Free Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman Page B

watch a movie together?” he asked.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œDid she pass away?” Karen asked.
    â€œAway?” asked Martin.
    â€œPassed away,” she repeated.
    â€œNo,” he said sharply. “She is alive.” He sounded irritated.
    â€œWhen we say someone has left money, we usually mean they’ve passed away,” Karen explained.
    Martin leaned back in his seat.
    â€œNo,” 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 thestairwell 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