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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 couldlaugh 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 finemood 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