn't want to fall into the old habit of discussing Vanessa. Near the end of her shallow cup of tea she began to feel a little odd in his presence, sort of shaky, as if she hadn't eaten, and by the time he put her in a cab she felt brittle, like something slowly cracking. Riding home in the cab was like being on an ice floe floating off in a dark sea. She no longer meant anything to anyone. She got out at her building and walked up the stoop with her folder of drawings under her arm and passed invisibly through the small, empty lobby and continued up the stairs to her door. She unlocked the bolts and went robotically inside and walked down the hall to the place in the back where she let things pile up and put the folder down and sat on top of some boxes and started to weep. She wept very hard.

SINCE HE WAS
putting all his effort into salvaging this thing with Vanessa, it was easy to put Kay out of his mind. She simply stopped appearing there.

So it was like seeing a ghost when he ran into her at that Christmas party. He'd forgotten how she looked and how it affected him. He had the sensation of a curtain rising, then stopping after a foot. She was wearing a red shirt with small feathers around the neck and beet-red lipstick and he was confused by how real she was and three-dimensional. Her eyes were liquid and glinting. He was feeling particularly wretched about Vanessa so he hardly could register Kay except as someone who carried for him a whole other brand of wretchedness. He'd been going out for a week to holiday parties, drinking constantly. That was probably the beginning of the debauchery, around six months ago. Kay asked him to come outside with her for a cigarette—he hadn't seen her smoke since Mexico—and he leaned wretchedly on the balcony railing, holding his drink. She started talking about what had happened with them and it was like trying to remember a dream which is dim. You know there was a cobbled street or that you were in the woods, but not what you were doing. He couldn't talk about what had happened with them. He didn't want to think about Kay and him. He told her she was out of his mind. He saw her face crumple like paper when he said it, then it hardened. She dropped her cigarette and ground it out. She kept looking down and shook her head. ‘You are something,' she said with loathing in her voice. She cocked a shoulder up as if to fend him off. ‘Then it wasn't love,' she said, and went back inside to the dark bobbing silhouettes.

He finished his drink out there on his own.

THE DOVE
, the one that was always out there, was cooing now out the back window. She felt an affinity to it, to the vibration in her throat. Her lips were pursed in the shape of an O.

Benjamin had not changed and yet to her he seemed changed at this moment. At one time he'd been a man she barely noticed, at another, one she'd cringed from. Now, she was worshiping him.

Life was mysterious. People were always saying that, so why were they always so surprised when they found it was true? Half the time, she was a mystery to herself. Her state of mind fluctuated. Her worldview could just as easily be buoyant and optimistic as convinced that life was blank and meaningless.

Right now, though, her state of mind was dreamy and fluid and sort of roaring. That was sex. But sex could be just as changeable. You never knew the state of mind it might put you in. After sex, you might have a robust, unassailable feeling, or just as easily a small creeping minuscule feeling. You might have the cardboard feeling of tilting over. Or the gimlet-eyed feeling. Sometimes sex made you giddy and light. It also could make you distracted and confused, as if you were picking up foreign radio frequencies. You might feel tremendous satisfaction and freedom, fortified to stride out into the world and do whatever it was your duty turned out to be. Other times you found your attention funneled down to one narrow track, the opposite of freedom, when your thoughts were only about the lover, about when you'd see him again, about what he was thinking, about when you'd have more of his sweetness.