Office at Night Read Free Page A

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 toexplain to an outsider.
    Even buying a coffee at the newspaper stand to bring to the office, steaming and hot, twenty-five cents with heavy cream added, one sugar, is personal business that she considers business, because it goes on her desk. You can see by the way she caresses the cardboard with her buttery fingers. My fingers aren’t buttery—they’re more like matchsticks. Not brittle—more like delicate—and effective for making a pass. But there’s nothing personal about me at work, or at least I maintain that impression, which takes discipline and technique.
    What goes on my desk—and I keep my desk bare as I can, just as I keep my body under my clothes—is all business, and the personal matters go in a drawer, or if not suitable there, in a file marked “Personal” (no subheading), and there’s a secret drawer for those files too, but enough of that now, that’s for later, or never.
    It is my job to train Quinn. I’ve never met anyone like her. I’d take a nickname like Quinn. Chan isn’t much of a nickname. No one ever uses nicknames for me.
    The last stenographer—well, we didn’t have one, but the girl who would have been a stenographer, if we’d needed a stenographer,wasn’t anything like Quinn, not one bit! She was all angles and business. She had few responsibilities apart from being sure the phone stopped ringing in time. I don’t think she had a personal life. She lived in the low numbers, if you know what I mean, where I would have lived if my father would have let me, but I lived at home, because he needed someone to take care of his business (all personal, and I would rather not go into details). That was two years ago, before I moved into the hotel. It wasn’t the Barbizon—not that I couldn’t have afforded it on my salary; Mr. C. treats me well—but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted my cup of tea my way, not the Barbizon way, and by that I mean I wanted my birds. Not caged birds, but pigeons—they mainly eat on the sills, but if they want to come in I don’t mind, and I wanted to live somewhere that didn’t mind either, and I didn’t want to sign in and out every time I left for a sandwich—egg salad, thank you, with iceberg lettuce and mayo on white. The receipts are all there in the filing cabinet. I take liberties only with this—keeping my personal affairs filed at work. “Sandwich Receipts,” all in order; you won’t find a single one missing.
    The trouble with being a secretary is training new stenographersto understand that there are some phone calls that must go unanswered, and some letters that will never be filed and some that will never be taken out of the files, will never be seen—there is only so much I can tell her, and it is quite clear from the way that she dresses that she doesn’t like to be told anything. So even when I am being evasive, because I don’t trust her, she thinks I am telling her something and wants to rebel. This shows in her thighs.
    If you’d like an example, I should not have shared with her the name of my tailor, the Latvian woman on Twentieth Street, Mrs. Lurenski. She’s a genius with wool. I can ring her up on a Friday and have the suit that I need by the