Free Rapture by Susan Minot Page B

evening. He hadn’t been sure if Kay’d be there or not. She was. And he was there alone. They ended up walking out together and went for a drink. At the bar he told her he’d moved out from living with Vanessa and she didn’t ask him anything more because, if she’d asked, he
would’ve
told her he was back in love with Vanessa. But she didn’t ask. She was relaxed and inviting, the way she got after a few drinks, and sitting beside her on the dark ruby banquette he felt the old urges.
    They rode silently home in a cab and he took her hand. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t move it away. She looked as if she was sleepwalking. So he was surprised when they pulled up in front of her building where the tree branch shadows were projected by the streetlights, that building where so much emotion had once been, and she asked him did he want to come up. It took him aback. ‘Do you want me to?’ he said. She shook her head, not at him but at the question, and got out of the cab, dropping some bills on his lap. He paid the driver and followed her in.
    Walking up the stairs, she didn’t speak. They stepped inside the apartment and she shut the door but didn’t turn on the hall light the way she usually did automatically. She turned around and pushed him back against the door and pressed against him with her face an inch away so he could see the dark shape where her eyes were, but not the eyes themselves. They stood with their mouths an inch from each other with her champagne breath on him, not moving for about a minute and a half, which is a long time to be standing in the dark that close to someone with your heart pounding. Out the open window a car went by blasting music which they could hear at the other end of the apartment and she finally moved the inch forward and mashed her lips against his and murmured something which he thought was, I love you so, then thought that maybe it was, I love this song, because the car was still down there waiting for the light to change, but he didn’t want to move his lips to ask. It was that Bob Dylan song “One of Us Must Know.”
    He didn’t understand women. He’d only grown accustomed to expecting certain types of inexplicable behavior. For instance, if you told a woman she looked beautiful it immediately cheered her up, no matter how much she was ragging on you or how pissed off she might be. Tell her she was beautiful and it genuinely seemed to make her feel better. Or, he’d observed, women spent long periods of time exchanging obscure information with each other which, if you listened to what they were saying, you could not figure out the important part.
    But he didn’t need to understand Kay in that dark hallway to like being with her as much as ever and to feel excited when he lifted her sweater and felt the skin on the small of her back and she sank heavily against him.
    He looked down at Kay now, and in that coincidental way of two people separately occupied happening to glance at one another in the same moment, she looked back at him, her gaze sweeping sideways, eyes at a low burn, hardly registering him there.
    He reached down to her face and gave her cheek an affectionate little slap.
    IT WAS AMAZING how much things could change between two people. That you could feel a person was your eternal mate one day and three months later bump into him in, say, the flower district and hardly know what to say.
    It was months after she’d fallen in love with him and weeks after they’d not been able to see each other
on
a friendly basis
, so it was disorienting to see his figure standing there on the sidewalk, purporting to be like anyone else’s.
    The weather had changed the way it does in the fall, suddenly cold from one hour to the next. She was walking home from an interview, tired and underdressed, carrying too much in her bag. The wind was smacking into people when they hit the corner, thumping