Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  And here was where Esme fit in. And why, years later, I had good cause to go to North Korea myself. At some point, these four American GIs would get to be of growing interest to the White House, for two reasons. First, a Pentagon memo about the four would be leaked to the press. What an uproar! Were they defectors or prisoners? The Pentagon denied knowledge of any living POWs but did concede to having watched a North Korean movie, Nameless Heroes, in which, lo and behold, the four American soldiers had starring roles as Western agents of evil. For years, the army’s theory on these men was that they were MIA. The North Korean theory was that they were promised body and soul to communist North Korea. Since neither seemed likely, the Americans figured maybe the thing was to get the three (by then one had died) to exercise influence from within. They were movie stars. And since Kim Jong-il was a movie buff with a library of twenty thousand films, and since he’d written volumes on the subject of the movie arts, the thinking was that he would not be able to withstand the allure of four movie stars, never mind the country of their birth or ended allegiance.

  Second, one morning, a sub would wash up in the Sea of Japan, empty of its twenty-six North Korean commandos, who were apparently on the lam in South Korea, plotting God knows. The result? Sixty thousand South Korean troops on their tail for fifty-three days, and during this time, did the U.S. have any idea what was going on? Not really. Meantime, the North Koreans had flouted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty again and again. Did the U.S. have any clue what her intentions were? No on that, too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have people on the inside? You bet. Enter Yul and Yul’s contacts, some of whom were in the film business. Enter Esme, on a mission.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. Before all this, Esme and I still had our nights together, when she’d read to me from Kim Jong-il’s manifesto On the Art of Cinema. I had a hard time getting past the foreclosing austerity of the man’s author bio—Kim Jong-il is leader of North Korea. Kim Jong-il succeeded his father, Kim Il-sung, who had ruled North Korea since 1948—though I did appreciate the singleness of purpose with which I imagined him recording his thoughts. The section titles were no joke. Life Is Struggle and Struggle Is Life. Compose the Plot Correctly. The Best Possible Use Should Be Made of Music and Sound. At no point did you ever get the sense that any of the tome’s fluorescence was lost in translation. I can still picture Esme, whaled out on the bed, pointing a Cheeze Doodle to passages she liked. “Look at this,” she’d say, and laugh so big I could see the snack-food paste around her molars. And so I’d look and read aloud: “Once agreement has been reached in discussion, the director must act on it promptly, firmly basing the production on it and never deviating from it, no matter what happens. If the director vacillates, so will the whole collective, and if that happens, the production will fail.”

  “Jesus,” I’d say. “I would hate to be on that guy’s set.”

  “Imagine he’s directing your country.”

  Mostly, though, when it came to her work, I had no idea what she was talking about. DPRK, IAEA, DMZ, NPT—she’d rattle off this shorthand as though I were in the know, and such was my ignorance that I thought these were clandestine agencies entrusted to my discretion. The first time I heard mention of the IAEA in public, I thought it signaled the toppling of our secret service. But it was just news: the International Atomic Energy Agency, having exposed its inspectors as titular in Iraq, was going full tilt on its evaluation of North Korea’s nuclear sites. As a result, negotiations were breaking down, and the North Koreans would likely not just defy the NPT but leave it altogether.

  Esme would say, “If that nut job really does have a nuclear bomb, forget five bombs, we are in a world of shit.” She’d be lying on her side with a pillow between her legs. I’d be lying on my side, too, and so there we were, belly to belly, while she foretold the end of the world and I touched her breasts because her breasts were so lovely that I always wanted an excuse to touch them, and I needed an excuse, since bald-faced admiration fell into a category of motives Esme could not stand. These included admiration without pretext, fear of the unknown, and indifference to situations just because you are unversed in them. I continued to touch her breasts and marvel at the summer palette of her skin—cream and sand, milk and flax—the gossamer above her lips, her sleepy breaths at night, and hair snarled across the pillow. And once she was asleep, I began to study the world in earnest.

  For those last months of her pregnancy, our lives were routine. On the weekends, I’d meet with Reese and peerage to discuss ideas. It was a reading group. We assigned each other the usual suspects: Freud and Lacan. Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant. Maybe Hume. William James. Mostly, though, I went there to lend credibility to what I’d been thinking about on my own. I was looking for quotes.

  At issue was the predicament of being alone, which I thought about obsessively, because I was a little confused. I’d found Esme and married, and we were going to have a baby, and so the wasteland of my heart was to have been lush and gay and departed from the isolation whose fix was the Helix mandate. And yet something felt wrong. I still felt unmoored.

  In the meantime, I needed a source of income. It turns out that having a child has pecuniary obligations you cannot quantify. It’s not about allotting funds for diapers or food or even higher education, but about needing to afford whatever this baby needs, whatever this baby wants, may she have everything I can give her and all the things I can’t.

  Esme wanted to name the baby Roxanne. I demurred but did not press. She wanted to name the baby Ida. Ida Dan? Don’t be absurd. Ida Haas.

  I got a job filing cases for a law firm. They called me a paralegal, but all I did was file. It was a large practice. Corporate and, as far as I could tell, engaged to flout protections of the Hudson River. The office was a tic-tac-toe arrangement of cubicles and hallways. Most days, I came home feeling like mulch.

  Still, I tried to retain this job because we had moved into a house that needed more renovation and repair than was apparent when we bought it. There were loans to pay down. A testy sump pump. Corroding pipes and backyard sludged with overflow from a septic tank twenty years old. The problems were menial, but of the sort I thought typified a young marriage.

  In the meantime, Esme was spending more and more time with Yul, who had been unable to make contact with the Americans on the inside and who, frankly, did not want to. His desire to topple the system from which he had fled was nominal at best. He just wanted to deliver babies in the free world, maybe to have one of his own, and to move on. Esme was appalled and, for being appalled, spiked her blood pressure. The baby was due in two weeks.

  Three days later, I was sitting at my desk, shooting rubber bands at the wall of my cubicle. I’d set up a bull’s-eye of pushpins. I was league champion. Coworker Janice poked her head over the panel divide. She wore silver hoop earrings that slapped her neck.

  I was in low spirits. That morning, I’d found a skein of Esme’s hair atop the shower drain and been disgusted. The feeling passed in a flash, but there was no denying it. I’d been disgusted. By my own wife. The shock of it made me feel woozy, and I pressed my head to the wall tile. And then came a siege of misgiving. All the times I’d pressed my lips to her more delicate nature and not enjoyed it. The way she let her nail polish chip for weeks before reapplication. How, for no reason, she walked on tiptoe. And then, and then, her inability to wash cookware, so that, on mornings I wanted eggs, I’d find the skillet greased in fat. Her toes, which gripped each other during movie night on the couch—have I mentioned how much I didn’t like her toes? And then perhaps the frequency with which she’d begun to say she loved me—perhaps I did not like that, either.

  I’d stayed in the shower so long, my skin had crimped and the water gone cold. But this was nuts, right? That the dream—of marriage, love, togetherness—never accords with practice is a timeless bromide. Even so, I began to query the content of this dream because I had thought it was about Esme. About Esme’s penetrating the horrible isolation that unt
il her had struck me as simply the thing we are all born into. I am not certain what in her made me think love and family were an antidote, but I thought they were, at least until that moment in the shower, at which point I crouched on the mat, drew my knees to my chest, and promised with everything I had to suppress what I’d just come to doubt. I swore to be a good husband and a good father and petitioned God not to smite me for thinking ill of my pregnant wife. I didn’t mean it; I was just scared and stupid and didn’t know better.

  Janice asked if I was going to Ed the custodian’s funeral. He had collided with a tree on Putt Corners Road, the canard being that he’d had a heart attack, though everyone knew he’d done it on purpose. Everyone but Janice. I remember her saying he always seemed so happy and me saying, “Jesus, Janice, misery can be looking you straight in the face, and you’d never know it.”

  She said, “Work is just too boring today—let’s play a game. It’s a drinking game, but I guess we can adapt.” It was called State of the Union. “You have to itemize everything that’s good and bad in your life. You know, talking points. So, you want to play?”

  This was the kind of thing we did at our Helix meetings. But I wasn’t in the mood. “I have to call my wife.”

  “Call her after.”

  I slumped in my chair. “Okay. The good? I’m married to the woman of my dreams, and we’re about to have a baby.”

  “Wow! That’s amazing! But way to sound happy about it.”

  “The bad? I’m married to the woman of my dreams, and we’re about to have a baby.”

  She frowned. “Is that like Nietzsche or something? Everything good is bad? You know Dale in HR? His brother goes to those meetings of yours at the university, so I know the stuff you guys read.”

  “It’s your game,” I said.

  She returned to her side of the panel, so I stood and draped my chin over the ledge. “Okay, wait, maybe this will explain it. Don’t laugh, but all my life, I’ve had this theory about loneliness, that it’s congenital, fundamental, but that you could escape or defeat it. And I thought I had, only now I see I haven’t even come close. And I’m worried it’s not even possible. But forget that. I just have to work harder, redouble my efforts. I think that falls into the good category, right?”

  She had been about to make a call, but now she replaced the phone in the cradle. “I just have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “But it doesn’t sound good at all.”

  “No, no, it’s good. I’m recommitting. I started those meetings a couple years ago, but now I’m going to make them huge. Nationwide.”

  I gave her my best smile. I’d wanted to try out my resolve, to see how it sounded aloud. To find in my speech a nostrum for anxieties fallen to me at that moment, among them my wife, the coming baby, and the fulcrum anxiety of knowing I might run out on them both.

  But Janice was right: It sounded bad.

  I went to the lounge and thought about Ed. If he was desolate inside, could the Helix have helped? Was suicide a more workable option than what I’d been trying to do?

  Then I heard Janice yelling my name from across the floor and getting closer. And something in her voice—I knew what she’d come to say. I jumped behind the couch and got low. Dust bunnies clotted the air vent. I held my breath and waited for her to pass. Then I snuck back to my desk. Six messages on the machine, all from my frantic wife. She was in labor, hurry up.

  That day, I was supposed to speak at an event on campus, and I felt the pull of this event so strongly that every turn I made toward the hospital had to be won from its clutch. The symposium was called “Iraq: Five Years Later.” I was scheduled to speak last on the bill. I would say something about self-interest and question whether we’d have invaded Iraq to protect a place like Singapore, which has almost no natural resources. I would go on this way for a few minutes and then swell the discourse to include matters touching and dire and germane to the malcontent I knew these people were feeling, the organizer in particular. Her name was Marshall. She was well loved by well-meaning people, which meant that, besides feeling isolated and unreachable, she also felt guilty, because, come on, how much love does a person need to feel a part of? What was she doing wrong? Driving to the hospital, I could not have empathized with her more.

  Ida, sweetheart, you were a breech baby. You nearly died from several problems, among them a dislodging of your mother’s placenta and a noosed umbilical cord. There was a C-section. I’m told she stayed awake through the entire procedure, asking for me at intervals of one to two seconds. I’m told she cried and feared for my life, because only a terrible accident could have kept me from her. I was told this by a nurse while Esme slept. I did, after all, get to the hospital, at least to reception, where I counted black diamonds patterned across the floor and tried to will myself to her room.

  The nurse told me you were in an incubator—you were having trouble breathing—but that Esme was awake and asking for me again.

  I said I’d be right there. I had flowers delivered from the lobby florist with a note that said: I’m on my way! And then I did something awful. I left. I raced my car through every yellow in town and got back to campus.

  Marshall gave me a kiss. And I was so relieved to be there with her. For months I’d been telling Marshall about the Helix. That I wanted to believe in this thing to save me from myself. Maybe to save a few other people, too. She said if I was going to be a leader, I’d have to shore up my pitch and make it coherent. Hone my ideas, communicate in story. She said I talked drivel and didn’t have the charisma to hide it. I was, she said, more Koresh than Jim Jones, though we were agreed I was neither.

  The plaza was full, which was insane for February. There were banners and balloons, torchlights and pizza. I started to panic. It would be hours before the horror of abandoning Esme tided over me so that I could not breathe, which meant the distress of the moment was caused by something else. And it was this: Those hundred people in the audience? Their lives could change for hearing me vaunt ideas I barely understood myself. Did I really think the predicament of being alone was soluble? I’d just left my wife and new baby to start their lives together without me for dread of us never being able reach each other, no matter what we said. So I don’t know. I was afraid. Too afraid to test out the very ideas I was about to insist were a retort to loneliness and despair. And yet there I was. Because maybe one in those hundred applauding my name would be less scared than me.

  They introduced me as a social psychologist who lectured nationwide and whose highly anticipated writ on the topic of loneliness would be issued by an eminent and heroic publishing juggernaut in the spring. I glanced at Marshall, who smiled big, and the smile said: In time, these lies will come true, so who cares?

  From the dais, I did not recognize anyone. I found out later that my childhood friend Norman was in the aisle, three rows in, but that he didn’t stay for the whole speech, just long enough to make eye contact with me. Or so he thought, because it wasn’t faces I saw but the same face in every one, of my wife, anguished and alone. And so I started talking about her. I said I worried she was as unknown to me as a stranger in the park. I said that the negative space contoured by our absence in each other’s lives gave shape to what was impossible to shape otherwise but which I could now see with a horror I could barely put into words. What does loneliness look like? So long as my wife was out there, this person I adored, clamoring for me and getting no response, I had a good idea.

  I said, “But this isn’t about me. It’s about us all. Because everywhere and all the time, people are crying out for each other. Your name. Mine. And when you look back on your life, you’ll see it’s true: woke up lonely, and the missing were on your lips.”

  I blinked at the audience, which had been quiet for a while. As I spoke, the antiwar posters had come down like the flag post-death. I’d noticed a few balloons released and bound for paradise. I turned off the mic. The crowd dispersed. I’d say it was funereal except that no one goes into a funeral
expecting to be stoked. This was more like the aftermath of a big loss for the home team.

  Marshall gave me a hug. I told her that my baby was three hours old and that I had to go. She lifted the hem of her T-shirt, and there was a double helix tattooed on the small of her back.

  I rushed to the hospital. This time, Esme had company. I found Norman sitting next to the bed and holding her hand. It was even possible he was trying to explain me. I was stunned but then not, because if Norman was his own season, he came every year.

  I gave him the nod and took her other hand. Kissed her on the forehead and said I’d seen the baby, that she was a marvel. I had not seen the baby, but in my head, I knew I was right.

  Esme’s voice was quiet, and for a second, I thought all would be well. Then she said, “Where were you, Lo?”

  I’d had hours to prepare an answer, but in my will to believe I was not shirking responsibility in the most horrible way, I had refused to accept this moment would come. I looked at Norman. I half expected a miracle to intercede on my behalf. Just give me a minute, let me think.

  Her face was blanched; her hair was matted. I spliced my fingers with hers and thought I’d never loved her more.

  Norman said, “Esme, it’s like I said before: I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I talked Lo into leaving work early and taking a drive with me and the car broke down. We just got back. Lo was just paying the cab.”

  I nodded, restated, embellished, and finally I just wept. I pressed each of her knuckles to my lips and wept. I had escaped discovery—the relief was palpable—and so I wept for this. Norman had secured for me a chance to redress this terrible mistake, and so I wept for that, too. I wept because I knew I would not redress the mistake and, in fact, would do worse in the months to come. My wife loved me, my daughter would love me long before she knew what this meant, and for these travesties I wept most of all.