Intimations

by Alexandra Kleeman

  When I captured him at last, he wore the expression of an animal smug with unearned fulfillment. His eyes were blister-red, racked with weeping, yet he wept still, wept freely. There was an air of contentment in his weeping that I felt to be incorrect, formally imbalanced, perhaps. Yet when I reached for his throat to amend certain flaws in enunciation, he ceased weeping at once and turned himself away from me. I heard him swallow deeply, as though tucking the remaining sobs into some secret, unseen cavity.

  From that moment on, young Victor refused to weep before me, though I often overheard him weeping in private, when lying about in the barn or in some moment of leisure.

  5

  Victor, I say. Victor, give me your attention. Look at me. I will not ask again.

  His great dull head stirs slightly, but remains fixated on a point far to my right. Victor, I say. Victor. Look at me. If you do not look at me, I will have to make use of the rod. I place my hand on the rod for good measure.

  He turns his head slowly, achingly toward me. The heavy skull swivels on its stand. It is his chewing-toy that distracts him so, resting naked and exposed upon the side table where I have placed it. He finds it cruel, cruel that he is not permitted to make use of it during this tutorial when I allow it for most of the lectures and dances. I explain again: Victor, we are practicing conversation. We are improving your speech and your pronunciation. You will not improve so long as you insist on keeping that useless bauble in your mouth, where it obscures your breath and proves an obstacle to your tongue, which I remind you has never been as limber as it should.

  He seems to have lost interest again. The chewing-toy gleams atop the table, lozenge-shaped and glinting like gold. The rod, I say, remember the rod. With this reminder, he regains a healthy alertness.

  Now, Victor, I begin. If another guest should approach you at court and speak to you, uttering the phrase “How do you do?” what should you say?

  Victor swivels his tongue around within his mouth, twisting his lips. He has never liked the taste of words, and I sense that he has not developed much of an idea what they are for. He sighs, and his eyes remain upon the toy.

  VerywellthankyouandIampleasedtomeetyouhowdoyoudo? he says, all in a rush, his mouth flapping up and down upon the sentence as though it were a piece of meat.

  I, myself, am also well, I say. Do you enjoy dancing? I ask.

  He stares at me, unsure what to do. I have never given him this prompt before.

  Are you enjoying the ball? I ask. This one he has done many times before.

  Ohverymuchsowhatareliefitistobeamongpropercompany, he says wearily.

  Good, Victor, fairly good, I say. But you would do well to attend to the pauses between your words, for they are as the counts in a measure of music, directing the body toward the greater expression of its own musicality. Measure your breaths, boy, and release them with much care and restraint. Let the words be a dance in themselves, a dance of meaning upon the surface of a tongue.

  He stares at me, chewing his finger. He has understood nothing.

  6

  Swollen-faced Portesquieu leans back in his chair and turns his open maw toward the sky, releasing a moist gibbering of laughter. His mirth strains against the strictures of his clothing, the flesh of his neck bulging sweetly over the stiffened collar. Beads of grease from the lamb leg float upon the dark surface of his ale.

  An infant does not learn to discourse on the advantages of walking before it learns to take a step, I declare, assuming a dismissive tone. Rather, the steps teach the walker the value of their use. You would have the infant crawl into old age, if it could not explain why it wished to elevate itself.

  And you propose to produce a butterfly by feeding a wolf on rose blossoms and sugar water, Portesquieu replies.

  Victor is no wolf, I say. And he shows a tender affection for butterflies and other creatures, one that would shame most well-bred children.

  This tenderness is a topic of conversation among your neighbors, says Portesquieu with an oiled grin. They say your student can be seen from time to time eviscerating small animals on the grounds. Your friend Madame Rameau suffered from strained nerves after witnessing him gnawing with great contentment on the skull of a rabbit, its fur still largely intact. Or perhaps this is a bit of fashionable choreography that I am too dull to comprehend. Were they dancing the gavotte?

  He tips the mug down his gullet. The blood pools in my face and I feel flush with sickly warmth. His face before me resembles a pile of meat, arrayed in the shape of a grin.

  One needs only to visit my home in the evenings when we practice conversation to observe how beautifully Victor expresses his nature. Come for dinner, and you will see what a sensitive soul might be revealed in any man once you have scraped off the grime, I say, reaching for my mug. I attempt to quaff my ale in a single robust gesture as Portesquieu does, yet it finds a way around my lips and trails down the corner of my mouth, cuts a path across the curvature of my chin.

  7

  Other villages have had feral children of their own, whom they have reared and educated; they have had wild boys whose unformed minds struggle to grasp the meanings of words and pictures, whose hands grope clumsily at pens. But no other village has had a feral child capable of performing the finest functions of the human body and mind. No other wild-born child has been able to speak with grace and refinement, employing the same terms of politeness and formality as high-born men. No other comports himself like a well-bred boy, or works the flute as nimbly as any middling player. Portesquieu would claim that this is impossible, that a body cultivated in the wild assumes the essence of wildness, turns swampy and will not admit of the growth of more refined habits. But with my labor, I prove him wrong: my wild child dances the minuet on command, as well as several other current dances.

  The head must be held upright, but not stiff; the shoulders falling back, extending the breast and giving a greater grace to the body. The arms locked, statuesque, with the left extended down to hip level and the right curving gently in front of the breast, forming a frame around the dancer’s body to ornament the proportions of the legs and lend gravity to their movement. Fixing the relations between these parts frees the expressiveness of the lower body, just as the verticality of the human anatomy frees man for complex motions of the hand and intellect. Victor struggles to stay upright as I put him through a series of gentle leaps into each of the five positions. But he is malleable as clay, and his body responds with an eagerness to take form when I correct the placement of his head, feet, and hands, when I press the feared rod to his back in order to demonstrate to him what I mean by “straight, perfectly straight, and upright.”

  He pants, standing there in fourth position, holding it decently, but losing shape before my eyes as his body bends beneath the pull of his savagery. At what must be a look of displeasure on my face, I see dismay reflected in his own. Then I go to him and place my hand upon his stunted shoulder, and I say to him that he may leave to have a cry if he likes. I say, Victor. Victor, the work you have been doing is not adequate, but it is admirable. There is no other like you, no other that may demonstrate to the world the civilizing power of art. You are the frozen mammoth, the crocodile. Your presence is proof. Some may hate you for what you bear out, but all will note your ability. To many, you will be a battlefield on which they strive to destroy and slander our accomplishments. But you will always be my garden: a shard of wildness bent into order, a geometric humility carved into the world, and adding to its beauty.

  I remove my hand from his shoulder, and he runs off to one of his weeping nooks, I know not which.

  8

  The body of Victor Tallon reaches the form of its repose: position four, one foot before the other, enabling the smooth transition to a well-practiced bow. The room sings with applause, applause beating against the walls like a hundred clipped birds. Now there is only one dance more that Victor must perform, one dance to prove himself a competent—though not brilliant—executor of the soci
al dances. The lady emerges from the crowd, a young girl close to Victor’s age, the age experts imagine him to be. This is the courante, a couple’s dance, and a dance of such exquisite tenderness and modesty that it is certain to stir the emotions of the audience. The two partners shall approach one another from opposite ends of the floor, facing each other briefly as mirror images of masculine and feminine grace, before turning toward the front to commence the inscription of delicately wrought arcs and turns invisibly upon the ballroom floor: mirroring each other yet never touching, like the sun and the moon drawing twin circles around our days.

  Victor and the young lady approach each other tentatively. Her face wears a sweetly youthful air, set within a complexion of lilies and purified milk—though I notice also a tinge of trepidation. His face is at first a bit difficult to glimpse through the elaborate costumes of my fellow onlookers, but I move left and right until I see him clearly. His face holds an expression that I cannot recall having seen before: a smile, a true smile spreads over his face as he nears her, a true upward lifting of the edges of the lips such as I have never witnessed. He gazes at her like one waking from a sleep that has lasted a lifetime. It is as I imagined: the noble spirit that imbues the dances of our age have awakened a noble sensibility in my savage boy. He lives, he moves, he loves! My heart heaves in my chest, an organ sighing with well-deserved peace. The girl’s face smiles in response, but her troubled demeanor increases visibly.

  I look to Victor. His smile has grown since I last observed it: now it reveals teeth, and a bit of fine, healthy gum. I look to the girl, her eyes clogged with fear. Victor’s gaze rests upon her décolletage, fixed to a point beneath which her heart beats hot, quick, like a rabbit’s. Victor, I say. Then I notice the young girl’s necklace.

  Delicate, finely made, and strung with several lozenges of real gold, gleaming like teeth in the candlelit room. Victor, I say. There is a resemblance, I say, but those are not yours at all, not yours to chew, they are not the same thing at all. The room is still, and I do not know whether I speak these words aloud, or utter them only in the pit of my stomach.

  Victor bears on with an expression of unutterable joy. His mouth plunges forward, open and full of hard white points. I feel like weeping. With my hands I grope at invisible strings, which do not exist. I look to Portesquieu, but he looks straight ahead, his pillowy face tightening. I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red.

  A Brief History of Weather

  The first requirement of architectural beauty is suitability to situation. A house should always seem to belong where it stands. If it looks forced upon an unwilling landscape, or if it is in any way antagonistic or uncomfortable because conspicuous or out of scale, then it fails in this first requirement.

  —EMILY POST, The Personality of a House

  It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain.

  —MARK TWAIN

  IN SNOW

  When a father returns to empty shelves, empty cupboards, and a family that can only sit there, parched, playing one of many games centered around counting to larger and ever larger numbers, he will retrieve the luggage that he has brought back with him, bring the brown suitcase, the suitcase with two brass latches, opening it up before our eyes to reveal that it is full of snow.

  Before our eyes he opens it up, his hands slip back the two latches in clean sound, and then the snow seen against a silk lining, paisley-printed, all the snow glaring back the lamps and shaming our house with the brilliance of things that belong outside it.

  The snow is what sand would be if it could forget its material, if it could forget its hardness, roughness, if it could forget its own weight. And the snow is what we would be if we could forget ours. If we could become the things we pretend instead of merely pretending at them, playing over and over at a game of falling silent and soft from couch to floor, making ourselves silent and soft as we can, playing at being snow, playing until our elbows and sides are too sore to move.

  Before our eyes he makes small motions at the contents of the suitcase, and the snow begins to fill out, piling the table and over the table to the floor. Then we are in up to our knees.

  WE ARE THE WEATHER

  The weather is beautiful through the windows of our house, you could take it for a painting. With an ear pressed to the window, it speaks, stutters, moist noises like someone in a form of forced sleep.

  Right now it rains. Water throws itself against our windows, sideways with the force of the wind. It makes the things outside melt, dripping off gelatinous blots of their own color. How wonderful to be able to melt the shape from things that belong so smugly to themselves. To be the outside itself, or to reach for it and feel something without the flat touch of glass.

  Father proclaims man and weather natural enemies, and suddenly we are. In motion his mouth laps at the air, takes into it the world we have been presented with and passes it out again, deformed. Pressed against tongue, teeth, the sounds fall out marked by indentations from human molars. They take shapes that imply our own deformation, that cause us to turn over the words in our own mouths, heavy and cold like a mouthful of marbles that taste of the hands of other children.

  Father names the body of man a device for sculpting weather more weatherlike, less crazed, a device for disciplining the air. He walks out into the daylight shaking damaged equipment toward the mild sky. As hollow tubes spill from his arms, as springs jerk wildly, taut and loose, flinging themselves like a ruined cartoon body, knotted together and dancing. His voice going on without punctuation without pause about the ruined possibilities of his invention, his invention a device intended to transform one thing into another, that takes it away from itself and makes it one’s own, as my father to the weather or my mother to her projects of paper and thread. In the partial daylight, a father fills up with shadow, standing as a silhouette of a machine shuddering up and down as it works, wobbly, clanking against itself, a machine for the production of heat and noise.

  My father, certain that internal forms of weather can be used to influence the external. My father under the big sky, shouting at clouds. We watch him through a window. We play rain, rubbing our hands and faces all over the smooth surfaces of the furniture.

  MEASURED FACTS

  We have invented a meter to measure the accumulation of time, a machine capable of producing detailed descriptions of the air. We have invented a method of extracting still water from rain and for shaming sleet and slush into legible forms of precipitation, forms a child could draw.

  The surface of our home is a single block of shatterproof plastic. There is a single flaw in the surface of our home through which we would enter or exit, a thing we rarely do.

  Air enters the flaw of a body and presses through into ever-deeper regions, traveling from oral reservoir to tracheal passageway to the lungs, which resemble small rooms. This is illustrated in a diagram fixed to the dining room wall, which is designed to remind us to keep food and air passages separate. In this diagram, a frog sits in a glass-sided tank. The frog is a cross-section, and air is a blue arrow traveling into its body. In the diagram to its right, the arrow is red, and represents food traveling the same path to the lungs. I point to this second frog, which is dead.

  “Many thousands of years ago, the world’s surface was covered with small, thoughtless beings whose deaths held no consequences. In the terrible storms of lava and rain that occurred before the climate had come to a form of sense, they died and multiplied like a storm in themselves, flourishing haphazardly and then collapsing into a pit or whatnot where their lungs filled with the syrupy weight of their own liquefied ancestors. They lived like the weather, like a smattering of problems unforeseen but urgent, and they died, too, like the showers or sunlight: a brief seizure with no purpose, no understanding of their own duration.”

  A necessary flaw belongs somewhere between an error
and a mistake.

  Our device to control the weather fails to control anything at all.

  DREAMING WATER

  We play a game based upon the weather, it begins in the living room. We stand in the middle, looking around. One player will ask, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” and the other will answer. I hold out my hand.

  “I think I feel some drops, just a few.”

  Look up at the ceiling, search it for clouds. Describe the color of the clouds and their shape. This one like a duck, that one like an anvil.

  Demonstrate surprise.

  Cirrus clouds indicate cold weather if they move from left to right. Cumulus clouds indicate rain if they are gray, stacked, or have grown taller throughout the day. Stratus clouds can bring snow flurries or storm. A cloud shaped like an anvil impends.

  Describe the direction of their movement. Describe their speed.

  I open an imaginary newspaper.

  The newspaper opens like wings, makes their sound.

  Gray squares tremble against the air.

  “It says there’s a thirty percent chance.”

  We watch the ceilings, and the minutes remove themselves.

  TO UNDO OR NOT TO DO

  This device is a vaporizer. It is for clouds, sunshine, temperature, and wind. It is also for plants and other living things.

  When I say it is for them, I do not mean that it is good for them.

  This device is heavier than almost anything. It has a case made of metal stuck through with tubes leading from one place within it to another. No matter how hard you lean against it, it does not sway. No matter how hard you kick it, it does not respond to or do anything. Under no circumstances is it to be kicked or pushed.