Rapture by Susan Minot Read Free Book Online Page A

that kind of attention. So she asked him for lunch two days later at her place and he said he’d see her Friday. It had not been the last scene in the movie after all.
    After they parted she walked to her dinner with a newfound energy. She felt she’d been given a tank of oxygen. And why shouldn’t she feel better? It was a lovely night and she’d salvaged something from a damaging, painful relationship which she’d been sure was lost and beyond hope. And she was not hoping for more than simple friendly relations. She passed by a building where she’d once worked years ago on a low-budget film. It looked bombed out and taped over and she had a momentary impression of walking in a city where there’d been a war and hostilities had recently ceased and the ruins were now peaceful. A soldier might have told her that this could be one of the more dangerous and vulnerable times in war, when things look serene, but before a truce has actually been signed.
    IT HAD alife of its own. He didn’t need to be thinking of where it was or what was being done to him for it to respond independently. He didn’t need to be paying it any mind. In fact, he’d noticed that sometimes when he did think about it, the vibrancy in it would falter and wilt.
    He watched Kay. She looked absorbed in a nice, slow way, applying herself. He felt oddly distant. He knew he’d once had a sharp, finely tuned feeling toward her, but he couldn’t locate it. Must be all the pollution of the last few months, he thought. Everything was corroded. It was impossible to think in a fresh way. He couldn’t imagine ever getting back to anything fresh.
    He could remember
about
the sharpness of feeling, even if he couldn’t feel it at the moment. He remembered one time at the beginning when they’d met in her hotel room after a half day of shooting and how nervous he was to be with her and excited and full of fear and how he sat on the arm of a chair and pulled her over by the belt. His hands were shaking and he tried to hide it by clasping her around the waist. He pressed his head into her chest. She was wearing a shirt the color of lettuce and a little silver cross. She took off some heavy silver bracelets, clanging them on a glass table, her hands moving with the same efficiency he’d seen when she was arranging tiny Mexican figures in a crèche on the set, decisively, without a pause. She was smaller than the body he was used to. The white afternoon blazed silently outside the blue-trimmed windows and lying beside her he couldn’t remember having wanted anything as much as he wanted her. She made so much noise he had to clamp his hand over her mouth. No, it certainly was not like now. That day was like something murky at the bottom of the sea.
    He’d never get to that again. Sure, he remembered it. Fuck if he couldn’t forget it. It would be better if he could. He would also just as soon forget that morning in the prop room with her in a Mexican dress up on the table, forget how they got no sleep, how in bed if they weren’t rolling around they were laughing or talking. What about? A lot. He couldn’t remember exactly what. The story of their lives? It seemed more than that, bigger. Whatever it was, he felt ridiculously close to her. But there were the other things that came along with it, which he would happily forget, too—the pit in his stomach, being unable to sleep, the worry. It was terrible being away from Kay and terrible feeling guilty about Vanessa. All those feelings in the past, he couldn’t forget them. But he wasn’t able, and probably frankly was too ruined, to actually feel them again.
    So, now, cut to three years down the line. Him, here, with Kay again, but with his earlier self worn away. He felt snapped off, like a heavy branch creaking on a tree which one night just doesn’t make it through the storm.
    IT WAS, from the start, perverse. She was aware of