Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,106

so, North Korea, which probably had some explaining to do re: our guys MIA from the war. Unlikely as it sounds, this baker had already made nice with the Vietnamese U.N. mission—he’d gotten them hooked on shortcake—so they facilitated contact, and soon enough, North Korea’s ambassador to the U.N. was eating red velvet cream pies at J.T.’s place.

40. Not long after, I started going there, too. And you know how it is when you’re a new mom and your husband’s sleeping with other women and you feel fat because you are fat, and unwanted because you are unwanted, and all the love that child and husband have taken from your vault is so accessorized with hurt, it barely looks like love—you know how that constellates into adulterous behavior of your own? So, yes, one second you are eating vanilla sponge cake with lychee buttercream, and the next you are panty-ankled on the stove top. So, yes, I went to Corona. I met J.T. I went once, twice, many times after that. And it wasn’t like you noticed, because how much were you home?

41. The bakery was by Shea Stadium, where it’s all chop shops and drug fronts. It had stone-wall siding and a shingled mansard roof. A cupcake weather vane and a big old American flag twenty feet up. Inside were framed photos of J.T. with Important Asians and with the relief pitching rotation for the Mets. He had been to North Korea with various businessmen. When he got there, they’d loaded him in the rear with sodium pentothal. Years later, when I heard tell of your plans to go—I intercepted an email Isolde sent her mom: Look, Mom, one woman’s cult is another’s Fulbright—I knew they’d do the same to you if not worse.

42. You might be wondering what the Baker has to do with anything. I’ll tell you. In 1996, when a submarine ran aground at Kangnung and released almost thirty North Korean commandos whose mission might be to terrorize Seoul; when the North needed to apologize for the incident because they had been busted, though they absolutely did no want to apologize; when the Agreed Framework between the North and the U.S. to denuclearize this most volatile and strange state was under threat; the navigating of these parlous waters somehow fell to J.T., who let it be known that the North might possibly have seven American POWs they might possibly be willing to send home, provided everyone forgot about the sub/commando incident. Seven POWs? Three of whom might be my soldiers?

Not surprisingly, then, I got a call: Go heavy with the Baker. At the time, Ida was just learning to talk. Though it wasn’t like she was saying either one of our names. Her first word was Lou, for the stuffed alligator she slept with. So the call could not have come at a better time; it gave me the chance to dwell on less hurtful things. We moved into the back room of J.T.’s shop. He knew I was Agency, but he didn’t much care. He went about his life. He would sit with the ambassador, the minister, and company, and since the banquette was bugged, I’d nurse Ida and listen in, and listen harder when they spoke Korean, which they often did, since the guys liked to keep J.T. insecure about how well he was trusted. I ate a lot of pie. And because J.T. didn’t really want us there—he was already seeing a woman in the kitchen who would strafe my arms with hot lard and go, Oops!—he put me on dish duty seven days a week. The composition of this food began to resolve in my veins. I had trouble waking up, I was tired all the time, and, for the way my breast milk started to taste, Ida deprived me of my one calorie-cutting exercise. She started to throw up my milk and then to refuse it altogether.

43. I did not have a new place to live, but only because I wasn’t ready to look. I’d have to start over. Send Ida to safety. Recommit to my work and stay away from you. If I went back, I’d have told you everything and put us all at risk. And I was done hurting. Enough.

But I was also running out of time. Ida was cranky or teething or maybe she just had heartburn. Whichever the case, she wailed with a frequency that, in the abstract, was admirable for its allegiance to habit but