Intimations

by Alexandra Kleeman

  The apartment opened up onto the disorderly kitchen. The kitchen was as she knew it would be: dishes undone, sliced cheese splayed out in the open. There was a bowl of cereal sitting out on top of the stove that she had forgotten to eat. Martin was looking at the spices on the rack and nodding at them. He pointed at one.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “What?” asked Karen.

  “Turmeric,” he answered.

  Karen crumpled the pile of paper and cheese into a ball and stuffed it in the trash.

  “Would you give me a tour?” asked Martin. From where he stood he could already see almost the entirety of the apartment, which was arranged in a straight line from the door toward a large back window. The only thing he couldn’t see into was the bedroom, a small closed-in room with walls all around. It had a small window onto the rest of the apartment. “Like a cave,” the realtor had said.

  “Sure,” said Karen, washing her hands. She dried them on a paper towel.

  She showed him the kitchen table and the bathroom with its goldfish-printed shower curtain. She showed him the couch and the heating duct and the bookshelf with its array of old schoolbooks and novels. She showed him a plant that she had been given by a friend when she moved into this apartment. She stood outside the bedroom and explained how it was very difficult for light to find its way inside, which made it a good place to sleep and write. Her desk was inside the small lightless room, and sitting at it occasionally made Karen feel so desperate that she went over to the bed and fell asleep instead.

  “What do you think you’d like to watch?” Karen asked.

  “What?” asked Martin.

  “What kind of movie do you want to see. I have some of everything,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Martin, “I’ll watch what you want.”

  “I don’t have any Dreyer,” she said.

  “Do you usually watch in bed?” he asked, pointing up at the lofted mattress.

  “Sometimes I watch at the desk,” she said, pointing at the desk.

  “Okay,” he said, “the desk.”

  “There’s another chair in the kitchen,” Karen said. She went to get it, but Martin stopped her.

  “Should I take off my shoes?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes.”

  He bent over and untied each shoe before pulling it off. His shoes were leather sneakers with a letter B on the side. As she watched him, Karen could see that his hands were shaking badly. He had trouble holding the little ends of the shoelaces as he tugged to undo them. He straightened his body up.

  “I think one chair is fine,” said Martin, sitting down in the rolling desk chair. It squeaked. They looked at each other.

  “I’d like to sit, too,” Karen said, her arms stiff.

  Martin leaned forward and took her hands in his, pulling her toward him. His hands were shaking so much that her hands shook too. Their hands jittered together like they were on a bumpy car ride through the countryside.

  “One is fine,” said Martin again, as he pulled her down onto his lap.

  Tim used to say that Karen was the smartest person he had ever met. This meant something to Karen because in her own family, she had never even been close to the smartest person. She was always the weak thinker, the vague thinker, and these days thoughts came to her damaged in transit, one piece now and one piece several hours later, its counterpart already forgotten. Tim used to tell stories about how dumb Vanessa was. Vanessa was a successful associate news producer and therefore not literally dumb, but she had done some things in college. Once she was tricked into skinny-dipping and nobody else went in the water. Once she paid $1,200 to buy a star that would be named after herself, and it was a scam. She used to think that global warming was due to the rise of air conditioners, pumping hot air out into the climate in exchange for cold, and would correct itself as people grew more used to the hotter temperatures and used their air-conditioning units less. None of it mattered much to Karen. She had only known Vanessa for six months, though she had been with Tim for almost two years. She liked Vanessa because Vanessa liked her. Vanessa liked her because they both read the big thick Sunday newspaper all through the following week, and felt roughly the same way about the quality of each article. At the end of the night Vanessa was often slung over her shoulders, breathing heavily near her ear and telling Tim that he was so lucky, so lucky and he should stop being such an asshole.

  Karen felt the sharp blades of Martin’s thighbones digging into the backs of her thighs. She squirmed on his lap, but that made it hurt more. He was like a man made of metal, inhospitable. Beneath her she felt something moving, twitching, a curious subterranean animal trying to find its way into the light.

  Karen pushed herself up from the chair and walked to the far end of the room, but it was not a large room. She turned and looked at Martin, who looked confused.

  “I just wanted to watch a movie,” said Karen. She was holding her elbows in her hands and her arms were crossed.

  “I,” said Martin. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you very much.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s fine.”

  They were six feet apart.

  “Would you like me to leave?” Martin asked.

  Karen nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  Karen didn’t want to stand there and watch while Martin put his shoes back on, but it was a small room and he was blocking the door. With one hand he formed a loop with the end of the shoelace. With the other he drew the other lace around and under. His hands were still shaking. He pulled the laces tight and stepped out into the apartment. The afternoon light was still cold and bright, but it was getting dimmer. She stood there and watched while he collected his bag, his jacket. Sometimes she looked away but there was nothing to look at. After he put on his jacket and gloves, she grabbed his forearm and squeezed it with her hand. Then she tried to slide her cheek next to his, but she forgot to make the kissing sound. She grabbed his forearm again and let it go. She had forgotten how to be a person.

  At the door Martin turned around.

  “I have your phone number,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll call you to come out on Thursday,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Karen, and she closed the door behind him.

  In the empty apartment, Karen sat on the chair by the kitchen table and shook silently. Her mother had a saying. Whenever you had given your all, she would tell you that it was time to “let the legumes grow.” This meant recognizing that you had nothing left to do because you had nothing left. You were a fallow field from which nothing more was going to come. Your task was to lay back and wait for the spring, when something might once again grow from you. Karen tried to sway back and forth, but it was not a sturdy chair. She sat still and closed her eyes. She had been doing okay at Ned Regan’s farm until she saw how they separated the cows from their calves. A milk cow only lactates if she has recently given birth, and this means that each dairy cow must be bred back roughly once a year. Calving is continual, and crucial. At the same time, the calf must be displaced so that it does not consume the bulk of the milk that is to be collected and sold. Ned Regan’s policy was to allow the cow and calf a week together, plenty of time to absorb the colostrum, an antibody-rich milk that mother cows produce in the first few days after birth. Most farmers only allowed three days, and industrial farms took the babies within hours. In the first few days after birth, Ned allowed the mothers to lick their babies dry. He lifted the spindly calves up to their mothers’ teats if they were too weak to find them themselves, he guided the teats into their wet mouths. But on the seventh day, Karen watched as Ned and his dairy hands set up a series of pens bounded by electrified wire. As the lot was herded through the pasture, the calves passed under a low-lying wire while their mothers remained on the other side. Once most of the calves had passed through, Ned and his helpers strung two more wires to close off the breach. The few calves that remained unsorted were sorted out by hand. They hauled them up into
the back of a pickup and drove them away. The mothers cried out for their calves all through the night, and the night after, and the night after that. “Why don’t the mothers fight when you take them away?” Karen asked Ned once he returned from dropping the calves off in town. “They feel safe in groups,” Ned answered. “That’s why they don’t spook when you walk them to the slaughterhouse.”

  Karen saw a text message on her phone. It was from Martin. She could see the shadow he cast in the thin slit of light coming from under the front door. He was still there, pacing back and forth. She never wanted to see him again. Martin had experienced only one truly uncivil encounter in the history of his romantic life. In college, a girl he had been sleeping with and whom he liked very much had stopped calling him and then stopped talking to him in the halls. When he saw her in the university buildings, she walked by him not as though he were a stranger, but as though he were not there at all. Later a friend told him she had spread the rumor that he cheated on her with someone from his economics class. This was not only false, but mystifyingly so. Martin knew nobody in his economics class. He couldn’t even name one female who took the class with him. The situation was bizarre, the girl’s behavior inexplicable. This experience impressed upon Martin the view that most women were unknowable. As he said: “Women will sometimes burn a thing just to watch it burn.” Although he was occasionally lonely, he tried not to be bitter. He thought there were good things in the world that he would encounter by chance. He was only thirty-five, and he believed it would happen whether or not he changed himself significantly.

  Karen went back to her room and closed the door. There was very little light now coming in through the bedroom window. She climbed the ladder up to her bed and wrapped herself in the duvet. She slept in a lofted bed, like a child. She was always afraid that she would roll off it in the middle of the night and break her neck on her own bureau dresser. This fear woke her sometimes, and she’d stretch out her arm to feel for the end of the bed before rolling her body inward to where the mattress met the wall. A psychology graduate student that Karen had met at a party listened to her description of the milk calf weaning and became excited. “Don’t you think it’s so interesting,” said the graduate student from Austria, “that you say the cows ‘cried’? We project so much onto animals. You hear the sounds as crying, as if they were human beings with our emotions, when it was probably something different, more like a call.” Karen thought about Vanessa at her party the other night. She was loudly drunk, the Vanessa of college stories instead of the one who spoke tautly about the people she competed with at work and got annoyed when it took too long for the check to come. “I just want to say that I’m sorry,” she said, placing her hand on Karen’s back and then removing it. “For a long time I never knew you were dating Tim, or actually I never knew he was dating you. You know I like you. So I just never knew. You only became real once I saw you. And then after I met you I just wanted you to like me back, so I didn’t want to say anything. It wasn’t about you, I promise, or even Tim. It’s just easy to keep doing a thing once you’ve already done it before.” Karen, already drunk on only two gin and tonics, was confused but understood that they were both engaged in an emotional interaction. “No,” she said, “it’s okay. It’s weird becoming friends through a guy, I really understand. You’ve always been great to me.”

  When Karen finally realized what it was that Vanessa had been trying to tell her, she rolled onto her side and pretended she was asleep. It was difficult to feel as though any of this had really happened. It was as though she had opened up a magazine and were reading about it all. She felt sympathy for those involved, but ultimately these were people that she would never meet in real life. When she began feeling again, mostly she felt dumb. She was definitely not the smartest person in any group of people. She was a creature. That night on Ned Regan’s farm, she had lain awake listening to the sounds of the mother cattle out calling in the fields. They moaned for their young, for the beasts that they had pushed out of their bodies, hooves and hard parts and all. Their voices were low, round, masculine. They sounded like trains, urgent trains, calling out for a place that they would not reach. Deep into the night she heard a knock on her door. Ned Regan eased it open. Some light from a far-off room leaked into her guest bedroom with the small cot and the nightstand. He stood there looking at her in bed.

  “Hello?” Karen said, asking.

  “I’m just checking to see,” said Ned Regan.

  “Is everything okay?” Karen asked.

  “Everything’s okay,” said Ned. “I just wanted to see if you needed something.”

  There was silence.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you need?” Ned asked again.

  “No, really, no,” she said, and she tried to sound like it was all settled. After Ned closed the door and she heard his footsteps moving farther and farther away, she looked out the window. It was a brilliant moon with a painfully white halo. The surface of the moon was disfigured with a gray shape that looked like a broken flower.

  Karen lay on her side in her own bed with her eyes closed, facing the wall. She thought about Tim’s body and Vanessa’s body locked together while she existed someplace else, knowing and feeling things about Tim. She thought about the first year dating Tim, when he had been sleeping with Vanessa and at the same time telling Karen about the intercourse map they had drawn of her freshman year. She wanted to call him ten times in a row and yell at him, but her phone was in the other room. She felt sad, but she hadn’t cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He was probably having the normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn’t until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry—a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself.

  Choking Victim

  When she was younger she could be alone for weeks and never realize that it was time to miss another person, time to call another person on the phone. Now she found herself missing anybody she could think of. Nobody had warned her that watching her husband hold her baby with such care, their faces opened wordlessly onto one another in admiration, would make her feel so clumsy. She climbed the staircase up to the bed and lay on her side, her gut and womb positioned directly above the space where the two of them took their alone time together. They might be in love with one another, but her body was the causal link. Mentally she was older than ever, tired in the morning as though it were already the end of the day, but this longing for others was a smooth pink patch where she felt as raw as a child.

  Her name was Karen and she was thirty-two years old, but she had a much younger face. She had hair to her shoulders and a body like a girl’s, with knobby joints. When she pushed her baby through the park in a bulky red stroller, people watched her with curiosity and pity. In her plain but adult clothes she looked like a teenage nanny, someone from another country who was underpaid and exploited. She was always being mistaken for a foreigner.

  For the next two weeks her husband would be in China, watching over the construction of a large new building, a government library built directly above a portion of the local river. Once the building was complete, the most beautiful and formerly accessible part of the river would be hidden away from the view of ordinary citizens. She felt lonelier without him around, but while he was away she could have her own time alone with her daughter. In the hot patch of sunlight on the sofa she drew the soft baby toward her. She rested the small, heavy body on her lap and turned it so that the head lay in the cup of her hand. She examined its face, an abbreviation of her own. Where the eye area and mouth area met was a strange new nose unlike any she had seen in h
er own family or her husband’s. They had named the baby Lila, a name that was impossible for an infant to occupy, hoping that she would grow into it.

  Dressed in lavender stripes, the baby looked up at her calmly and shut her mouth. By six months, infants were supposed to babble freely—but hers had said almost nothing. A traumatic or hostile home environment could obstruct an infant’s development, but Karen was confident that she and her husband weren’t guilty of that. They got along well, and when they fought it was in the style that he preferred—sentences clipped, reasonable but with a harsh and colorless tone. There was nothing there that could harm a baby, Karen told herself, especially one that didn’t even understand words. Karen and her husband had met when they were young and working in a bigger city. One of the best things about him had been his face, which was handsome but not overly so. It was a healthy, normal face, and when you looked at it you could imagine the person it belonged to doing any number of harmless things—pedaling on a stationary bicycle, assembling a sandwich, listening to music while driving a car. Just looking at that face was enough to make Karen feel that she had peered into every crevice of his personality. But when he was away for too long, she found it difficult to remember how the different parts of his face fit together, even though they had been married for almost five years now.

  Outside the window, men walked past berating faceless, bodiless voices on their phones. Cars rolled by so slowly that she could hear the engine whine in the deep center of the machine. It was time to begin speaking to your baby, the parenting books warned. At all moments of the day she should be describing the world and linking objects with the words that identified them. Without a steady stream of well-articulated adult speech an infant might lag in its development, not only in language use but also in its understanding of objects, concepts, and reasoning. Her daughter would essentially remain an animal. Karen wanted to begin speaking a steady stream of well-articulated language to her baby, but it was difficult to articulate. Sometimes when she sat still and listened to the inside of her mind she became distracted by the sound of a gentle rushing, like water from a faucet.