Something about the
sight of the man caught Rayna up short from the start.
His very presence
presented a paradox of sorts. His lean frame and milky-pale complexion
suggested a faintly supple insinuation of illness, but his ready, watchful,
alert eyes struck her with such force that she had to catch her breath.
As he met her
helpless gaze with unsmiling, incorrigible implacability, Rayna felt racked
with confusion; her pulse raced wildly, her palms moistened, and she felt she
would faint. Desperate to restore equilibrium, she clutched at her chest as an
inchoate spasm of intolerable expectation swept over her.
Who was he?
Much as she pondered
this question later, Rayna could never reconcile her immediate, avidly visceral
conviction of dread and anticipation with the man’s generally unprepossessing
appearance. It is true enough that he
was conspicuously overdressed. At a party in which most of the men wore jeans,
shorts, and T-shirts, he was clad in a jacketed suit, an odd enough wardrobe
choice for even a formal gathering, given the sweltering August weather.
Yet when she first
caught sight of him, this man of indeterminate age—he could have been anywhere
between thirty and fifty—she found herself caught up in the most earnest,
penetrating gaze she’d ever had to endure from another person. He saw her,
really saw her, in a manner nobody in
her life ever had before. It was more than a little disconcerting, yet not
totally unexpected; it even felt familiar, as if she had in fact already been
mercilessly scrutinized by his gray-blue eyes many times already, by those
wide, extraordinary eyes which seemed to be pleading intensely for something, pleading even as they held
forth with an imperious, implacable will that seemed able to burn to cinders
all that they gazed upon, should they aim to do so…
And then, after the
shock waves had pummeled her for an eternal-seeming moment, they suddenly
dissipated into the smoke-soaked air of the crowded house, when the man turned
his gaze elsewhere and exited the room. Equilibrium was recovered with
astonishing rapidity, yet Rayna felt so exhausted, so… exposed by this electrifying instant of intimacy, that she could
barely respond when her friend Sara called to her a moment later; she heard her
friend’s voice only faintly, as one might discern the distant distress call of
a sinking ship.
Presently, Rayna
managed to snap out of her frightful reverie, regaining what others had long
found to be her nearly preternatural state of self-possession. But thoughts of
this fiery-eyed, ashen-faced man lingered in her mind. She pondered anew the
riddle of his presence: Just who was
this creature, and what was he doing at this party, of all places?
***********************************
Rayna Kisley wasn’t
naturally disposed to shyness, and though her sweet, modest nature would have been
too embarrassed to admit this openly, she knew that being blond and beautiful,
and possessed of a nearly perfect set of shiny white teeth, tended to dispel
social anxieties which may otherwise have cropped up in the consciousness of an
eighteen-year-old girl. When you’re a lovely young woman, the world is
essentially at your command. But when your brains are equal to your beauty, you
learn early on that the power you wield ought not be abused, both for
conscience’s sake and in the interest of prudence. Taking overt advantage of
your beauty to obtain personal gain is both unkind and unwise, though only the
brainiest of beauties grasp this. For her part, Rayna was smart, if not precisely brilliant. Still, her intuitive grasp
of the ambiguities of reality, including the darker aspects of the human
condition, was insightful indeed. She saw, readily enough, the “skull beneath
the skin,” yet somehow avoided the corresponding morbidity such a perspective
would typically engender in one’s mind.
Perhaps it was mere
youthful exuberance, but possibly her overall state of contentment—even in the
face of what ought to have been a propensity to sadness, but somehow avoided
being so—was due to some more auspicious quality: a quality whereby satisfaction
takes the paradoxical form of yearning; that
is to say, where one essentially already comfortably bathes in the rays of joy,
yet wishes to draw ever closer to the source of this light, sensing that the
dangers of such proximity would be greatly outweighed by the benefits, since
that which would certainly sear one’s flesh might well also set one’s soul
aflame with bliss. So the fulfillment fuels the hunt, and the taste stimulates
the craving.
For most of her
young life, Rayna had been aware of a dull ache creeping ever more insidiously
into the solid core of her contentment. It was strange to know oneself as
happy—for what reason did she have not
to be happy?—and yet at the same time to be aware that she lacked some feature
crucial to the obtainment of full-bodied fulfillment. She could never figure
out what she wished to have more of, or how she could at once be so happy, and
yet so conspicuously aware of such a distressing lack of this ingredient, whatever it was, which she knew must
necessarily be added to one’s life in order for happiness to gain a true
foothold over her being.
Ever aware as she
was of this puzzling circumstance, Rayna’s teenage years had passed like a
dazzling mystery: beautiful and sinister, familiar and strange. She knew she
had everything, yet also couldn’t escape the awareness that she truly possessed
nothing. Cognizant of this latter truth, she never spoke it. Had she tried to share this insight, it simply
wouldn’t have made sense to anyone. Neither Rayna’s friends—who at once looked
up to her and bitterly envied her, with the simultaneous awed idolization and
peevish regard of which only young girls are so uniquely capable of holding
towards others of their own kind—nor her family would have been able to make
head or tail of such an observation, nor could she have managed to articulate
it properly, had she even attempted to do so. To them, she was simply a lucky,
lovely, blessed, and beautiful girl, with every rightful claim to glory, in
this life and the next.
Indeed, Rayna came
from a devout family, and had been raised up in the tenets of the Catholic church.
She attended Mass every Sunday, and regularly frequented Young Life events at
her school. For her, religion was a high-minded and solemn affair, an earnest
and rightful thing that she took quite seriously, to the point of
compulsiveness. She badly wanted to please God, and feared lest He find her
wanting. This isn’t to say that Rayna was what some would unkindly call a
“fanatic” when it came to matters of faith.
Instead, it would
best be said that she felt an acute sensitivity to a kind of perceived
propriety, which she envisaged with keen alacrity. God, she was aware, watched
her at all times, but His eternal eye was especially vigilantly trained upon
her when she reclined in the church pew with her family. The Everlasting knew
what was on her mind at all times, and Rayna blushed to think of it, since she often
entertained notions that would shock most people who believed they really knew
her.
Yet, these features of her mindset aside, it would in fact not be fair to
say that Rayna’s religious perspective was either naïve or overtly
superstitious. One would never mistake her for the sort of person who sees the
Blessed Virgin Mary in a bowl of spaghetti, or who keeps herself up at night
fretting over whether her last confession had truly been valid, since she may
have forgotten to spill some obscure venial sin or other to the priest, thus
flinging all prospects of grace out of the window. A free spirit who didn’t get
caught up in distressing technicalities—if, as the saying goes, “the Devil is
in the details,” then surely God would sort out these pesky little demonic
trifles and kindly cover a multitude of miniscule misdeeds—Rayna nevertheless
remained always cognizant of her unworthiness, and was thus painfully afflicted
with a never-ceasing apprehension of her Creator’s eternal vigilance.
