Karen watched him waiting, standing, shifting in place at the counter and sliding his pale dry hands in and out of his pockets. The coffee shop was noisy, but she could still hear the hands as they burrowed into their stiff cavities, making a sound like safety razors scraped across a leg. She could hear something about this man’s life in that sound, or she thought she could hear it—that was the only way to explain why she was beginning to dislike him even though he had done nothing to her, said nothing to her at all. She imagined his chapped hands caressing the stubble on his own face, she imagined his fear of speaking in public or giving a presentation. A small, rubbery tongue twisting within the dry mouth. Karen hadn’t been near people for some weeks, and now when they were around their presence was almost unbearably sensual. He looked toward her and smiled stiffly. He had a compact and tightly formed skull.
Karen looked back at her computer reflexively. She was working on an article about a dairy farmer in northern New Jersey. The article was three weeks late. To her left, a young woman with streaky blond hair pasted a cover letter from one Internet browser window into another. A man hunched over a small laptop erased the nipple from a photo of a woman. Karen had signed on to do the article last summer, when she was living in a different apartment and still had a boyfriend. The article was a slam dunk, a home run, as her friend Vanessa had put it drunkenly the other night. It profiled a man who others in the business of rearing dairy cattle referred to as the “Holstein Einstein.” Ned Regan was the epitome of a caring, humane dairy farmer, one who could make you feel good again about using the bodies of animals. His small herd of about 150 hormone-free, antibiotic-free milk cows had names and nicknames, family trees drawn up by hand and tucked away in Ned’s old khaki green filing cabinets, and homeopathic dandelion compresses applied to their engorged nipples to soothe sore udders. Ned’s competitors spoke of him with reverence: his cows gave the most milk and this milk, like a fine wine, had notes of cherry and smooth oak. Karen had been doing fairly well at the Regan farm up until the last few days. Since she had been back she worked only when it was dark outside, writing for ten minutes at a time and then napping out the rest of the hour. She went out only after midnight to buy a meatball sandwich at the corner deli. She had written eighteen different first paragraphs.
Now there was nobody waiting at the counter. She looked around her at dozens of bodies spaced one foot, two feet apart. Then she noticed him there, in the rightmost seat, holding an unopened bottle of water out toward her.
“This is for you,” he said.
Karen looked at it. It was beautiful water, the sort she didn’t buy.
“I saw you were empty,” he said.
He indicated a little plastic cup on her table. To her left, someone released a loud sputtering laugh at a vigorously animated figure on their computer screen.
“It’s good,” he added, nodding.
She reached out slowly and took it in her hands. The bottle of water was a tiny diorama, heavy and plastic-cool. Clear, pure water tipped back and forth across a tiny photo of a tropical landscape. In the foreground, a little waterfall plunged from the top of a mossy cliff into a deep, refreshing lagoon the color of toothpaste. The tropical water was festooned with little white glints of sunshine, small sharp waves. She looked into the distance at the miniature mountains, shrouded in pixelated mist. But where were all the fish, the birds, the vacationing tourists with their bikinis and cameras? They’ve all drowned, Karen realized suddenly. She put the bottle down.
“Thank you,” she said.
The man smiled again, his little mouth smooth and slightly pink. She felt bad for having disliked him while he was standing up there at the counter, buying water for her. She thought of buying him something. Saying something pleasant to him. She felt thick-brained and inept at the delicate choreography of being nice to people. She had been watching two movies a day, sometimes more. There were almost enough movies around to live your entire life in them. But there were not quite enough. Last night she had watched all six installments of a miniseries about espionage during the Cold War. In this series, people were terrible and the protagonist was boring. The plot centered on finding out who within the bureau was a double agent, and though there was ultimately only one double agent many of the main character’s friends betrayed him in small, inconsequential ways. When at last the protagonist returned to the orderly apartment where he lived alone, alone despite having resolved a major national crisis, Karen felt so angry, without reason or direction, that she cried in the loud way, the way that sounds like choking.
“This water looks great,” said Karen. She nudged it on the table, but did not pick it up. She smiled tightly. “It’s nice,” she said, feeling like she hadn’t said enough. “It’s pretty.”
“My name is Martin,” said the man solemnly.
“I’m Karen,” said Karen.
“I’m working,” she explained.
“Yes,” said Martin. “So am I. I’m sorry to disturb you.”
He had a slight accent, his words were blurry. He wore a blazer and a red and black striped T-shirt with a small, useless pocket sewn onto it. He was fairly attractive, with a face like an exsanguinated Jared Leto. While Martin turned back to his computer, Karen listened to the sound of his breath, even and calming, a foot and a half away.
Karen still hadn’t settled on a title for the article, and she stared again at the list of phrases she had been able to come up with. At Home On the Range. The Holstein Whisperer. Some were just phrases: Milk-Fed, Whole Milk, The Milky Way. She opened the document up and tried to start again, this time beginning with her arrival at Ned Regan’s dairy farm. The gentle green hills. The round smell of cow manure, the soft sounds of grass tearing and flat teeth chewing ambiently everywhere. She and Tim had broken up the week before she went to stay at the farm; was that important? Would it add something? Ned Regan’s hard jaw, handsome but set at an unhandsome angle, like it was sliding off the side of his face. And the cows, all the cows, their hipbones jutting up, moving past her at almost eye level. Once they were too old to produce milk, they would be eaten. Martin was bent over his keyboard, his back supple, while he scrolled down, down, continuously down, stroking the trackpad with one finger. He looked utterly absorbed. A feeling of loneliness overtook her. “What are you working on?” she asked, and tried to lean a little toward him. Karen’s ex-boyfriend Tim hadn’t written or called in over four days, even though he had said that he would check up on her once she got back to the city.
“I am re-creating a website,” said Martin, sitting up and blinking at her with his round, factual eyes. “It is an artist’s website, a photographer. I create the infrastructure,” he said, drawing something like a box in the air with thin fingers.
“I am from Germany,” he said.
“Oh,” said Karen. “That’s interesting.”
“I am here for work,” said Martin. “I am staying in the neighborhood, with a friend. We work together on this project. We had a great deal to do.”
“I’m writing an article,” said Karen. “Beginning an article,” she explained. She felt self-conscious. She could no longer talk about her troubles with the article without revealing herself to be a disaster. “It’s on a farmer, a dairy farmer. Who is supposed to be a genius at cows.”
“You must have to go far to find a cow in this part of the country,” he said, “unless I am misunderstanding.”
He had a very gentle voice. He didn’t seem to know much about agriculture. He asked about the size of the farm, the distance from the city, and about the cows—were they gentle? They were very gentle. They were tender with their young. But they weren’t really interested in anyone. It made them easier to slaughter: up until the very moment of the act you could imagine they might not notice. Karen twisted open the bottle of water and took a small, polite sip. She was becoming interested in herself again after several weeks of wishing she could be anybody else. Did she like milk very much? Yes, she did, this is how she found the story, she drank the wonderful milk that cost $13 a bottle and then began to investigate where it came from and how it could be so good. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the grayish winter light looked flat through the plate glass windows. She had a sense of her face as flexible, soft. This was the longest that Karen had talked to a person since Vanessa’s birthday party last week where Vanessa had compromised herself with whiskey sodas and made Karen promise never to get back together with Tim, ever, because he was a sneak and a pervert, practically a stalker and she could do so much better, she was better off. Vanessa and Tim had been friends since college, but after the breakup Vanessa said she was choosing Karen. “I’m not saying Tim’s a terrible person,” she said, “he’s a mediocre person. But he’s one of those people who won’t let up. He thinks he can wear you down, and he can.”
When Martin asked her if she’d like to go next door and have a pizza, she didn’t think about whether it would be awkward. She thought about how normal it was to talk to someone, to drink coffee, to thrust your face into full view of other faces, to let the daylight grime up your skin. “I think I can take a break,” Karen said abstractly, like one being shaken out of deep concentration, “but I’ll need to come back afterwards, I have a deadline coming.” They put their things into bags and stood up. He tried to carry her bag, but he kept dropping it.
A middle-aged man and woman were sitting at the tables closest to the exit. They sat separately, but had identical laptops. “You know what,” Karen heard the man say as she passed by. “I haven’t dreamt in a very long time.”
In the pizza restaurant, Martin looked five years older. A waiter brought them ice water in green-tinted glasses of pebbled plastic, and straws. Karen watched as Martin tore the tips from the paper casings of the straws and gently pulled them off. He split the remainder of the wrapper down its seam precisely, like he was undressing a doll. She wondered whether this had to do with being German. Karen didn’t use the straw he had prepared for her. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank the cold, slightly sour water. Ice tapped against her teeth. She felt like she was going to cry, but then inexplicably she felt okay again. Food was disgusting, but she had to eat it anyway. Martin was telling her that he, too, had been interested in writing for a brief time. He had become involved in film criticism during his time in the media studies program at Humboldt University in Berlin. In those days he used to watch a film each night, walking a mile and a half back home along the Spree River. He liked to see the other regulars there, although he never spoke to them—the old man with the antique briefcase, the young mother who brought her slumbering infant. He thought that he might even write a book on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s work, in particular the film Vampyr.
“Why Carl Dreyer?” Karen asked.
“Carl Theodor Dreyer,” said Martin. “This is like asking ‘Why history? What is interesting about history?’ It is not a matter of interest. There is no opinion on it.”
“I haven’t seen Vampyr,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied. “It’s quite all right.”
In her weeks at Ned Regan’s farm, Karen had seen why they called him a genius. With a long, knuckly arm, Ned guided cows from field to shed, weaving them through the gates like huge, slow-moving agility dogs. When yield fell below Ned’s expectations, he knew how to adjust the feed, supplementing grass with alfalfa, fenugreek, thistle. With firm pressure on the flank he could signal a cow to slow or stop, with a deep, low groan he could still an anxious mama and she would let him come close and take her knobby calf into his rough hands. In the empty restaurant Martin seemed to be having a nice time. His smile had grown easier, he was marveling at the menu. All of this was locally grown? Here, so close to the city, the marvelous towers of cold, hard glass? He suggested they order the “Bad Girl,” a pizza with four different types of cured meat on it, plus smoked cheese and green onions. Over by the register, their waiter was talking to a waitress in a black tank top. “That’s terrible,” he said, patting the countertop instead of her hand. “That’s not all,” replied the waitress. Karen told Martin that she would prefer a different pizza. The only meat that she ate these days was beef: somehow, after having spent so much time with the cows, she felt certain that they meant her no harm.
When the pizza came, it was covered in mushrooms. They had the earthy smell of something that has been buried and then dug up. Martin said he would also like a beer, but Karen told him she had to write later. They were the only customers in the whole place, it was too early for dinner. The sky seen through the windows was a pale, even gray as though it had been scrubbed bare. Martin had nice skin. With his small front teeth, he nibbled at a mushroom, seizing it delicately and pulling it from the pizza. He was nice, and he asked good questions. He asked whether Karen had traveled much and if, when she did, she felt like a different person. He asked if she liked to know where her food came from, or whether she preferred to think that it had been created just for her at that moment. He asked if she often met strangers in the coffee shop and then went with them to eat pizza, and she told him honestly that she never had before. She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t spoken to anyone besides Vanessa in the past week and even that had been strange, stilted and vague as they spoke surrounded by Vanessa’s other friends, hard-eyed young women from the world of television news. Martin would be here, in this city, in this neighborhood, for a few more days. He would be completing the project with his friend who also lived in the neighborhood, in a loft building overlooking the motorcycle-themed Biergarten. Perhaps Karen and his friend were neighbors. There was a gallery event on Thursday that she might be interested in attending. Or she could show him some of the other sights of the neighborhood, like the grocery store operated by the Korean family that also sold martial arts merchandise and kung fu DVDs. Their waiter was no longer talking to the waitress in the black tank top, though they stood near each other still. Martin ordered a large can of beer from the waiter, and when it came Karen ordered one too.
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.
The apartment opened up onto the disorderly kitchen. The kitchen was as she knew it would be: dishes undone, sliced cheese splayed out in the open. There was a bowl of cereal sitting out on top of the stove that she had forgotten to eat. Martin was looking at the spices on the rack and nodding at them. He pointed at one.
“Very nice,” he said.
“What?” asked Karen.
“Turmeric,” he answered.
Karen crumpled the pile of paper and cheese into a ball and stuffed it in the trash.
“Would you give me a tour?” asked Martin. From where he stood he could already see almost the entirety of the apartment, which was arranged in a straight line from the door toward a large back window. The only thing he couldn’t see into was the bedroom, a small closed-in room with walls all around. It had a small window onto the rest of the apartment. “Like a cave,” the realtor had said.
“Sure,” said Karen, washing her hands. She dried them on a paper towel.
She showed him the kitchen table and the bathroom with its goldfish-printed shower curtain. She showed him the couch and the heating duct and the bookshelf with its array of old schoolbooks and novels. She showed him a plant that she had been given by a friend when she moved into this apartment. She stood outside the bedroom and explained how it was very difficult for light to find its way inside, which made it a good place to sleep and write. Her desk was inside the small lightless room, and sitting at it occasionally made Karen feel so desperate that she went over to the bed and fell asleep instead.
“What do you think you’d like to watch?” Karen asked.
“What?” asked Martin.
“What kind of movie do you want to see. I have some of everything,” she said.
“Oh,” said Martin, “I’ll watch what you want.”
“I don’t have any Dreyer,” she said.
“Do you usually watch in bed?” he asked, pointing up at the lofted mattress.
“Sometimes I watch at the desk,” she said, pointing at the desk.
“Okay,” he said, “the desk.”
“There’s another chair in the kitchen,” Karen said. She went to get it, but Martin stopped her.
“Should I take off my shoes?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes.”
He bent over and untied each shoe before pulling it off. His shoes were leather sneakers with a letter B on the side. As she watched him, Karen could see that his hands were shaking badly. He had trouble holding the little ends of the shoelaces as he tugged to undo them. He straightened his body up.
“I think one chair is fine,” said Martin, sitting down in the rolling desk chair. It squeaked. They looked at each other.
“I’d like to sit, too,” Karen said, her arms stiff.
Martin leaned forward and took her hands in his, pulling her toward him. His hands were shaking so much that her hands shook too. Their hands jittered together like they were on a bumpy car ride through the countryside.
“One is fine,” said Martin again, as he pulled her down onto his lap.
Tim used to say that Karen was the smartest person he had ever met. This meant something to Karen because in her own family, she had never even been close to the smartest person. She was always the weak thinker, the vague thinker, and these days thoughts came to her damaged in transit, one piece now and one piece several hours later, its counterpart already forgotten. Tim used to tell stories about how dumb Vanessa was. Vanessa was a successful associate news producer and therefore not literally dumb, but she had done some things in college. Once she was tricked into skinny-dipping and nobody else went in the water. Once she paid $1,200 to buy a star that would be named after herself, and it was a scam. She used to think that global warming was due to the rise of air conditioners, pumping hot air out into the climate in exchange for cold, and would correct itself as people grew more used to the hotter temperatures and used their air-conditioning units less. None of it mattered much to Karen. She had only known Vanessa for six months, though she had been with Tim for almost two years. She liked Vanessa because Vanessa liked her. Vanessa liked her because they both read the big thick Sunday newspaper all through the following week, and felt roughly the same way about the quality of each article. At the end of the night Vanessa was often slung over her shoulders, breathing heavily near her ear and telling Tim that he was so lucky, so lucky and he should stop being such an asshole.
Karen felt the sharp blades of Martin’s thighbones digging into the backs of her thighs. She squirmed on his lap, but that made it hurt more. He was like a man made of metal, inhospitable. Beneath her she felt something moving, twitching, a curious subterranean animal trying to find its way into the light.
Karen pushed herself up from the chair and walked to the far end of the room, but it was not a large room. She turned and looked at Martin, who looked confused.
“I just wanted to watch a movie,” said Karen. She was holding her elbows in her hands and her arms were crossed.
“I,” said Martin. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you very much.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s fine.”
They were six feet apart.
“Would you like me to leave?” Martin asked.
Karen nodded. “Yes,” she said.
Karen didn’t want to stand there and watch while Martin put his shoes back on, but it was a small room and he was blocking the door. With one hand he formed a loop with the end of the shoelace. With the other he drew the other lace around and under. His hands were still shaking. He pulled the laces tight and stepped out into the apartment. The afternoon light was still cold and bright, but it was getting dimmer. She stood there and watched while he collected his bag, his jacket. Sometimes she looked away but there was nothing to look at. After he put on his jacket and gloves, she grabbed his forearm and squeezed it with her hand. Then she tried to slide her cheek next to his, but she forgot to make the kissing sound. She grabbed his forearm again and let it go. She had forgotten how to be a person.
At the door Martin turned around.
“I have your phone number,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’ll call you to come out on Thursday,” he said.
“Okay,” said Karen, and she closed the door behind him.
In the empty apartment, Karen sat on the chair by the kitchen table and shook silently. Her mother had a saying. Whenever you had given your all, she would tell you that it was time to “let the legumes grow.” This meant recognizing that you had nothing left to do because you had nothing left. You were a fallow field from which nothing more was going to come. Your task was to lay back and wait for the spring, when something might once again grow from you. Karen tried to sway back and forth, but it was not a sturdy chair. She sat still and closed her eyes. She had been doing okay at Ned Regan’s farm until she saw how they separated the cows from their calves. A milk cow only lactates if she has recently given birth, and this means that each dairy cow must be bred back roughly once a year. Calving is continual, and crucial. At the same time, the calf must be displaced so that it does not consume the bulk of the milk that is to be collected and sold. Ned Regan’s policy was to allow the cow and calf a week together, plenty of time to absorb the colostrum, an antibody-rich milk that mother cows produce in the first few days after birth. Most farmers only allowed three days, and industrial farms took the babies within hours. In the first few days after birth, Ned allowed the mothers to lick their babies dry. He lifted the spindly calves up to their mothers’ teats if they were too weak to find them themselves, he guided the teats into their wet mouths. But on the seventh day, Karen watched as Ned and his dairy hands set up a series of pens bounded by electrified wire. As the lot was herded through the pasture, the calves passed under a low-lying wire while their mothers remained on the other side. Once most of the calves had passed through, Ned and his helpers strung two more wires to close off the breach. The few calves that remained unsorted were sorted out by hand. They hauled them up into the back of a pickup and drove them away. The mothers cried out for their calves all through the night, and the night after, and the night after that. “Why don’t the mothers fight when you take them away?” Karen asked Ned once he returned from dropping the calves off in town. “They feel safe in groups,” Ned answered. “That’s why they don’t spook when you walk them to the slaughterhouse.”
Karen saw a text message on her phone. It was from Martin. She could see the shadow he cast in the thin slit of light coming from under the front door. He was still there, pacing back and forth. She never wanted to see him again. Martin had experienced only one truly uncivil encounter in the history of his romantic life. In college, a girl he had been sleeping with and whom he liked very much had stopped calling him and then stopped talking to him in the halls. When he saw her in the university buildings, she walked by him not as though he were a stranger, but as though he were not there at all. Later a friend told him she had spread the rumor that he cheated on her with someone from his economics class. This was not only false, but mystifyingly so. Martin knew nobody in his economics class. He couldn’t even name one female who took the class with him. The situation was bizarre, the girl’s behavior inexplicable. This experience impressed upon Martin the view that most women were unknowable. As he said: “Women will sometimes burn a thing just to watch it burn.” Although he was occasionally lonely, he tried not to be bitter. He thought there were good things in the world that he would encounter by chance. He was only thirty-five, and he believed it would happen whether or not he changed himself significantly.
Karen went back to her room and closed the door. There was very little light now coming in through the bedroom window. She climbed the ladder up to her bed and wrapped herself in the duvet. She slept in a lofted bed, like a child. She was always afraid that she would roll off it in the middle of the night and break her neck on her own bureau dresser. This fear woke her sometimes, and she’d stretch out her arm to feel for the end of the bed before rolling her body inward to where the mattress met the wall. A psychology graduate student that Karen had met at a party listened to her description of the milk calf weaning and became excited. “Don’t you think it’s so interesting,” said the graduate student from Austria, “that you say the cows ‘cried’? We project so much onto animals. You hear the sounds as crying, as if they were human beings with our emotions, when it was probably something different, more like a call.” Karen thought about Vanessa at her party the other night. She was loudly drunk, the Vanessa of college stories instead of the one who spoke tautly about the people she competed with at work and got annoyed when it took too long for the check to come. “I just want to say that I’m sorry,” she said, placing her hand on Karen’s back and then removing it. “For a long time I never knew you were dating Tim, or actually I never knew he was dating you. You know I like you. So I just never knew. You only became real once I saw you. And then after I met you I just wanted you to like me back, so I didn’t want to say anything. It wasn’t about you, I promise, or even Tim. It’s just easy to keep doing a thing once you’ve already done it before.” Karen, already drunk on only two gin and tonics, was confused but understood that they were both engaged in an emotional interaction. “No,” she said, “it’s okay. It’s weird becoming friends through a guy, I really understand. You’ve always been great to me.”
When Karen finally realized what it was that Vanessa had been trying to tell her, she rolled onto her side and pretended she was asleep. It was difficult to feel as though any of this had really happened. It was as though she had opened up a magazine and were reading about it all. She felt sympathy for those involved, but ultimately these were people that she would never meet in real life. When she began feeling again, mostly she felt dumb. She was definitely not the smartest person in any group of people. She was a creature. That night on Ned Regan’s farm, she had lain awake listening to the sounds of the mother cattle out calling in the fields. They moaned for their young, for the beasts that they had pushed out of their bodies, hooves and hard parts and all. Their voices were low, round, masculine. They sounded like trains, urgent trains, calling out for a place that they would not reach. Deep into the night she heard a knock on her door. Ned Regan eased it open. Some light from a far-off room leaked into her guest bedroom with the small cot and the nightstand. He stood there looking at her in bed.
“Hello?” Karen said, asking.
“I’m just checking to see,” said Ned Regan.
“Is everything okay?” Karen asked.
“Everything’s okay,” said Ned. “I just wanted to see if you needed something.”
There was silence.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you need?” Ned asked again.
“No, really, no,” she said, and she tried to sound like it was all settled. After Ned closed the door and she heard his footsteps moving farther and farther away, she looked out the window. It was a brilliant moon with a painfully white halo. The surface of the moon was disfigured with a gray shape that looked like a broken flower.
Karen lay on her side in her own bed with her eyes closed, facing the wall. She thought about Tim’s body and Vanessa’s body locked together while she existed someplace else, knowing and feeling things about Tim. She thought about the first year dating Tim, when he had been sleeping with Vanessa and at the same time telling Karen about the intercourse map they had drawn of her freshman year. She wanted to call him ten times in a row and yell at him, but her phone was in the other room. She felt sad, but she hadn’t cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He was probably having the normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn’t until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry—a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself.