My husband comes home today, finally. I’ve been missing him terribly. To pass the time until his plane landed, I went out to his studio to work.
We live in a house built in 1907 by a Berkeley physician who practiced in a miniature consulting room on the first floor. My husband renovated a derelict shed in the yard as his idiosyncratic studio, with a desk tucked into a dark, windowless nook, the light blocked by a tall bookcase. For a while, I worked in Dr. Schaeffer’s former office, my desk abutting the hand-washing sink, my ink cartridges and red pencils in the long instrument drawers. The room was dark; its windows were hidden beneath eaves. Wainscoting, stained nearly black, crawled up the walls. A heavy bookshelf ran the entire circumference of the ceiling, a leather strap keeping the books in place. Very cool. I hated it.
From the moment I moved into that office, I loathed the gloom, the dark wood, the heavy window shades, the decrepit, original, Victorian-style light fixtures. I couldn’t bear to work in there, but neither could I bring myself to spend money renovating the space. I had sold my first book, and two more in the same mystery series; I taught a seminar every year at the law school and did consulting work; but even so I earned a fraction of what I had as an attorney. Though I never articulated the feeling, or even really recognized it, I didn’t believe that the approximation of a career I had cobbled together justified the expense of a renovation.
Then my husband began traveling more for work, and the business of his business, which I had always handled in order to feel I was participating in the economic life of our family beyond the pittance I earned, became too much for me to manage on my own. He hired a part-time assistant to help book his travel, deal with his correspondence, and do all the things that were taking up the hours of my day that I was supposed to spend writing. I happily turned Dr. Schaeffer’s dreary consulting room over to the assistant, and wandered with my laptop out to cafés, to work surrounded by people and pastry—an ideal environment, I insisted, for an extrovert with an addiction to sugar.
This lasted until my wrists and elbows started to ache. I needed a more ergonomic arrangement than Starbucks could provide. My husband invited me to set up a desk in a corner of his studio in the backyard. This system, though not ideal, worked for years. He keeps vampire’s hours, sitting down to work at around eleven at night and working until dawn burns out his eyeballs and sets his heart aflame. I work in the mornings, once the kids leave for school. On the rare occasions when we were both in the studio at the same time, we enjoyed one another’s company. We sat back-to-back, each listening to the other clicking away on the keys. My husband claimed he could tell from the tempo of my tapping whether I was working or surfing the Internet, and thus he kept me disciplined.
But something about his space bothered me, too. My desk faced a wall, something my husband enjoys but I despise. I could roll my chair back to look out the window, but still I felt claustrophobic. I am, it seems, a poor workman, and I blamed my tools for my creative frustrations. After a while, I just stopped going out to the studio to work.
The couch that my husband bought recently to make me more comfortable has only made matters worse. His workstation, now in the middle of the room to make way for the couch, takes up all the available floor space. Then there is a matter of the stuff: the obsolete audio equipment, the mid-century radios, the reel-to-reels, the three or four or eleven eight-track players, the turntables, speakers, tuners, and amps. And let’s not forget the dolls, models, and figurines. The studio is adrift in bits and oddments that lend it a distinctive personality. That personality, a charming and delightful one, is my husband’s. Aside from a few photos of the children, a row of books on the bottom of one of the bookcases, and a bulletin board on which I can tack up notes and images for the project I am working on, there is nothing of mine in the studio. Though he’s welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend who’s been given a drawer in a bachelor pad bathroom.
Today I had, as ever, a hard time getting comfortable enough in the studio to focus. I lay on the couch, my feet up on a pillow. Unsurprisingly, I dozed off.
When I woke, I gazed at the furnishings in the office, so charmingly expressive of my husband’s iconoclastic personality. Then I looked around my little corner with its sad, few things. I leapt up, ran out to the storage shed, and found an empty cardboard box. I shoved all of my things into the cardboard box, tossed the box into the back of the shed, and surveyed the space. Without my few objects trying to assert a partial dominion, the studio felt like it belonged entirely to my husband. It felt right.
I sat down on the couch and happily got to work, my mood profoundly altered. I don’t need to share my husband’s studio. I can work anywhere. On a couch in the corner of the room, at a table in a café, in the library. I am nimble and free from the constraints of needing to have a room of my own. According to her nephew who penned a biography, Jane Austen didn’t require an elaborate, secluded space: “She had no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions.” If Pride and Prejudice could be produced under such circumstances, only a pretentious fool with an overly precious sense of her own importance would demand a place of her own, free of vintage eight-track players, in which to write.
Day 10
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: Weirdly conscious that one of my eyes sees better than the other.
Mood: Wonderful. Happy. Content. Another really good day.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Seven hours.
Work: Wonderfully productive. I see why some people microdose as a substitute for Adderall.
Pain: Much less.
It’s surprisingly difficult to squeeze precisely two drops of liquid into one’s own mouth. I have to do it in the mirror, and even so there’s a certain fraught quality to the experience, as I am terrified of accidentally ingesting too much. I must have looked frazzled when I came into the house this morning, because one of my kids gave me a suspicious look.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Where were you?”
“Um, just, you know,” I mumbled, fishing for time, “taking a walk.”
“Why?”
“It’s supposed to, like, improve my mood or something.” I winced. Why was I sounding like a fourteen-year-old whose mother notices her red eyes (“I was, like, riding my bike behind a bus or something”)?*1
“Good,” he said. “Walk longer.” Ordinarily, that’s just the kind of sass that might put a damper on my mood, but not today, Satan!
“Very funny,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t think it works like that. More isn’t necessarily more. In fact, in this case less is more.”