Rapture. Susan Minot
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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 was impatient to have him go—she explained with very female logic that it was because she wanted him to stay—he told her he wished he could be with her and her response came through her nose in a little snort. She wasn’t buying it anymore. She had started to buy it, she told him, for a while, in Mexico. But it was different back in New York. Nothing had changed in his life. He tried to explain it to her: things were complicated. She nodded. She regarded him with a blank expression which was worse than scorn. He could see how maybe it didn’t look as if he loved her, but his hands were tied. What could he do? He had other people to consider. Another person, that is. He’d been in this thing too long a time to just walk away. He owed that person too much. He really did.
Kay didn’t argue with him. She just listened, arms folded, standing against the stove. Her expression said, You’re full of shit. But she was still listening and as long as she was listening he was going to keep talking. He needed her to understand: Vanessa had saved him. He didn’t put it that way to Kay, but tried to convey how Vanessa had stood by him all those years while he was struggling to get the damn movie made. Truth be told, she’d supported him for a solid year in there. Then on and off for a few more. How did you repay someone for that? At least now he was pulling his own weight. (Though it did help that he didn’t have to pay rent. Vanessa’s owning the apartment was a definite plus. He saw it as a matter of good luck, for the both of them. She had the good fortune to have family money and it was no skin off her back and they both benefited. She was starting actually to make money with her gallery and that money he considered distinctly different from the family money. The money she earned, he’d never take that money. She worked hard, and even if it was her family money which she’d used to back the gallery in the first place, she was now earning it herself. A lot of girls wouldn’t have bothered working at all. He admired Vanessa for that. But he wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t like the fact that she had money. A woman with money was less helpless. A woman with money could choose. She had power. So, because Vanessa did happen to have money, she ended up, he admitted it, taking up a lot of financial slack. But a lot of it was out of his control. She was the one who wanted to be by the sea in the summer, so she took the share on the North Fork. He would have been perfectly content to slump his way through the summer in town stringing together visits to air-conditioned movie theaters, but if they were going to spend time together, then he had to go out there and when he did there was bound to be the inevitable mortifying moment when he didn’t have enough money to chip in for the tuna or the booze or whatever it was they were all madly consuming in that disorganized house. What else could he do? He was broke.)
But it wasn’t just the money that made him indebted to Vanessa. Everyone made too much of money, he thought. (He dimly acknowledged the fact that this assertion was usually made by those with not much of it.) The more important thing, though, with him and Vanessa was what went on emotionally. She had supported him in much more important ways. She encouraged him through those long deserted stretches when if he had to go out one more night and answer questions about what he did and have to say again working on an independent feature when he’d rather have put a bullet through his head. She’d stuck by him when even he didn’t think he was worth sticking by. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t love her for it. He did. She was … well, his best friend, he guessed. They’d been together since college nearly the whole time. With only a few on-and-off periods. Part of senior year was one. And after graduation when he needed to be on his own. He moved to Paris. He’d gotten a scholarship.