Rapture by Susan Minot

to him, and therefore to all humanity. Or want only to crawl off under the nearest rock and die.
    She could gaze at a lover sleeping and feel gratitude and adoration. Or fume with frustration. Sometimes even after a lover’s tender attentions, she might feel ignored or bereft.
    If things lined up she’d feel secure. Or sore. She might be overwhelmed by an urge to embrace everything (the first thing would be him) or a desire simply to sleep. She might want, for a moment, to be left alone. But more often, she wanted to swim up into his arms and stay there forever.
    THAT BEAUTIFUL TIME she stood near him in the dark    Well, he thought, that’s over now.
    WHAT DID SHE really want anyway? Could she picture settling down with one man for the rest of her life? It was a nice idea, but were people built that way?
    She hadn’t been able to stay with her longtime boyfriend, Angus. After six years, when it came time to decide if they were going to get married, she just couldn’t do it. She was twenty-eight. Angus loved her; she loved him, but it was in a certain way, not in the
total
way that her instinct (there it was again, that instinct) told her did exist.
    Her difficulty envisioning a life with Angus probably had more to do with her own failings, but it
felt
like it was something missing in him. She met Angus in New York after college. He was the friend of her friends Tamara and Gary, who lived down the block (she was living in Brooklyn then, the third of her so far ten apartments) so Angus was around a lot. She probably wouldn’t have gotten together with him if they hadn’t inadvertently spent so much time together. Her main boyfriend in college had been totally different. Jake was seductive and druggy, and gave her intense, possessive attention when he wasn’t giving it to someone else, i.e. sleeping with her roommate. He had such a hold on Kay that she continued to see him, through rehab and even on and off afterward when he’d moved in with an older woman who was supporting him. Angus, in other words, was a hero in comparison with Jake. He paid for dinner and called when he said he would. He was never jealous. He worked as an editor of business pamphlets and was diligent but had quirky taste in shoes and from the start treated Kay as if they would always be together. Initially she liked thinking that way, too. It was a nice idea. But after a few years of domesticity, she found herself looking at Angus with expectation. She waited for him to say something more at the breakfast table. More and more she was waiting for him to turn over to face her in bed. Once, returning from visiting his parents in Pennsylvania, she had the claustrophobic feeling sitting next to him as he drove that the two of them had nothing in common and that her real self was the one at work who blushed when the lighting technicians flirted with her. She knew the value of Angus. He had patience and steadfastness and she used to cling to his long back as if it were a life raft. Their life was tranquil and their bed, one might say, was becalmed. Angus thought she was too concerned with sex.
    â€˜You focus on it too much,’ he said. ‘It’s overrated.’ They were at an inn in France on vacation, a time Kay felt was rather conducive to sex. Angus wanted to rest. It made it hard for her to picture a future with him. When they were first together, exchanging stories of their sexual past during that limited period when lovers feel free to disclose anything, a period of time which definitely ends, Angus told her about sleeping with the Panamanian maid of a friend of his. He’d met her in the pantry in the middle of the night and they did it on the floor. Kay was thrilled to hear he had it in him. But he must have seen Kay in a different light, and though she waited for it, she never got that sort of treatment from Angus.
    Kay used sex as a gauge, despite its paradoxes. She found it easier to read the