Office at Night (7 page)

A
nd they dance. It’s ridiculous, really—a slow-motion dance—it’s not a good dance. It’s awkward. She doesn’t pick up the paper. She ignores it. She walks over to him and places her hands on his shoulders and starts to move them down the sleeves of his jacket. And he sits very still. He is like a scared rabbit. He even looks like a rabbit. Like a giant man-rabbit. Like a child or father. He must not think that, he thinks; he empties his mind of all but the music and her hands upon him, upon his nervous night body. He needs this more than he knew.

H
e signs all his letters to Hester “Confidentially Yours.” That’s how he signs all his letters, but especially hers. Why does he sign the letters to Hester “Confidentially Yours”?

Because he hurt her.

I
n the back room of Mon Fong Won Co., Hester Chan lies on a table. She is stretched out on a white sheet, and she wears a beautiful pair of silk Chinese pajamas: a deep shade of blue. The phonograph plays “Mean Old World” over and over. T-Bone Walker is Hester Chan’s favorite musician.
Someday someday darling I’ll be six feet in my grave
. . . as the needles warm her whole body, as the needles calm her startled condition, Hester enters a dream. Or is it not a dream? Nobody knows. And isn’t that the whole problem, that nobody knows whether or not life is a dream? If we knew, we wouldn’t be afraid of dying, would we? If life is a dream nothing is real—not even the pictures we see with our mind. But if life is a dream, then is there even a mind? Are we someone else’s dream, maybe? What Hester Chan’s brother told her when they were kids: that he controlled her every movement. That she was his. That she was his servant. That she was his love. That she was his soldier. That she was his robot. That she worked for him. He is the one who puts in the needles. He has
a gift. Everything that he does is illegal. In the back room of Mon Fong Won Co., on a Saturday morning, there is no direct light coming in; it’s a closet, curtained by velvet—dark blue. A small sliver of light sneaks in under its edges, washes the floor, slides up the blue silk of her pajamas, and reaches her face—gives her complexion a ghost’s chilly color. But she isn’t dead, she is only dreaming she is. Or is it a vision? The needles are supposed to calm down the dread; her mother suggested the treatment. Her mother told her to let her brother do it. It’s the best thing Hester could have imagined. Her complexion glowing in blue, the record turning around and around with a soft whir—and those strong, lyrical sounds floating toward her—and her brother’s cigarette smoke, wafting in: Mon Fong Won Co., Saturday morning. The Office of Unconsummated Desire is far, far from her mind. Hester Chan knows she must go back to work the day after tomorrow. Why is Hester Chan so afraid?

“W
ait, what?” Hester says.

“This is romance,” he answers.

“But it doesn’t feel right.”

“So why don’t you throw yourself out the window?”

“Wait, this is romance?”

“Romance,” Marge chimes, from her post at the files.

“Yes, romance,” he says, at the desk.

“So strange,” Hester murmurs. “I don’t feel like I’m even here anymore.”

AFTERWORD

An Interview with the Authors

T
raditionally, curatorial institutions like the Walker Art Center and Coffee House Press are viewed as tastemakers presenting “great art” to audiences. Walker Art Center Education Director Sarah Schultz and her colleagues, as well as my colleagues at Coffee House, have been striving to subvert that dynamic. With much of our new programming, we seek to create opportunities for audiences to engage with the art we present, to use it as stepping stone, or tool, to make something new, to inspire.

In conjunction with the exhibition
Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process
, we invited Coffee House writers Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt to do just that. The two have spent the last few months “in residence” in
Office at Night,
charged with the task of collaborating on a novella related to Hopper’s 1940 painting. We gave them no other instructions—they were free
to do as they pleased. The results were serialized on the Walker’s website throughout April 2014, then published by Coffee House as an e-book.

We chose these writers because each of them work in genres that Hopper’s work lends itself to: noir, in the case of Laird Hunt, and fairy tales for Kate Bernheimer. Why fairy tales? Not because of any magical elements, but because fairy tales, structurally, draw frames around themselves and deal heavily with archetypes, objects, and light and dark the way Hopper’s paintings sometimes do. Having worked with both Laird and Kate for many years, I also knew that they would leap at the chance to participate—and that they would think expansively about their approach. Believe me, they have.

What they have written is not meant to be a definitive interpretation of the painting, and when you read it, you’ll see why. Their novella is only one of a thousand stories we hope are inspired by this remarkable painting.

      
—Chris Fischbach, Publisher

         
Coffee House Press

CHRIS FISCHBACH
: What were your first thoughts when we approached you with the idea of being a “resident” in
Office at Night
?

KATE BERNHEIMER
: Your initial letter of invitation to us read, in part, “I think the noirishness of the painting, and its creepiness, and something I can’t quite tell what, made me think of both of you right away.” I am a big Laird Hunt fan, and a big Edward Hopper fan, so I was hugely flattered. But at the same time, frankly, I was terrified. If you’ve read any of Laird’s books, you know what a formidable stylist and thinker he is. So one of my first thoughts was that I really needed the outfit of the woman in the painting, not to mention her lipstick, so I could get into the role— which means one of my first thoughts was of her body, my inhabiting it. Basically, the idea took hold immediately for me, artistically. I even exchanged emails with Sarah Schultz about whether the Walker was offering costumes to us; she sent me an enchanting photograph of a forties secretary in spectator pumps with a note that read simply, “The secret might be in the shoes.” (Laird and I actually didn’t find ourselves assigning roles by
gender, in the end. Instead, we traveled as desire took us, from body to body, object to object, in the painting.) Coffee House and the Walker had such a brilliant, original concept for this: we were told the residency would be about the process of being inside the painting together as much as about the finished novella. It was smart and seductive, and I think I typed back, “Yes, please!”

CF
: What kind of research did you do in order to prepare for writing?

LAIRD HUNT
: I looked at the painting (a digital version provided by the Walker of said). Then I looked at the painting again. Then I looked at it some more. Then I covered up parts of it and looked at what was still there and what wasn’t. Then I looked at whatever marvelous ideas Kate was coming up with. Then I read up a bit on Hopper. Then I looked at the painting. Then I thought about an unfinished and abandoned manuscript of mine set partly in New York and partly in Hell’s Kitchen, in the twenties and thirties. Then I wrote. Then I looked some more. Then I wrote some more. Then I
imagined I was standing just out of sight, perhaps beyond the open door, inside the painting. Then I looked at one of my daughter’s rather elaborate paint sets and the abandoned (or all but) easel we have in the back room. Then I wrote some more. Then I looked again.

CF
: What method did you come up with in order to “collaborate,” and did you consider different options?

KB
: Looking back at the hundreds of e-mails we’ve had about this project since its inception, I realize that very early on in the process we moved super naturally into a call-and-response form of composing the novella. The first words arrived on my desk on the evening of December 30 from Laird, who sent what he called “a start on the guy in the picture.” He wrote: “I’ve named him Chelikowsky, after a colleague of my father’s from the old days. Writing it, which starts with a kind of paranoia about the open window next to him, makes me realize: he is effectively frozen, a figure in a painting, an epic instance.” Laird also asked me if I knew the woman’s name, and mentioned that he thought she was a new hire.
Soon after, I wrote the first passages for Hester’s narration—in which she sets forth some complaints about the new hire, Marge Quinn.

We collaborated via correspondence. Our many exchanges contained passages for the novella, letters to each other about the painting and the novella, and stuff about our personal lives outside of the painting (worlds colliding intensively for a couple of months). Amidst very intense discussions about the aesthetics and plot of the novella, we talked about things like Laird’s childhood in Singapore and my Chinese American daughter—who is the same age as Laird’s daughter—and sometimes we suggested cocktails to each other for the end of the workday. Bits of these personal exchanges made their way into the fiction. Even the subject lines of the e-mails became part of the story as it evolved: “Thus spake the file cabinet,” “Does Chelikowsky have a first name?” and “Hester (far from painting)” are three examples. Once we were exchanging letters and bits of fiction, we didn’t consider doing it any other way; questions, challenges, were built into the process, and I found the whole experience aesthetically thrilling. The call-and-response method challenged me technically in certain tangible ways,
and it also gave me a new sense of freedom to put an idea in the story, trusting Laird would take it from there.