I don’t want to spoil the party Oct. 18, 2012

  

They held a party for her leaving to which naturally, I was not invited. The owner, who catered the affair, had seen me at the auxiliary office that morning, and said nothing about it, not even a nod and wink to say, “you know it would be unwise for you to attend,” only silence.

Not that I would have gone anyway, but it’s the slight that stings, one more in a series of them that have left scars.

Yet, our male owner puzzles me as does all the hoopla about her resignation. The office gossip tells me the owner sprung for the cost of catering the affair.

This is the cheapest son of a bitch on the planet who has never sprung for any party for any employee leaving. We held a party for one of the other women last month, but we – the employees – paid for it, not management.

He wouldn’t give her a raise without requiring her to do special assignments.

This all sounds so strange.

She apparently expected drama of some sort, perhaps my showing up on her last day to spoil what turned out to be a remarkably tender send off.

I avoided such confrontation on Tuesday letting her take whatever parting shots she wanted. It was better to ignore her knowing she won’t be there next week or at any point in the future. I thought to skip the meeting entirely, but that would have been equally unwise.

One of the office gossips informed me about the plans for the party, which I knew better to attend even had I been invited, just as I had avoided the party for the magazine last June.

My showing up yesterday would have only fed into her myth making about me. My absence left much of that in doubt. The fact is, I don’t want to ever see her again, though her leaving comes with a lot of sadness.

I scheduled a meeting with The Little Man to find out exactly what happened, since he knows that I know about RR and the rest, a situation not of my making since I did not want him to find out anything through me. Yet I needed to know how much if anything he told the two owners, so I don’t accidentally divulge anything to them that I don’t have to. The less they know about RR’s plot to use the publication, the better off everybody is. From my lunch meeting with the Little Man, I gathered that he hadn’t talked to the owners about her, leaving them as much in the dark about her resignation as most of the others in our office. The Little Man did not confess his role in the matter, did not tell me that he had talked to her and advised her to “to do the right thing,” and resign, but he said enough to convince me he had.

She apparently told the Little Man that she was moving onto a job with a TV network, CBS, NBC, he couldn’t recall which she’d said.

Because the male owner was still in Europe last week, she gave her resignation to the female owner.

“There are some people in our office who think she quit because of me,” I told The Little Man, coming dangerously close to violating journalist ethics by even having this conversation with him.

“RR is very convincing, and she is very naïve,” the Little Man told me, going on to verify what I had heard about RR’s putting a Nazi symbol on his police test sheet, failed a psyche test, then refused to another. “The congressman tried to help him, but unfortunately RR blamed him instead,” the Little Man said.

 

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