At some point in the last couple of days, the mayor from the neighboring town finally concluded that she is indeed out to get him.
And being as paranoid as he is, he also believed the boss was, too, and decided he needed to have a meeting with out staff to sort it out.
He came in to the office, saw that I wasn’t there, and he stormed out again, telling her, the boss and the owner that he’d wanted me in the meeting, too, and had made it clear from when he proposed it.
The boss apparently had decided not to include me or even tell me about the meeting at all.
The mayor later called me and asked why I wasn’t there, and said he was particularly concerned about her and her coverage – the union gossip being only part of his complaint apparently.
He claimed she had an agenda.
I told him this can all be straightened out and that he should sit with her directly and hash it out. He agreed, but only if I was there as well.
I pretty much knew this would not be acceptable to her, but I told him I would try.
But when I talked to her about it.
“He’s trying to get me fired,” she told me during one of several phone calls she had with me over the last couple of days, regardless of the rules of engagement.
This explaining more about what happened with the neighboring mayor.
“Who is trying to get your fired?” I asked “Do you mean the mayor? How?”
She really didn’t answer the question but went on about the meeting I had set up between him and her.
“Where did you have in mind?” she asked.
“I thought to meet them at the pizza place,” I said.
“Them?”
“The mayor and his aide.”
“That’s not acceptable to me. I wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“Why?”
“You know.”
“Are you saying I’m the problem?”
“I would be more comfortable if we had the meeting at the office.”
“Okay,” I said, a little confused, about changing the arrangements I had already set up, especially after the mayor had already refused to meet in the office when he felt the boss, owner and she were about to bushwack him.
The pizza place was neutral ground. But if I was included in the meeting at the office, maybe the mayor wouldn’t feel like it was a trap.
“I guess I can tell them to meet us at the office,” I said. “I just don’t want them to feel uncomfortable either.”
“Well, I would be uncomfortable,” she said, confusing me even more.
“Do you mean by having me there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“If you meet them at the pizza place, I could arrange not to be there.”
“But it’s your meeting.”
“I set it up so that we could all talk to him.”
“All who?”
“The boss, you and me.”
“The boss would be there?”
“That was the plan.”
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Then it’s acceptable.”
In her paranoid state, she assumed this was some kind of trap, or worse, some kind of trick to get to go out with her again, a revelation that took me completely by surprise.
I guess I’m just not paranoid enough.
Unfortunately, the best plans made by mice and men proved inadequate.
The mayor came into town and waited down the street at a local restaurant while I went back to the main office to discuss it with the others.
The mayor did not want the boss to be at the meeting. He wanted to talk to her (the writer) and straighten it out without the boss or the owner.
As I expected, she (the writer) wouldn’t do it either, saying she would not be in the same place alone with me – which seemed a bit of a stretch since the mayor and his aide were going to be there.
But I told her I didn’t have to be there, but she should be.
I had to inform the boss the meeting was off.
The mayor wasn’t completely right in all this either. The story he was most offended by had to do with his giving special benefits to his allies while denying them to other employees of the city – a legitimate gripe, although in truth, she (the writer) and the boss were well aware that the mayor had gotten special permission from the state to do it.
I later learned the boss had pushed the story on to the shoulders of the writer, although she bought into it, and seemed convinced that the mayor was corrupt and that she was going to prove it.
This didn’t come out of the office, but out apparently out of one of the mayor’s political enemies. Tom claims it RR, her boyfriend, who has a political vendetta against the mayor.
She seems to be caught in the middle of powerful people, thinking she has control of the situation, when she does not, thinking that she’s a player when in fact real players seem to be playing her.
Her street savvy she’d displayed those times at the bar seemed transparent and weak, a front to cover her weakness.
“She’s very vulnerable,” the press person for the local congressman told me. “She’s starting to look bad from the strain.”
Her tough talk, even her sexual inuendoes appear to be a front to keep people from seeing how vulnerable she really is.
She must see herself as sounded by enemies. She seems to think the neighboring mayor wants to get her fired. But the impression I get from him is that he doesn’t care, doesn’t dislike her, but appears to be concerned about her getting her information from the wrong people.
And here I am in the middle of it all, a man she clearly hates.
The whole thing is terrifying and fascinating at the same time. And again, I begin to think our former temporary boss had the right assessment about her. She is nothing but a bundle of pain, somehow managing to hold herself together.
And every move I make to “normalize” our relationship only tightens the screws and increases the pain, and I think if I don’t cease trying, she might yet take a plunge off her roof.
I’m the last person to play peace maker. I am a symbol of something dark in her life, and there is no way to have any kind of friendly relationship.
She’s too deluded for any of that, projecting all her demons onto me, and inflating those demons I’m already possessed by into something too monstrous in her mind for me to even imagine.
It’s time to stop everything, to keep to my Harry Potter cupboard and pretend like she doesn’t exist.
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