The man whose fortune is known is a man everyone is managing: flattering, angling toward, quietly calculating how to separate from a portion of it.

But the man who looks like a retired accountant clipping coupons — no one manages him.

No one performs for him.

And so he gets to see people as they actually are, unguarded, because they do not think he is worth the effort of a mask.

That is what my frugal-old-man costume bought me across thirty-five years: the truth about people, freely given, because they didn’t think I mattered enough to lie to.

Amber never once performed for me.