by Rick Moody
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.
—I’m not doing anything to you, Andrew, Linda said. —I’m expressing myself. It’s supposed to be a good thing.
Reaching, she laid a palm flush against my face.
—I know you aren’t…
—So what’s the problem?
I was ambitious to reassure. If I could have stayed the hand that fluttered up to cover her mouth, so that she could laugh unreservedly, so that her laughter peeled out in the Ticonderoga Room… But I just wasn’t up to it yet. I got out of there. I danced across the floor at the Wackerman wedding —I was a party of one —and the Wackermans and the Delgados and their kin probably thought I was singing along with “Desperado”by the Eagles (it was the anthem of the new Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Wackerman), but really I was talking to myself, about work, about how Mike Tombello’s best man wanted to give his toast while doing flips on a trampoline, about how Jenny Parmenter wanted live goats bleating in the Mansion parking lot, as a fertility symbol, as she sped away, in her Rolls Cornische, to the Thousand Islands. Boy, I always hated the Eagles.
Okay, to get back to Glenda Manzini. Linda Pietrzsyk didn’t write me off after our failed embraces, but she sure gave me more room. She was out the door at 5:01 for several weeks, without asking after me, without a kind word for anyone, and I didn’t blame her. But in the end who else was there to talk to? To Marie O’Neill, the accountant? To Paul Avakian, the human resources and insurance guy and petty-cash manager? To Rachel Levy, the head chef? Maybe it was more than this. Maybe the bond that forms between people doesn’t get unmade so easily. Maybe it leaves its mark for a long time. Soon Linda and I ate our bagged lunches together again, trading varieties of puddings, often in total silence; at least this was the habit until we found a new area of common interest in our reservations about Glenda Manzini’s management techniques. This happened to be when Glenda took a week off. What a miracle. I’d been employed at the Mansion six months. The staff was in a fine mood about Glenda’s hiatus. There was a carnival atmosphere. Dorcas Gilbey had been stockpiling leftover ales for an office shindig featuring dancing and the recitation of really bad marital vows we’d heard. Linda and I went along with the festivities, but we were also formulating a strategy.
What we wanted to know was how Glenda became so unreservedly cruel. We wanted the inside story on her personal life. We wanted the skinny. How do you produce an individual like Glenda? What is the mass-production technique? We waited until Wednesday after the afternoon beer-tasting party. We were staying late, we claimed, in order to separate out the green M&Ms for the marriage of U.V.M. tight end Brad Doelp who had requested bowls of M&Ms at his reception, excluding any and all green candies. When our fellow employees were gone, right at five, we broke into Glenda’s office.
Sis, we really broke in. Glenda kept her office locked when she wasn’t in it. It was a matter of principle. I had to use my Discover card on the lock. I punished that credit card. But we got the tumblers to tumble, and once we were inside, we started poking around. First of all, Glenda Manzini was a tidy person, which I can admire from an organizational point of view, but it was almost like her office was empty. The pens and pencils were lined up. The in and out boxes were swept clean of any stray dust particle, any scrap of trash. There wasn’t a rogue paper cl
ip behind the desk or in the bottom of her spotless wastebasket. She kept her rubber bands banded together with rubber bands. The files in her filing cabinets were orderly, subdivided to avoid bowing, the old faxes were photocopied so that they wouldn’t disintegrate. The photos on the walls (Mansion weddings past) were nondescript and pedestrian. There was nothing intimate about the decoration at all. I knew about most of this stuff from the moments when she ordered me into that cubicle to dress me down, but this was different. Now we were getting a sustained look at Glenda’s personal effects.
Linda took particular delight in Glenda’s cassette player (it was atop one of the black filing cabinets) —a cassette player that none of us had ever heard play not even once. Linda admired the selection of recordings there. A complete set of cut-out budget series: Greatest Hits of Baroque, Greatest Hits of Swing, Greatest Hits of Broadway, Greatest Hits of Disco and so forth. Just as she was about to pronounce Glenda a rank philistine where music was concerned, Linda located there, in a shattered case, a copy of Greatest Hits of the Blues.
We devoured the green M&Ms while we were busy with our reconnaissance. And I kept reminding Linda not to get any of the green dye on anything. I repeatedly checked surfaces for fingerprints. I even overturned Linda’s hands (it made me happy while doing it), to make sure they were free of emerald smudges. Because if Glenda found out we were in her office, we’d both be submitting applications at the Hot Bird of Troy. Nonetheless, Linda carelessly put down her handful of M&Ms, on top of a filing cabinet, to look over the track listings for Greatest Hits of the Blues. This budget anthology was released the year Linda was born, in 1974. Coincidentally, the year you too were born, Sis. I remember driving with you to the tunes of Lightnin’ Hopkins or Howlin’ Wolf. I remember your preference for the most bereaved of acoustic blues, the most ramshackle of musics. What better soundtrack for the Adirondacks? For our meandering drives in the mountains, into Corinth or around Lake Luzerne? What more lonesome sound for a state park the size of Rhode Island where wolves and bears still come to hunt? Linda cranked the greatest hits of heartbreak and we sat down on the carpeted floor to listen. I missed you.
I pulled open that bottom file drawer by chance. I wanted to rest my arm on something. There was a powerful allure in the moment. I wasn’t going to kiss Linda, and probably her desperate effort to find somebody to liberate her from her foreshortened economic prospects and her unpronounceable surname wouldn’t come to much, but she was a good friend. Maybe a better friend than I was admitting to myself. It was in this expansive mood that I opened the file drawer at the bottom of one stack (the J through P stack), otherwise empty, to find that it was full of a half-dozen, maybe even more, of those circular packages of birth-control pills, the color-coated pills, you know, those multihued pills and placebos that are a journey through the amorous calendars of women. All unused. Not a one of them even opened. Not a one of the white, yellow, brown or green pills liberated from its package.
—Must be chilly in Schenectady, Linda mumbled.
Was there another way to read the strange bottom drawer? Was there a way to look at it beyond or outside of my exhausting tendency to discover only facts that would prop up darker prognostications? The file drawer contained the pills, it contained a bottle of vodka, it contained a cache of family pictures and missives the likes of which were never displayed or mentioned or even alluded to by Glenda. Even I, for all my resentments, wasn’t up to reading the let ters. But what of these carefully arranged packages of photo snapshots of the Manzini family? (Glenda’s son from her first marriage, in his early teens, in a torn and grass-stained football uniform, and mother and second husband and son in front of some bleachers, et cetera.) Was the drawer really what it seemed to be, a repository for mementos of love that Glenda had now hidden away, secreted, shunted off into mini-storage? What was the lesson of those secrets? Merely that concealed behind rage (and behind grief) is the ambition to love?
—Somebody’s having an affair, Linda said. —The hubby is coming home late. He’s fabricating late evenings at the office. He’s taking some desktop meetings with his secretary. He’s leaving Glenda alone with the kids. Why else be so cold?
—Or Glenda’s carrying on, said I.
—Or she’s polygamous, Linda said, —and this is a completely separate family she’s keeping across town somewhere without telling anyone.
—Or this is the boy she gave up for adoption and this is the record of her meeting with his folks. And she never told Dave about it.
—Whichever it is, Linda said, —it’s bad.
We turned our attention to the vodka. Sis, I know I’ve said that I don’t touch the stuff anymore —because of your example —but Linda egged me on. We were listening to music of the delta, to its simple unadorned grief, and I felt that Muddy Waters’s loss was my kind of loss, the kind you don’t shake easily, the kind that comes back like a seasonal flu, and soon we were passing the bottle of vodka back and forth. Beautiful, sad Glenda Manzini understood the blues and I understood the blues and you understood them and Linda understood them and maybe everybody understood them —in spite of what ethno-musicologists sometimes tell us about the cultural singularity of that music. Linda started to dance a little, there in Glenda Manzini’s office, swiveling absently her arms like asps, snaking to and fro, her wrists adorned in black bangles. Linda had a spell on her, in Glenda’s anaerobic and cryogenically frigid office. Linda plucked off her beige pumps and circled around Glenda’s desk, as if casting out its manifold demons. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She forgot who I was and drifted with the lamentations of Robert Johnson (hellhound on his trail), and I could have followed her there, where she cast off Long Island and Skidmore and became a naiad, a true resident of the Mansion on the Hill, that paradise, but when the song was over the eeriness of our communion was suddenly alarming. I was sneaking around my boss’s office. I was drinking her vodka. All at once it was time to go home.
We began straightening everything we had moved —we were really responsible about it —and Linda had gathered up the dozen or so green M&Ms she’d left on the filing cabinet —excepting the one she inadvertently fired out the back end of her fist, which skittered from a three-drawer file down a whole step to the surface of a two-drawer stack, before hopping and skipping over a cassette box, before free-falling behind the cabinets, where it came to rest, at last, six inches from the northeast corner of the office, beside a small coffee-stained patch of wall-to-wall. I returned the vodka to its drawer of shame, I tidied up the stacks of Brides magazines, I locked Glenda’s office door and I went back to being the employee of the month. (My framed pic ture hung over the water fountain between the rest rooms. I wore a bow tie. I smiled broadly and my teeth looked straight and my hair was combed. I couldn’t be stopped.)
My ambition has always been to own my own small business. I like the flexibility of small-capitalization companies; I like small businesses at the moment at which they prepare to franchise. That ’s why I took the job at Hot Bird —I saw Hot Birds in every town in America, I saw Hot Birds as numerous as post offices or ATMs. I like small businesses at the moment at which they really define a market with respect to a certain need, when they begin to sell their products to the world. And my success as a team player at the Mansion on the Hill was the result of these ambitions. This is why I came to feel, after a time, that I could do Glenda Manzini’s job myself. Since I’m a little young, it’s obvious that I couldn’t replace Glenda —I think her instincts were really great with respect to the service we were providing to the Capital Region —but I saw the Mansion on the Hill stretching its influence into population centers throughout the northeast. I mean, why wasn’t there a Mansion on the Hill in Westchester? Down in Mamaroneck? Why wasn’t there a Mansion on the Hill in the golden corridor of Boston suburbs? Why no mainline Philly Mansion? Suffice to say, I saw myself, at some point in the future, having the same opportunity Glenda had. I saw myself cutting deals and whittling out discounts at other fi
ne Mansion locations. I imagined making myself indispensable to a coalition of Mansion venture-capitalists and then I imagined using these associations to make a move into, say the high-tech or bio-tech sectors of American industry.
The way I pursued this particular goal was that I started looking ahead at things like upcoming volume. I started using the graph features on my office software to make pie charts of ceremony densities, cost ratios and so forth, and I started wondering how we could pitch our service better, whether on the radio or in the press or through alternative marketing strategies (I came up with the strategy, for example, of getting various nonaffiliated religions —small emergent spiritual movements —to consider us as a site for all their group wedding ceremonies). And as I started looking ahead, I started noticing who was coming through the doors in the next months. I became well versed in the social forces of our valley. I watched for when certain affluent families of the region might be needing our product. I would, if required, attempt cold-calling the attorney general of our state to persuade him of the splendor of the Niagara Hall when Diana, his daughter, finally gave the okey-dokey to her suitor, Ben.