Free Rapture by Susan Minot

was good between you and to prize that and have no regrets. It was easy to believe all that in the jungle.
    Back in New York, she was embarrassed by the direction her feelings had taken. She still had a small creeping desire for that joined feeling to continue.
    When he called, she listened at first. She told herself she was being tolerant. When her feelings began to revive she told herself she’d better kill them. She said his name as if it were a hard nut and told him to leave her alone.
    But the afternoon Benjamin called, Kay was not the least concerned with managing her feelings. Her little drama with Benjamin Young looked like a toy house compared to the cathedral of Dave Jacobs’ death. Kay told Benjamin the news she’d just heard. Benjamin said, Could he come over? Why not? Kay thought. She didn’t need to protect herself. On the contrary, she had that dulled feeling which comes in the wake of loss which made her feel: What more can one lose? Matters of fidelity and possession were small compared to the broader ones of friendship and admiration, some of the feelings she’d had for Dave Jacobs.
    When she opened the door to Benjamin, seeing him didn’t penetrate her in the stark way it usually did. She was numb. He put his arms around her; she stood limp. He led her to the one armchair in the corner (found on the sidewalk years before) and sat her on his lap. Resting her head against his chest, she listened to the vibrations through his shirt as he talked about some
project
he wanted to do and why he was doing it and the money blah blah blah and the experience etc. etc. etc. while in her throat she felt a nervy, hyped-up flutter.
    When she started to cry he stopped talking. He stroked her head and the stroking was soothing and good. She turned her face up to him and his mouth was there, close, and when she kissed him it seemed as if his mouth was the perfect and probably only relief there was for this lost feeling of swirling in fog.
    They didn’t leave the armchair. Afterward when she pulled her skirt back down, she looked at his face and saw something new: she was in love with it.
    He had to go. (He always had to go. In fact, Kay figured, even now, years later, on this Friday afternoon as she tended to him, he probably had to go.) But that afternoon, in the first moments of being in love with him, his having to go was all right, because he could never
really
go now, not after what had happened. Anything he did was all right. Now she was on his side. She was in love with him. She had truly believed then that everything would be O.K.
    She had genuinely actually believed it.
    What had made her fall in love with him then? Kissing him while thinking of someone she’d liked who’d died? Because he got inside at that lost moment? Didn’t it have anything to do with his personality? Maybe that he’d made her laugh? Was it because she suddenly felt his gaze reach to the back of her skull?
    For a short period after falling in love with him it was wonderful. She felt she was living straight from her soul. She was no longer alone. After a while though it turned, as certain types of love have a tendency to do, into a sickness, and she longed for the time before she’d ever laid eyes on him.
    HE KEPT his eyes closed. He felt as if he were whirling down a drain.
    SHE PAUSED TO take a breath, knowing that pauses interrupted the building of momentum, but her cheeks were being pulled in a way they were never pulled at any other time. They were a little strained. She didn’t want to hurry. That could make it unpleasant. She rested her cheek against his thigh, flushed. Outside she heard the moan of air conditioner kicking on in the building across the back garden, if that’s what you could call the lot full of weeds and warped pieces of plywood and bent lawn chairs. The vent let out high-pitched creaks. It sounded to her like a waterwheel creaking in a running river.
    After she fell