Chelikowsky never did anything to JJ beyond shoving her ever so more gently than the phone remembers it out the door. Well, as I have said, he did follow her sometimes. But she also followed him. He shoved her because she laughed at him. Laughed at his fumbling, his groping, his getting it so wrong. Do I excuse shoving because of laughing? Of course I don’t. I’m just some light. Light from everywhere. You are looking at me right now. Or if you aren’t you just were. I am the light of this moment.
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.
Once 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.
So 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?
It 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.