Office at Night Read Free Page B

following Monday—a Following Suit. These are the most difficult patterns, and they need to be frequently changed for success in the office and on the street, where some of our work takes us—especially down to the pickle district, and that is no joke.
    What worries me is that Quinn always stays late. Mr. C. says she’s motivated, she’s the most motivated and mysterious stenographer he has ever known, and I’m worried. He’s vulnerable, Mr. C., to certain sensations—no need to go in the gutter with that. I mean he admires ambition, but the firstthing to know about business is it isn’t personal. Personal ambition is the opposite of his father’s ideals, and it is the opposite of how to get where we’re going, and I should know, because I’ve read all the mail. I also designed the communication system, the one with the mailroom that doesn’t exist, but as far as Mr. C. is concerned it exists, and apparently, according to him, it is very, very real, because he frequently refers to the mailroom. According to him, it’s down in the basement, which you can only get to by taking the stairwell to the door that’s marked B. I discovered, my first day of work, that the drawer key opens this door. Behind the door is a room full of filing cabinets, locked. My key does not open these files and they’re covered with dust and with grime, and the one closest to the door—the one illuminated by the light of the stairwell—has a heart drawn in the grime by a finger, with two initials inside joined by a + and outside the heart, a finger has scraped in a word that might read forever or never .

 

     
    I t was not Hester Chan’s desire to become a secretary—since I am a light, I can say this with confidence; I shine a light on every desire, and every lack of desire.
    It was Hester Chan’s hope that she could—like her father—work at the hand laundry only six blocks away from their Chinatown flat. She had wanted to work in the back room of the hand laundry—it opened onto an alley where the laundresses stood during their work breaks and smoked. Hester’s older brother, who, if he wasn’t her brother, if it wasn’t so wrong, she’d think of as a half-Chinese Jimmy Stewart (Jimmy Stewart being her favorite actor, since he had appeared in her favorite play about an imaginary rabbit). Hester’s brother, who, like Hester, wasn’t half Chinese at all, but maybe an eighth, nobody knew, and both Hester and her brother had such an elegant look—I shone a light on it carefully when visitors came, delicately tilting my neck.
    Hester’s brother always had some adorable girl waiting for him on the stoop, and had told her that the laundry workerssmoked opium, and that he smoked it too.
    Even though laundry work is especially wearisome—soaking, scrubbing, and ironing of clothing by hand, often in rather uncomfortable circumstances, overly hot or overly cold—Hester enjoys wearisome work. She enjoys wearisome work of this kind in particular, the kind that involves water and fabric, electricity, steam—not human beings. She is not a self-punishing sort, but she’s not very ambitious either, in some significant ways. Yet more to the point, she detests entanglements, intrigue. It is difficult, for this reason, to know precisely how Harvey —the play about Jimmy Stewart and his imaginary rabbit, which had been put on a couple of years ago—had cemented the actor as her ideal sort of man. Yet a man, a perfectly wonderful man with a constant wild look in his eyes, with a long body that was lazy and sensual and really quite strange—a man having an invisible, huge talking rabbit as a best friend is not the same as a man having a tedious entanglement with any old human. Which is the sort of intrigue most humans enjoyed.
    And who could blame the encouragers, really? Those who wanted Hester to have more aspiration, that is. As a laundryworker, her daily routine would have consisted mainly of working, eating, then sleeping. A