BreakupBabe

by Rebecca Agiewich

  It was also a good thing that I’d kept my options open by meeting the doctor. True, he still hadn’t called, but he was busy saving lives, no doubt! Potential faults not withstanding, he was a fine specimen of manhood if ever there was one. “Arm candy” as GalPal #3’s husband, Henry (who was always trying to come up with clever phrases in the hopes of getting quoted in my blog), would call him.

  I put the travel pillow around my neck. Closed my eyes, and deliberately tried to steer my mind away from the Li’l Rockclimbing Spy. I pretended that I was flying to New York on business. That I was going out to meet my agent. Tomorrow we’d be meeting for lunch at a hip Greenwich Village eatery, and then she’d take me “on the rounds” to meet some editors who were interested in my book. Whatever book that might be. In the evening we’d attend a literary gathering where other up-and-coming young writers would be gathered.

  When I got back, the doctor would call me, and we would go someplace quiet yet hip for dinner. Then we’d hit a lively nightspot where we could toss back a few. Heat things up a little. During dinner, I would tell him about my literary adventures in New York. He would look at me in awe and admiration as I talked about the editors I’d met, my agent, the other writers…

  The next time I jerked awake, it was because of a voice over the loudspeaker. “As you can tell, we’ve started our descent into JFK airport.”

  Thank God. I pressed my nose to the window again. Below, in crystalline sunshine, New York was spread out like the sumptuous centerpiece of a children’s storybook. The Hudson River snaked shimmering alongside the city. Speeding through the sky at five hundred miles an hour, destination in sight, I felt like I’d left all my ghosts behind in the night over North Dakota. Sexy Boy. The Li’l Rockclimbing Spy. Loser.

  When I got back to Seattle, I would be a different person. A stronger person. One who wasn’t scared to stand alone on her own two feet. So maybe I was in my midthirties and didn’t have my “whole life” ahead of me anymore. Maybe my biological clock was ticking and the alarm was about to go off. But I wasn’t going to jump willy-nilly into relationships just because I was scared. No, sir!

  “We’ve started our final descent into JFK,” said the captain, whose voice was unreassuringly high-pitched and fey. Nothing like Sexy Boy’s down-home manly drawl. “Flight attendants, please prepare for landing.”

  I was irrationally unafraid of landing. This close to our destination, I figured, we couldn’t crash. As we bumped down through wispy clouds, the plane banked to such a degree that I felt like I was looking at New York from a glass-bottomed boat. As I peered down at the vast metropolis, the theaters, the skyscrapers, the restaurants, the throngs, which doubtlessly contained thousands of men who were just right for me, I knew, without a doubt, that the best in my life was yet to come.

  POST A COMMENT

  I don’t have a moral superiority complex. I’m just always right. Li’l Sis | 10/21/02—8:13 A.M.

  You can’t dump him until you find out the size of his manhood. If it’s big and you still want to dump him, give him my number! Delilah | Homepage | 10/21/02—1:40 P.M.

  Though I hate to ally myself with a stoner, I have to agree with Sexy Boy when he says that youngsters are good “filler.” My last girlfriend was more than eight years younger than me. She was a great person with lots of “potential,” but at our age, there’s not much time for potential, I’m afraid. It’s hard to date someone who doesn’t really know who they are in the world yet.

  El Politico | 10/21/02—8:10 P.M.

  Your plane is not going to crash, but if it does, I get the red couch, right?

  Still Tired of My Furniture | 10/22/02—9:53 A.M.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Crap.

  The rain poured in sheets off the windows of Perkatory, a coffee shop right down the street from my apartment. I stared out at Union Street, laptop on the table in front of me. I’d typed three whole words, then stopped. I felt too awful to even blog. What was the point when I couldn’t tell my readers what was really going on? I so badly wanted to spill it all. Tell my readers everything so they could comfort and advise me, so they could share my sense of outrage and betrayal.

  Well, I could tell them. It would just mean putting my job in jeopardy. But maybe I didn’t want my damn job anyway, I thought, watching pedestrians hurry down the street with newspapers over their heads. What was so great about my fucking job (aside from the high salary, excellent benefits, and flexible work hours)? Especially after what I’d just discovered.

  I watched the rain lash the trees outside. Normally I loved the rain, but I worried it would wash the leaves away before they got to put on their fall display. I’d been waiting for fall ever since the parched, heartbroken days of July. Even if the Northwest autumn couldn’t compare to the obscene fall pageants hosted by snooty states like Vermont, the fall here was still more spectacular than anything I’d seen growing up in California. And now that the oranges and reds had just started to splash the trees, I prayed this storm would not take us directly from the desert of summer to the gray prison of winter.

  I turned my gaze from the window to my empty coffee cup. Perkatory did have good coffee, I had to admit that much. But otherwise it failed to meet my stringent coffeehouse standards. They had uncomfortable chairs, and people watching even worse than Vivace, which at least had obnoxious rock stars to offer. I’d come here only because I didn’t have the energy to drag myself anywhere farther away. I thought about getting a refill, but now even the ten-foot walk to the counter seemed too far. All the life had been sucked out of me yesterday afternoon. Starting with the knock on my office door.

  “Come in!” I sighed and took my headphones off. The Go-Go’s were belting out “We Got the Beat” in a failed attempt to motivate me. Productivity would be delayed at least another twenty minutes now.

  Twelve hours after my return from New York, I hadn’t readjusted to life as a tech-editor drone. The euphoric feeling that gripped me on the descent into JFK infused my entire trip. Even though I spent much of the time alone while my friends worked, I hadn’t felt lonely. Instead, as I strolled around in the honeyed October sunshine, I felt like a hip, independent woman on the verge of a new life. As much as my existence had felt desolate and devoid of hope three months before, New York (with just a dash of Celexa) made it feel full of promise. Every teeming bookstore, every vertiginous skyscraper, all the hot Jewish guys (couldn’t some of them move to Seattle?), made me feel like an adventuress, a writer, a person in the world again.

  Not surprisingly, then, it had been a shock to return to this windowless hole. My life shrank back down from a vast metropolis to tedious black lines on a white page. At least I’d resisted calling the Li’l Rockclimbing Spy so far. I was determined to just let the whole thing go. The passive-aggressive approach wasn’t the most mature, but I wasn’t quite ready to tell him I was ending it. Yet.

  The door opened and my coworker Arthur walked in. Today he had on a painfully bright tie-dyed T-shirt with the words “Forever Grateful, Forever Dead” on it. Arthur wore at least one Dead T-shirt a week. He had 103 of them, he’d told me proudly, when I first met him. The red in this particular shirt coordinated nicely with the red socks he wore under his Birkenstocks.

  “Hello,” he said, walking in and closing the door. Arthur always wore either a very serious look or a very happy look on his face, and today it was the former. It must be Conspiracy Theory Day. Half the time he came to talk to me, it was about a conspiracy that he thought was being conducted against him by the group. On these days, I was sworn to secrecy on average twice per visit: once when he walked in, and once before he left. I wondered if this paranoia had something to do with the copious amounts of hallucinogenics that a Deadhead might have ingested over his lifetime.

  “I have to talk to you about something,” he said, his tone grave. I nodded, trying to look equally grave, wondering what evil doings he would reveal this time. I enjoyed Arthur’s company; he was, after all, the only re
al friend I had at work, but still, his conspiracy theories got old sometimes. He looked around the office suspiciously, searching, I could only suppose, for hidden security cameras.

  Then he looked at me intently, his eyes big and blue behind his John Lennon glasses. “I know you’ve been worried about what might be going on with”—he gestured with his head in the direction of Loser’s office—“and I don’t want to stress you out unnecessarily. Because what I have to tell you might mean nothing at all.” Arthur was one of the few people on the team who knew Loser and I had been a couple. I hadn’t confided to anyone else about the breakup.

  My heart lurched. I took my headphones from around my neck and placed them on the desk. Across the hall, an obnoxious program manager was yelling into his speakerphone, broadcasting his conversation about “bits” and header files for the entire hallway to hear. I looked at Arthur, not nodding, not saying anything. I felt myself grow strangely calm. My computer whirred in the background. I was like a patient waiting for the doctor’s diagnosis, when I already knew what he was going to say. Malignant.

  He paused. Took a breath. Then said, “I saw Loser and Theresa running together.” The first thought that struck me on hearing this was She runs? Theresa seemed like the nonathletic type. Oh, I could see her daintily walking the treadmill at the gym, wearing a pair of tacky pink five-hundred-dollar sweats, but running outside? Where dirt or bugs might get on her?

  Then a strangled laugh escaped me. Of course. Running! Had Loser not seduced me that way, with all our runs around the Empire grounds? Had he not then disposed of me that way too? He was like a serial killer. Jack the Jogger. I could only hope he would destroy and dispose of her in an equally brutal manner.

  Arthur raised his eyebrows. Then he continued. “I just thought you should know about this because you said Theresa had been acting strangely toward you, and”—he looked around my empty office again and lowered his voice almost to a whisper—“I’m worried that this could affect your review.”

  “Right,” I said. After my first inappropriate reaction, I now felt nothing. Numb. I flashed back to a time just before I’d gotten my job in this group. Loser was describing a managers’ lunch he’d been to, where he’d been seated next to Theresa (whom, at that point, I had never met). “She’s such a bitch,” he’d told me. “Not to mention, she’s an incompetent manager. I don’t know how she got to be a vice president.” He’d paused here. Dug around in his memory for more dirt. “Did you know she’s only twenty-eight and has been married twice? The first one lasted a year, and the second one lasted six months. She got divorced only a few months ago!”

  I should have seen his snotty gossip for what it was. Lust. Back then, though, I never would have suspected my adoring boyfriend of actively coveting another woman. After all, hadn’t he told me many times that I was the “most beautiful woman he’d ever known”?

  Then I felt them. The tears. All of a sudden they were pushing at the back of my eyes, desperate to get out. Humiliation washed over me. I wanted Arthur out of my office. Immediately.

  “Are you all right?” asked Arthur.

  “No,” I wanted to say. “NO, I AM NOT ALL RIGHT! HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE ALL RIGHT?”

  Instead I said, in a tight voice, “What do you think I should do? Should I talk to Lyle?” I tried to sound icy. To feel icy. But the tears were jostling one another at the starting line.

  “No, don’t do that,” Arthur said quickly. He distrusted anyone in management, especially our manager, Lyle. Lyle, he had previously informed me (after swearing me to secrecy), was nothing but a “corporate toadie.”

  Arthur continued. “You need to get a clear head first before you do anything.” The decisiveness in his voice irritated me. “Besides, they were just running together. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  If he told me to meditate on it, I was going to kick him.

  “Maybe you should—”

  “Oh my God,” I said, looking down at my watch, my voice high and false. “I have to go to a meeting right now!” Suddenly, I needed, more than anything, to be out of this seething den of deception and lust.

  He looked at me with concern. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Fine. Great! Never better!” The kind tone in his voice made me want to weep. I stood up abruptly. He stood too.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said, my voice shaking. Then I grabbed my coat and cell phone and stumbled down the hall, where I half hoped to run into Loser or Theresa so I could tell them exactly what I thought of them. Who cared about my stupid review? My life was ruined anyway. But neither of them appeared, and in thirty seconds, I was outside in the buttery fall sunshine—a perfect October day in Seattle.

  I had nowhere to go and no plan, but at least I was out of that office. For a moment, I was disoriented. I turned in three different directions with tears cascading down my face. Empire was so vast, so sprawling. With perfect landscaping, complete with waterfalls, winding paths, and flowers that never died, but were whisked away in the night to be replaced by other flowers in full bloom by a phalanx of Central American gardeners.

  A breeze gusted, blowing red leaves into the parking lot of Building B40. My head cleared. I was facing east, toward the Rolands Human Resources building, home of Wendii and her fellow human resources clones. They’d probably like to hear this story, wouldn’t they? Their little ears would perk up, their perfectly manicured nails would tap nervously on their photo-covered desks (smiling Aryan fiancés and cherubic toddlers) as I told my story without emotion, just the facts:

  My boss is fucking my ex-boyfriend, you motherfuckers. Not only that, she’s HIS boss too! Now DO something about it!

  I walked, fast, and then faster, before breaking into a jog—as if it were possible to outrun all the images now spinning in my brain.

  A crack of thunder rattled the windows in Perkatory. Someone gasped. The three patrons in the place looked at one another. Smiled in a goofy and embarrassed way to acknowledge their weather wimpiness. The screen on my laptop flickered off, then on again. I lost the blog entry I’d been writing, but since there were only three words, it didn’t matter much. I looked back out the window, where the rain pelted the glass like bullets. Such different weather from yesterday, when the sunshine had mocked me in my misery!

  In the end, I hadn’t gone to HR. Instead, I’d paused for breath in a basketball court set in a small grove of trees and called my mother, who’d advised me to get a grip on myself.

  “Yes, this situation sucks, but you do NOT want to put your job in danger,” she said. My whole family had been thrilled when I’d finally “settled down” with a full-time job at Empire. My father, had he been alive, would have been cautiously happy about it, although worried about what would happen to my creative side. “Don’t ever become a technical editor,” he’d warned me once. “It’s too boring.” (He himself had been a technical editor.) My father was always torn between his desire for me to have a safe, stable life and his desire for me to climb the highest mountains and suffer for my Art.

  “It’s not fair,” I sobbed on the phone. “HR should know about this! It’s a conflict of interest!”

  “I know,” she said, trying to sound soothing. Her words, however, did not soothe me. My poor mother was usually the first on the firing line when a crisis occurred. I’d call her in tears, begging for advice, then immediately shoot her ideas down in a fit of anger. “But they have way more seniority than you.”

  “FUCK seniority!” I sobbed even harder. As the firstborn, I had a very well-developed sense of self-righteousness and justice. Don’t touch that, it’s mine! Don’t mess with me. I’ll tell! I’d never learned to fly under the radar like my sister. To exact my revenge in subtle ways.

  But I knew my mother was right. And that “fair” was a meaningless term. Had it been fair that my father had gotten his first heart attack at age thirty-three, and a heart transplant at forty-three? Was it fair that my mom had
to become his caretaker and watch his health slowly fail for the last five years of his life, when they should have been traveling and doing all the things they loved together? THAT wasn’t fair. This, in comparison, was peanuts. But I couldn’t let it go. Not yet. Not right now.

  On the other end, my mother was silent. I was sitting on a bench facing the empty basketball court. Sunlight filtered in through the surrounding trees and a few birds chirped their happiness about this little bit of Empire-sponsored paradise. I’d sought out this bench before because of its secluded location, but the basketball court had often been occupied during the summer. If Empire was really thinking of its employees, they would offer a little area just for people who needed to throw themselves on the ground and weep.

  “At least think it over,” said my mother, finally. “Don’t do anything right now. Okay? Sleep on it and see how you feel tomorrow.”

  I looked longingly over in the direction of the HR building. It was not in my nature to wait. When I was angry about something, I liked to vent immediately. Then the anger passed and I didn’t hold a grudge. This, I’d realized in the midst of The Great Unpleasantness, had been a major issue between Loser and me. He’d been too thin-skinned to handle my angry venting, and, unlike me, he held grudges. By the time I understood this dynamic, his massive two-year-old grudge had already caused him to cheat on me and throw our relationship out the window. Now, apparently, it had caused him to start fucking my vice president. His VP too! Man, if it was all true, I really had some dirt on them.