Demonology (4 page)

—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 clip 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 fine 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.

I may well have succeeded in my plan for domination of the Mansion on the Hill brand, if it were not for the fact that as
I was examining the volume projections for November (one Wednesday night), the ceremonies taking place in a mere three months,
I noticed that Sarah Wilton of Corinth was marrying one Brice McCann in the Rip Van Winkle Room. Just before Thanksgiving.
There were no particular notes or annotations to the name on the calendar, and thus Glenda wasn’t focusing much on the ceremony.
But something bothered me. That name.

Your Brice McCann, Sis. Your intended. Getting married almost a year to the day after your rehearsal-dinner-that-
never-was. Getting married before even having completed his requisite year of grief, before we’d even made it through the
anniversary with its floodwaters. Who knew how long he’d waited before beginning his seduction of Sarah Wilton? Was it even
certain that he had waited until you were gone? Maybe he was faithless; maybe he was a two-timer. I had started reading Glenda’s
calendar to get ahead in business, Sis, but as soon as I learned of Brice, I became cavalier about work. My work suffered.
My relations with other members of the staff suffered. I kept to myself. I went back to riding the bus to work instead of
accepting rides. I stopped visiting fellow workers. I found myself whispering of plots and machinations; I found myself making
connections between things that probably weren’t connected and planning involved scenarios of revenge. I knew the day would
come when he would be on the premises, when Brice would be settling various accounts, going over various numbers, signing
off on the pate selection and the set list of the R&B band, and I waited for him —to be certain of the truth.