Irretrievable Breakdown

The taxi ride to my apartment is usually very quiet. I get in, tell the driver my address, and fifteen minutes later I'm there. I come in quietly, I lie down quietly, and I sleep if I can—at least until my phone rings again.

Tonight is not the usual.

Right now there is a very giggly girl in the taxi beside me. Carla Mencia is giggly because … well, she's generally happy. She's also very tipsy right now. And I'm not sure if I should blame her for her state of drunkenness, or if I should blame my ex for giving her such a strong cocktail. Carla's tiny. She shouldn't have had 6 oz. of liquor on a near-empty stomach no matter how much she begged.

Carla is currently very huggy. Which is interesting considering how much she dislikes me when she's sober.

Oh, sure, she plays it off, more or less, but her disdain always comes shining through. Sometimes she's trying to rush me out of the bar, sometimes she ignores me completely, sometimes she's happily encouraging any sign of a relationship between myself and my coworker Eric. I suppose if the circumstances were different, I'd be offended by her behavior. As things stand now, though, I can't feel anything for her but pity. She's so young and naïve. And I see a lot of my old self in her.

"Are you sure about this?" Vic asked as all three of us stumbled from the bar—him on the left, me on the right, and Carla dangling in the middle, singing in Portuguese. "She can take care of herself when she's drunk, y'know. You don't have to chaperone her."

"Trying to spare me?" I asked with a smile. "Don't worry, Vic. I'm a big girl, I can make my own decisions. And truthfully, Carla and I need a little time for some girl talk without you around."

"… oh, so I'm in the way. I see where I stand."

"You currently appear to be standing in a puddle of god-knows-what. I think you should close up for the night."

"Sure thing, boss."

"… mas eu te amo, Victor …"

Oh dear. Portuguese was not one of my known languages, but I could understand a woman moaning "I love you" regardless. As the taxi slows to a halt and idles, I pay the driver and gently help Carla out of the back. She's shaking all over, she can hardly stand. Why in the world is she wearing those horrible four-inch heels?

"… where am I?" she murmurs. "This isn't my place."

"No, it's mine."

"Why'd you bring me over?" she slurs, but takes my arm when I offer. I lead the way to the elevator. Fortunately there's a car already waiting for us.

"Well, Carla, I've always said that I wanted to be friends with you. And I do. Really."

At this, she starts giggling again. "Friends? … that's silly. We can't be friends, we're rivals!"

"… rivals?" I reach out for her; the upward motion of the elevator is making her sway. She doesn't seem to notice now, but she'll notice if she hits the floor.

The whine in her voice is absolutely piteous. "Yes! Rivals! Why can't you drink at another bar? Why can't you be with Eric, like you're supposed to be? Why would a genius accountant like a stupid bartender anyway?"

I half-expect her to pull away, but she doesn't. I look at her, just to reassure myself that she hasn't lost consciousness. She hasn't. She's just crying.

"Everyone said you'd dumped him and moved on. And everyone told me that he'd be heartbroken … and I knew I could help him heal. But it's not true … he doesn't want anything to do with me… and it's because of you, isn't it?"

She falls silent. I continue to hold her up as the elevator creeps up to floor 9. I carefully walk Carla to my unit, continue to hold on to her until I can turn on some lighting, and finally set her down on the loveseat directly in front of the fireplace. She looks around the semi-lit room, her hair falling into her face. "This is … a really nice place."

"Glad you think so. I'm rarely ever here, maybe that's why it's so nice at the moment. Would you like a glass of water?"

"Yeah … yeah."

I hurry to get the water. I have a very real fear that Carla may vomit or pass out before I can get back to her. But she's doing neither when I return; she's staring at the dormant firebox, half-smiling. I have to touch her hand with the chilled glass to make her look up.

"Oh … sorry … "

"Don't worry." I gesture to the fireplace. "Would you like for me to turn that on?"

She nods, so I do. I sit at the far end of the loveseat and we watch the blue flames leap from the glass tiling in the small firepit. The light sends wispy shadows all over Carla's skin. She's a lovely girl, I muse to myself. Being sad doesn't suit her at all.

"Desree."

"Hmm?"

"Why did you dump Vic if you didn't want to let him go?"

I sigh. "That's a good question. A very good question. Well, even though we're rivals, I suppose I owe you an explanation … as a friend.

"Have you ever heard of the term 'irretrievable breakdown?' … no, I guess not. It specifically refers to a dissolution of a marriage. It indicates to a court that neither party has any further interest in trying to repair what went wrong.

"I know you've heard a lot of rumors about Vic and his love life, Carla, but have you ever noticed that none of the rumors mention me? That's because I never talked to anyone about what was going on between the two of us. As much as I like both Mark and Sheila, I didn't want my relationship to be like theirs, something that any random drunk in the area felt like they had the right to weigh in on. I told myself that it was solely between Vic and me, and no one else needed to know. Love can be selfish, in that way.

"But of course word got out. Maybe it was my expense reports that gave me away. After all, the only thing I ever charge on my corporate card is whisky—and I guess it must look kind of strange to see an expense report full of nothing but $17 charges, all from the same bar. Maybe Vic said something in front of the wrong person and it just spread. Maybe someone saw us together. Who knows.

"It's funny, how knowing a little information suddenly makes people feel like they have the right to know more and more. People who had never spoken to me about anything were coming up to me and asking me questions. The most personal, invasive, rude questions you can imagine. How often did we do it? What positions did we like best? How big was he? Had we done it in public? … things that you wouldn't tell your average friend, let alone a complete stranger."

I stopped and shook my head. Even the memory still had the power to make me flush with shame. "Overnight, every bit of respect I'd earned at J&M went down the drain. My MBA? Worthless. All of my hard work? Didn't matter. I was dating a bartender, that was enough to make me into the office bimbo.

"I still don't know what I should have done then, but I can tell you what I shouldn't have done. I shouldn't have poured myself into my job to try to prove a point to people who didn't matter—do you want some more water?"

"Could I have something a little stronger, please?" Carla's voice seems a little shaky.

In the end, all I could scrape together was a bottle of cola, a remnant of silver rum, and a little whisky, darkened with age. Carla stirred up a Cuba Libre for herself and a whisky/coke for me. Her drinks taste good, significantly better than what I can prepare for myself. I thanked her, took a swallow to steady myself, and let out a long breath. This next part was going to be the worst. I still couldn't talk about it without tearing up.

"We knew from the beginning that we didn't have much in our favor to make it work. We had so little in common, not even a work schedule. We didn't talk about a lot, and our talks weren't the kind of talks that you have when you're fighting to make a relationship last. They weren't the hard talks that let you get it all out there and keep you up all night because you've got to work things out. They were too easy. 'How was your day? Did you like the shirt I bought you? What did you have for lunch? Are there any movies out that you want to see?' … stuff like that. Life was hard enough on us both. I didn't want to make things any more complicated.

"But it seemed like, no matter how hard I tried to keep it simple, it just didn't work, somehow. Things didn't get complicated, they just began to break down. I made it so easy that after a while there was nothing at all for either of us. No words, no conflict, no heat, no passion. We had no way to reach each other any more, and he began to slip away, physically and emotionally. If he wasn't working, he was riding. Alone.

"I couldn't blame him, of course. How could I be jealous of his motorcycle when I was hardly even home? And it's only now that I'm realizing that he wasn't riding out of love, he was doing it to get me to notice that he wasn't around. And I missed it. I missed everything he was trying to say to me …"

I look at the glass, startled to find that I had gone through all of the liquid without even realizing it and that there was little left other than melting ice. I set the tumbler down. The next breath I took was a half-sob. Carla was watching me now, her own drink untouched.

"Carla … I used to come home at 4 a.m., and fall asleep right there on that couch, right where you're sitting. And sometime between night and morning, Vic would come over and undress me. At first I thought it was a seduction, and it used to really annoy me. Then I slowly came to realize that it was nothing like that. He was hanging up my suits and steaming them so that no one at my job would realize that I had spiraled so far out of control that I was sleeping in my work clothes. He was trying to take care of me. And I never once thanked him for it or told him how grateful I was for him doing it.

"One night I laid down as usual, and … I woke up still in my suit. And I was too in shock to really understand it, until I realized that his toothbrush was gone. And his helmet was gone from the coat rack. And …"

Carla's face is going blurry now.

"And then what did you do?" Carla asked faintly.

"The same thing I've always done when faced with disappointment—I threw myself into my job and worked harder. And guess what it got me?"

"Promoted."

"Exactly. To a branch in Hong Kong." I laugh. It sounds bitter and wrong.

"I'm sure you already know that I turned down a promotion once. In the business world, there aren't a lot of those to go around, so if you refuse a promotion, it's very possible you might not be offered another for a long time." I stare at my hands. "The first time, I refused for love. The second time … well, what was there to refuse for?

"So I accepted the second promotion, and when I told Vic that I was moving in a month, he said 'Okay,' and didn't even look at me. And I moved and he wasn't there at the airport to say goodbye, and I honestly thought that was the end of us. I was as surprised as anyone when he came to Hong Kong two weeks later. But even though he had flown a thousand miles, the words we spoke couldn't bridge the distance between us.

"You asked me how I could dump Vic when I still had feelings for him. I've asked myself that same question, every day. Maybe we should have tried harder. Maybe we should have had a big blow-up in the middle of downtown Hong Kong and gotten it all out there. But this is what we ended up with, and now we're stuck with it. And there aren't any words that can fix what happened between Vic and me, in any case. The only language we mutually speak is whisky.

"That's why I keep coming back to Oasis, Carla. That's why I've never tried to find another bar. And that's why Vic makes drinks for me that no one else ever orders. Because I want to talk to him and he wants to talk to me. And even though our words are never enough, we are talking to each other, the only way we know how."

I look at Carla, wondering how she has taken my meaning. But she isn't looking at me anymore.

The following evening, I went back to Oasis around 9 p.m. The bar was strangely quiet—not even the sound of music wafted from its underground entrance. As I approached, the door flew open and Carla came rushing out, wearing her coat. Her makeup was streaked and her eyes were an ugly shade of red. She didn't have to say a word. I already knew what had happened. She looked at me once, and ran off into the night.

"Carla!" I called to her fleeing back. "Carla, are we still friends?"

There was no answer.