Caught in the Act

What do men and women think about when they’re making love? Some things, it seems, are better not known, especially in the case of Benjamin Young and Kay Bailey. In a physically intimate moment that she initiates, their thoughts collide. God, he is lovely, she revels. I don’t understand women, he concludes.

Simple conceits seem to be the strength of the fiction of Susan Minot, whose highly acclaimed novel, “Evening,” published in 1998, was the reconstructed memory of a woman lying on her deathbed. As a protracted interior monologue, “Evening” is really no different than “Rapture,” only “Rapture” is a duet played in the minds of Benjamin and Kay in flagrante delicto one June afternoon in an apartment in New York City. While the action may be simple, what lies beneath is most certainly not.

His breath on her skin, the clasp of his arms around her--and the important fact that his on-again, off-again fiancee, Vanessa, might finally be out of the picture--were too much for Kay to bear. He had just come over to her place for lunch and now this: a distraction made all the more distracting by the fact that it has nothing to do with love or with lust. By jumping the story from her mind to his, Minot has taken what might have been a sexy, even comic, romp--similar to other repasts taken by such writers as John Updike, Erica Jong and Harold Brodkey--and turned it into something far more serious and far less fun.

As their thoughts unwind, “Rapture” becomes a story about the rationalizations that drive men and women together, for between Kay and Benjamin there is no chemistry, no animal magnetism, only the thinking that once made it so. “Rapture” is, as the title ironically suggests, less about ecstatic transport than it is about powerlessness: As much as Kay wants to be in control, as much as Benjamin wants to speak his mind, neither is able to.

Playing off the role of the imagination and memory in maintaining erotic momentum, Minot lets Benjamin and Kay reveal their histories, starting with the day when she walked into his office to apply for a job as a production designer for his fledging film company. Three years and so many broken resolutions later, Benjamin and Kay are a man and a woman fumbling together in a moment of one-sided desire. It isn’t a grand moment. It isn’t a romantic moment. It is a particularly ordinary moment--as much about them, as it is about Benjamin and his inability to disconnect (or even connect) with Vanessa.

In another world, Benjamin and Kay might have been the couple who kept us awake in the throes of their passion, but today their screams are mute. Lust has dropped off as the human condition crept in, and the difficulties of being a man and a woman in this world--both dependent and independent, in need and autonomous--fix the tenor of the story. Here sex is the illusion that you know someone and are connected to that person, while love is “a road at first wonderfully lush and appealing which very quickly [deteriorates] into an impenetrable mass of brambles.” If the flesh is certain, the mind never is.

Minot has not taken her notions about sex and love much further than she did in her 1989 collection, “Lust,” in which men are predators and women are ripe for disappointment. In this case, Benjamin is passive and self-centered, unable to tell the truth or recognize the price that his own needs exact upon others, and Kay is the perfect pawn, a woman whose resolve melts under the heat of her own wishful thinking.

By the end Kay thinks she has done something to bring them closer. She says the only words spoken in real time: “That was worship,” a phrase as selfless and hollow and forlorn as the episode itself. Benjamin’s response--the moment upon which the suspense of the entire story breathlessly hangs--is sadly predictable. Either Kay needs to improve her technique, Benjamin his focus or Minot should have realized that sex, as a narrative device, is a flimsy pretext for a story. In the sealed air of this room, so crowded by hope, fear, guilt and misgivings, one begins to beg for a breeze from the outside world.

“Rapture” might have been more effective at half its length or with that breeze brought in. Although the tendency may be to leap from the confines of this story into some broader realization about the meaning of love and sex, Minot writes her characters with such particulars that we walk away knowing no more than what we suspected in the beginning. Which is the real disappointment of this story.

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Thomas Curwen is the deputy editor of Book Review.