Читать книгу Rapture - Susan Minot - Страница 14

AT LEAST they’d had Mexico, he thought. At least, that.

But he could not recall the enchantments of Mexico without being reminded of the night of her desertion, near the end of the shoot when he’d stayed in the hotel to wait for Vanessa’s call. Back in New York Vanessa was entertaining one of her artists, a guy from San Francisco who seemed to Benjamin to be gay but about whom Vanessa made a point of relating that he was always hitting on her. Kay knew why he was staying in the hotel and went defiantly off to a club with some of the crew. When the group returned very late, bursting into the lobby and streaming into the bar where Benjamin waited over his vodka, Kay was not with them. Neither was Johnny. Johnny, his DP, for chrissakes, the man shooting his movie, the person other than Kay closest to him in these last two months. Kay and Johnny were notably absent. The next morning Kay left early for Miami, as planned, having gotten a commercial for a couple of days which meant money, something Benjamin couldn’t offer, and he hadn’t seen her before she left and had to endure the cracks on the set that day about Kay and Johnny disappearing from the theme brothel they’d gone to after the disco, not knowing, or at least pretending they didn’t know, what had been going on between Kay and himself. He felt sick all day.

He finally reached her on the phone in Miami and confronted her. She didn’t admit or deny anything, but flabber-gasted him by saying she hadn’t thought he expected exclusivity. Her voice was cool and he wondered with panic if this was the woman he’d allowed himself to fall in love with. Just the other night they’d stayed in that thatched place in the jungle, and under that pink mosquito net he’d felt that he’d very possibly found the woman of his life. She was good and reasonable and skeptical and true and whenever he rolled over and looked at her another surge of love, or lust at least, would sweep through him and he’d reach for her again and each time she was drawn easily and willingly into his arms.

‘What about the other night?’ he screamed. He was losing his voice, he was a wreck. ‘Weren’t you exclusively mine the other night?’

‘Would that have been the night,’ she said, ‘you were waiting for a certain phone call?’

He hated when they weren’t direct. If she were just direct and came out and said what she meant, then he would be able to respond to her, but this half-insinuating, half-accusatory … it bugged him. ‘I’m talking about three days ago,’ he said. ‘In that pink bed.’

‘Right.’ It was a whisper.

‘What about that? What about then?’

‘That was lovely.’ She sounded uncertain.

‘I thought you were mine then,’ he said.

‘I was.’ She was barely audible. She was far away. In Miami. Who was she, anyway? Did he even know her?

There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘But I’m not the only one, am I?’

The thing was that during those last few weeks in Mexico he had seriously been thinking about leaving Vanessa and seriously been trying to figure out how he could do it. But that had been when he was certain of Kay. Now he wasn’t so sure. And with his uncertainty came the end of the short period of happiness they’d had, and the beginning of the misery.