Rapture by Susan Minot Page B

girl lets him in, then that’s her decision? He’s not going to be the one to point out why she shouldn’t. He wants to get in! She can be the one to say no. She has a mind of her own.
    It wasn’t that men and women were completely different in what they wanted, but they were different enough. They had different attitudes. He’d learned some things after thirty years of trial and error. A man had to hide some of those attitudes if he was going to get close to a woman. If a woman knew everything about you, you weren’t ever going to make any headway.
    MEETING AN OLD lover could be a kind of ambush. You wouldn’t know till it happened how out of your system he was. Or wasn’t. No matter how grounded you were in the present, your body could send you into the past. Even if all feeling was gone and the person no longer held the tiniest glimmer of fascination, your body could still react and you’d feel it, like the vibration of an old land mine, long forgotten, being tripped and exploding miles away. The jolt got registered in the body. Benjamin gave her that: the jolt. One got the jolt when, in a mild state of mind in an anonymous crowd of people filing into their seats in a movie theater, one recognizes among the other silhouettes one head with its particular brow and particular bristling unbrushed hair bending down to pick something up off the floor as belonging to the body of the person who had once sent wonderful voltage through one’s own. Only, now, the voltage received is one of adrenaline and fright.
    She’d not seen Benjamin for many months and had moved away from him and the island on which she’d sat stupefied with love for him was now very small and far off in the distance. Enough time had passed that she imagined him vastly changed, so it was a shock when he appeared in front of her with the same translucent skin and the same long hands buttoning his coat and she saw again the shifting of his eyes back and forth on their internal search. His jaw had the same shape. She looked at the area near his ear and saw it as a place she used to kiss. His voice was exactly the same.
    A strong jolt alerts one to danger and she got a strong jolt. She was still under his sway. She ought to have removed herself from his presence immediately. But she had not suffered enough. She lingered. She responded to the jolt in another way. He walked her home. They kissed outside in the cold and the drug of him slipped in. She was firm about not letting him come up. It took willpower, but at least that time, she held firm. It hadn’t made her feel better. She did the
right
thing and still she felt pain.
    HE DIDN ’ T WANT to think too much about what time it was, but he did have Vanessa waiting for him. Kay didn’t need to know about that.
    BUT she wasn’t firm about not letting him up that other time, months later, after Margaret’s wedding. She’d practically dragged him upstairs.Was it the champagne? He did mention he’d moved into his own apartment. Though that apparently didn’t make a difference after they lay panting in a dark tangle in the hall: he still left.
    He didn’t have another woman to get back to, but he still wasn’t going to spend the night. He said he was sorry. He made out as if there were all sorts of complications, things he didn’t have time to explain. He promised he’d come back the next day and explain them.
    He did. He came back the next afternoon. His explanation was the usual. Too much had happened. He was still getting over Vanessa. He wasn’t in any shape to be in
any
relationship. He loved her. She must know that by now. But he was too messed up. He just couldn’t   
    As he continued talking, Kay stopped listening. This, she told herself, was the last time she wanted to hear this, to hear a man say he loved her, then enumerate all the reasons he couldn’t stay with her and couldn’t choose her