Susan Minot - Rapture

It was weird. He liked it.

He hired her. On her way out she surprised him by sort of lunging toward him as if she was about to fall over. She grabbed his arm and gave it a squeeze, not in a flirtatious way—he had made sure to mention Vanessa, the fiancée, all that—but it somehow hit him more than if it had been flirtatious. It was full of goodwill, and strong.

That night walking home he wondered about her, telling himself he was wondering about her the way anyone wonders about someone he’s just met and is about to work with. He wondered about where she lived and what her life was like and if she was involved with anyone and what she was like in bed, just normal idle thoughts.

He saw her again a few days later at Liesl’s loft, where they’d agreed to meet before an art opening. Liesl was a pot friend he’d met during his brief employment moving works of art, and she’d suggested her friend Kay for his movie. Kay was there already and opened the door to him and led him back into the gigantic room. As he followed her he could see her shape better. She was wearing jeans and a small sweater and giant boots. She had narrow hips without much of a waist, but with a sloping curve at her lower back. A strong urge to get near that body expressed itself in his becoming mute and planting himself by a window, a place he’d spent many hours, since there were no chairs in Liesl’s loft. Kay and Liesl were crossing back and forth in the narrow door across the room, still getting dressed. What were they doing? They looked ready to him. During one of his times of estrangement from Vanessa a few years before, he’d found himself back there in Liesl’s bed. Just that one time. Liesl had been his friend for a reason; she wasn’t his type. She looked too—how would he put it?—exhausted. You heard people say that whenever men and women were friends they secretly wanted to sleep with each other. But he never wanted to again. Just that once. Watching them arranging themselves in the mirror above Liesl’s paint-encrusted sink, he felt intuitively about this new woman Kay that she probably shared a lot of the same interests that he had. At least, more than Vanessa. Though he loved Vanessa. He told himself that. It was like a refrain, one he often returned to since he’d fallen out of love with her. It was his concession to fidelity to remind himself of his continual love for Vanessa in the presence of this new woman.

Later at the opening he glimpsed Kay across the crowded white room. There were people in bulky coats and a muffled din. He felt a sudden proprietary feeling when he saw her gaze up at a tall guy with a goatee. What was that guy saying to her to make her eyes shine that way?

SHE SANK INTO the familiarity of him and let the mainline of sex do its work. Benjamin was like that, a drug. He was the lure of the abyss. She drank him in. He was like a strong liqueur trickling down, so warm inside you, you wonder, Have I been so cold until now?

Yes. It was starting again, the humming of the blood. She let it carry her. What was that Oscar Wilde quote?—how the advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray. The humming spread through her. She felt how wound up she’d been. What relief this was. She was tired of having to look out for herself, tired of beating through thick brush. She didn’t realize how tired. Trying to sort out the right way to behave if she was going to get where she wanted ultimately. Which likely wasn’t this. At least, that’s what she’d convinced herself of. The whirring in her ears seemed to indicate tanks receding, called off to fight other battles.

For a moment the rushing stopped like an engine switched off and her languorous feeling was suspended. She was momentarily stranded, staring at the soft bulging veins an inch from her face. It often happened at some point during sex: the oddness of what she was doing, in this case, swallowing a man’s private parts, pumping him up and down. He wasn’t making a sound or a movement. For an instant she felt the absurdity of sex like a wink from a wise man standing in the corner.

Then she saw herself and him as two soldiers, survivors on a battlefield, too exhausted even to moan, united by the fact that they’d both gone through the barrage and both were miraculously still breathing.

The thing to do was to press on. The sensation would come back again. Sometimes you had to help it with the right attitude.

So, pressing forward, she continued rhythmically tending to him, lips firm. An image appeared of an oil rig on a dusty Texan flatland. She let it fade. It became pistons in a factory assembly line. Neither was helping her to press on. She steered her attention out of the factory and into an alley behind a bar where a door was open to music playing and in the shadows were a man and a woman. The man’s back was against a wall and he was pulling up the woman’s short skirt. He told her to get down on her knees. The woman did what she was told. She was wearing high boots. She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants and began doing the same thing Kay was doing. Kay sort of merged with the woman. The ground was hard under her knees and the man’s hands were guiding her neck, binding her. She went over other details of what was going on in the alley, someone spying through the door, the man lifting her shirt to feel the woman’s breasts. Dwelling on this scenario intensified the less varied activity of what Kay was actually doing there, ministering to a silent Benjamin.

ONE MINUTE he was watching Kay’s shiny eyes in a mob of people and six weeks later he was knocking on the ocher door of that modern run-down hotel in Mexico City in the middle of the night, having called from two floors above, waking her, to ask if he could come down and talk to her. The next day was their first day of shooting and he was nervous, he told her. He couldn’t sleep. Would she mind if they went over a few things? He still had some worries. All of which was true, but also true which he didn’t say was the fact that he couldn’t stay away from her. Some dogged animal instinct was propelling him those two flights down to her in her room.

When she opened the door he could see she’d been asleep. She squinted at him sideways. ‘I’m glad you have no qualms about letting me know how I can be of service,’ she said, which didn’t necessarily mean defeat, but it wasn’t what you would call a shoo-in. She was wearing a long-sleeved Indian thing reaching to her knees which would have been see-through if the thin fabric had actually hit her body anyplace, but it fell around her, loose, white, fitting only at her shoulders.

He looked at her shoulders now, with nothing on them. They were the same, so why did he feel so different? A woman’s body always looked different before you got it into bed. Sometimes when he’d gotten too used to a body, like Vanessa’s, he would trick himself into imagining that he was conquering it for the first time. But it was hard to conjure that up with Kay now. All his conquering in the past had just resulted in a lot of misery. He’d sort of lost his appetite, at the moment, for conquering.

SHE WASN’T in love with him at the beginning, that didn’t happen till she was well into it. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She wouldn’t have let him into her hotel room that night in Mexico if she thought he was someone she might fall in love with. They were working together.

She let him in that first night because there was no way she would fall in love with the guy. Besides he had a fiancée back in New York. That made it safe. Nothing would come of it.

So she let him in that first night. Later she wondered, was that her first mistake? No, she decided. One way or another they would’ve ended up here, here in her bedroom in New York on an afternoon in June, having traveled more than three years from that couch in the room of a Mexican hotel.