People were crying. It was a great thing. My boss milled about the room, talking to those he whose attention he could get and standing around in one of the groups of two or three whose attention he could not. Everyone was happy. Everyone talked about what it was going to mean for our division. One of our own had been given the call. She was moving on up.

She walked over to me, as I stood in the corner holding my small plastic cup of diet soda, sipping occasionally, and keeping watch over the well arranged cheese platter I’d been asked to order for the occasion from Dag's next door. She approached me with a broad smile and I failed when I tried to respond with one of my own. So what did I think? Was I happy? Did I have any idea what this was going to mean for our group? I explained that I thought it was a good thing, and sure, I was happy, how could I not. Things were going so well, who was I to be the one to bring everyone down. I nodded in agreement and let her pass by to someone who might actually have words of support for her in her new job, reaching down blindly for another little cube of whatever cheese was within my reach.

For different groups she had different reactions. For the guys – the few who worked for the magazine – she feigned a punch to the gut and smiled before air kissing our cheeks and waiting for the words of encouragement to flow. Some of them were nothing if not prolific about how they felt. Her new position – a position she was very clear in explaining, was created explicitly for her – was going to allow her to leverage the group’s properties even better against the rest of the publications than it was now. They couldn’t believe that people who worked for the same company hadn’t heard of our magazine. We had a history of over fifty years! She would nod and explain the direction she planned on and, when they offered their own suggestions, smile in such a way as to hint – at least from the vantage point I had over the room – that she had no intention what-so-ever of actually following up on anything they said.

She explained – after arriving fifteen minutes late to her own announcement, leaving us all to wait while trying to figure out what to do with the cheese – that when she came to our magazine as a Director of Something-or-other she had only one goal in mind and that was to make ours the best publication in our space. There was nothing else she expected. After only three years she managed to do that and our parent was happy. We only had one or two competitors, and only one to be taken seriously either way, but she was a political fiend and had made sure the people she reported to knew about her achievements while downplaying any faults. I couldn't help but to think of the stories of the Soviet Union I'd grown up with where factory managers did much the same when talking to the local Party boss. It was a surprise, she told us, that they were rewarding her so handsomely, but that we shouldn’t worry, her promotion was a promotion for an entire group.

I felt a grin creep across my mouth and grabbed another cheese cube – cheddar – chewing with enthusiasm. I was new. I was in a low position. I was fresh out of the University of Iowa where I managed our school paper. New York was supposed to be the publishing center of the world, where the best of the best worked, and I couldn’t help finding some amusement in the fact that the room was buying her line. Worse even. They wanted her to repeat it so that they could gain renewed joy at the mere mention of her clever fiction. It was like all those Mafia movies where everyone felt that if a member of their crew became a ‘made’ man then they all benefited, except that everyone seemed to forget that that person became untouchable except to another made man. She didn’t care what happened to us, she was moving uptown.

I’d figured out the kind of person she was the first time I’d ever met her. The website had just launched and she had invited everyone associated with it into her office for her ‘gin-aritas,’ a true bastard of a drink. She sullied a good gin by blending it with an off the shelf margarita mixer in a mini-blender usually kept beneath her desk. Along the walls were newspaper clippings and magazine articles in which she had been the subject of apparent interest. The latest was a Page Six column from about a month prior of her in the picture with a couple of executives from Conde Naste. Each framed in a simple black metal frame and a subtle off-white matte that must have cost far more than I brought home every two weeks. The little shrine was impressive and reflected my own lack of achievement recently, as I wasted the last six months at the magazine writing uninteresting copy on a subject I found I didn’t like and other menial intern-like tasks I thought I was going to be able to bypass with that job.

She continued around the room until finally reaching the gaggle that actually wept tears of sheer joy. She let loose a small wail before launching herself into their pudgy arms so that they could cry together. I stood in my corner shaking my head in disblief.