Rapture Page 8

  Her difficulty envisioning a life with Angus probably had more to do with her own failings, but it felt like it was something missing in him. She met Angus in New York after college. He was the friend of her friends Tamara and Gary, who lived down the block (she was living in Brooklyn then, the third of her so far ten apartments) so Angus was around a lot. She probably wouldn’t have gotten together with him if they hadn’t inadvertently spent so much time together. Her main boyfriend in college had been totally different. Jake was seductive and druggy, and gave her intense, possessive attention when he wasn’t giving it to someone else, i.e. sleeping with her roommate. He had such a hold on Kay that she continued to see him, through rehab and even on and off afterward when he’d moved in with an older woman who was supporting him. Angus, in other words, was a hero in comparison with Jake. He paid for dinner and called when he said he would. He was never jealous. He worked as an editor of business pamphlets and was diligent but had quirky taste in shoes and from the start treated Kay as if they would always be together. Initially she liked thinking that way, too. It was a nice idea. But after a few years of domesticity, she found herself looking at Angus with expectation. She waited for him to say something more at the breakfast table. More and more she was waiting for him to turn over to face her in bed. Once, returning from visiting his parents in Pennsylvania, she had the claustrophobic feeling sitting next to him as he drove that the two of them had nothing in common and that her real self was the one at work who blushed when the lighting technicians flirted with her. She knew the value of Angus. He had patience and steadfastness and she used to cling to his long back as if it were a life raft. Their life was tranquil and their bed, one might say, was becalmed. Angus thought she was too concerned with sex.

  ‘You focus on it too much,’ he said. ‘It’s overrated.’ They were at an inn in France on vacation, a time Kay felt was rather conducive to sex. Angus wanted to rest. It made it hard for her to picture a future with him. When they were first together, exchanging stories of their sexual past during that limited period when lovers feel free to disclose anything, a period of time which definitely ends, Angus told her about sleeping with the Panamanian maid of a friend of his. He’d met her in the pantry in the middle of the night and they did it on the floor. Kay was thrilled to hear he had it in him. But he must have seen Kay in a different light, and though she waited for it, she never got that sort of treatment from Angus.

  Kay used sex as a gauge, despite its paradoxes. She found it easier to read the signals she got from touching someone than to make the more complex discernments of character having to do with responsibility and honor. Those qualities mattered to her, but overshadowing them was the vague but weightier notion of the life force in a person, a person’s bigness of heart. A person willing to make contact with other people—that was one of the most appealing things. And people who were struggling. They were appealing, too. Usually the people struggling happened to be messes, but that was because they were taking in more of life. Intact people had ruled a lot of things out. They were less open. It was easy to see the openness in people who were wrecks. And, she had noticed, wrecks were often more likely to give a high priority to sex.

  So she’d left Angus. She continued to envision a lifelong situation with another person, just not with someone she actually knew. It was easy to envision it with an unknown person. And children, she figured, would come eventually. She just didn’t have the urge yet.

  At the moment, sex with Benjamin was putting her in a very receptive state of mind. Was he what she really wanted? The answer was simple and immediate: yes. An image came to her, of the concentrated look he used to get on the set attempting to answer three questions at once, staring down penetratingly at his sneakers. Yes, she was sure of this. The intensity of her conviction was so strong she felt it must be making her body glow, like something radioactive.

  IT WAS a disturbing change, Vanessa keeping him at arm’s length. His Vanessa. She became the aloof one, and the aloof person has the power. Vanessa was acting as if she didn’t even care she had the power, that’s how aloof she was.

  But she still was permitting him to see her. They had dates. If it was a Saturday night date, he was pretty much guaranteed to spend the night back in his old bed. One Saturday night she told him, her eyes going a little cross-eyed, which happened when she was being intent, that she was getting serious about this guy she’d been seeing. Some joker who worked with her father. Benjamin didn’t eat for a week.

  He caught a bad flu. He lay in his basement sublet surrounded by this other guy’s knickknacks, delirious, with visions of Vanessa’s long legs hooked around another man’s back. He called her repeatedly on the phone. Sometimes she’d talk to him nicely and sometimes not. It was Kay all over again.

  It was around that time that Patty, the editing assistant with the shiny black hair, came and brought him soup, and they’d had that little thing. And around then was when he asked out Olga who worked at the Cuban place where he had breakfast every morning and suddenly like spring bursting into leaf all these girls started to appear, girls at casting calls, girls he met at parties of people he sort of knew. He was still preoccupied with Vanessa, but a new world of girls was opening up. It was a consolation. There were some very nice girls out there, sweet girls. He didn’t stop wanting to be with Vanessa, but thoughts of her pained him and it was a relief to forget her for moments here and there. The moment he stepped out of these girls’ beds the thought of Vanessa would return, but he would’ve had an hour or two, or maybe a night, of not feeling like such a disappointment. He liked seeing these girls who weren’t talking about the future or commitments or working it out or working on it, but instead were opening the shadows at the front of their shirts. They drew close to him. They were smiling and unworried. Each different pair of eyes had a different level of brightness or sadness or sophistication and was always interesting. And all these girls—where had they come from?—seemed to share a total lack of qualms about unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his pants. It seemed as if every girl was willing to do that. One girl told him she didn’t really consider it sex. What Kay was doing to him right now. Another girl said she thought it was intimate, like dancing is intimate. It was something romantic.

  He felt these girls accepted him. They were sympathetic. They slapped his arm in a frisky way, they rolled their eyes as if to say, Aw you, nothing matters that much, we’re all friends here. But best of all, in their faces he saw no signs of hurt he might have caused. After a while, hurt was all he saw on Vanessa’s face in the form of a bruised childish expression. He shuddered to think of it. And on Kay’s face—well, it had been there practically from the beginning, the tight jaw, her lowered gaze. It seemed the longer you were with a woman the more hurt you put in her expression. He was tired of seeing it. He didn’t need to be reminded what an asshole he was.

  What might be more helpful to address was his trying to be with just one woman. It’s what he wanted eventually, but it was becoming more and more apparent that he would always like knowing other women. He couldn’t help it; it was biological. Maybe he was incapable of loving only one woman the way she deserved to be loved. The way his mother, for instance, was loved. If that were true, then he should just take himself out of the race. He shouldn’t be with anyone. He told each woman he slept with as much. He even sort of meant it.

  HER SLAVELIKE posture was arousing to her. She imagined him saying crude things. That aroused her further.

  Though he wasn’t saying anything. He was silent. He was slumped back against the pillows, his arm still lay to the side. His posture seemed to say, I am only being temporarily detained. In the past, he had conveyed to her how much he liked this, but he did not look overwhelmed.

  But then, Kay had never heard a man say he didn’t like this. Even the evocation of a blow job would, in conversation, invariably elicit bluster, or a leering look. And yet she’d been with men who grew skittish when she moved down there. There was often more a
wkwardness than enthusiasm. It could undermine a girl’s confidence. It was easy for confidence to be undermined in sex. People got very shy doing this intimate thing, and no one seemed to want to face the fact that sex was complex. They had a hard time talking about it. Lust was simple; it just happened and grew, and if nothing interrupted it, all went smoothly. But personalities were full of interruptions.

  People were surprisingly inarticulate on this subject they were supposedly so interested in. That was one of the alluring things about having sex with someone, you got to find out his attitudes. You got to experience a hidden part of that person. It was like getting near the source.

  It was rare, the person with a lot of ease in sex. You needed to think for yourself, and not be tangled in preconceptions and misinformation which might have gotten lodged in your psyche way back. It also helped to have a doctor’s knowledge of the body, if not a prostitute’s.

  Kay understood the shyness. She was prey to it, too. Apparently Catholicism could take some blame. But she was working on it. She was trying to pry herself open. She discovered, though, there were certain things you could learn only in bed. Once when she was waitressing, she had a flirtation with a guy she worked with. He had a gruff brutish manner. They ended up in bed one night and everything was going along liquidly and smoothly and she pushed against him and he pushed back and at one point she sort of ground her cheekbone against his cheekbone and he cried out, Ouch. And she thought, Oh guess not. You had to get close to find these things out. And even then you learned just a fraction of the whole unexplored vastness of what went on inside a person.

  To Kay it seemed impossible to learn a lot of these things about sex if you were with only one person.

  That had been one of her attractions to Benjamin. His boldness looked to her like a fresh natural attitude. He just grabbed the girl. That was nice and straightforward.

  On one level, at least.

  In bed you imagined scenarios. She imagined now she was being forced by him to do this. She was doing what he had ordered her to do. She was eager to please. Though it wasn’t always like that. She didn’t always feel the same eagerness to obey, the same zest. Sometimes it was distasteful, the exact thing she didn’t want to do. Sometimes she’d do it purely for his sake, a treat for him, and sometimes the sweetness of it would miraculously gather in her. She’d met a makeup girl on a job once who said she reached orgasm doing this. Another girl she knew liked doing this better than anything else in sex and had managed to find a boyfriend who didn’t like it at all.

  Sometimes being far from the person’s face, she got a sort of alienated feeling. But at other times, like now, she felt minutely close to him, close to a crucial part of him.

  Kay was always surprised when she heard other women (those waitresses had really had some mouths on them) talking about size and prowess and lusting after penises because, really, in and of themselves, how desirable were they as separate entities? It depended a lot on whom they were attached to. The rare glimpse of a penis when she was young—a teenage boy at a pool house, her father coming out of the bathroom and rewrapping his towel—had been fascinating, but not particularly titillating. It was scary. That is, men were. She was right to be scared. Look how much damage men could do. And they didn’t even have to know it. They could really ruin a person.

  HE LOOKED down at Kay. Hair lying across one cheek, bare shoulder. Her eyes were open a slit and glazed. She looked as if she were on opium.

  Kay didn’t like drugs particularly. She drank, not a lot, wine usually. When she drank she became more amorous. He’d only seen her what could barely be called drunk a few times. The same could not be said for Benjamin, particularly lately. Fact is, he’d probably done more drugs in the last six months than in the previous six years.

  After the broken-down mournful period when he’d moved out of Vanessa’s, he began to get his strength back. If nothing else, he was free to do as he pleased. And if that meant imbibing chemicals and giving himself the impression that he was launching on a great adventure, then what was to stop him? There was no Vanessa waiting to get mad that he was out late. He didn’t have to think about pacing himself or to hold back having another vodka tonic. He could be himself.

  When he first went out with Donald Deitch, it was a challenge to keep up. He couldn’t believe a guy could live this way. Donald Deitch hit the town every night. Donald was an actor who’d starred in a surprise low-budget hit five years before and was still best known for that. He’d been in The Last Journalist as a favor to Benjamin and they had gotten to be friends. Donald had a girlfriend, Sheryl, who sometimes came out, looking foxy and bored in satin halters, and when she didn’t appear, Benjamin wondered what he told her on those nights. Because there were girls everywhere.

  He marveled that these girls had been out here all the time. All those years of puzzling over video choices with Vanessa, or reading a book in bed beside her, these girls were all out here. So, O.K., maybe they weren’t the women of his life, still, they were nice girls and fun and had a lot of heart. Their lives had been a little rougher, some of them, than those of the daughters of Washington bigwigs or girls who went to private schools in Connecticut, though to be honest he didn’t hear that much about the lives of these girls. He didn’t hear much about that as they shook back their hair after bending over a mirror and handing along the rolled bill to the next person. They were mischievous and game. Their eyebrows went up, they smiled shyly, they straightened their spines, aware they were being watched. Eventually their glitter-painted fingernails would creep over and rest on his sleeve. They were willing. He didn’t need to profess his eternal devotion. Often the girls were trying to seduce him.

  Maybe this was where he belonged, with these girls. He’d proven himself unsuccessful in being faithful—maybe these girls were the right thing for him. Sure, he missed being attached to Vanessa, but staying with her meant he’d miss out on this whole other aspect of himself. And, sure, he’d like to have a family. One day. If he ever got it together. Though it would probably have to be with a smart but more simple girl. A simple girl, by his description, was one who adored him and would be a good mother to his children and would busy herself with that. She wouldn’t care if, now and then, he went off the beaten track. She could live with it because she knew how men were. She wouldn’t want to know about it. She would only ask that it not be thrown in her face, that he not be baldly disrespectful. She’d look the other way. She was smart. She accepted how men were and didn’t take it personally. She knew it wasn’t anything against her. But most importantly, she loved him. That was the sort of woman he would probably have to find.

  But in the meantime these other girls suited him. They recognized his true nature and weren’t asking for fidelity and didn’t have expectations. Fact is, they hardly asked for anything, just to have a good time. They sometimes came up to him at the bar breathlessly asking him if he was partying, or as they walked together out of some club would ask him to drop them off on his way home or even to borrow some cash and if it cost him a little, then, in a way, all the better. When it came down to it, if money changed hands then the exchange was understood and everyone was happy. You got a little action and the girl got some free fun. They were happy, they were sweet girls. They genuinely seemed to like him. He figured it was probably because he was a little different from the types they were used to putting up with. He wasn’t really in this scene, he was just passing through it. He knew better than to end up like the fifty-year-old geezers chatting up the permed women in tight skirts at the end of the bar at Mary Lou’s at 3 a.m. He would never fall that low.

  AS KAY grew older, it only became more perplexing, the enormous influence boys had. Kissing, for instance. A girl had to be careful whom she kissed. Just kissing did something. It actually had a chemical effect. It was possible to kiss a person you had a neutral attitude to and a chemical seemed to be released, or something, because the boy whom moments before was not someone you had been regarding longing
ly could suddenly turn into an object of intense interest or distraction and possible obsession and very likely pain. One of Kay’s friends called it boy poison—a boy’s kisses were like a poison which infected you and after exposure you craved more, like an addict.

  This did not, however, seem to be the case with a boy after he got kissed, or more particularly, after he’d slept with a girl. It was one of the differences between the sexes, that sex, for the most part and very generally speaking, often had the opposite effect. That is, once a boy felt he’d made a conquest, then his energy was released and he was free to move on and put the girl out of his mind. For a girl, that conquest left its hook in.

  Of course, this didn’t always happen. Women were sometimes not susceptible to the boy poison, and mysterious influences were known to make men want to stay. But Kay did not see a lot of that happening close around her. She only saw it from afar. For her, in New York City at the end of the twentieth century, she did not see a lot of roots between men and women fixing themselves in the ground.

  Sure, this man had driven her crazy. He was a minefield. Hidden dangers lay in him everywhere. But right now, above the pulled-back bedspread, she’d pushed past the worry of those smaller considerations. If she was adrift, then adrift was the thing she would embrace. She would find the value in adrift. She was taking herself to a higher plain. What could be dangerous in this expansive benevolence? For that’s what she felt full of: benevolence and acceptance. Mixed in with physical desire, the moment was only more rich and sweet. It was serene. She was savoring every bit of it. Such a small portion of their history had been serene or benevolent or sweet.

  HE WAS DAMNED. He was sure of it.

  ANOTHER LITTLE pang of worry swam up through her languid thoughts. It was a small pang. It grew out of the fact that she was lavishing all this adoration on a man who had, frankly, put her through the wringer. He’d lied after he’d vowed not to lie. He gave her little hopes, then yanked them away. Perhaps it would have been better if he’d not given her anything in the first place. But the small disturbance was swallowed up with the softening of her body. She wasn’t asking for anything now, and wasn’t that the real sign of loving, to give everything out and not ask for anything back?