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?