Alexandra Kleeman - Intimations - Stories

When she went to use the restroom she didn’t check her phone. It almost didn’t matter to her whether Tim had called, though she had to admit it still mattered. Talking with Vanessa had made her feel that she was nearly ready to forget him completely; all she needed was another week or two. Last time they hung out, only their second time without Tim around, Vanessa had told her about something terrible that he had done to her while they were still in college. In senior year, a large group of their friends had decided to rent a six-bedroom lake house for the weekend. The house had five full-size beds, four cots, and two couches, but the situation was such that different people would still have to bunk together, systematically, to fit everyone into bed at night. This was ideal for Vanessa, who knew that she had a good chance of sharing a bed with Jason, who not only had admitted that he had feelings for her but also really understood why she was interested in broadcast journalism — not because it was the best or most rigorous journalism but because it felt like it was happening in the immediate now. The first night they spooned together in bed, but the next Vanessa drank too much tequila. When she woke up, it wasn’t Jason but Tim crawling naked under the covers with her, his pink and sunburned arms reaching up under her nightshirt, rooting around the folds of her flesh, grabbing at her nipples. Even though nothing else happened, Tim told Jason that they had sex. Jason didn’t speak to her again until after graduation. Now Jason was in Hollywood, acting in a popular TV show where he played a high school athlete. Although Vanessa had slept with Tim a few months after that under different circumstances, she had never completely forgiven him for having foreclosed for her the possibility of sleeping with the person she had truly wanted and hoped to sleep with. It was news to Karen that they had slept together. The week after she met Vanessa, she had asked Tim if anything had ever happened between them. He told her nothing had, then he made her apologize to him for asking. It was a fight over this piece of information that had broken them up, and this surprised her: there had been so many fights that left behind no trace or consequence.

When Karen got back to the table, Martin was putting away his phone. “Sorry,” said Karen. “It’s not a problem,” Martin replied. He tried to be warm to her, he reached his hand across the table and placed it near hers. Tim had liked this place, with its stupid pun-filled names for pizzas and its great beer menu. The tank top waitress was humming a different pop song from the one playing over the speakers. Karen and Martin listened to her humming. Neither of them had anything to say.

“You should come for a visit,” said Martin.

“Visit?” said Karen.

“In Berlin. It’ll be spring soon. There are fantastic clubs,” he said.

Karen was surprised. She smiled.

“Maybe I’ll visit,” she said. She had a vision of herself walking in the sunshine. She was wearing the same clothes, same hairstyle. She felt happy. Was she in Berlin? They drank from their huge cans of beer.

“Are you doing something after this?” Martin asked.

“Well, I need to work,” Karen replied.

“Yes, yes,” said Martin. “But can you take a break?”

“Well,” said Karen, confused, “I might watch a movie.”

“Do you want to watch a movie together?” he asked.

“I don’t know where,” she said. “I just watch movies in my room. I don’t even have a TV. It’s a small screen.”

“It might work,” he said.

More people were entering the restaurant now. They had come off work nearby. They were chattering and laughing. They were the loudest thing in the room. Every time someone entered, a frigid draft passed through and made all the customers look around. It was decided that Martin would go to Karen’s apartment. Karen felt tired. She wanted to be alone now, but it wasn’t fair to want someone around only when you wanted them around. As Martin had grown more relaxed, he had also grown more agitated. When he spoke, he gestured with a pointed finger. They talked about their parents while they waited for the check. Martin’s mother was an angel, a kind and very pretty woman who had left him the money to go to graduate school.

“Did she pass away?” Karen asked.

“Away?” asked Martin.

“Passed away,” she repeated.

“No,” he said sharply. “She is alive.” He sounded irritated.

“When we say someone has left money, we usually mean they’ve passed away,” Karen explained.

Martin leaned back in his seat.

“No,” he said, more mildly. “Not dead.”

Karen thought of her article, of the different scenes she had tried to begin with, none of which were right. She thought of Ned Regan, bending down to grasp a teat infected with mastitis, a persistent and sometimes fatal inflammation of the udder. The teat was black and necrotized and surrounded by other abnormal teats, deeply red and swollen. He pulled at it to show her how the tissue was dead, how the tissue felt nothing. The cow released a tired moan. Because the Regan farm was 100 percent antibiotic-free, cases that weren’t identified in time were nearly always fatal. That day Tim had written to her, admitting that he hadn’t been honest about his relationship with Vanessa, that he was sorry, that he only failed to mention it because it wasn’t important and took place so long ago. Karen felt unhappy. She thought she might cry. Then she felt a little less unhappy. When the waiter brought the check, she noticed that there were small cuts all over his hands, each one scabbed over and neat.

As they left the restaurant, Karen remembered how she had left food out on the kitchen counter hours ago. The sliced deli cheese would still be there, shiny and hard, sweating out beads of grease atop the waxy paper.

Martin and Karen stood in front of her building, a converted warehouse that housed over twenty different lofts on each floor. The lofts were labeled A through V. Though over a hundred people must have lived in her building, Karen had met none of them. When she came upon them in the stairwell she looked away, at the painted gray cement or out the window at the roof of the warehouse across the street. As she looked away they looked at her quizzically, trying to gauge whether she belonged. Martin stood next to Karen as she tried to key in the security code to the front door. She wished that he’d look away while she pushed the buttons in order, but he did not. When the door buzzed and she pulled it open, they stepped into the chilly foyer. He held her hand for a second and then dropped it. The texture and shape of his hand reminded her of a washcloth.

They climbed the steps slowly and without talking much. Through the window you could see a large truck unloading boxes at the doughnut warehouse. Karen stopped at the apartment door. “I may not be much fun,” she said, trying to make it sound like a joke and a serious statement at once. “That’s all right,” said Martin, picking her hand up and holding it longer this time, patting it three times with his free hand. At the end of each workday, after they had finished with dinner and cleaned up the dishes, Ned Regan would sit down at the table with a cool glass of fresh whole milk squeezed from his favorite cow, Lainey. Ned used to say that it was this daily glass of milk that reminded him why he should get up the next morning and do it all over again. He also said that it had cured him of acid reflux and sleep apnea. Ned was a picture of health, his cheeks ruddy and tanned, his teeth straight and the strong hands clutching a column of pure thick white. But as he brought the glass to his mouth and began sucking up the creamy, frothy top with his sun-chapped lips, Karen always fought the desire to look away. She could hear the wet slap of tongue against liquid, the greedy glug of the throat as it tried to swallow as much as it could and then swallow more. When he had finished the entire glass and breathed a sigh of relief, she saw the white ghost of milkfat on his upper lip and couldn’t help but think of him as an infant, a gigantic callused infant.