The more direct contact I have with our former temporary
boss, the more I wonder just who influenced whom when our poet still worked in
our office.
Was she merely trying to live up to his expectations, rather
than influencing him as I thought early on?
This is not to make her out to be an innocent bystander but
suggests that she learned early on how to read our agendas and play up to them.
While I think she misread me, she had him pegged since he
clearly needed someone to mentor, and as they say, he wore his heart on his
sleeve.
I still don’t know exactly what happened with our neighboring
mayor, what caused their falling out after she had been the darling of his
town, but our former temporary boss had adopted many of the biases towards that
mayor and other players as she seems to have, though it is our regular boss
that seems most connected to the former deputy police chief turned private eye
that became the neighboring mayor’s biggest nightmare.
And before her leaving our office, our poet joined the
anti-neighboring mayor faction to the point that the neighboring mayor did not
want to meet with her or our regular boss unless I was also present – and both
our boss and our temporary boss deliberately sought to exclude from such a
meeting.
The fact that our poet said openly at one of our meetings
that the Neighboring Mayor was corrupt shocked me (and still does), even in
this county, there isn’t a public official free of corruption.
Her statement – along with the claim that the neighboring
mayor had impregnated an underage girl and had stashed her in an apartment
supplied by the housing authority – seemed more personal than professional,
something like the sour grapes of a rejected lover.
If so, it is clear she misread the Neighboring Mayor as
well, who is a notorious womanizer, even excluding her claims about him.
All this may also be part of RR’s agenda, who appeared to want
to exploit the differences between the neighboring mayor, the virgin mayor, the
congressman and the small man. RR might have been peeved when the Neighboring
mayor did not support the candidate for county prosecutor RR wanted (and hoped
to use to get back into an official law enforcement job), which may also
explain our poet’s distaste for the Neighboring Mayor.
It is difficult to tell if our former temporary boss hates
the neighboring mayor on his own or has had his opinion influenced by his love
of our poet.
Frankly, I don’t think she cares in the least. All this is
her version of a shell came as she moves into new shells in order to appeal to
specific people – though if she was involved with the neighboring mayor and he
spurned her, this would give her good reason to strike back at him.
Early on at our office, I got the impression that she worked
on a number of us at the same time: the owner, the former temporary boss, me
and perhaps others, and why she got upset when I talked to our temporary boss
about her, as if concerned that we might compare notes and realize there were
discrepancies between what she told me and others, such as her telling our
former temporary boss that her father had died when she was young, when her
father is still alive and kicking.
This might not have been her doing, however, as our former
temporary boss seems to hear what he wants to hear about her, and she is aware
of his fascination with the mafia and might have played up that angle with him,
when such stories fell flat with me.
Her tales about stalkers, however, clearly worked with both
of us, but in particular with our former temporary boss, who aches to protect
her.
After losing his power as temporary boss, she largely had
little use for him and relegated him to that host of men who still cling to her
memory, wanting to keep connected to her regardless of how tenuous a connection
that might be, as she distances herself from them.
Those who accept this distancing become like ghosts in her
life, spirits she acknowledges, but no longer close as they once were, leaving
them with mixed feelings of bitterness and longing, craving contact with her,
accepting whatever contact she gives them, so, they linger in limbo, staggering
behind her footsteps, accepting whatever she grants them (which is never much),
all foolishly believing they might once again get back in her good graces, when
they never will.
Until this year and the man she fell in love with a year
ago, she never went back to something or someone she left behind, especially when
we (they) have nothing to offer her. She has moved on and seeks someone new in
her life
In all this, I’m a different kind of ghosts, from whom she
expects nothing, but can’t quite shed, part of that group of people she has delegated
to the role of stalker, persistent, petulant frat boys who some how have a
place in her life, a literary foil; against whom she can play – fear of
stalkers helping her to generate new saviors to rescue her.
This perhaps is the saddest part of our former temporary
boss’ predicament, he loves her, but she no longer needs him to ward off ghosts
from the past like me, and so, he floats behind her wanting what he can’t have.
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