Intimations (9 page)

As Karen spoke, she saw that her old classmate was impressed by the things she had accomplished. She felt content. Talking about work had always made her feel more like herself. He asked thoughtful questions, and she answered them, taking up almost all the space in the conversation. Something in her was eager to expand, to monopolize, to be casually selfish in the way that others often were with her. She felt free, in an old, almost-forgotten way. The happiest
week of her life had been in college, the summer after junior year. She had stayed in town working at the library, where she cataloged old, miscellaneous photos according to the objects or themes they contained: Fanaticism, Rhinoceros, Etiquette. At the end of August, students who had also spent the summer in town went home to visit their families for a week or two, but Karen's family was on vacation. So she worked unsupervised in the frosty archive, and after work she jogged five miles to an old railway bridge over the river where she dangled her feet and looked down, watching trash and swaths of plant debris pass below her, borne by the current. When her mother called, she turned her phone facedown and left it there. She would call back several hours later, once she was sure her family was all asleep.

She talked and he nodded. Talking was easy, as it used to be when she was younger and as it would be again and again in the future. This town, which was foreign, would become home, and home would slip again into foreignness. It was only in this small sliver of her life that she would be lonely, and it would pass. But then Karen noticed that he was looking at her more intently than before. She looked away, a reflex.

“Listen,” he said seriously. “I'm glad you're not still upset, but I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize for what?” Karen asked.

“You know, for what happened that last year of school.” He picked a box of toothpaste up from the shelf, glanced at it, and put it back down.

Karen searched her college memories earnestly for times
when she had been wronged. Most of her life, she felt, had been spent alone in rooms.

“I don't know,” she said.

“For the video. I hear it messed you up.” Karen could tell he was annoyed that she was making him reassemble the whole situation in front of her in words. “The video of you,” he said, “the one I used for class. I know it seemed exploitative, but the idea was to implicate myself. About being male in the cultural moment of the sex tape.”

“No,” Karen said. “I don't think anything like that's happened to me.”

He looked at her in disbelief.

“I don't think I'm who you're thinking of,” Karen said slowly. “When exactly were you there?”

It became clear that he had graduated several years after her: they hadn't even overlapped. She had a young face for her age, or he had an old one. They stood in the toothpaste-and-Band-Aid aisle feeling uncomfortable. To Karen he was worse than a stranger: she knew with certainty that something weird lurked inside him. He sensed her change in attitude and stuck his hands back in his pockets. “What did you mean, ‘the cultural moment of the sex tape'?” Karen asked. “What did you think would happen if you apologized?” He didn't seem to hear her. Already he seemed a mile away—he was closing up as she watched.

“What did you do?” Karen asked. She stared at him.

“I don't remember,” he said unconvincingly. “It was forever ago.”

Karen suddenly realized that she hadn't thought of her
husband at all in more than an hour. Had he thought of her, even once?

The sun was setting behind the crosshatching of oak trees as Karen pushed the empty, tilting stroller toward the café as quickly as she could. The sight of the intent, ferocious-looking woman with the empty stroller alarmed the people she passed, but Karen didn't notice. She was truly ready to go home. It seemed incredible to her that just a few hours earlier she had thought that staying in that apartment for another second could kill her. Now she knew that she would become irreparably warped if she spent another minute out here. She felt as if she were deep underwater, desperately stroking up toward the surface, toward light and air. She had no idea how far away it might be.

She'd get back to the café, thank Linda for her time, and hurry her baby home. Home was still a safe space. Everything had gone well there in the end. Puldron was alive, he hadn't choked at all, not completely. And even if he had, the choking was just another corporeal encounter, the body articulating itself around the obstacle of that which choked it. It didn't mean anything more than that. The word
express,
derived from the medieval Latin
expressare,
meant to “press out” or “obtain by squeezing.” The word had once been used figuratively as a term for extortion. It was possible that to cough, to choke, was the root of all speech: the urgent need to evacuate something whose internality threatened to kill you. To express yourself or be expressed by extruding words. It was just a bodily function, like sweating or throwing up. Sometimes
you felt relief afterward, but there was no point in doing it unless you had to. In light of this, Lila would speak on her own time, when the small, mild experiences she was accumulating finally coalesced into something she needed to expel.

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things. Compared to the gentle, competent family she had chosen, they were monsters. Even someone like Linda, seemingly so warm and lively, was an unknown. Though Karen had felt happy and connected after talking to her, when she reflected on their conversation she realized that they had spoken mostly about Linda herself, mostly in glowing terms, without learning anything concrete about her that would make her real. Since graduating from college, since getting engaged and then married, since moving to this new, worse city, Karen had always mourned her growing isolation. She had longed for the unpredictable, haphazard quality that other people had, which she had found beautiful. What seemed more beautiful to her, now, was the new being, unsullied, perfect for now in every way, whose entire existence so far had unfolded under her gaze. Even if Karen was no longer connected to the chain of exhausting events that comprised her past, she could still attach herself to a whole life, pure and complete, in the form of her innocent, silent daughter. Her daughter would live whole inside her mind, inside her memory, forever.

As she rounded the corner to the block where she would find the café, Karen saw that something had gone on. In the vivid blue dusk, swaths of a brighter blue alternated with hot red, electrifying the trunks of trees and sides of buildings.
A few people milled around, talking; others walked past as though everything were just as it should be. With a terrifying expression on her face, Karen ran with the ugly stroller, her feet festooned with Band-Aids, toward police cars up ahead.

As she came close, she saw, first, a policewoman with a short blond ponytail, then her partner, who had a notepad, and then a potbellied man explaining something to him with vigorous gestures. She saw the vehicles double-parked by the entrance to the café where the lights were on and the barista slid a rag along the counter. There was no sign of Linda, or of her garish pinks and greens: Linda was gone. The light was ending. And then, in the arms of a policeman, standing in the yellow sheet of light cast by the streetlamp that had just come on, she saw Lila, she saw her baby. She squirmed gently, held by a stranger. Linda had left her there, gone about her own business. With a shudder, Karen thought of the stranger's hands, the strange hot arms.

Inside the baby, something was taking shape. There were colors and planes, indistinct, as if viewed through a thick layer of water. There was dimness and cold, the unmoored perception of bright blue and red, flashing. The baby watched as her mother came toward her with a face full of terror. The two eyes large and wild, the mouth pouring. With her gentle mind, the baby took the face in and waited, waited as it sank slowly to the top of a pile of things without names, waited for the noisy world to become still once more. It was all collecting inside there, gathering like dust, building, building up, until someday there would be enough for some part to pierce the surface of her silence and gasp out a piece of what lay beneath.

She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. It didn't bother her when she had to walk past strangers unwashed in the middle of the day or when she forgot a newly bought bag of groceries on the subway seat. Crossing the street, she paused to look up at an airplane etching a thin white stroke in the sky and was nearly hit by a taxi. Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.

Now they were at a resort hotel by the beach, though the beach was really a five-minute drive away. All they had here was a forty-foot strip of damp sand visible during lowest tide, and a staircase that led directly into the sea. Karen looked down at the blue water frothing against the last visible stair. The water had a mouthwash color, something usually achieved through dye, making everything look unreal, retouched, staged somehow. Seeing her own hands foregrounded against this blue filled her with the sensation of dreaming, in the moments just before you wake up. Off in the far distance fishing boats floated at the horizon line, the only indication that this country had a real economy of its
own, separate from the all-inclusive resorts that lined this stretch of land, which resembled utopian communes but operated secretly under cutthroat capitalist principles.

The water was cool, and looked as clear as a glass of water: you could see shells strewn on the ocean floor. But the unusually hot weather had caused jellyfish to multiply unchecked. They populated the shallows, a slight distortion in the shifting, flashing patterns of sunlight on sand. Beachgoers descended the staircase to steep their bodies in the tropical blue, but once they got out into the sea they stopped, looking down and moving around nervously, a few steps to the left, then to the right. One woman was stuck in waist-deep water, crying, her face deeply pink. She kept wiping it with short, rough motions that looked like slaps. Over and over she turned back toward the staircase, but she was too far away. The man she had come with was several feet away, doing the breaststroke in tight circles. “You have to kick their heads,” he shouted to her. “Kick them out of your way!”

Daniel had proposed to her that morning and she said yes in an instant. He went to take a shower. Karen had left the bungalow, identical to every other in the resort, and walked out into the swelter. It seemed strange to be apart from him in this moment, but it felt even stranger to wait for him there in the overly cold hotel room, trying vaguely to read a magazine while he washed each part of his body with scrupulous care. She expected the world to feel different now that she had achieved a new life state. Instead, it was deathly hot. Karen walked out to the railing and stared down into the sea. It looked beautiful enough, but
the water was haunted. If you waited patiently and let your eyes adjust, it would come into focus: the faint pale outline of a jellyfish, like a ghost of the jellyfish you had seen on TV or in photographs, a bland white space waiting to be colored in.

“She stood there wailing. Every few minutes it got louder, then she'd shout out ‘I'm so scared!' or ‘They're everywhere!' He just swam around. At the end he picked her up and carried her out.”

“I love how easy it is to pick people up when you're in the water,” Dan said, tilting a small full glass of orange juice into his throat.

“What?” Karen asked.

“That's what we used to do when we went on family vacation. Once I was a teenager, my dad used to let me pick him up and carry him around the pool. He was a big guy then, that's when he was still training for marathons. It was hard to do, but it was still possible.” Dan smiled and stabbed at his breakfast sausage. He had chosen this resort for its high ratings on decor.

“That sounds nice,” Karen said, uncertain. Dan's plate contained a horrifying amount of meat from all different cultures and civilizations.

“It
was
nice. My mom would bring us all virgin daiquiris from the bar and we'd pretend they were getting us drunk. My dad and I would use them like lances and try to joust in the water.”

“Daiquiris?” Karen asked, trying to picture it, the novelty straw pointed outward, weaponized.

“No,” said Dan, “my mom and sister. They tried to make themselves perfectly rigid and narrow at the tip.”

“Oh, I see,” said Karen. Karen had never heard of a happy childhood like Dan's from any real person, but she had seen things like it on TV screens. When he told her about the sunny, lively experiences of his past, she often thought of them as synopses or, if there were many, montage. She tried to ask the questions that would make these stories take on mass. Was this while his mother was working in prison law, trying to stop the construction of new facilities? Were his lawyer parents troubled by their work, did it make his childhood less bright? Did his father regret training so hard when it was a marathon that had blown out his knee? She looked out the restaurant window at the perfect blue water full of stinging tentacles, then at the resort-goers crowding the omelet bar, several of them calling out their orders at once. Behind the counter, a boy no older than sixteen regarded the ingredients with terror as he cracked two eggs into a small white bowl. Karen prayed that he would not do something tragic like try to escape.

“The worst part of it,” said Karen thoughtfully, “was how happy he was. I watched him paddle around, do handstands, splash in the water, while she wept twenty feet away. He might as well have been whistling jauntily.”

“Who?” Dan asked, looking up.

“Nothing,” she said.

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.

“What's that?” Karen demanded, pointing to the ugly form on-screen.

“It's the first concept for a hybrid gallery-gym,” Dan said. “Victor's firm got the commission, and he wants me to help out. He actually wants to offer me a job. I'm just trying to look at the idea and figure out what he's thinking.” He spun
the shape around casually. It slowed and settled on a slant, looking cheap.