Read Online Rapture by Susan Minot - Free Book Online Page A

aggressive, weaponlike, something she very much wanted plunged into her. But it could also be something athletic, full of vigor, boyish. In a different mood, she saw it transformed again, into a kind of totem at the center of a ritual, almost sacred, with the power to bewitch.
    It was curious, taking one form in repose, then quite transformed when activated. This activation, Kay had been told, was not necessarily even registered in a man’s mind. She’d heard a man describe the surprise of looking down and seeing himself protruding. A man could become aroused and apparently not know it. It was like a separate creature. A woman did not have that. A woman’s excitement traveled through her mind just as much as to the other parts of her body. While her temples were pounding, her wits were aware of it. On some level, the body knows that a woman is the one who carries the consequences of this excitement. A woman definitely knew if something was happening. She became it.
    Kay took Benjamin in slowly, keeping her teeth back from the ridge of the soft helmet. If she took him in too far it’d make her gag. She’d learned to do a sort of flexed thing with her throat. She bumped him gently back there.
    SO — TYPICAL —just as he’s finally adjusting to his decision to stay with Vanessa, just as he’s finally making peace with it, Vanessa decides she’s had enough.
    She hits him with it on a Sunday night, a time when no people should ever try to talk about anything serious. She sat on the couch lighting one cigarette after another. ‘Is something bothering you?’ he said. Actually, she said, there was. He’d changed. She no longer felt appreciated by him. He was no longer there, he was absent.
    Come on, he told her. It was the movie. He’d been busy with the movie and the editing had taken longer and with him finally working she wasn’t getting the attention from him she was used to getting and she— No, she said. It wasn’t that. It was more than that.
    She was right, of course, but how did she know? How do women know these things? He didn’t even know it himself till he could look back on it and see she’d been right.
    To top it all off, he was just starting to feel as if he were falling back in love with her. O.K., maybe it started when she said she wanted to split up, but the fact remained the same. That night in bed he held her tenderly and felt how precious the body in his arms was to him. He realized how deeply he loved her. He always had. He forgot that he’d stayed with her because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her and saw now that it was because of his real true and abiding love—it just needed the threat of her leaving him to reveal itself to him.
    He begged her for another chance. She didn’t dismiss him completely. He paid extra attention—meeting her at work, enduring a dinner with some of her clients—but it didn’t pay off. It was too late, she told him. She was fed up. She asked him to move out.
    For a long time it’d been what he’d wished for, that Vanessa’d kick him out and he could go to Kay without feeling responsible and guilty. But now that she was doing it, he was consumed by jealousy. He was sure she’d met someone else. He finally got it out of her: No, there wasn’t someone else yet, but there might be. Women had a way of putting these things.
Might be.
There definitely
was
.
    He found a sublet in a basement full of some guy’s knickknacks which he thought would be temporary but was where he still was now, a year and a half later. Kay saw it once and asked him how he could stand having all this other person’s shit around and he said he didn’t mind it. That was one thing which had unnerved him about Kay, she wasn’t particularly tolerant when it came to other people’s shit. Chances were she probably wouldn’t’ve put up very well with his. Vanessa, however, had.