Rapture by Susan Minot

their shopping bags like drums, making their hair fly. She spotted him outside a florist’s pointing to a bucket of flowers.
    He noticed her and smiled; he was slow, staring.
    He gestured toward the flowers. ‘For a show in Vanessa’s gallery,’ he said, and named the artist, as if Kay would be interested. He seemed proud to be doing this errand for his girlfriend. Why was he staring at her that way, straight on?
    None of her self was there as they smiled. They nodded. They pointed in different directions. She left with his
Great to see you
ringing in her ears. She walked away, rattled. She felt as if God were watching and testing her—not that she actually believed in God, it was more like a concerned third party—overseeing what was going on between her and Benjamin, watchful of her progress. She didn’t know exactly what she was expected
to
do, or what the test was, but instinct told her that walking away from him on her own was the beginning of passing it.
    It gave a person a chill thinking about it, how much things could change between people. It only confirmed her impression that the bottom was constantly dropping out of human relations.
    So now, here, reunited and joined, that was being on the right track, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the state to which all aspired? The forgiving accepting attitude. The dropping of all one’s restraint and reservation and mistrust, no longer subject to a back-and-forth, the seizing ahold of something and holding fast to it and giving all to that whether or not you’ve determined if it was
safe
or promising or even wise. There’d been so many days of saying no to him, then weeks, then months—all those days lay piled in a useless heap. What had they taught her? Anything?
    The fact that they were here seemed to render those days worthless. Something had endured and brought them together again. She relaxed into letting go of all that worry. Things certainly could never be as bad as they’d been. She was sure of that. She felt a strange thing happening: the evaporation of all that old hideousness. This late afternoon of this particular day in June she was getting the distinct, golden feeling that now was their time. Here, in her bedroom with the window open to the feathery trees growing alongside the barbed wire spirals, no one knowing where they were (at least no one knew at that moment where she was), certainly no one knowing what they were doing (
she
hardly knew what they were doing). They had survived something. It was a turning point.
    A tiny little pang disturbed her inside. Hadn’t she felt this turning point feeling before? Perhaps, said the little dinging pang, perhaps nothing had changed, he was still Benjamin and this was just another version of the same thing. She shook off the thought like a chill and followed the warm expanding feeling instead. She was opening up. That was the better feeling. Maybe something would even come of it. She felt airy hope gathering in her, some impending thing    something beautiful waiting over the hill   
    HE HAD fucked it up. He was well aware that he had done a good job of majorly fucking it up.
    SHE WAS full of revelation. In this sultry flexible state she was seeing clearly: all the frustration and sobbing and feeling worthless was the road they needed to travel to get where they were now. That they’d made it to here meant that he was, well, something like her fate. Meant for her after all. The only way to process it was to forgive. Everything. Him. Herself.
That’s
what she was feeling, a voluptuous letting go.
    She felt strong and direct. She no longer needed to feel like an idiot for enduring the humiliations, for being locked in self-absorption. It was all needed to get her here. It had led to this union. And she could forget it now.
    What were once big trees towering over her, the warnings against Benjamin (none of her friends had touted him as a