Office at Night (2 page)

There is a coconut product that she favors for her fingers. She told Miss Chan about it just the other day and for a moment Miss Chan seemed interested, then looked away. But not before clicking her tongue. Quietly, but Marge Quinn heard it. It makes her feel very tired to think of Miss Chan clicking her tongue. She clicks it frequently. Like she is breaking matchsticks. Abraham must hear it. All those matchsticks. Though he never shows any sign. Such a gentleman, thinks Marge Quinn. She of the soft fingers. So much softer than the fingers of Janice Jones. Always jamming them here and jamming them there. Good riddance, I say, when that one left. Miss Chan’s fingers are fine. Nothing special. Just regular fingers. And they don’t move too fast. But the fingers of Marge Quinn! Like firm butter in five little bags.

She loves to file. Put more in than she takes out. I suspect one day, if Miss Chan lets her, she will fill me up, and they will have to buy another cabinet, and perhaps I will finally
have a friend. A true friend of my own kind! I would love to be full. And not with tooth powder. Not with tooth powder or wrapping paper or sandwich leavings. There is still a little oil in my upper drawer, back left. Oil! Marge Quinn fills me with firm paper and firmer card stock. She is a treasure, truly.

Abraham, Abraham, thinks Marge Quinn. Abraham, who fired her predecessor Janice Jones. She left him a letter, did Janice Jones, thinks Marge Quinn. She filed it under Q. The letter begins, “I am not fired, you crumb I could have maybe ever-so-slightly loved but never quite did, because I quit.” The letter is not typed. It contains a number of vague threats. She filed it under Q and Marge Quinn just found it. With her soft fingers. She does not pluck. She coaxes. So gently. And handed it to him. To
Abraham,
as she calls him. When she thinks no one is listening. Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. Of course Miss Chan has heard her. She hears everything. Sometimes when she is just walking past, she gives me a good pat on the side.

Marge Quinn handed “Abraham” the letter from Janice Jones, only when she handed it to him her soft fingers, having pulled out more than one letter, nothing to be ashamed of,
let fall the one she wanted him to read. So that he could take steps. Forewarned is forearmed! Her lovely, long, soft fingers let fall the one that would help him to take steps and handed him something else, some old letter from a client he has forgotten all about. She has just seen the letter on the floor. There it is, oh darn it,
darn
it! she thinks. I know if I reach for it Miss Chan will ask me what I am doing, she thinks. Bending down like I would have to beside Abraham’s desk. And she is so efficient, Miss Chan, that she will have it anyway before I have finished my bend. Only there it lies, the letter from Janice Jones that says, “I told them all what you did to me. All the things you did to me.” Only he couldn’t have done anything. Dear Abraham. She calls Chelikowsky that, does Marge Quinn of the long, buttery, soft, slightly clumsy fingers, whose father once killed people, even though she has only worked in the office for, what, two weeks?

H
ere is the story, lit with my finest glowing light, of the letter Chelikowsky is holding. It, the letter, was written by an individual of curious intent, whose concern—though Chelikowsky himself was ultimately unable to see it and so missed an opportunity to profit—cut to the core of our great (if modest) company’s central mission. The letter Chelikowsky is holding is the second he received from this particular correspondent. The first was much longer. So perhaps this is the story of a letter Chelikowsky once held. That he once held and then forgot. Regardless, he was a widower, the writer of these letters, a Mr. Stetly, who lived in a palatial apartment on Fifty-Sixth Street with only a single servant, a “cadaverous” individual named Gibson, whose gender was never specified. These two had for some years, before Mr. Stetly entered into contact with Chelikowsky and Co., spent their days cataloguing what was purported to be a vast collection of unusually masterful forgeries. Stetly, an artist of no particular note in his youth, one who had quickly wrung the towel
of his own talent dry, came into possession of an absolutely unlooked-for and monstrously significant tinned oyster fortune when he was in his early thirties, and immediately set about acquiring Impressionist masterpieces.

Stetly’s taste was excellent, but his eye was poor, and after three years of profligate buying from a Paris-based dealer named Delors, he learned at the vernissage of his one and only exhibition that every single one of the paintings he had poured so much of his fortune into was fake. Stetly’s high-strung wife, who had never liked the Impressionists and would die some short time later from an imperfectly swallowed chicken bone, smelled disaster to come, smacked Stetly hard on each cheek, then flung herself out the nearest window. Her fall was broken by the accommodating arms of an oak tree that grew too near their luxurious brownstone, and as Stetly, “buoyed by the audacity of her gesture,” helped nurse her back to health over the coming weeks, he formulated a plan that, properly implemented, would allow him to tack into the erratic winds of fortune. When Stetly told his wife—whose name was Gladys by the by, although Chelikowsky, distracted as usual, skimmed that part of the very long first letter Stetly sent him and so
missed this—what his plan was, she demanded ten thousand dollars, the deed to their Long Island property, and a statement of separation, then left him to sink his ship on his own.

Undeterred, Stetly began implementing his plan, which, far from seeing him end his relationship with Delors, saw him doubling down on it, so that in the years that followed he used the lion’s portion of his remaining fortune to buy fake after fake, and not just of French Impressionists. Into his collection went fake baroque landscapes, fake Scandanavian realists, fake American gothic, fake Italian Renaissance, fake Japanese woodblock prints. Somewhere along the line, Stetly forgot the part of his plan where he was to begin reselling the works as first-rate forgeries for a nice profit, and instead kept amassing them, eventually going through Delors’s daughter, who had taken over the family business when her father, as wealthy as Stetly had once been, retired.

One morning, some months before he had taken up pen to write to Chelikowsky and Co. for guidance, Stetly had awoken, “as if from a dream,” to find Gibson, whom he did not remember hiring, dusting away at the stacks and stacks of pictures in their often unusually tawdry frames. He had
decided to take an inventory of his collection before having it appraised. Not terribly long into this process, he realized that some of his key works, his earliest fakes, were no longer in his possession. As the weeks passed, more pictures went missing. He was writing Chelikowsky, he said, because of their previous acquaintance, which Chelikowsky couldn’t help but recall, in order to seek his advice on the matter. He did not expound on the nature of the advice he was seeking, nor fully clarify which part of “the matter” he hoped Chelikowsky could address, nor offer anything concrete about the nature of their previous acquaintance, but he did say he would have to apply for a line of credit, one that he would be in a position to terminate as soon as he began selling portions of the collection. Chelikowsky, who is not immune to the seductions of idiosyncratic solicitations, nonetheless set the letter and its request aside. Even though it is quite true that he once knew Stetly and was to some extent in his power. I feel quite certain that he will do the same thing with this second letter too.

I
do not light up the room. I am the secretary in this strange little office.

The history of this office is complex, is a blur, is a puzzle, has been erased from the frame. Please know that I have been framed. At the time of this telling, my day begins at nine o’clock, and I am at my desk on time every morning. Promptness, neatness, orderliness—in the first few minutes of every day, I display the attributes of a very good secretary. This is due to my training, and reflects my commitment to our business achieving the highest success.

Of course, the arrangement of supplies in my desk necessitates a quick check to be sure I have what I need to perform, and I keep on the desk only the supplies that I need for the day. I remove all the rest and place those items in the top drawer, which locks with a very small key I wear on my neck on a gold chain.

With my place of business in order, I begin to organize the day for myself and for my employer, Mr. Chelikowsky,
by referring to my invaluable calendar pad and typing up an hourly schedule. I record the names of people who have appointments during the day—these never are many, and mostly are none—and I also prepare memoranda and reminders for Mr. Chelikowsky, whom I always call Mr. C., though he has requested that I call him by his full name, so this is my one act of rebellion. I don’t mean to rebel, and in fact I am not rebelling, because my teachers at secretarial college always referred to employers by just an initial—Mr. B., Mr. Q., Mr. R., depending on which lesson we were on for that unit. I have explained this to him and that it is difficult to unlearn certain habits of administrative behavior.

I place the schedule on Mr. C.’s desk before he arrives. Soon after, Marge Quinn, office stenographer and my coworker, arrives.

Yes, I can easily clarify this distinction between a stenographer and a secretary. A stenographer takes dictation, transcribes, and types; she may also do billing and filing and operate machines like a duplicator, adding machine, etcetera. At times a stenographer may also operate the switchboard, but we don’t have a switchboard. We’re a small operation,
but we don’t deal in small things. Either way, a secretary assumes much more responsibility than a stenographer and she contributes much more to the potential success of her employer—in this case Mr. C. I have worked with him long enough to know that he’ll be successful—that he and I will be successful—in this, our daily routine, which amounts to everything, just as each moonrise and sunrise is everything too, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. A secretary can’t get ahead of herself—not only is it impossible, practically speaking, but it is inadvisable.

At the same time each day the morning mail is distributed, and sorting it is one of my responsibilities. I separate out the personal letters from the business correspondence—all of this is first opened in the mailroom, if a business has a mailroom. We don’t have a mailroom. Mailrooms are not the tradition in Hell’s Kitchen, and in our trade, we prefer direct delivery. And I should mention that of all my responsibilities, I take this separating out of the personal letters from the business correspondence most seriously, though I take all the work seriously.

Office work is very serious business.

When the office was established, I was there to arrange it: the desk needed to go next to the window, for one thing, that I knew. Mr. C.’s mother thought the desk should face the door—there were notes in Mr. C.’s desk to this effect. I filed them under “Chelikowsky, Mother.” She never liked me, but I liked her. Her perfume was amazing: Sumatra.
Whispered romance
. You wouldn’t expect it, was the thing, from someone like her. If a woman thinks there is something improper about a woman and a man working in close quarters, you can pretty much guarantee there is something improper about
her
. Like I said, I liked her—I like women with secrets. But she never liked me.

When I was hired, the notes were all willy-nilly. Personal mixed in with business, and that’s never smart. An outsider might think that personal business is business, but there’s business and there’s business, and this is one thing that employers (e.g., Mr. C.) don’t understand but secretaries do. Marge Quinn, stenographer, does not understand this due to her inexperience and also due to her figure. What I mean is, her personal self comes into the work. When she stands at the file cabinet she’s not filing, she’s also standing—it’s hard to
explain to an outsider.