A talk in the park June 29, 2012

 


I went to him, our former temporary boss, because I thought he was in the same boat I was since she apparently had trickled up to the owner.

I didn’t realize how wrong I was until I actually got to talk with him and found he not only didn’t know about the owner, but was still so hooked on her, my talking about her scared the living shit out of him.

I asked if we could go for a beer after work so I could confide in him. He suggested coffee in the park, leading me to suspect he might suspect the subject of the conversation.

Yet, he made no attempt to hide our going off together even though she had a window on that side of the building – that came later, that came after he heard what I had to say, and he went into a panic suggesting we should not be seen together.

We carried our coffee into a small pocket park where we settled onto a bench, as mothers with baby carriages paraded around us.

I told him my tale from the beginning, occasionally getting confused about the timing, and with a certain panic. He interrupted only to get clarification and when I was done told me she had also confided in him, but flatly denied my assumption he had been involved with her romantically.

Still, he looked nervous and kept looking back over his shoulder towards our office building not at all visible from where we sat, more as if he expected her to pop out from between the hedges and catch us at our talk.

He said she had told him about her stalker, and how he had insisted that she supply a photo of him to keep in the office computer bank in case something happened.

“He looked like a wimp to me,” he said. “I told her to report him to the police.

She had said she had although I’m not sure she actually had.

During those times when I was with her, her texting notification frequently sounded, sometimes she claimed it was her stalker, other times she didn’t explain.

When we were still talking, she asked questions about our temporary boss, how old he was and such. She had read his book.

“He’s really fucked up when it comes to women,” she’d said.

During the talk in the park, he said he was aware of just how wounded she was and said he felt her intensity each time she walked into a room.

I was aware of this, too, although it seemed more sexual than wounded, as if she was an actress constantly performing, flirting with men, getting their attention, well aware of each man’s vulnerability, reaching us each in a different way.

For our former temporary boss, her vulnerability worked well as did her family history and its connection to the mob.

She had spoken briefly to me about her family’s history, but when it was clear I had little interest in it, she seemed to drop it. For him, it was like catnip. He couldn’t get enough.

She said her father had rebelled against the mob ties before his death when she had just turned 8, and how she struggled after that.

Our former temporary boss concluded she had spent the rest of her life trying to compensate, seeking a man to replace her father in her life.

The only problem is her father isn’t dead. If fact, he helps support her because the job pays her so little, something she resented, but tried to make up for by occasionally playing bartender as some of his functions.

When I pointed this out to our former temporary boss, he told me I was wrong.

Later after a little research, I found her father’s email and address and sent them to him, and email he never acknowledged.

Before we went back to the office, he advised me to cease posting poems on my blog, even if they are not related to her.

“She will read them all as if they are,” he said. “And keep communications at the office as cool as possible.”

This last is easy since she’s not speaking to me anyway.

At this point, he said we should take another way back to the office, out of view from where she might see us out the window, and that we should enter the building separately.

Why all this stealth if we have nothing to hide?

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