Rapture by Susan Minot Page A

signals she got from touching someone than to make the more complex discernments of character having to do with responsibility and honor. Those qualities mattered to her, but overshadowing them was the vague but weightier notion of the life force in a person, a person’s bigness of heart. A person willing to make contact with other people—that was one of the most appealing things. And people who were struggling. They were appealing, too. Usually the people struggling happened to be messes, but that was because they were taking in more of life. Intact people had ruled a lot of things out. They were less open. It was easy to see the openness in people who were wrecks. And, she had noticed, wrecks were often more likely to give a high priority to sex.
    So she’d left Angus. She continued to envision a lifelong situation with another person, just not with someone she actually knew. It was easy to envision it with an unknown person. And children, she figured, would come eventually. She just didn’t have the urge yet.
    At the moment, sex with Benjamin was putting her in a very receptive state of mind. Was he what she really wanted? The answer was simple and immediate: yes. An image came to her, of the concentrated look he used to get on the set attempting to answer three questions at once, staring down penetratingly at his sneakers. Yes, she was sure of this. The intensity of her conviction was so strong she felt it must be making her body glow, like something radioactive.
    IT WAS a disturbing change, Vanessa keeping him at arm’s length. His Vanessa. She became the aloof one, and the aloof person has the power. Vanessa was acting as if she didn’t even care she had the power, that’s how aloof she was.
    But she still was permitting him to see her. They had dates. If it was a Saturday night date, he was pretty much guaranteed to spend the night back in his old bed. One Saturday night she told him, her eyes going a little cross-eyed, which happened when she was being intent, that she was getting serious about this guy she’d been seeing. Some joker who worked with her father. Benjamin didn’t eat for a week.
    He caught a bad flu. He lay in his basement sublet surrounded by this other guy’s knickknacks, delirious, with visions of Vanessa’s long legs hooked around another man’s back. He called her repeatedly on the phone. Sometimes she’d talk to him nicely and sometimes not. It was Kay all over again.
    It was around that time that Patty, the editing assistant with the shiny black hair, came and brought him soup, and they’d had that little thing. And around then was when he asked out Olga who worked at the Cuban place where he had breakfast every morning and suddenly like spring bursting into leaf all these girls started to appear, girls at casting calls, girls he met at parties of people he sort of knew. He was still preoccupied with Vanessa, but a new world of girls was opening up. It was a consolation. There were some very nice girls out there, sweet girls. He didn’t stop wanting to be with Vanessa, but thoughts of her pained him and it was a relief to forget her for moments here and there. The moment he stepped out of these girls’ beds the thought of Vanessa would return, but he would’ve had an hour or two, or maybe a night, of not feeling like such a disappointment. He liked seeing these girls who weren’t talking about the future or commitments or
working it out
or
working on it,
but instead were opening the shadows at the front of their shirts. They drew close to him. They were smiling and unworried. Each different pair of eyes had a different level of brightness or sadness or sophistication and was always interesting. And all these girls—where had they come from?—seemed to share a total lack of qualms about unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his pants. It seemed as if every girl was willing to do that. One girl told him she didn’t