Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,69

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