“I shouldn’t have let it go this far.”

It was a strange thing to say and an even stranger place to say it.

“It” hadn’t gone anywhere. Certainly not in the sense that she meant. And if you’re a woman pre-confessing to future indiscretions, you don’t do it on an internal company G-chat.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t distressed by her on-the-record acknowledgement that we were flirting with some sort of disaster. I’d spent the previous decade — to then my entire adult life — engaged in a series of increasingly dicey business ventures with escalatory stakes. In the context of hazardous complots to which I’d been a party, a nascent Manhattan office romance didn’t register as especially risky.

If anything, her message — sent from a cubicle close enough to my desk I could’ve heard her type it had my door been open and were it somehow distinguishable from the undifferentiated din of office keyboard clacking — was gratifying. Independent verification that my various conceits and egotisms weren’t misplaced. Nothing gladdens the vain quite like that.

I wasn’t her boss. She was a mid-level ad executive and I was… well, it’s complicated. I had a title (the rough equivalent of a junior VP), a job description and a set of performance metrics for which I was ostensibly responsible. But everyone in that 42nd Street office saw me for exactly what I was: The New York eyes and ears of the company’s co-CEO, who was based overseas and only visited three or four times a year.

In a company of hundreds, at least a dozen of whom were my on-paper corporate superiors, I was accountable only to him. That made my relationship with the New York office’s two senior executives (a VP of ad sales and her boss) somewhat tricky. I could’ve thrown a chair through a window and there wouldn’t have been a single thing they could do about it. I didn’t abuse the situation. Until I did.

I was “cutting back” on drinking at the time. “Cutting back” just meant switching from hard liquor to hard seltzer, which was gaining popularity on its way to becoming a full-on fad. I made the switch after waking up one morning to a follow-up email from a client call I didn’t remember. “Great chatting,” said the client. A colleague who apparently participated seconded the sentiment. I checked my phone log. An hour and a half at half past eight. At the office, I probed the colleague for clues about the nature of the call trying not to let on I had no recollection of it. He gave no indication I’d embarrassed myself, but then he wasn’t the type who would’ve told me if I had.

The problem with the hard seltzer switch was straightforward: When you’re an alcoholic, a committed one, it’s difficult to get drunk on anything other than liquor. My crash pad was a one-bedroom apartment in tower one of what’s now a two-building residential development at Ridge Hill, near Yonkers. There’s a Whole Foods in the adjacent shopping mall, and I’d go there every evening and buy a cart full of BON & VIV. Back then, it was just called SpikedSeltzer. (I knew the Bonnie and Vivian mermaids intimately half a decade before a 2019 Super Bowl ad made them famous.)

Getting drunk on SpikedSeltzer by itself was wildly inefficient, so I got creative: I spiked the spike with diphenhydramine. ZzzQuil turned the crisp, clear seltzer into a purply syrup. Six of those was usually enough to give me the same buzz as a fifth of liquor, and without the unwanted loss of inhibition. Mission accomplished. Except the grogginess from the diphenhydramine made the next day an aggravated fog. As my bad luck would have it, the company was being sued just then by a celebrity hedge fund manager. As the only New York-based employee who didn’t work in ad sales, I had to answer all the media inquiries and there were a lot of them there for a while.

“Surreal” doesn’t quite capture it. Not two years previous, I was working on a political science Master’s thesis and moonlighting as a successful racketeer in a third-tier city 300 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The butterfly effect’s a helluva thing. A mostly unremarkable argument with an accomplice was the wing flap. 20 months later, I landed in midtown, silencing calls from name brand bylines while cosplaying a young professional. (“Do you need to take that?” someone assigned to my table wondered, during a banquet-style awards luncheon at Cipriani 42nd. “No, it’s just Sorkin again.”)

By the time my incipient office fling accompanied me on a road trip to speak to students on behalf of the company at her undergrad alma mater, I’d stopped drinking entirely. I even had a Post-it note on my refrigerator door in Ridge Hill with a jail-style unary tally marking sober days. I was up to 16 when we left. I was up to 19 when we got back.

How I marshaled the discipline not to drink on that excursion I don’t know. She was almost the alcoholic I was, and she drank more or less the whole time. I often wonder what would’ve become of us if I hadn’t refrained. (A week-long bender in Philly? Maybe, on day four, she would’ve said, over another whiskey sour, “Tell me more about Knoxville.” I would’ve given her an embellished, romanticized version, aided and abetted by Johnnie Black. “Can you still go back?” she might’ve asked. “To the city or to the life?” “Both.” “For sure.” “Let’s go.” “Ha, ok.” “I’m serious.” “Ok, let’s go.”)

Most of my memories of her recall innocuous text message exchanges. To keep me awake during presentations for a stock-picking contest I arranged for our company to sponsor at Harvard. To keep me company at a hotel bar near Logan International that evening. To keep me from staying too long when I traveled back down south to tie up a loose academic end so I could formally claim an MBA. And to pass a test she didn’t know she was taking when, one lonely night in Ridge Hill, I asked her to name an interesting movie.

The movie question’s critical. The point isn’t to find out someone’s favorite movie (that’s the sort of trite question boring people ask each other on first dates), nor even to determine if we have the same taste in movies. I want to know what other people find interesting in film. If the other person can’t say why they think a particular movie’s interesting, that’s sometimes even better.

She picked My Blueberry Nights. “It’s not, like, very good,” she warned. Then, in a quick followup text: “I just like it for some reason.”

She was right, My Blueberry Nights isn’t good. In fact, it’s almost bad — a plodding, at times saccharine, attempt to stitch disparate slice-of-life-style vignettes together with, of all people, Norah Jones, whose acting debut was, like the film itself, frustrating in being objectively bad but difficult to criticize.

To the extent My Blueberry Nights isn’t described as the vacuous clutter it most assuredly is, the work owes its inarticulable appeal to its director, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, a veritable legend. My office dalliance had recognized, without realizing it, the mark of a master.

There are moments in life when there’s so much to say you have no choice but to say nothing. There was no way to communicate this to her, because not being a cinephile she wouldn’t have fully appreciated it, but I’d often thought, to myself, that my New York experience felt like a Wong Kar-wai film. A mostly plotless, uneven, motion blur that sped up during fitful Manhattan nights, when everything happened, slowed into blue monochrome dawns in Ridge Hill and dissolved into daylight hours whose purpose was merely interludial.

Wong’s films, particularly Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, released back-to-back in the mid-1990s, are atmospherically surreal, shot through from start to finish with the neon-noir, nocturnal aesthetic that made Wong famous. Influential, paradigmatic, accessible and brilliant, Express is the better work. Angels, though, is a cult classic.

In each film, Wong employs an unparalleled mastery of artificial light to create melancholic dreamscapes where the absurd intervenes to temper the gloom (“Do you like pineapple?” a crestfallen, newly-single twentysomething asks, at a bar, in a flailing attempt to pick up an older woman he doesn’t realize is a murderous drug runner) and the macabre’s paired with the mundane for comic relief (an insurance broker reminiscent of Stephen Tobolowsky’s Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day runs into an old classmate on a bus and tries to sell him a policy, not knowing he’s a mafia hitman).

Thematically, Wong’s films are studies in urban isolation and romantic tension. His cities are deliberately cramped, but proximity doesn’t ameliorate his characters’ solitude. On the contrary, the nearness, both spatial and temporal, serves as a foil, accentuating the loneliness and highlighting the often transient nature of human connections.

Serendipity’s everywhere in Express and Angels. Like so many contemporaneous romantic comedies, timing’s everything, but unlike that decade’s schmaltzy American rom-coms, it’s almost always wrong.

I made it to 27 on my refrigerator sober days count. So, not even a month. My next company speaking trip took me to Rochester, where I ran up a ridiculous bourbon tab sitting alone at a Carrabba’s bar table. I stayed until closing time and left with the bartender, a woman about my age, who took me on a tour of local dives. I woke up the next morning on top of the hotel comforter with my suit still on and my phone gone missing. (It was at the front-desk. Someone found it in the parking lot.)

After a depressingly drab stop in depressingly drab Buffalo, I was back in Manhattan. “Break’s over,” I told her, on the elevator ride down after my first day back in the office. As we stepped out, I clarified: “The drinking break, I mean.” “I gathered,” she said.

We got right to work, starting with drinks at a generic spot across the street from the office. From there, it was a blur — a nonlinear, neon-bathed, bar-hopping expedition rendered in Wong-style ghosted-motion.

“I don’t dance,” I reminded her. It was well on past two and we were somewhere orange. The music was loud, and she was pulling on my arm. “Seriously. I don’t dance.” She was offended. Or pretended to be. And I was aggravated all of a sudden. I deliberately lost her in the crowd, strode out the door and down (or up, I didn’t know) the street. She ran out and caught up with me. Which was a good thing: I had no idea where I was, where I was going or how to get there.

Half an hour later, we were back where we started: On 42nd. “Let’s go up to the office.” “Why?” “I dunno.” “Ok.” We tapped our key cards, rode the elevator up, tapped our cards again and went in. She sat at her cubicle, turned on her computer and played music. I stared out the windows at an urban vastness I still couldn’t quite wrap my mind around even after a year working in the city. She tried to get me to dance again. Maybe, she thought, I’d be less physically reserved if there was no one else around. (She didn’t know me.)

Nothing happened. “It” didn’t go anywhere. She blasted her eclectic playlist, which included someone’s very bad attempt at a “California Dreamin’” cover, through crackling computer speakers until I asked her to turn it off. Then we raided the office liquor stash and ate all the avocados.

True to Wong’s Hong Kong nights, those 11 hours felt somehow separate from the real-world narrative — a step-printed, hallucinatory montage removed from, and suspended outside, normal time.

It was too late to go home, so I spent the next few hours power-napping at the Grand Hyatt. Around nine, I took a shower, put on the same suit and walked right back across the same street and rode the same elevator up to the same office. I fixed a coffee and listened to muttered complaints about management’s failure to restock avocados for breakfast toast.

She showed up late, but not as late as I expected. An hour or so after she settled in, my G-chat chimed. “Did you go home?” “No.” “Sorry. I shouldn’t have let it go this far.”

After work, I stopped into a little boutique shop in Grand Central that’d just opened. They had a delightful mix of craft beer and spirits, including a small-batch gin I favored. I drank a fourth of the bottle on the Metro North commute to Tuckahoe, and the rest by 10. Shortly after midnight, she called me from the back of a cab, so drunk she could barely speak. I entertained it for as long as I could, but eventually hung up on her, confident she wouldn’t remember.

She called in sick the next day, a Friday, with an implausible story about locking herself out. As if there were no locksmiths in the city. She apparently took the opportunity to rest, if for no other reason than to be recharged for the weekend. The next morning, she called before noon.

“It’s not even 11:30. How are you already drinking?” I wondered, as if I wasn’t two drinks in myself. “How are you already drinking?” she shot back. And so began our last conversation. And the end of my short-lived stint as a Manhattan professional.  

Chungking Express

Fallen Angels