Rapture. Susan Minot

Laughing throws a person’s balance off, and in that state she is more easily toppled.

      Why not laugh with this guy? she thought. Maybe her recent bad luck was the result of being too serious. The animal trainer she’d met when he brought in the lions for that car commercial had said she was too rigid. (This was a man who hadn’t wanted any major thing.) Maybe here was a time to loosen up. If she continued to steer herself too stiffly, she’d never grow or expand. One shouldn’t try always to be certain and sharp and right. It probably did a person good to go slightly against her principles. A person could maybe learn something. Maybe in certain situations it could do both people good. And how would she know till she tried? This was her chance to branch out. Though this rather drunk, boyish, groping man might not look on the surface to offer her expansion, Kay saw there was, tucked inside him, a call to adventure.

      But she was still on the fence.

      Then he pulled a guerrilla tactic. Into the joking and the laughter he introduced a serious tone.

      ‘The first time I saw you I knew my life was going to be different.’

      She held the smile on her face, waiting for the punch line. She would have rolled her eyes at him if he’d looked at her, but his head was bent forward.

      ‘I know that sounds like a line and you’re probably thinking, Who is this asshole?’

      Her smile sagged. He was sounding different and his face was changed. His face was not looking happy.

      ‘And I thought, I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. Because I already have someone in my life.’

      Kay had the ghost of a smile.

      He looked down into the can of Pepsi between his hands. ‘The only reason I’m saying this is because I’m drunk.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Isn’t that ridiculous? And want to know something even more ridiculous?’ He looked at Kay, angry, as if this were her fault. She had stopped smiling now. She was doing her best to make her face placid and not reveal the strange physical effect his words were having on her. ‘I kept thinking about you and I thought to myself, If she asked me to throw everything away for her, I’d do it.’

      Kay got the same disconcerting feeling one has listening to the ravings of some lunatic on a street corner when, in the midst of the screaming, one hears a profound truth.

      Despite her appreciation for loosening up, Kay had not, since the moment she’d first let him in the door, since the first moment she met him for that matter, abandoned the deep and hidden skepticism which underlay all her relations with men. That part of her remained as alert as a watchman, quick to spot strange movements and to anticipate possible strategies. Of course, the fact that she was giving him so much attention should have been the first indication that she was letting her guard down.

      She had learned that when you believe everything a man tells you, you are lining yourself up for a direct hit of disappointment and heartbreak, so it was best not to believe certain grand pronouncements. But she was human. And there was still an unjaded place in her thirty-four-year-old self that allowed for the slight tiny possibility that what he was saying might turn out to be real and that this might, in fact, be big. You never knew when the big thing might happen. It might happen anytime. (That it would happen was a given. You never heard anyone say, ‘You know what? In some lives the big thing just never happens. Some lives simply miss it.’ No, the big thing was like death, it happened to everyone.)

      Somehow she relocated herself to the bed—she had an overwhelming urge to lie down—and somehow he had followed her. She was under the sheet and a flimsy blanket. She allowed him to lie on top, but she kept the sheet taut over her chest, barring him. He managed to nudge himself under the bedspread. They were laughing again. They were chummy, cozy.

      Then he did something. He proprietarily wrapped his arms around her and drew her close to him. He did it in a way that was nonchalant and robust. She was shocked how nice it felt. She was always surprised how good a person felt. It was shocking. It was one of those rare instances when reality outstripped imagination. Up to that point in their acquaintance he’d been very much a foreign entity, a person making her laugh, a person she did not, in any great degree, fathom—i.e., what was he doing in her bed at four o’clock in the morning, with a fiancée back in New York? No, he was not understood. But once he put his arm around her, he became inexplicably familiar. She’d had a preview of this feeling that night at the opening with Liesl when she stood next to him in the crowded elevator. She felt something radiating from him. For a fleeting moment she had the strange sensation that she was standing next to herself.

      You couldn’t be sure which way it would go, the first time you touched someone. Either the person would be familiar and the way he held you would sort of take your breath away, or he would remain a stranger and though your breathing would be affected, the way he held you would be odd and unknown, like arriving in a foreign country and being hit with its smells, which are intoxicating but about which you remain uncertain. It was not the all-consuming feeling which comes when you arrive at a place you’ve known well, after being away a long time, so that some things are changed, giving you a new thrill, and since you see it with new eyes, it is both old and new, both familiar and strange. That is always more powerful. Benjamin was like that to her. Familiar and strange. But powerful things usually contain complications and with complications come trouble, trouble of the sort that certain people spend their whole lives avoiding, or, if they were like Kay and most of the human race, looking for.

      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.

       Chapter Ten

      AT LEAST they’d had Mexico, he thought. At least,