Rapture by Susan Minot Read Free Book Online Page B

that. She was both drawn to him and repelled. She was attracted to the audacity of a man who could one night in a thatched bar tell her he was falling in love with her and the next day on the set be overheard, while she was hanging a crucifix to hide some wires, telling the script girl how much he missed his fiancée back in New York and how much he wished Vanessa were there with him. When Kay heard that, having slipped out of his arms only a few hours before, it repulsed her and, also, God forgive her, made her want to be with him immediately.
    It got worse, the longing for him. It still filled her with dread to think of that period. She would fantasize about applying herself to something worthwhile and dutiful, welcoming derelicts into homeless shelters or cradling AIDS babies in preemie wards—anything the opposite of the self-absorption. (Now and then in her youth she had made small forays into public service, but after the initial charge of being part of a march or counting envelopes filled with checks, she grew discouraged by the bureaucratic busywork, the inept organizers, the sitting in windowless rooms. The suspicion grew that what she was doing was distinctly ineffectual, made worse by the expectation that it was supposed to be so affecting. That’s where the movies came in. In those windowless rooms she found dramas resolved and complexities explored. People had character and bravery in addition to beautiful faces. Things came together. Things made
sense.
And even if life wasn’t like that, it was consoling. It actually helped her live.)
    Oh, Christ if she knew. She was tired of thinking. Tired of thinking about Benjamin. Tired of trying
not
to think about Benjamin. She was tired of trying to adjust to what she thought she was
supposed
to do, and of trying to work out whether something was against her better instinct, or if her better instinct ran counter to the better practical thing, only to find out when things didn’t work out, which was the only time you seriously analyzed your behavior, that an instinct which had appeared and been rejected turned out to be, at least to some degree, correct. With experience you were supposed to learn when to trust your instincts. For instance, you should not, as people were always advising you, against your instinct,
give the guy a chance
if you really had no interest in him. There’d better be
something
to start with. She’d learned, too, that it was not prudent to tell a new lover, in the early days of getting to know each other, details of your amorous past, as your instinct might be urging you to do in the spirit of trust and full disclosure. The lover is not to be believed when he reassures you that of course he can handle it. It is, he might argue, in the past. Don’t believe him. The only things truly
in the past
are things completely forgotten.
    It was hard to recognize instincts. They got easily tangled up with desires and fears.
    But on this sweet afternoon Kay felt mercifully lifted from those petty concerns. Sex, in the form of love—or love in the form of sex, it was hard to differentiate—had swept her up. This was real, this was the most real thing. (Sex made you think that. It blotted out logic. And thank god. What a relief. How did people do without it? They grew ill, they went mad, that’s what happened.)
    Still, there were contradictions. That feeling of
the most real thing
was capable of suddenly vanishing. One could very well experience a giant
lack
of connection with the very person to whom moments before you were cosmically connected. In any event, if you’d felt that most real thing with someone, you, especially if you were a woman, were going to have a hard time forgetting about it.
    Kay was still trying to figure it out. She was not prepared to give up her reverence for sex. It was too mysterious, too powerful, too magic. A kiss for instance. What was it? Two mouths coming into contact with each other, and