Demonology Read Online Free Page A

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, ofcourse, 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 ofwedding 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,