Читать книгу Rapture - Susan Minot - Страница 8

BUT HE COULDN’T empty his mind. He hadn’t seen her in so long. He’d finally gotten used to not seeing her. When last had he? Once eight months ago. Probably not two or three times in the six months before that. Her refusal to see him had been part of the continual attempt to enforce something. Not that she wasn’t right to, not that he didn’t deserve to be barred and not that it wasn’t the best thing for her and, truth be told, for him. He had himself told her she was better off without him. He himself had admitted he was a sorry bastard and that she ought to have run away in the opposite direction the moment she saw him. He was the first person to own up to that. Not that he actually thought she’d believe him. It’s easy not to believe the bad things about a person when you first meet, particularly if you’re kissing that person. But he had warned her. He couldn’t be accused of trying to put one over on her, or of pretending to be something he wasn’t. He’d let enough people down recently not to be maintaining certain illusions about himself.

Still, he wasn’t going to take the blame for everything. Not everything was his fault. Some things a person can’t help. Was it a person’s fault if he fell in love with someone else? Could he have stopped that? He couldn’t’ve helped it. How does a person help falling in love?

Or, if you were going to take first things first, how does a person help falling out of love? That was the problem before anything. He’d fallen out of love with Vanessa. He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore. He’d just lost it. So was it not understandable if a person found it difficult to face the excruciating fact that the person he’d fallen out of love with happened to be his fiancée?

Well, he did face it. He hung in there. And, given his reasoning, he didn’t think it so outlandish to believe that if he just stuck with her anyway she hopefully wouldn’t notice that he, the guy who used to plead with her to marry him, to the point that it became a running joke, no longer felt the same lovestruck urgency. After all, they had been together for eleven years, which made the lack of urgency not surprising, but also in a way kind of worse.

So anyway you do your best. You continue with the plan to get married—fortunately no date has been set—figuring she’ll never notice the difference and will be spared the hurt. And it might haunt you a little, but you figure deep down that this is what was bound to happen over time anyway and that one can’t stay in love like that forever. So you are pretty resolved with the situation when into your preproduction office of the movie you’ve been trying to make for the last eight years, which is finally, actually, coming together, walks a production designer named Kay Bailey who has a way of frowning at you and looking down when you speak as if she’s hearing something extra in your voice. And slowly but surely is revealed to you your miserable situation in all its miserable perspective.