Rapture by Susan Minot Page A

had her hair in a ponytail and he watched her walk away, the person he loved. The further she got away, the more the extras started to turn into actual indifferent people, college kids with backpacks, people taking little steps walking their dogs, lone men muttering
spliff ludes uppers,
and the pink sky spread above all of them and if he thought about it he could also say that that day might be remembered as the last time he’d felt anything close to being in love.
    SHE SORT OF lost respect for him when he wouldn’t move out. Not that Kay understood all the complexities of his relationship with Vanessa Crane. She only knew some of the things which had gone on between them. But if he could be believed, which frankly, at this point, she had to admit he probably couldn’t, his heart had been telling him to get out of this relationship for a while. But he wasn’t listening to his heart. He was, as he said, taking other things into consideration. He called those things obligation and loyalty. To Kay they looked like avoidance and denial.
    But Benjamin was not unlike many men. He would rather endure twenty years of misery than face ten minutes of discomfort.
    But who was she to say?
    She had purposefully not been encouraging about urging him to move out. She wanted him to make the decision himself. She saw him as being perched in one woman’s nest and ready, with a signal from her, to fly into another’s—her own. She feared the opportunist in him, the way his face would light up when he saw the prospect of a financial backer. Additional unnerving feelings no doubt sprang quite naturally from the singular fact that he was, after all, cheating on his girlfriend.
    Then, at a certain point, her mistrust faded. Or, at least, her mistrust became diluted by empathy and something she could
handle
. She told herself things were more complex. This line of reasoning was introduced after she’d fallen in love with him. After she fell in love with him, his ambivalent feeling was a cause for sympathy. Frailties were a part of a person’s character. His frailties made her love him more, in a way. Fact is, she could relate to his ambiguous feelings. She understood them. She had those feelings herself.
    HE COULDN ’ T leave her. When it came right down to it, he was simply unable. He tried. One time he really actually did try. He told Vanessa he was moving out. It was a Friday night. How he managed to speak the words still amazed him. They’d been in his head so long he supposed he just had to say them out loud. She wept uncontrollably. He comforted her and reassured her and they ended up talking about a lot of things, things which neither had dared admit before, and afterward felt much better and made up and went to bed. He never so much as packed a sock.
    Besides, Kay had never actually asked him to leave. That might have helped, if she had.
    What was his choice? On the one hand he had Vanessa, a woman with whom he’d once been in love, standing before him saying she wanted to marry him and be with him forever—as soon as a few more things were in place—and on the other hand Kay, a woman with whom he was in love now,
not
standing in front of him and
not
saying anything about the future, only conceding that she might
consider
him if he were free. Who would anyone say was better to bank on?
    I mean, here Kay was now, performing fellatio on him when she’d told him a year ago she never wanted to see him again. He didn’t get it. He couldn’t piece it together.
    So he thought of his grandmother’s driveway. That’s what popped into his head. The way it looked in the fall with orange leaves on the bright green grass. He thought of the model of a ship in her dining room. The
Flying Cloud
. It was always in the same place on the sideboard for as long as he could remember. But someone else lived in the house now, his grandmother was dead and the
Flying Cloud
must’ve been