Intimations (10 page)

“Where would the job be?” Karen asked. “Don't you think you should have told me?”

“Boston,” said Dan. He looked at her. “But there isn't even an offer yet.”

Karen stared into the shallow pool. Jellyfish are a gathering of protein, water, nerves—no brain. The bungalow they had paid for cost over two hundred American dollars a night, times four nights. They still had two nights to go. It was embarrassing to be here, seeing into the lives of so many strangers: for the first time, she missed the generic motels of her childhood, where people were kept safely stowed away from one another. She wished she had never seen the swimming couple, whose discord had ruined the morning's fragile new feeling.

“It's not a big deal,” he said, reaching over and squeezing her arm.

“Don't you think,” Karen said in a wavering voice, “that we should talk about the engagement?”

“Because of this?” Dan asked. His voice was flattening, the way it did when he was angry. “Are you serious?”

Karen spoke carefully, in clipped phrases. “I mean, it just happened this morning. Why aren't we talking about it? Why aren't we happy? Shouldn't it change this whole day? Make it better? Shouldn't it be present in everything we say or do?”

“I'm having a great day,” he replied stiffly. “Aren't you?”

She stared at him reproachfully.

“This is ridiculous,” Dan said.

Karen felt confused and angry. She was only trying to communicate, and she felt that nothing should be off-limits on the day of their engagement. If anything, she wanted to delve more deeply into their relationship, learn about it, immerse herself.

“You know what,” Dan said, standing up. “Let's take an hour to cool off. I'll be in the room. You can find me whenever you want.”

As he walked off toward the rows of indistinguishable cottages, their shapes modern but boring, Karen tried not to cry. Alone among vacationers, she closed her eyes and tried to will away the people around her, playing, laughing, sucking drinks through convoluted plastic straws. With her eyes closed, their presence only grew louder: she could hear mouths squishing around bread, mucus unclogging deep within a head. The ocean sound was everywhere, close and encroaching, coming to carry her away. Then, at some point, she was asleep.

She awoke to the sensation of a damp towel being draped over her face, one was already on her torso. It felt like a funeral ritual, gently conducted. She pulled the towel away and blinked into the impossibly bright light. The ocean had come up almost to the railing: now it was only a few feet of tile that separated her from the sea and everything in it. To her right stood a man about her age, wearing navy blue shorts and a black T-shirt, some outfit that said nothing about who he was. He had picked up the towel she had thrown on the ground and was holding it out to her.

“You're burning,” he said flatly, in a completely normal
American voice. He looked at her expressionlessly, waiting. He was dramatically handsome.

Karen reached for the towel, pressed it against her face. There was an insistent feeling on the surface of her skin, like her face was falling asleep and blushing at the same time. She felt thirsty, or maybe faint.

“Thank you,” she muttered. She looked around. The French family was gone, and so were the sunbathers strewn on the hurricane wall. It seemed shameful to sleep out here, in public. Karen thought of someone, a strange man or woman, watching her unconscious face, her slack, open mouth. The sun was in a different place now, but it was no cooler than before.

“It's okay. People here do this all the time,” he said, gesturing at his own face. Karen supposed he meant getting as sunburned as she must be right now.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “I usually pay more attention.” She lay stiffly beneath the towel he had placed on top of her body. “Have you been at this place for a while?”

The man nodded. “Years,” he said.

Karen didn't know whether he was joking, so she laughed uncomfortably.

“I work here,” he explained. “I'm the director of culinary services.”

“Oh, wow,” Karen said. “How did you end up here?” Though he seemed strange—stiff, or boring—she was glad for the distraction of talking to him. There was no place on this resort for her anymore: the sun, the water, and her fiancé had all turned against her.

“Well,” he said, “I'm a world traveler. That's the first
thing. I've been all over the world, and I've tried everything they have to offer, in terms of food.” He grew more and more animated as he talked about himself. “You name it. I've eaten live squid in Tokyo-cho and fresh chicharróns in Mexico City. I have a good handle on what's authentic, and how to achieve it. So when my buddy came to me and said he didn't need a chef, he needed someone to run the chefs, I put my hand up.”

Karen glanced at the lamentable pizza she had ordered, whole and wet-looking on the table to her left.

“Plus, to live in a gorgeous place,” he added, “like all of this.” He held his arms out in front of him, palms up, gazing into the bungalow village.

“It is very beautiful,” Karen said, though she wasn't sure. Each bungalow had an identical porch with a gate on the right or left side. Each bungalow had a small, intensely groomed tree blooming with fragrant white flowers and a small kidney-shaped pond populated by frogs that you sometimes saw dead on the path, crushed by feet. The effect of so many small, identical details multiplied and extended into the far distance was nightmarish, an optical illusion made suffocatingly real. She imagined herself running forever into the far distance and remaining somehow in the same place.

“You have
no
idea,” he said, deeply emphasizing the word
no
.

“I just wish,” she said, “that it was safe to swim. I've never seen so many jellyfish at once.”

He nodded deeply. “They're responding to the critical upheaval in the climate. The jelly blooms are destroying
us. Not only that, but we lose beach every season to erosion, and storms.” Little creases formed at the outer corners of his eyes: he seemed genuinely troubled.

“I was watching one couple this morning,” Karen said, looking up at his face. “His girlfriend was bawling for maybe thirty minutes straight. She was terrified of them, the jellyfish. He just swam around, having a great time.”

“That's ice-cold,” he replied, shaking his head firmly. He looked off toward the horizon line, where a yacht cut through gray haze. Karen smiled up at him.

“You know,” he said suddenly, looking down at her, “I know some bloom-free beaches. It's a lot better farther down the coast. Different currents, colder ones—the ones the surfers chase.”

“Oh wow,” said Karen.

“It's maybe ten or fifteen minutes away, if you have wheels.” He shrugged. “I could give you a ride.”

Karen looked down at her stinging, reddening arms. If she went back to the room, would she find Dan angry with her still, fiddling with shapes and abstractions? When she saw him, would she feel relief or just a return of that rigid feeling? From the long, flat rectangle of the shallow resort pool she could see the man-made water close by, empty and painted blue, and the wild water farther off. This handsome man with the convincing feelings seemed benign. Just because he was attractive didn't make him dishonest: it could even turn out to be the case that his attractiveness had made him more honest than other people since he hadn't had to lie to get what he wanted. It was then that she realized, like an epiphany, that all the employees around her were significantly
more attractive than the average guest. But what was the strategy behind this hiring practice? Was it to make the guests feel young and attractive too? To make guests feel that this was a beautiful and clean place? Or to show the resort's power and high standing, as evidenced by its ability to recruit such good-looking people from the towns nearby, people who conceivably had more opportunities than average? Karen felt a headache coming on. The director of culinary services looked impatient as he stood before her, watching her make up her mind.

“Are you going now?” she asked, not sure how his answer would affect her decision.

“If you're ready,” he replied, looking her up and down as if for the first time.

Karen thought of the cold, tense bungalow, set behind the eerie pond and tree. “Okay,” she said, turning to grab her bag.

“Hold on,” he said, a little sternly. Karen froze. He pointed at the terrible pizza, still perfectly intact. “Don't you want to get that boxed up?”

“Oh, right,” Karen said. She walked to the bar and asked for a box. She walked back to the table and began the process of shoving the terrible pizza into the too-small Styrofoam container. It fit: folded over twice, with a chunk of crust torn off.

“Great,” he said.

His name was EJ, and the vehicle he owned was an old motorbike painted construction-cone orange. The rattle of its worn-down motor clashed alarmingly with the deep, serene
green of the jungle around them. When EJ slowed down to avoid potholes or clear a curve, the engine sputtered a deeply unwholesome gray smoke.

“I'm Karen,” Karen said, shouting into the rush of air.

“What?” EJ shouted. “I can't hear you!”

The groves of palm trees and bananas were a broad smudge around them, as EJ made alarming decisions about when to barrel through piles of palm debris and when to swerve suddenly, wrenching around them. Absolute time and absolute speed were difficult to gauge on a motorbike, Karen thought as she tried to cling to EJ's sweat-soaked back without digging her fingernails into the flesh, but it seemed as though they could die on this ride. In her left hand, she clutched the Styrofoam box packed with awful pizza: she would have dropped it, but it was still possible that EJ would turn the bike around and make them go back for it.

“Where is it?” she shouted.

“Soon!” he shouted back. “Can you try to sit still?” They were both visibly annoyed, and annoyed with the other person for showing it. Each time she shifted on her piece of the seat, EJ let out a grunt and made a big show of correcting for the wobble Karen had created as she struggled to rebalance herself.

“Stop wiggling around!” he shouted over his shoulder.

“What?” Karen shouted back.

Out of nowhere, EJ made a sharp left turn onto a dirt road. Gravel crackled beneath motorbike wheels as they barreled down the narrowing path. And then, abruptly, the ocean splayed out before them, gray-blue in the deteriorated
light, more real and less pretty than the toothpaste water the resort was built to exploit. EJ dismounted and kicked his thong sandals off in the sand. “Holy shit,” he said, “glad that's over!” He did a couple cursory stretches of his hamstrings and went into a downward dog. Now it was like Karen wasn't even there: he pulled off his shirt and jogged toward the water with an easy stride. From time to time, she saw him punch at the air with his right fist in a gesture of triumph.

Karen walked slowly up to the water. She had no idea whether she was supposed to follow him in, but she didn't care. EJ was only a fleck in the distance at this point, bobbing among waves. If she squinted her eyes into the shifting surface she could see the notion of his head or arm or leg as he swam around in the deeper water, among the cold currents or other such bullshit. She set the Styrofoam box down on the sand, dropped her tote bag. She slid off her sandals and piled some sand onto them, so they wouldn't blow away: Dan had taught her to do this, last summer at Fort Tilden. She walked into the sea gingerly, step by step, the water lukewarm and smelling of brine and tar. Once when she was eighteen she had done something like this: she let an art professor from the college next to her own drive her in his car to a beach she didn't even know the name of. He wore a black, full-body wetsuit; she had walked waist-deep into the waves fully clothed. As he dove and surfaced like a seal in the clear water, she had realized that she knew almost nothing about him. She had looked down at her skirt swirling around the dim, disappearing legs and hoped that she'd make it back to the car, back to town, to live free of
mistakes like this one. And now, almost a decade later, she had made the exact same mistake.

Knee-deep in the surf, Karen willed herself to take another step, and another. She would move to Boston if she had to. She would get back to the bungalow, somehow, and she would say all of this to Dan: they had made the right decision, she was happy, she was ready to become even happier. Waist-deep in the warm gray water, she saw something wobbling beneath the surface. It was Styrofoam-white and resembled a piece of trash, suspended between the surface and the sand. She looked to her left, to her right. As she stared into the water, the floating shapes came into view all at once: like constellations they were there, venomous and drifting, more numerous than she could even have imagined.

In the summer between high school and college, Karen's father was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer was malignant, but not incurable. Curing it would, however, involve a great deal of pain: the pain of incision, extraction, and then days of radiation battering the flesh invisibly. Her father underwent the course of treatment almost without comment, so that the only visible trace of its effect was his body lying on the couch for most of each day, silently watching baseball on a dizzyingly colorful TV screen. That summer, Karen stayed away from the house as much as possible. She walked for hours around their town and the banks of the creek, picking up pebbles and putting them in her pockets, emptying them out someplace different but equivalent. And when she came home for dinner she joined her parents
in choosing not to speak about the cancer, though it wasn't clear what else there was to speak about.

Even while it was happening, she sensed that she was living in disaster and failing to make herself adequate to the situation. What she wanted to say to her mother and father she couldn't say, what she wanted to ignore she couldn't ignore. After the remission, Karen promised herself that she would be ready for the next true disaster, she would identify it and react appropriately. She was haunted by the feeling that, even though her father had lived, she had let him die.