Demonology (3 page)

Still, in spite of these personal issues, I was probably a model employee for Glenda Manzini. For example, I managed to sort
out the politics concerning the Jewish wedding and the Islamic wedding (both slated for the first weekend of April), and I
did so by appealing to certain aspects of light in our valley at the base of the Adirondacks. Certain kinds of light make
for very appealing weddings here in our valley, I told one of these families. In late winter, in the early morning, you begin
to feel an excitement at the appearance of the sun. Yes, I managed to solve that problem, and the next (the prayer mats) —because
K-Mart,
where America shops,
had a special on bathmats that week, and I sent Dorcas Gilbey over to buy six dozen to use for the Muslim families. I solved
these problems and then I solved others just as vexing. I had a special interest in the snags that arose on Fridays after
5
P.M.
—the groom who on the day of the ceremony was trapped in a cabin east of Lake George and who had to snowshoe three miles out
to the nearest telephone, or the father of the bride (it was the Lapsley wedding) who wanted to arrive at the ceremony by
hydrofoil. Brinksmanship, in
the world of nuptial planning, gave me a sense of well-being, and I tried to bury you in the rear of my life, in the back
of that closet where I’d hidden my secondhand golf clubs and my ski boots and my Chicken Mask —never again to be seen by mortal
man.

One of my front-office associates was a fine young woman by the name of Linda Pietrzsyk, who tried to comfort me during the
early weeks of my job, after Glenda’s periodic assaults. Don’t ask how to pronounce Linda’s surname. In order to pronounce
it properly, you have to clear your throat aggressively. Linda Pietrzsyk didn’t like her surname anymore than you or I, and
she was apparently looking for a groom from whom she could borrow a better one. That’s what I found out after awhile. Many
of the employees at the Mansion on the Hill had ulterior motives. This marital ferment, this loamy soil of romance, called
to them somehow. When I’d been there a few months, I started to see other applicants go through the masticating action of
an interview with Glenda Manzini. Glenda would be sure to ask,
Why do you want to work here?
and many of these qualified applicants had the same reply,
Because I think marriage is the most beautiful thing and I want to help make it possible for others.
Most of these applicants, if they were attractive and single and younger than Glenda, were shown the door. But occasionally
a marital aspirant like Linda Pietrzsyk snuck through, in this case because Linda managed to conceal her throbbing, sentimental
heart beneath a veneer of contemporary discontent.

We had Mondays and Tuesdays off, and one weekend a month. Most of our problem-solving fell on Saturdays, of
course, but on that one Saturday off, Linda Pietrzsyk liked to bring friends to the Mansion on the Hill, to various celebrations.
She liked to attend the weddings of strangers. This kind of entertainment wasn’t discouraged by Glenda or by the owners of
the Mansion, because everybody likes a party to be crowded. Any wedding that was too sparsely attended at the Mansion had
a fine complement of
warm bodies,
as Glenda liked to call them, provided gratis. Sometimes we had to go to libraries or retirement centers to fill a quota,
but we managed. These gate crashers were welcome to eat finger food at the reception and to drink champagne and other intoxicants
(food and drink were billed to the client), but they had to make themselves scarce once the dining began in earnest. There
was a window of opportunity here that was large enough for Linda and her friends.

She was tight with a spirited bunch of younger people. She was friends with kids who had outlandish wardrobes and styles of
grooming, kids with pants that fit like bed-sheets, kids with haircuts that were, at best, accidental. But Linda would dress
them all up and make them presentable, and they would arrive in an ancient station wagon in order to crowd in at the back
of a wedding. Where they stifled gasps of hilarity.

I don’t know what Linda saw in me. I can’t really imagine. I wore the same sweaters and flannel slacks week in and week out.
I liked classical music, Sis. I liked historical simulation festivals. And as you probably haven’t forgotten (having tried
a couple of times to fix me up —with Jess Carney and Sally Moffitt), the more tense I am, the worse is the impression I make
on the fairer sex. Nevertheless, Linda Pietrzsyk decided that I had to be a part of her elite crew of
wedding crashers, and so for a while I learned by immersion of the great rainbow of expressions of fealty.

Remember that footage, so often shown on contemporary reality-based programming during the dead first half-hour of prime time,
of the guy who vomited at his own wedding? I was at that wedding. You know when he says,
Aw, Honey, I’m really sorry,
and leans over and flash floods this amber stuff on her train? You know, the shock of disgust as it crosses her face? The
look of horror in the eyes of the minister? I saw it all. No one who was there thought it was funny, though, except Linda’s
friends. That’s the truth. I thought it was really sad. But I was sitting next to a fellow
actually named Cheese
(when I asked which kind of cheese, he seemed perplexed), and Cheese looked as though he had a hernia or something, he thought
this was so funny. Elsewhere in the Chestnut Suite there was a grievous silence.

Linda Pietrzsyk also liked to catalogue moments of spontaneous erotic delight on the premises, and these were legendary at
the Mansion on the Hill. Even Glenda, who took a dim view of gossiping about business most of the time, liked to hear who
was doing it with whom where. There was an implicit hierarchy in such stories.
Tales of the couple to be married caught in the act on Mansion premises were considered obvious and therefore uninspiring.
Tales of the best man and matron of honor going at it (as in the Clarke, Rosenberg, Irving, Ng, Fujitsu, Walters, Shapiro
or Spangler ceremonies) were better, but not great. Stories in which parents of the couple to be married were caught —in,
say, the laundry room, with the dad still wearing his dress shoes —were good (Smith, Elsworth, Waskiewicz), but not as good
as tales of the parents of the couple to be married trading
spouses, of which we had one unconfirmed report (Hinkley) and of which no one could stop talking for a week. Likewise, any
story in which the bride or the groom were caught
in flagrante
with someone other than the person they were marrying was considered astounding (if unfortunate). But we were after some
even more unlikely tall tales: any threesome or larger grouping involving the couple to be married and someone from one of
the other weddings scheduled that day, in which the third party was unknown until arriving at the Mansion on the Hill, and
at which
a house pet was present.
Glenda said that if you spotted one of these tableaux you could have a month’s worth of free groceries from the catering
department. Linda Pietrzsyk also spoke longingly of the day when someone would arrive breathlessly in the office with a narrative
of a full-fledged orgiastic reception in the Mansion on the Hill, the spontaneous, overwhelming erotic celebration of love
and marriage by an entire suite full of Americans, tall and short, fat and thin, young and old.

In pursuit of these tales, with her friends Cheese, Chip, Mick, Stig, Mark and Blair, Linda Pietrzsyk would quietly appear
at my side at a reception and give me the news —
Behind the bandstand, behind that scrim, groom reaching under his cousins skirts.
We would sneak in for a look. But we never interrupted anyone. And we never made them feel ashamed.

You know how when you’re getting to know a fellow employee, a fellow team member, you go through phases, through cycles of
intimacy and insight and respect and doubt and disillusionment, where one impression gives way
to another? (Do you know about this, Sis, and is this what happened between you and Brice, so that you felt like you personally
had to have the four G&Ts on the way to the rehearsal dinner? Am I right in thinking you couldn’t go on with the wedding and
that this caused you to get all sloppy and to believe erroneously that you could operate a motor vehicle?) Linda Pietrzsyk
was a stylish, Skidmore-educated girl with ivory skin and an adorable bump on her nose; she was from an upper-middle-class
family out on Long Island somewhere; her fathers periodic drunkenness had not affected his ability to work; her mother stayed
married to him according to some mesmerism of devotion; her brothers had good posture and excelled in contact sports; in short,
there were no big problems in Linda’s case. Still, she pretended to be a desperate, marriage-obsessed kid, without a clear
idea about what she wanted to do with her life or what the hell was going to happen next week. She was smarter than me —she
could do the crossword puzzle in three minutes flat and she knew all about current events —but she was always talking about
catching a rich financier with a wild streak and extorting a retainer from him,
until I wanted to shake her. There’s usually another layer underneath these things. In Linda’s case it started to become
clear at Patti Wackerman’s wedding.

The reception area in the Ticonderoga Room —where walls slid back from the altar to reveal the tables and the dance floor
—was decorated in branches of forsythia and wisteria and other flowering vines and shrubs. It was spring. Linda was standing
against a piece of white wicker latticework that I had borrowed from the florist in town (in return for promotional considerations),
and sprigs of flowering
trees garlanded it, garlanded the spot where Linda was standing. Pale colors haloed her.

—Right behind this screen, she said, when I swept up beside her and tapped her playfully on the shoulder, —check it out. There’s
a couple falling in love once and for all. You can see it in their eyes.

I was sipping a Canadian spring water in a piece of company stemware. I reacted to Linda’s news nonchalantly. I didn’t think
much of it. Yet I happened to notice that Linda’s expression was conspiratorial, impish, as well as a little beatific. Linda
often covered her mouth with her hand when she’d said something riotous, as if to conceal unsightly dental work (on the contrary,
her teeth were perfect), as if she’d been treated badly one too many times, as if the immensity of joy were embarrassing to
her somehow. As she spoke of the couple in question her hand fluttered up to her mouth. Her slender fingertips probed delicately
at her upper lip. My thoughts came in torrents:
Where are Stig and Cheese and Blair? Why am I suddenly alone with this fellow employee? Is the couple Linda is speaking about
part of the wedding party today? How many points will she get for the first sighting of their extramarital grappling?

Since it was my policy to investigate any and all such phenomena, I glanced desultorily around the screen and, seeing nothing
out of the ordinary, slipped further into the shadows where the margins of Ticonderoga led toward the central catering staging
area. There was, of course, no such couple behind the screen, or rather Linda (who was soon beside me) and myself
were the couple
and we were mottled by insufficient light, dappled by it, by lavender-tinted spots
hung that morning by the lighting designers, and by reflections of a mirrored
disco ball
that speckled the dance floor.

—I don’t see anything, I said.

—Kiss me, Linda Pietrzsyk said. Her fingers closed lightly around the bulky part of my arm. There was an unfamiliar warmth
in me. The band struck up some fast number. I think it was “It’s Raining Men”or maybe it was that song entitled “We Are Family,”which
played so often at the Mansion on the Hill in the course of a weekend. Whichever, it was really loud. The horn players were
getting into it. A trombonist yanked his slide back and forth.

—Excuse me? I said.

—Kiss me, Andrew, she said. —I want to kiss you.

Locating in myself a long-dormant impulsiveness, I reached down for Linda’s bangs, and with my clumsy hands I tried to push
back her blond and strawberry-blond curlicues, and then, with a hitch in my motion, in a stop-time sequence of jerks, I embraced
her. Her eyes, like neon, were illumined.

—Why don’t you tell me how you feel about me? Linda Pietrzsyk said. I was speechless, Sis. I didn’t know what to say. And
she went on. There was something about me, something warm and friendly about me, I wasn’t fortified, she said; I wasn’t cold,
I was just a good guy who actually cared about other people
and you know how few of those there are.
(I think these were her words.) She wanted to spend more time with me, she wanted to get to know me better, she wanted to
give the roulette wheel a decisive spin: she repeated all this twice in slightly different ways with different modifiers.
It made me sweat. The only way I could
think to get her to quit talking was to kiss her in earnest, my lips brushing by hers the way the sun passes around and through
the interstices of falling leaves on an October afternoon. I hadn’t kissed anyone in a long time. Her mouth tasted like cherry
soda, like barbeque, like fresh hay and because of these startling tastes, I retreated. To arm’s length. Sis, I was scared.
What was this rank taste of wet camp-fire and bone fragments that I’d had in my mouth since we scattered you over the Hudson?
Did I come through this set of coincidences, these quotidian interventions by God, to work in a place where everything seemed
to be about
love,
only to find that I couldn’t ever be a part of that grand word? How could I kiss anyone when I felt so awkward? What happened
to me, what happened to all of us, to the texture of our lives, when you left us here?

I tried to ask Linda why she was doing what she was doing —behind the screen of wisteria and forsythia. I fumbled badly for
these words. I believed she was trying to have a laugh on me. So she could go back and tell Cheese and Mick about it. So she
could go gossip about me in the office, about what a jerk that Wakefield was.
Man, Andrew Wakefield thinks there’s something worth hoping for in this world.
I thought she was joking, and I was through being the joke, being the Chicken Mask, being the harlequin.