“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 until 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.”