Rapture. Susan Minot
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Название: Rapture
Автор: Susan Minot
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эротика, Секс
isbn: 9780007393497
isbn:
His arms were around her and she felt stilled, like a glass of water. Did a man feel that, too, the slow melting of the self? Did a man get the same orders? Not likely. A man had a different drive.
Even now, here in her bedroom where the light had spread into a glow across the wall, lighting up the room indirectly so it was like being in a yellow tent, even now she could remember that first night and how the dawn showed up glass-blue by the black wilting palm trees and was cut into long strips by the dangling metal blinds.
His putting his arm around her had been the real start. That was the bolting from the quiet house, the setting off on a sudden journey. That was the physical decision which got made on its own.
There was no subtle prod toward love. People would never get together without some kind of hydraulic urging. Without strong physical insistence, would people ever dare?
She could remember that first night in Mexico vividly, the way one always remembers a first night or a first impression or a first kiss. He was trying to pull back the covers in the gray darkness, trying to get in. Now they were laughing again. After the serious moment, it was a game again. She remembered his insistence; she felt it was proof of something. He kept asking her questions—Where are you from? What is it like there? What is it like to walk around and be you?—without waiting for answers. She kept laughing. He kept tugging. He made it under the blanket. She asked him, ‘What are you doing here with a fiancée somewhere else?’ He didn’t laugh at that. He sort of flopped back and stared at the ceiling (much like he was doing now, she thought, at least as far as she could see out of the corner of her eye with her head bent like this, though she couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. That night they were open, staring up, worried.) ‘I don’t know, Kay,’ he said. The room was suddenly quiet with only the air conditioner humming. ‘I’m here to find out.’ He looked at her. She felt dread. She felt a thrill.
He pulled the last cover back with an impatient sweep and settled in beside her. His face was stern. He reached down and encountered fabric and pushed it aside and encountered more and pushed that away and finally got through and touched her. He rose up on one elbow to look at her. He had an amused, revelatory expression, as if to say, I have been given the impression all night that you have wanted to keep me out and now I am finding evidence quite to the contrary. It was hard to forget the expression on that face.
AT LEAST they’d had Mexico, he thought. At least, that.
But he could not recall the enchantments of Mexico without being reminded of the night of her desertion, near the end of the shoot when he’d stayed in the hotel to wait for Vanessa’s call. Back in New York Vanessa was entertaining one of her artists, a guy from San Francisco who seemed to Benjamin to be gay but about whom Vanessa made a point of relating that he was always hitting on her. Kay knew why he was staying in the hotel and went defiantly off to a club with some of the crew. When the group returned very late, bursting into the lobby and streaming into the bar where Benjamin waited over his vodka, Kay was not with them. Neither was Johnny. Johnny, his DP, for chrissakes, the man shooting his movie, the person other than Kay closest to him in these last two months. Kay and Johnny were notably absent. The next morning Kay left early for Miami, as planned, having gotten a commercial for a couple of days which meant money, something Benjamin couldn’t offer, and he hadn’t seen her before she left and had to endure the cracks on the set that day about Kay and Johnny disappearing from the theme brothel they’d gone to after the disco, not knowing, or at least pretending they didn’t know, what had been going on between Kay and himself. He felt sick all day.
He finally reached her on the phone in Miami and confronted her. She didn’t admit or deny anything, but flabber-gasted him by saying she hadn’t thought he expected exclusivity. Her voice was cool and he wondered with panic if this was the woman he’d allowed himself to fall in love with. Just the other night they’d stayed in that thatched place in the jungle, and under that pink mosquito net he’d felt that he’d very possibly found the woman of his life. She was good and reasonable and skeptical and true and whenever he rolled over and looked at her another surge of love, or lust at least, would sweep through him and he’d reach for her again and each time she was drawn easily and willingly into his arms.
‘What about the other night?’ he screamed. He was losing his voice, he was a wreck. ‘Weren’t you exclusively mine the other night?’
‘Would that have been the night,’ she said, ‘you were waiting for a certain phone call?’
He hated when they weren’t direct. If she were just direct and came out and said what she meant, then he would be able to respond to her, but this half-insinuating, half-accusatory … it bugged him. ‘I’m talking about three days ago,’ he said. ‘In that pink bed.’
‘Right.’ It was a whisper.
‘What about that? What about then?’
‘That was lovely.’ She sounded uncertain.
‘I thought you were mine then,’ he said.
‘I was.’ She was barely audible. She was far away. In Miami. Who was she, anyway? Did he even know her?
There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘But I’m not the only one, am I?’
The thing was that during those last few weeks in Mexico he had seriously been thinking about leaving Vanessa and seriously been trying to figure out how he could do it. But that had been when he was certain of Kay. Now he wasn’t so sure. And with his uncertainty came the end of the short period of happiness they’d had, and the beginning of the misery.
GOD, men were nice.
He was nice. When she thought of all the time she’d spent agonizing over him and thinking about him and fighting the idea of thinking about him and dreading him, she felt how truly sweet it was to accept him now with an open heart. She thought, This is what it must feel like to be a saint. Full-hearted and ecstatic. Though no saint she could imagine would have been in precisely the same position she was in at the moment.
THEN HE GOT back from Mexico and watched Kay withdraw. He had loosened his grip for a moment after the Johnny incident and she stepped back. And why wouldn’t she, really? He wasn’t offering her anything. At least, not yet. He needed to figure things out. But he still wanted to see her while he was doing that. He could only offer her the fact that he loved her, which he did and which he told her whenever he managed to convince her to see him. But by then her reaction to him had changed. She wasn’t listening to him anymore with the same attention she’d once had, looking like someone with earphones on, watching his face at the same time she was listening for confirmation from somewhere else, from a voice in those earphones.
No, after they were back in New York in their old lives, by then she was sort of scoffing at him. One time standing awkwardly in her small kitchen when she СКАЧАТЬ