Woke Up Lonely (28 page)

14. I went to the pub. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the negotiator. What was he talking about? Why so down on the new orders? Why so emasculated? I decided to flush my mind with the night air and get ready to listen again. I would block out everything I’d translated already, home in on the rest, and find meaning in the carnage of this guy’s self-esteem.

I went to the cave, which is what we called a mostly neglected listening room in the basement. You went there primarily to do what I had in mind, which was to recue a tape and try again.

15. The door was unlocked, and inside were four cryptanalysts I’d seen around but never talked to. They were gathered at a work-station-turned-bar and were playing cards. I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me, though I was glad for the company. It’s true I kept to myself and that I
liked
reclusion, but this did not militate against the loneliness of just breathing in and out and all the other fundamentals you do alone each day.

I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up.
Okay, now pay attention.
I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third time to parse content from emotion. By the sixth listen, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and thought: Listen.

16. Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just say it: they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker or spin-the-bottle, just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another. I went back to the tape. I knew that this was important and that if I missed something big, I’d get fired, and that I was running out of time. And so, wouldn’t you know it, the tension that should have spurred me on to greater facility instead began to manifest in a libidinal stir whose accomplice was the knob of denim pressed against my vulva. Under the circumstances, orgasm didn’t seem like the worst idea, albeit rough, given the knob of denim and on this occasion it being the cave at a tracking base in the middle of the desert, where—what do you know—two of the four, the two who were boys, had found their way to each other.

17. I’d seen this on TV, the phenomenon that is boys kissing, and felt then that my interest was anthropological. Here, too, minus the part where I could stare without offense. I was unclear if in the dawn of an orgy—because I was pretty sure that was what I was looking at—
staring
is ever met with offense, but what did I know? I tried to get back to work. I tried to listen to my Korean guy, in whose mewling hung the balance of war with the U.S., and to silence my screaming vulva, because the boys had moved on to the girl—her name was Morgan, and since when does a girl named Morgan let two boys touch her at once? And frankly, why was no one touching me? I was wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt with Tinker Bell in flight over the castle, jeans with an elastic waist, and clogs. Nothing says
I am a frozen bread loaf
better than clogs, but come on, was this a discerning orgy?

Well, fine. If I got orgied, I’d also get an STD, so lucky for me no one was noticing me panting across the cave. Why couldn’t I understand what the negotiator was saying? Why couldn’t I penetrate his wounded feelings? If I got fired and had to go home, I’d hang myself from the showerhead, never mind the war that would be my albatross for life. Where was the justice in that? I was just some girl from Anaheim with a crush on her parents, a brother in a coma, and no talent for intimacy with anyone who mattered.

18. That night was a lesson learned: there’s the erotics of a woman who feels so miserable and wrecked and anxious and sad that she will get on her knees and let four people have at her with varying degrees of rupture and bliss, and then there’s everything else. I unplugged my headphones and let the tape feed through the wall speakers. None of them minded the Korean, and so it was as though his voice kept my head in quarantine while the rest of me went to town. Who took off my clothes? Had I ever kissed a girl? Were ministrations lavished with judicious regard for people’s feelings and self-esteem? Are these the questions that spring to mind? We were five; it was exhausting. Labor intensive. You gave up what you got, were debased and exalted, and also profligate in the disport of your limbs so that they might land anywhere and on anything, and sometimes on the volume button of your listening console, so that just as one guy cums (and on your forehead, because you are not, after all, a porn star and can’t even catch rain in a storm), you suddenly understand loud and clear what your Korean negotiator is saying: “I am not a man, my shame is paramount”—in short, the DPRK will bow its head and
freeze its nuclear program
in exchange for light water reactors.

19. A major concession. If the U.S. knew this ahead of time, they could call off Carter—Carter, who was making the administration look impotent and ridiculous, calling in an ex-president to negotiate for them. God, I felt good.
Alive
. And I was slick with the proof. My thighs were wet, my lips and hands, so that when I went for the tape, hit Eject, I don’t know, my finger slipped and the tape jammed. Got caught halfway. Worse, I had done the horrible but corner-cutting thing of using the original tape—a dupe took days—which meant the only way to recoup the information was to keep hitting Eject until the button jammed as well. I knew that we shredded transcripts and that we had an entire building filled with tubs of acid to dissolve paper, but also that maybe we were not above dissolving the linguist who screwed up big-time.

20. Morgan was threading her legs through spandex, snatching her accoutrements—bra, earrings, pink panties—and bolting for the door. The others almost clotted in the doorway for how fast they were trying to get out. I put on my clothes. Things in my body felt misplaced, but there was no time to get cleaned up. I went to my boss’s quarters and briefed him on what I knew. Did I have the tape? Sort of. The cave reeked of jizz and sweat, the smell defying what meager perfumes I’d levied against it. My boss snapped the tape trying to get it out, and I was redeployed.

21. Back in the States, I knew a few CIA guys and went to them for help. The help was not forthcoming. They said I’d have to start from the bottom. Apply. Spend a year at
the farm
, which was a training center in Virginia, and after that, who knew, maybe I’d get assigned to a country of note, like South Korea or China, but just as easily I could end up translating again, and this time at Meade, in that horrible glass box south of Baltimore. So forget that. Communications intelligence had its limits; I wanted to be on the ground.

22. So: no work, though I did keep up with the news. The Agreed Framework brokered by the Carter meeting—which went off okay, I guess—would get signed soon enough, though the agreement would not last long, the North refusing to accept light water reactors from the South under the aegis of—who knows?—the bad karma of furnishing your house with the enemy’s loveseat. Also, like anyone believed the North would actually abandon its nuclear pursuits. The upshot? Kim Il-sung almost dead, his pansy son ready to go, and me working in Anaheim at a Korean bar just to keep up with the vernacular. What kind of career trajectory was this? Sigint to dive bar?

23. I didn’t take any money from my parents until years later when I had to care for Ida on my own. Instead, I just lived with them. It was not a good time. I had come back from Australia changed. Still secretive and cross, but training these qualities to serve new goals. Because, one thing I noticed at the bar? The white guys who came in for karaoke were actually coming in for me. To chat me up and take me home. The meaner I was to them, the more solicitous they got. And I liked it.

24. For six months, all I did was have sex. If a week went by without action, I’d find myself staring at people on the street, men
or
women, and imagining them bent over or me just nuzzling my way up their thighs. I had no profession, no friends, and at twenty-seven, my greatest ambition was to wedge my body into places it had never been before. Every day, to work, the store, the
mall
, I wore crotchless thongs and shelf bras. Neither served a purpose—I had no breasts, and if I was manifesting arousal in the way some women do,
crotchless
panties were no kind of basin—and so these garments were all about alerting my skin to possibility. Know why I couldn’t save enough money for a security deposit on an apartment? I blew it all on toys. And gear. Leather is expensive. A PVC slave harness costs $200, and this
without
the cuffs or chains. Take that, Vicki—I was raw in my day.

Still, I could abuse a guy for hours or get put in the stockade myself, but neither defined my needs. Femmes, doms, tops, bottoms, I wanted to be them all. But I was not confused. The psychology of my behavior was too glaring and trite for me to be confused. When you grow up neglected by the people you love most, it tramples your self-esteem, and when you are adult enough to stop blaming them, you end up blaming yourself, which means,
wamu!
even less self-esteem. And so, two models of conduct: (1) I lorded over men because I wanted to recover what self-regard was taken from me, and in this model, all men were the same man; (2) I wanted to be misused because this treatment squared with my self-regard, and sometimes it’s just good to harmonize what you deserve with what you get. In the grammar of both models, low self-esteem ranked as subject and verb, and so I guess I knew exactly what I was: a woman with no self-esteem.

25. Hurt, hurt. When you sign up for hurt, hurt is what you get. I’d promise myself to stop. Every day, I’d promise. And then I’d go to work, watch the corn cheese resolve under my fingernails, and five hours later wake up with one guy down my throat and another up the rear. Roofies? Course not. Just a campaign of self-destruction, deaf, dumb, and blind.

We all do this, right? Blame ourselves for the wrong thing? My brother? The coma? Our fight not two minutes before he cracked his head on a fiberglass plate?

The bar got busy. More and more, guys started coming in from the poles. Guys with wedding bands. Guys with pregnant wives, first kid, second, third. Guys who worked for people who worked for other people who were not so keen on the consolidating ethic of a young man I used to know as a kid. According to these people, the country was given over to a liberal agenda that had colonized the White House for way too long. This young man from Anaheim was an affront. And considerably easier to take out. Need a job, Esme? Tired of your body’s trade in extremities? Yes? Then go bring me something on this man. His name is Thurlow Dan.

26. It was not a chance encounter, a left turn when I should have gone right; it was exactly as planned, the guy I’d crushed on for five minutes in elementary school, sort of awkward and sad, biggest virgin I ever saw, Thurlow Dan, the pudgy kid, standing on the corner. Only you weren’t so pudgy anymore—a study in alchemy if I ever saw one—but the memory was still there. A funicular over Disneyland. A camping trip in the Angeles National Forest. Glowworms in the leaf litter and a boy silhouetted against the sky, telling stories. Little moments nostalgia does not have to extol, because they were already nice to begin with.

27. I had a plan, and it was this: Do your job, do not have sex. For this plan, I wore a light blue sweater with white plastic buttons down the front, enough to make tedious any effort to undo them, and Keds. White leather Keds. I came to a stop sign. You were at the post. Svelte, almost gangly, and so awkward in your bearing, it was hard to take. In the movies, women like me pity the inexperienced and see in the vanilla putty of lust something to mold and color and fashion. But it’s not really like that. Boys who paw all over you or wait to be told what to do, who cannot find your better parts or your any parts, they are ages twelve to twenty; they are sweet and certainly sweeter than the monsters they often become, but they are not for me. So I was certain that I would not have sex that day, and maybe, on one’s day’s abstinence, I could build another. And from there rebuild a life worth having.

28. We drove into town; I don’t think you said anything the whole way. You sat in my car with hands clutched in your lap. I remember strings of hair playing across your face when I downed the windows. I remember you closing your eyes when the sun came in and squinting when it didn’t.

At the restaurant, we sat outside on a patio under a sun umbrella. It had a wedge pattern, yellow and mint green, and the table wobbled for need of a matchbook you stuffed underfoot. Even now I have to ask why I remember these details—as though I already knew then that this dreamy boy would compass all the unhappy days of my life to come.

And that’s how I still think of you. The boy who dreams.

29. I tried to play catch-up. What had you been doing all these years? You skipped the details, went right for the pitch. From the look of it, the way you were pulled out from the table and sitting with legs crossed at the knee, there was little chance you were addressing me. But I was rapt. The day was getting on, and it seemed that all around you was light, warm and flattering. You said you were so alone. That we all were. And, just listening to you, I was bowed down to the candor of people in pain. To people in solitude—imperious and urgent—and to your claim that we get so few chances to tender empathy as consolation for the trials of our epoch, but that you were looking for these chances every day.

30. I called for the waiter. We ordered gourmet pizzas—all white for you, shrimp and goat cheese for me—but as I ate, I felt my cheeks flush and wizen. My throat, too. Even my teeth started to parch. There was the water in my glass and yours, and three glasses after that, and still it was like trying to wet steel. You figured I was allergic to shellfish, and wanted to call an ambulance because people died from this allergy, it was worse than peanuts. And remember I said no, that I was fine? But the look on your face was tragic, and in your eyes was the desuetude of a life without me. I know it’s strange, but already I could see the wasteland you saw for yourself, more comprehensive than anywhere I’d thought it possible for a man’s loss to take hold.