Rapture by Susan Minot Page B

really consider it sex. What Kay was doing to him right now. Another girl said she thought it was intimate, like dancing is intimate. It was something romantic.
    He felt these girls
accepted
him. They were sympathetic. They slapped his arm in a frisky way, they rolled their eyes as if to say, Aw you, nothing matters that much, we’re all friends here. But best of all, in their faces he saw no signs of hurt he might have caused. After a while, hurt was all he saw on Vanessa’s face in the form of a bruised childish expression. He shuddered to think of it. And on Kay’s face—well, it had been there practically from the beginning, the tight jaw, her lowered gaze. It seemed the longer you were with a woman the more hurt you put in her expression. He was tired of seeing it. He didn’t need to be reminded what an asshole he was.
    What might be more helpful to address was his trying to be with just one woman. It’s what he wanted eventually, but it was becoming more and more apparent that he would always
like
knowing other women. He couldn’t help it; it was biological. Maybe he was incapable of loving only one woman the way she deserved to be loved. The way his mother, for instance, was loved. If that were true, then he should just take himself out of the race. He shouldn’t be with anyone. He told each woman he slept with as much. He even sort of meant it.
    HER SLAVELIKE posture was arousing to her. She imagined him saying crude things. That aroused her further.
    Though he wasn’t saying anything. He was silent. He was slumped back against the pillows, his arm still lay to the side. His posture seemed to say, I am only being temporarily detained. In the past, he had conveyed to her how much he liked this, but he did not look overwhelmed.
    But then, Kay had never heard a man say he didn’t like this. Even the evocation of a blow job would, in conversation, invariably elicit bluster, or a leering look. And yet she’d been with men who grew skittish when she moved down there. There was often more awkwardness than enthusiasm. It could undermine a girl’s confidence. It was easy for confidence to be undermined in sex. People got very shy doing this intimate thing, and no one seemed to want to face the fact that sex was complex. They had a hard time talking about it. Lust was simple; it just happened and grew, and if nothing interrupted it, all went smoothly. But personalities were full of interruptions.
    People were surprisingly inarticulate on this subject they were supposedly so interested in. That was one of the alluring things about having sex with someone, you got to find out his attitudes. You got to experience a hidden part of that person. It was like getting near the source.
    It was rare, the person with a lot of ease in sex. You needed to think for yourself, and not be tangled in preconceptions and misinformation which might have gotten lodged in your psyche way back. It also helped to have a doctor’s knowledge of the body, if not a prostitute’s.
    Kay understood the shyness. She was prey to it, too. Apparently Catholicism could take some blame. But she was working on it. She was trying to pry herself open. She discovered, though, there were certain things you could learn only in bed. Once when she was waitressing, she had a flirtation with a guy she worked with. He had a gruff brutish manner. They ended up in bed one night and everything was going along liquidly and smoothly and she pushed against him and he pushed back and at one point she sort of ground her cheekbone against his cheekbone and he cried out,
Ouch
. And she thought, Oh guess not. You had to get close to find these things out. And even then you learned just a fraction of the whole unexplored vastness of what went on inside a person.
    To Kay it seemed impossible to learn a lot of these things about sex if you were with only one person.
    That had been one of her attractions to Benjamin. His boldness looked