Rapture (12 page)

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, and 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 THOUGHT
OF
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.

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.