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  He tried fleetingly to find that tenderness for her. He waded through the scenes of being pushed back and being sucked and stroked by god knows who god knows where. He saw Kay on the beach in Mexico with the whites of her eyes showing up in the dimming light. Then she zoomed off as if shot by a cannon and he was standing at the yawning edge of a great brown pit under a stony sky. Across the canyon he saw a puny little stick figure on the opposite side. It was Kay. Not waving. Just looking at him.

  He tried to sink into base sensation. He heard his breathing. He saw a barren landscape, like something on the moon, except damp. He concentrated on the solitary figure looking at him. He was breathing harder.

  HER FACE flushed deeply.

  She wished that he could be feeling this, she hoped she was amazing him. The room suddenly went lighter and the walls were white and soft. His skin was soft and he’d gotten just now even harder.

  Out of the smoke of battle he seemed to appear to her, disoriented, in tatters, returning. She would welcome him. She’d take him in. A wave of gratitude swept through her and she had a terrible urgency to hold on to him, to keep him here. The desire gripped her feverishly, like a sickness. She wanted to hold fast to the beauty of him and to the feeling of love and to the notion that at some point in the past they’d loved each other and that she’d known how it felt to be loved by him and that she loved him now and even if nothing came after this, she would have at least the resolution of this afternoon. Their being together would stay here in the room and be a thing she could look in on through the half-closed door when she wanted. She would see herself lying alongside him and be able to conjure up the feeling of union that went along with it. She would always have it to see. It would never disappear, not till she carried it off with her when she died. A thought flickered through the spots in front of her eyes: there must have been other times like this she’d already forgotten. When had they been?

  One could hold on to only so many memories at once. A big memory required a lot of attention to keep it alive. You had to visit it often, or the memory would fade. Maybe this memory was replacing another memory no longer being checked on. Well, that was bound to happen.

  Above her she could hear him breathing more quickly. More shallowly. Then in his throat she heard a low groan.

  The sound sent a flare through her. Her heart was racing so fast she felt she might black out. Her head vibrated and her hand and eyes were clenched tight and she heard his long intake of breath sort of shuddering. Then he was silent and her mouth felt the small spasm. He released his breath in a long sigh and she felt the liquid in her mouth full, neither warm nor cool, but the same temperature as her mouth, the exact same temperature as herself.

  IT SLIPPED OUT of him weakly. It seemed to spill out on its own, before he even had a chance to register it. It sort of came out before he meant it to, without any fanfare, happening without his say-so.

  SHE HAD a surreal two-dimensional feeling, suddenly still. She felt like a cutout, hovering over his body, hovering just off the bed. She thought oddly of the moment in church when you cross yourself and how curious it was you could bless yourself and not need someone else to do it and she kept ahold of him with her lips soft now and her hand slack, but still in position. They were both quiet. She tasted him, pale gray, pooling in her mouth. It didn’t make sense, but it seemed to taste numb.

  Her heart, which had been bursting, now slowed down and everything was still.

  The liquid settled in her mouth and she found that in addition to tasting numb, it also seemed to taste slightly forlorn, as if it were aware somehow of having been delivered to a warm wet place, but not the right one.

  HE FELT asif he’d emptied out everything good left in him. Then he wondered if, in fact, there had been anything good left.

  Goodness was something way back there. He’d crossed the bridge away from it long ago. The moment he stepped off the bridge, up it went in flames. He could still hear the wood spitting and the planks popping. It had all burst into fire when he’d not been able to change his life for a person he loved.

  Her head was resting on his upper leg which had fallen dead asleep up to the hip. He pushed the hair back from her temple and she blinked her eyes slowly, catlike. She murmured something. He couldn’t hear what. He didn’t want to disturb her dreamy mood by asking her to repeat it. At this point there wasn’t anything he could imagine hearing that would make much difference anyway. He wished he felt as satisfied as she looked there, collapsed. She lifted her head with a wobbling effort. He saw her throat smooth out when she swallowed. She set her head back down. It was hard to say if her unblinking stare reflected bliss or the blankness you see in the traumatized.

  He had a sudden sinking feeling. Something left him: the potential to do anything good again.

  Then came a further sinking feeling, lower than all the other ones before it. A sharp little truth hunched there. Whatever goodness he thought he might have had was turning out to be less than he might have hoped.

  SHE FELT HIS hand stroking her hair. A need stirred in her, to say something, to tell him what this meant. She wanted him to know, and to tell him everything. What came out sounded much milder than she’d supposed, seeming so intense inside.

  “That was worship,” she said.

  She turned her face up to him and swallowed. Then she lay her head back down. The words shook her. She felt altered in some big nameless way. She stared, not focusing on anything, stunned.

  HE WENT to the Grand Canyon once. It was after college, driving out West on his own. He walked the steep paths down into the canyon and spent three days by himself, wandering around. He saw hardly any other people. One morning he woke and opened his small tent flap to all the cliffs and bluffs and ground which when he’d gone to sleep had been red and brown to now being covered in snow. It was like God was down there. When he climbed back up he brought that feeling with him, of there being a force behind everything, a big power. It was something he would always have, he thought, to fall back on.

  But he’d lost that feeling now. He couldn’t for the life of him recall it.

  Here he was in a glowing bedroom which all of a sudden seemed lit up like some flower with the sun flooding the wall, with a woman whom he’d not exactly honored who was, for some reason beyond him, treating him lovingly. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why she was doing that. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine that feeling he’d had of belief after being in the Grand Canyon. It was like trying to move your hand through space without muscles to grasp anything.

  He shut his eyes. He saw the empty landscape. He knew he had to get out of bed and get going and soon, but he was mesmerized by this vision of emptiness. It was telling him something. The air above the pit began to move. All his sorrow and pain seemed to gather there. It began to swirl around and, whirlpool-like, to pick up force, attracting all the misery and grief in the whole world. The weight of it was being sucked down into the pit.

  It was fucking sad. He wondered if Kay had any idea how really fucking sad this was, or how wretched he felt, or how polluted he was, or really how bad. He’d been sliding along in the shadows for a long time so no one could get a really good look at him. Because if they did, they’d see what a truly hideous human being he was.

  Well, people found these things out in good time. And she’d learn, soon enough.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Evening, Lust & Other Stories and Folly, and she wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty.

  ALSO BY SUSAN MINOT

  MONKEYS

  LUST & OTHER STORIES

  FOLLY

  EVENING

  The author would like to thank her beloved editors, Ben Sonnenberg and Jordan Pavlin, and early readers Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, the M
inots Carrie, George and Eliza, Lucy Winton and Tripp Lewton for their orienting feedback; and Charlie Pingree, for standing by.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2002 by Susan Minot

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Minot, Susan.

  Rapture / Susan Minot.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.I4755R37 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2001038377

  eISBN: 978-0-375-41442-8

  v3.0