Alexandra Kleeman - Intimations - Stories

Her own parents had not known how to vacation at all. Once a year, usually in the spring or summer, they would take Karen with them on a trip to someplace similar in climate and geography to the place in which they lived. When this happened, there was always a reason: to visit a great-aunt or a friend of a relative, or to go to one of her father’s professional conferences, where archivists gathered to listen to panels on database administration. On these trips they stayed in motels or hotels some distance from the center of town, where diverse locations like Atlanta, Tallahassee, and Richmond converged in an interchangeable span of franchises and family restaurants. For years they ate the motel waffles and the croissants of the nicer hotel chains together, but since she graduated from college her parents had found a new joy in traveling without her, recreationally. Last year they traveled to Morocco and stayed in a converted inn that had once been a small summer palace. Attached to their mass travel e-mail, Karen found photos of her father looming over a bowl of dried apricots, his mouth exaggeratedly open in an expression of surprise. She found her mother grinning at a small tame falcon perched on her open hand. Her mother was wearing a huge straw hat encircled by small multicolored bells, a tourist hat. Her father had captioned the photo “my wife has all the bells & whistles!” Karen had the uncomfortable feeling that they had advanced, leaving her behind.

Dan went to the buffet for seconds, leaving behind a plate on which teriyaki chicken chunks abutted slices of smoked ham piled askew, stratified and resembling steep cliffs or canyons. The plate signaled great abundance and great waste at the same time, canceling itself out. Karen chewed at a massive piece of underripe cantaloupe and swallowed. The hard angles pressed against her inner throat, sliding. Karen thought to herself that she’d probably become a vegetarian, someday.

A few hours later, it was time to eat again: they ordered at their seats by the pool from a menu as thick as a book. Turning its huge plastic-covered pages made Karen feel like a child again, gaping at the pictures of odd-colored food shot too closely, curiously shiny. “No thank you,” Karen said to the waiter who tried to fill her water glass. “Stay hydrated,” Dan said, pushing his own glass over to her. It was too hot to move, and they sat by the pool with their laptops on, waiting for more food to come to them and be consumed. As the staff door swung open, Karen could hear several people laughing together in a language she did not understand.

Dan seemed to be working on an architecture project next to her, though he had promised that he would not bring any work along on their vacation. He stared into his screen at a contorted orange shape, zooming in and out on it, rotating it to one side or the other, sighing deeply. Meanwhile, Karen had become obsessed with reading about jellyfish. The Nomura jellyfish could grow up to two meters in diameter, and weigh up to 450 pounds. A ten-ton Japanese fishing boat had capsized after trying to haul up a load of Nomuras caught in the net. She stared at a photo of giant jellyfish clogging a water treatment plant, their heads like plastic bags full of dirty water. She clicked on one link and then back to the search screen to click on another and another. She learned with horror that a jellyfish stinger was not just a stinger: it was a sac of toxins that ruptured when touched, shooting out a ridged, wicked-looking spine. This structure, called a nematocyst, was intelligent — it knew the difference between random pressure and human skin. In the drawings of the jellyfish nematocysts, the stingers resembled harpoons shooting into the flesh and burying themselves there, lodging like insect splinters below the surface. Karen suddenly felt like she was going to throw up.

“I’m going to cancel my order,” she said to Dan, standing abruptly.

“What? Why?” he asked, looking up from his small virtual object.

“I’m not hungry,” Karen said.

“Then why did you order?” he asked, exasperated.

“Because you wanted to! You decided!” Karen replied, mirroring his tone.

“I didn’t decide anything,” said Dan. “It’s lunchtime. Time decided it.”

“You always decide,” Karen said more quietly, looking out at the sea.

Dan looked at her, then followed her gaze out to the water. A pair of kids floated offshore, clinging to a boogie board. At this distance it was impossible to see whether they were huddled in fear, or just talking. Karen sat back down.

“Cancel it,” Dan said, “and you can eat later, when you’re hungry.”

Karen nodded and stood back up, looking for the waiter. When the waiter saw her, he disappeared for a moment and then walked toward them, carrying a large tray. He went to Dan’s side and set down a beige-colored pad thai. Then he came around to Karen’s and set down a large, puffy pizza. As Dan ate, Karen regarded her unwanted pizza. It had the shape and pattern of a pizza, but the cheese on top was creamy like brie, the tomato sauce had a deep burgundy color. It was as though somebody who had never known a pizza in real life had created one based on a vintage photograph and a dictionary entry. Several feet away, a family of French tourists sat drinking tall blue drinks and eating cheese sandwiches. The children played a game that involved slapping each other’s hands; sharp smacks cut through the drowse of the waves and of buzzing insects.

When she first met Dan, a graduate school classmate of her friend Naomi, she had called him “fun,” which was not the same thing as “exciting.” Most of the people Karen dated had pushy personalities and visible insecurities: when she soothed their worries, it created a serene feeling in her, like petting a cat. When the two of them experienced worries simultaneously, huge fights would develop and last anywhere from one to three days. Dan’s emotional life was sturdier: Karen admired how he shrugged off smaller offenses and articulated his disagreement with larger ones in simple, practical language. He had experienced few conflicts in his life, and those he remembered were strange to her. Once he told her about a graduate school rival, Paul Mitchell, who had stolen his idea for the semester’s final project. They had been assigned to come up with a concept and suite of renderings for a public library proposed in downtown Los Angeles. Dan’s idea had been an elegant oval with a large, open central space where patrons could gather and socialize, with stacks and quiet study spaces radiating outward. The building would have a natural “hearth” to it, and visitors could choose what type of “heat” they wanted to experience by placing themselves in relation to it.

Two days before his presentation, Paul had come to class with the same building, identical down to the colors used and the key terms bolded on his slides. He looked straight at Dan while giving his talk, smirking. Dan ended up having to design an entirely new library, this time conceived as a honeycomb of adaptable nooks that could become spaces for private reading or cozy group interaction. In the end, his two-day project received the highest score in the class, he told her: the story ended there. But had he confronted Paul Mitchell afterward? Why was Paul so bent on fucking him over? Had Dan been angry, and if so, how did he exhibit it? Karen couldn’t understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding.

The health and robustness of his mind were compelling to her: like an alien or a hero, she believed him capable of anything. At the same time, she felt useless in the face of his decisions, which she believed were stronger than her own. She didn’t understand why he had arrived at the decision to propose to her today, rather than some day earlier or later. Now, as she watched him staring at his computer, outlined in sweat and brilliant sunshine, the air around them so hot that it almost seemed to wobble, Karen felt an urgent and acrimonious feeling rise in her.