Office at Night (4 page)

I am the light of the aging doughboy, who sometimes walks down the street holding two lit flashlights. I don’t know why he does it. No one does. I am the light of the moon. It is here sometimes, peeping through. And of the stars. I am old light. I have traveled. Across the dark reaches. Sometimes there is too much of me. I lie burning the night long against the wall. Chelikowsky doesn’t like to lean against me. Marge Quinn places her lovely hand in my light and looks at it, at her hand bathed in my light. Hester Chan avoids me when she can. Sometimes JJ would caress me. She had small fingers and big palms. Of course I saw who opened the window. Hester Chan knows who opened the window. Regardless, it doesn’t matter. The window is not what will get Chelikowsky, if anything
will. I think something will. The window is just open. I pour through it.

Nobody ever pulls the blind on me at night.

I
avoid the light when I can. The light is vertical. The light is horizontal. It travels through windows too well, slides easily onto the wall, where it hovers—telling us what? You know what it’s trying to do. It’s an intruder, appearing to illuminate, to glow; you yourself know it infiltrates, threatens. Light makes art along with shadow, but what about when both are erased—or when
we
are? I feel erased. I want to say—I don’t want to say—I think the light kills. I am a reasonable person. And I know the light killed you—when it shone on your affair, though it was never anything as common as that, no one has any idea whom your affair was with—no one but me that is, and you know it, and it’s why you look so lost when I am absent. Though you and I never entertained any conversations about this, because I am very professional despite my dislike of this career, and, like you, I have never had a single pretentious idea in my life. Not like my brother, with his sexy Jimmy Stewart persona, which yes, I myself identified, I myself named, but then he took it on and used it with
common girls, any-old-girls with blonde hair. What about me? What about
Hester
? I’m the outsider. Quinn has taken my place—I’ll always be exotic to her. And I can tell that she does not understand you. All I ever wanted was to work at the laundry with Mama and Papa. I never cared about money. And here I am, hunted—haunted—by you.

No one will believe what I say. It used to be you looked at me. Now, you hang your head at the desk. You seem ashamed to even be there.

You don’t even tell anyone that you are a painter.

O
nce he threw me across the room. Just picked me up and threw me. As if I were someone trying to kill him. It hurt me badly—internal bruises and whatnot. I had no appetite for days afterward. Even to this day, whenever Mr. C. enters the office, I startle.

S
o many questions remain—some of them wrong, some of them right. That’s the trouble. We might be asking all the wrong questions. Marge Quinn—is Marge Quinn some sort of spy? Is Marge Quinn a seducer? Is Marge Quinn a good girl? Is Marge Quinn working late out of the goodness of Marge Quinn’s expansive, kind soul? Are these questions too conservative, maybe? For example,
did
Marge Quinn participate in activities related to forgery; specifically,
did
Marge Quinn, before she became a stenographer—she is suspiciously practiced for one so low in the field—work in an illegal art form?
Did
Marge Quinn have a hand in selling the work that got people killed? What’s Marge Quinn trying to hide? Or is Marge Quinn trying to find something, is that what it is? Does Marge Quinn have an innocent interest in art? What would that even mean? It’s about possessing something, so it cannot be innocent, but maybe it can, because it’s like love. Marge Quinn just suddenly appeared here—took center stage in the painting and everyone pays attention to her. She’s not so interesting,
or maybe she is, but Hester Chan’s more interesting, and she’s not even depicted. Why is that?

Marge Quinn hasn’t worked long enough to know that Mr C. took that painting off the wall. She doesn’t even know to ask: did Mr. C. even paint it, or, that time the electricity failed, that time he was in the office at night, in the office at night alone just like always, ever since Janice Jones quit and just before Hester Chan came on the scene, did Mr. C. smoke a red paper–wrapped cigarette with Chinese lettering on it, then
draw on the wall
? And if he drew on the wall, who erased what he drew? And why did she do it? And what happened next?

I
am the window. I can speak for myself. I can even open myself. Like a mouth. I am like a mouth. Fear my teeth. My tongue. The deeper reaches. All of you can leap through me. Can pour through me. Howl through me. Just leave me alone. I don’t like your radio. Turn it off. Put it back in the file cabinet. There is nothing easy about being a window. Especially not in a painting. Yes, I know I am painted. I know we’re all painted. What can it mean to be a painted window? Can it mean anything? A window made of paint. An open painted window. Talk about your Office of Unconsummated Desire. And what happens when the lights in the room you are looking at me in go out, and we exist together, all together, in the dark?

I
t is not difficult to explain, though maybe it is difficult to understand. The aim of a good secretary is to create the most exact transcription of the most intimate impression of her boss’s nature as expressed in his dictation to her of letters, documents, telegrams, etcetera.

People who do not do secretarial work have no comprehension of secretarial work as an art form. This could be said, I suppose, of anyone outside any particular practice, of course. The conductor does not see the janitor well, nor does the waitress see the chimney sweep well. Etcetera. Look, my parents’ impressions about what their daughter’s future should look like were far more decorative than mine; my only goal is to be fully aware of my own limitations and to let my intuition on this be my guide. I find office work brings a disturbing intrusion of elements that are not in the scope of my vision. To do my job well, I must obliterate the disturbing intrusions—Marge Quinn, for example. I must obliterate her from my vision in order to do my job well. I find any
digression from this large aim—the creation of an exceptionally accurate record—leads me to boredom. And yet I am forced to train her. I have done this as well as I can, but I cannot share my secret with her. I can, however, share it with you: a great secretary, with her intellect, that is to say her intuition, as the sole master, can in her own way create an exceptionally accurate record of the boss’s emotions. Just look at my filing system. It is aesthetically sensitive. New technologies have been invented, but there is no replacement for a secretary’s ability to read the boss’s emotions. Just what technical discoveries can do to assist interpretive power is not clear. And the question of the value of nationality, as it pertains to my job, is perhaps unsolvable.

M
r. C. only uses lead white now, never zinc white. As to pigment, the maker is Winsor & Newton. He can’t remember all the colors exactly. There are about twelve or thirteen of them. He tries to keep them organized in his apartment. Mr. C. gets the best Winsor & Newton linen he can acquire. He trusts Winsor & Newton and paints directly upon it. He doesn’t make his own stretchers. JJ used to make them down in the basement (at work), but now he acquires them elsewhere. He has a very simple method of painting: It’s to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and he uses almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as he goes along until the medium becomes pure oil. He uses as little oil as he possibly can, and that’s his method. It’s very simple. It should be taught. However, none of this will ever be known. Only the light ever will know it.