Rapture Read online

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a wedge of light reaching the front of the bureau. The sun didn’t make it into the room this way in the winter. It lay low on the windowsill. Now, if the curtain was pulled back, sunlight would be flooding one whole side of the room.

  THERE WERE ASPECTS of this indulgent life which were not altogether detrimental. He was seeing a different side of life. He was learning things—for instance, that he didn’t always want to live this way. He’d get back to the projects that he wanted to do, meanwhile he was learning a little more about the business from hanging out with Donald. He and Donald both agreed what a joke Hollywood was. The only reason to deal with Hollywood was for the money and Donald did that, he admitted it, but he wasn’t taken in by the game. He lived in New York. He wouldn’t want the life of one of those Hollywood guys. Benjamin heard the spiel many late nights. For his part, Benjamin felt he’d proven himself, to some degree, with his movie, it had gotten some attention. He’d had an eleven-year relationship, he’d made that effort. So who could begrudge him a little cutting loose? Though even he had to admit, lately it was getting out of hand.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to bed before three. Usually it was more like six. He’d seen the sky lightening into day far more than he’d seen it darkening into night. But living this counterlife bent his thoughts in new directions; it opened up his perspective. Not that he ever saw a sunset in New York anyway. Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or a heat wave.

  What he really probably ought to do was get out of the city. That’s what he needed. Seeing Kay made him realize that. He was nearing the end of a long bender and when it was over he would get out. Away from Donald and temptation. He’d rent some place up near Jeffrey and Andre’s house upstate. They’d look after him. They were a good domestic influence with their tag sales and homemade soup, and he could start working on the new script. The only reason he was staying in the city was to hear about whether that music video was going to come through, and then there was the possibility of that low-budget thing if those guys could raise the money, which reminded him, he better give them a call. Before the end of the week, he really should. Shit, was it Thursday already? He definitely better do that tomorrow wait, was Kay saying something? She must be getting tired. At least, a little. But he shouldn’t think of that, of her getting tired. When he thought of her, it made him lose, in a weird way, some of his enjoyment. Which was ironic, this being sex. You’d think that if you were having sex with someone, thinking of them would intensify it, but sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes, if you were concerned, it was best not to think of them at all. Concern wasn’t part of the drive. The drive was, ultimately, to invade her, overpower her, not protect her. The protective feeling appeared at other times, but not during sex. So much missing was the protective feeling that Benjamin marveled that women actually liked it, which they definitely appeared to at times. They liked being penetrated that way. It was when they didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves that it made more sense to him. It never ceased to surprise him when they did.

  He’d better empty his mind. Everything always moved along more smoothly when there was no real thought going on.

  THE INEXPLICABLE thing was, the thing you weren’t supposed to like in a person, she liked in him. She was drawn to how wayward he was. She was embarrassed to admit that it had a sexy aspect to it, the shiftlessness with the soulfulness. She was fascinated by the oblivion with which he tilted into women and tried to get under their clothes. Sometimes he seemed unaware of the world around him, then suddenly very keen. She couldn’t figure it out. She wasn’t scared off by the fact that he wasn’t a smart choice, she preferred it. His waywardness seemed directly tied to his interest in sex. He wasn’t just interested in it, he liked it. Not all men did, contrary to popular lore, not in her experience. Many men purported to be interested in sex, to be after only one thing and all that, and then when it came right down to actual contact they didn’t really delight in it, they could easily be oddly unmoved. It was as if it involved too much interaction. Their attentions were often aloof and rather cool, as if they couldn’t quite inhabit them. She’d encountered that a few times. So she appreciated it when a man seemed genuinely interested in women, even if that interest ended up being directed at whatever girl happened to be crossing his path, or sitting beside him at dinner, or bringing him his cup of coffee. Along with Benjamin’s disorganization and democratic taste in women was a lack of having formulated strong ideas about how a woman ought to be or about trying to get her to act in a certain way. He had a lack of expectation that a woman be demure or obedient or fun or whatever it was a man supposedly wanted a woman to be. Benjamin just seemed to like how women were. She liked that open, lax attitude. It allowed her to be how she was. It allowed her to be free.

  Of course, those wayward qualities which in the beginning were appreciated and inspiring soon became the very things which made her suffer.

  THEY NEVER REALLY did have a chance, he thought. He and Kay had started out on the wrong foot and how can it ever be right if you start out with so many things out of order. They didn’t have a prayer.

  It was hard to look at her now. He didn’t want to look at her with pity. Suddenly he thought of that time in Mexico when she climbed over the cement wall with the jagged top. He’d held her bare foot in his clasped hands. She’d thrown her sandals over the wall and he was giving her a leg up and she placed her foot in his hands. Her leg was braced against his shoulder after she stepped up and he tried to hold her steady. Mesmerized, he watched her swing the other leg firmly up. He wobbled a little, keeping ahold of her foot, then she stepped out of his hand, relieving him of her weight, and even then he knew they didn’t have a prayer.

  BUBBLES OF DOUBT popped to the surface of her certainty. But wasn’t it more real, to have doubt? Shouldn’t you expect a little doubt in everything?

  The last night in Mexico, after the last day of filming, they sat in the far corner of the hotel bar. They were returning the next day to New York. He looked miserable which she had appreciated. His face was fixed in a stricken, doglike expression. He stared at her, unable to speak. They ordered a late dinner and hardly ate the food and took the elevator up to his floor. They walked solemnly close to each other down the hallway to his door. Inside, a muffled phone was ringing. He slipped the white card into the key slot and the door clicked open to blackness and a loud ringing. He winced, half facing her. ‘Go on,’ she said. He checked her face to see if she meant it, and went forward hunched into the gloom. She waited at the doorway. He glanced back over his shoulder, a pale mournful face giving her one last look out of the shadows, then he picked up the receiver.

  ‘Honey!’ he said.

  He threw back his head and jauntily shot out his leg, locking the knee. His posture lifted up. His voice was breezy and happy and genuine. Kay’s blood ran cold. She felt as if she were watching the first few sparks spit from a cracked pipe in an unattended corner of a factory just before the whole plant explodes.

  Why didn’t she shut the door there and then? She was frozen. She was shocked. She was hurt. But some damaged part of her stirred. Some damaged thing in her was invigorated. One could almost say she liked it, the slam of emotion. It went directly to her heart. Maybe it came out of her heart. His complete and utter disregard for her had a transforming effect. It made her disappear. She no longer stood in the door. She was ignored out of existence. He’d had the power to do that. The slamming feeling, even if it was painful, was better than no feeling at all.

  Afterward, her practical, protective nature prevailed and she removed herself from him. Then her weaker nature crept forth, entertaining unrealistic expectations, a
nd she gave him little slivered chances. Neither had worked. And now? Now came her wide, openhearted nature, her letting-go nature, her what-will-be-will-be nature, her not-judging-another-person nature. It was fueled by goodness and acceptance and love.

  Those bubbles of doubt were minuscule in this vast ocean. Why worry about some unaccountable things? Particularly things you could do nothing about. One must let go of all that and simply surrender.

  And there was this lovely feeling to surrender to. She sank into a soft pad where logistics and personal foibles and preconceptions melted down to small lumps. She saw Benjamin simply as a man, someone with the power to overwhelm her. If she was lucky he would break her and demean her into oblivion. Her mouth was around him and her hand held him down and inside her a pleasant chaos whirled. In the whirling she felt savage and depraved.

  HIS MIND unmonitored roamed. Kay shifted and started to do something with a slightly different grip. He tried to stay with it, but he kept flashing on the other recent administrations he’d been getting in those dim rooms with girls in shiny tops and their high heels pigeon-toed behind them. They were kneeling before him, with that shadow at their breasts. He reached out to part the shirt. The girls pushed him onto his back. There’d been one who slipped under the restaurant table and undid his pants with everyone there. There was that girl named Zizi who wanted him to bite her, the Peruvian movie star with a fired-up look even more wasted than he was. Parts of the nights were blurred, other moments were clear as freeze-frames. In the mornings he woke with his clothes on, frail as an eggshell, unsure of his journey home. The afternoon light appeared behind the diamond grid on his window and he would think how strange it was that he had once moved around in daylight.

  It was even surreal in Kay’s room now, in the late afternoon with the bright yellow band of light on the long side of the curtain. He’d sort of forgotten that people did things like made tomato sandwiches for lunch and kept flowers on the windowsill. He was not high now, and his body felt the difference. It was not necessarily a better feeling. At the moment what he felt most was weary. Too weary to move. Everything was addled. Images from his nights were worming their way into this room. It was hard to believe he’d gotten a thrill being let into the back entrance of some place with Donald. At this point he would have welcomed Vanessa’s Where were you? expression. He remembered a girl one night in a white dress. She wasn’t carrying a bag or anything so she looked unfettered and superior. The girl wouldn’t let him buy her a drink. She barely glanced at him. She didn’t want to have anything to do with him. It had bothered him. He usually could get a girl’s attention. So he ended up with another girl wafting with perfume in a backseat with Donald on the other side of her no, he didn’t want to think of that. He looked at Kay. Through a part in her hair a small earring trembled. It was silver, shaped like an egg.

  He reached down for her shoulder and tried to bring her up to him. Maybe if they were closer. Maybe if he saw her face, or if he was kissing her, he’d feel more engaged. But, no, she was shaking her head. She wanted this. He didn’t have the strength to try to persuade her, he didn’t have the conviction. She was intent. Let her then. He closed his eyes.

  They sort of lurched toward him, these body parts of other women, their breasts, their lips, their unzipped skirts. From his position in Kay’s bed they weren’t looking so enticing. From this point of view they were losing their luster. He mustn’t think about that. It occurred to him that if he looked at it too long, a pain would start. It would hurt. He tried sweeping his mind clear. Sky. He thought of sky.

  There was a golf ball sailing through the sky. It flew up from a good, squared-off stroke. He saw the fifth hole of the golf course on Fishers Island where he’d been once. It was a rosy evening. That was better. A man walked in the distance. He bent down to right a ball. A swallow swooped overhead. Then he was driving on a highway in an open car, the green signs were gliding by tilting down. He passed a sea wall. There was Monica Vitti in L’Avventura walking along it, her heels clicking on the pavement, wearing a narrow black skirt.

  His thoughts wavered for a moment and he had a flash of some girl from the other night or the other week. She was standing in front of a blue wall, bending down to pick up her bag. Her skirt came up and the lamplight shone on the back of her thigh and on a green bruise. Then there was the coffee table at Donald’s apartment: the white-streaked mirror next to the stack of car magazines, the green glass blob of an ashtray full of butts. His mood dipped. He forced his mind to swerve in a better direction, upward.

  He was carrying a flag up a hill. It was windy, the flag flapped with a noble sound. He could see rooftops spreading far away and the sea in the distance. He swooped down to one old building with stairs on the outside and a woman in bare feet waiting at the door. He thought of a clip from an old Ed Wood movie, of a man clutching his head with both hands and grimacing. A radio was knocked off a table. Then it was back on the table, an old radio with yellow shellacked siding and brown dials. Scratchy static, then dance music. A farmhouse set on a wide prairie. There was a farmer on a tractor, bumping slightly up and down. A flock of birds took off behind the farmer, startled by gunshot. A woman stepped out the door of the farmhouse onto the porch, rubbing sweat from her neck. Out of the woods came a row of soldiers holding up a row of shotguns. They looked up: a fan of fighter jets sliced the sky in formation, in the shape of a stingray. Then he was in his fourth-grade classroom with the flesh-colored desks. An eraser bounced off the blackboard, leaving a white corner. He thought of the girls going into the girls’ bathroom, of the girls’ knees above their kneesocks and their short skirts. He thought of the abandoned house behind the playing fields where they sometimes snuck at recess. He hadn’t thought of that in years. It had a cement floor and the brown leaves were scratchy and dry on it. You always tried to catch a glimpse of the girls’ underwear. It wasn’t hard. Kay made a low noise. He thought of Kay walking in front of him, on a path in the woods, wearing her black dress with the hem fluttering. He watched her from behind. Yes, that was doing something. He was getting closer. Was she gripping harder or was that him getting bigger? A moving mass of hats flooded by, men on their way to work in the morning, charging through Grand Central Station. It was another time in history, a time he’d never seen, a time he’d never even known. Yes, he was getting there.

  IT WAS COMING together now and that’s all that she could count on.

  She knew, way in the back of her mind, that there was a trapdoor somewhere. There was always a trapdoor. But by definition, the trapdoor was where you didn’t expect it, so why waste time trying to position yourself to avoid it? She would try to stay with this transcending feeling for as long as she could.

  And at the moment she was feeling what surely must be the best feeling there was. Rapture.

  She was creeping slowly to the center of herself. He was the bridge she took to get there. Around her was a steep universe, dark at the edges, encroaching. There were rocks with inky shadows and tree branches against a night sky. Did he know how he was carrying her? Could he feel it?

  She felt as if a powerful magnet were pulling her up against resisting air. Her body kept meeting waves of pressure and pressing through them. Everything was swimming upward. She rode the steep rises and something luminous and thin ran up and down her spine. Light was coming out of—out of her ears, out of her forehead! She was radiating light. Stiff wings beat in her head. Her mouth was battered. Everything around her was lifted and golden and electric.

  HE THOUGHTOF the fact that Kay was here with him and how he never thought that would happen again. And after today he was certain it never would. As soon as she found out he was going straight from her to Vanessa, that would do it. She might not find out now, but she would, eventually.

  He’d completely lost track of the time and it was very possible that he was late and that Vanessa was already starting to wait. Though even her waiting had changed. It wasn’t as firm as before. She didn’t have as much
invested in it. Even that was probably temporary. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine her ceasing altogether to wait for him. He could see it. Some things he could see clearly, even in the haze his life had become. He saw that the hands he’d been holding recently and the breasts he’d leaned on and the mouths he’d been kissing were not the hands or breasts or mouths of a person he loved.

  The other night he was coming home in a cab. It was before dawn but the sky had started to get light. The sun hadn’t hit any of the buildings and the city still looked muted and gray. He was slumped back with his head on the seat, burnt out. His cab stopped at a cross street and an Asian guy on a bicycle pedaled past. The guy was balancing a big round bag just below his handlebars. His posture was upright and erect. He wasn’t a young man and he had an industrious air: up before sunrise, pedaling to work. On top of his helmet was a blinking red light, a square ruby. The guy was really looking out for himself, Benjamin thought. The helmet was one level of protection, the blinking light an extra one. Benjamin figured he probably had a wife at home, and kids, so he was worth being looked after. Seeing the guy made Benjamin feel pretty lousy. He didn’t actually want to be that guy, but he still felt like a loser.

  He felt short-circuited, like some crude science experiment, wired by kids in a garage. The tenderness he had for Kay, he knew it was somewhere in him, but it had slipped off. He often had a recurring dream of being on the wing of an airplane which was tipping and by some miracle he would manage, by flattening himself to the wing, not to slip off. It defied the laws of physics, but he stayed on. It was like that with Kay: it defied laws. There was no reason he should be staying on.