Rapture by Susan Minot Page A

particularly good idea) now looked like wiry needles in the distance. What did other people know about what really went on inside a person? About what a person needed beyond the practicalities? Not that
she
knew precisely what she needed, but she knew what she was drawn to, and those things were not always in her practical best interest. They were the things which made her
feel
. In them was allure and wonder and something which made her marvel at the world, and if there was defiance in them, well, then she’d stick up for it. It made her feel like a scout. Love, as far as she could see, had little to do with reason and practicality, unless you were lucky and happened to be built that way. The choices she made were mysteriously directed and she might as well accept them and not fight them. With her senses hazy from his skin and body, it seemed very likely Benjamin was the ship the gods had sent for her to sail. It was sort of mythical. He may not have been the ship she or anyone else might have envisioned for herself, but that must have been what people meant when they said the person you ended up with was very often
not
the one you would have expected. She seemed to recall that it was usually happy, satisfied people who said that.
    IT WAS FUNNY the things that came into your mind during sex. That Lou Reed song with the line
playing football for the coach
. The street in Providence where he’d gone to college. He thought of the green where they used to throw Frisbees, the girls reading on the grass, lying on their stomachs with their backs bent and long hair spilling down their arms. And for no reason he could explain, he thought of one night he’d climbed up the fire escape into a girl’s room. He hadn’t thought of that in years. It was before he’d started going out with Vanessa (though he already had his eye on her, as a lot of people did. Vanessa stood out on campus—a blonde not just tall but bigger than other girls, one of those girls
involved
in college, but who also liked to get high). The time he was remembering was before Vanessa. He’d gone to a party where it was dark and narrow and smoky and music was pounding, where he’d talked to this brown-haired girl he knew liked him because she’d written him a note after he’d said something in political science. Her name was Libby. He hadn’t found her that attractive. At the party she was wearing a striped shirt which followed the curves of her breasts and he still didn’t make a pass or anything. He left without saying good-bye. He prowled around campus with some guys, and after they’d said good night in that abrupt unceremonious way, he found himself, fuzzy with beer, scanning the windows of her dorm—she lived next to a girl he knew—and looking up at the beckoning ladder of a fire escape zigzagging up its side. When he climbed up and knocked on her window, the girl Libby, much to his amazement, let him in (women never ceased to amaze him) and practically immediately made room for him in her single bed, slipping in alongside him wearing underwear and a T-shirt which he promptly and with her assistance removed. He felt more pleasure in the fact that he’d been let in than in Libby herself, who a few days later left in his mailbox a rather long
note
accusing him of
using her
. She seemed surprised by this, further amazing him. What else did she think he was doing, climbing into her room at 2 a.m.? He hadn’t, as far as he could see, from the outset, given her any other impression. This was another amazing thing about women: they didn’t seem to want to face some basic facts about men. (Which was probably just as well. They were better off not knowing.) But how deluded do they have to be not to realize that when a boy who never speaks to them and practically doesn’t know them knocks on their window in the middle of the night there’s pretty much only one thing on his mind and if the