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| A Corner of my Studio |
Sometimes, up there, alone, I think:
this would be enough. Living alone, in my studio, with maybe a
bathroom and kitchen added. I know what all the articles say about
single people not being as happy nor living as long, but maybe those
people just don't have the right furnishings.
It reminds me of what Frank Girard
said once. Frank Girard was a friend and colleague of my father's.
They were writing a book on some obscure Socialist Labor Party
ephemera, and every Summer Frank would visit from Wisconsin. He wore
plaid shirts and had large hands and always took an interest in what
I was up to.
The first Summer he came he stayed in
my step-sister's old room that was across the hallway from mine. She
had moved out and so I had made it into a sitting room and I must
have been proud of the whole set-up because as soon as he finished
mounting the stairs and could see the hallway and the two rooms he
said, “Ah. Every man must have his castle!”
I understood that then, and I
understand it now.
Making the whole upper floor into an
apartment had always been part of my designs, and as soon as my
sister moved out I jumped on to the space with all the first-world
imperial privilege a boy my age could muster and annexed her room. I
was fourteen.
My bedroom I kept as my bedroom, but
I arranged her room to be a sitting room, furnished half in the style
of 221 Baker Street B, complete with a magnifying glass and Victorian
ort, and half in a more noirish style.
To fulfill the latter I gathered a
couple of empty liquor bottles from around the neighborhood and
arranged them with an empty bottle of my dad's Canadian Whiskey. I
half filled them all with water so that my “bar” consisted of the
blended whiskey along with two bottle of “Old Grand Dad.” The
picture of the Victorian old man with the spectacles I had seen on
billboards for the liquor also went nicely with the Sherlock Holmes
aesthetic.
In the late afternoon, or early
evening I'd pour myself a glass of the “whiskey”, put my record
of “Rhapsody in Blue” on using the large wooden console stereo
and then sink into the green faux-leather armchair. I felt like a
grown-up. but old-fashioned too, like I was a Bogart detective. The
fantasy would continue and although it wasn't specific, I was just a
detective in the big city relaxing with his drink at the end of the
day, it pushed the boundaries of my natural existence—an
assimilated Jewish boy growing up in a Philadelphia suburb and all
the angst that comes with the adolescent territory—almost enough,
until my mother yelled up to me that it was dinner time, or my father
started mowing the lawn. Then I was just a kid again, not a guy in
his thirties in the 1940's.
At forty-four, I'm still sitting
around in a furnished room, longing for something. The fantasy is a
little different now. In the fantasy I'm a writer and a renaissance
man, and I draw Arabic calligraphy and play the oud, and as it
happens I do all of these things anyway. But in the fantasy I don't
have a wife and child, I control everything, and I have lovers who
come and go. And some sort of passive income.
When I was a teenager the problem
seemed to be that I wasn't a grown-up. And I couldn't be a grown up
at that age any more than I could be a real private eye or living in
the 1940's. And I certainly didn't think I'd miss my family one day,
my parents, or my sister. Those were the people I couldn't wait to
get away from.
Now, I have all that and a bag of
chips. That's something my wife would say. We've been together long
enough that our speech patterns are well-integrated. And I suppose
that if I really wanted to I could leave, set myself up in a small
studio and live that coveted bachelor life where I fix myself drinks
and listen to Gershwin, alone on a chair. Here's what actually
happens when I'm by myself, for example when Jill takes my son to
Memphis so they can visit relatives: I end up drinking a lot of beer
and watching Jackie Chan movies. It's great for the first two days
and then I feel lost. I suppose if it had to be that way I would push
through it and even achieve some sort of happiness, but I also know
something I didn't know when I was fourteen. And that's maybe that I
would have enjoyed my sitting room for another hour if no one called
me to dinner, maybe even two hours, but after that I would have
gotten bored and wanted to hang out with my parents. The only reason
my fantasy was appealing was because people were around...for
escapism to be effective you need something to escape from.
What keeps me
from actually escaping is that without my wife and child my life
would be drastically empty, pale and drained. Call me co-dependent,
if you want, but we happen to have a great relationship and love all
around. I'm very lucky. It's a pain living with anybody, but if it's
the right people, it's a gaping pain living without them.
I open the door
and walk on to the balcony. The moon is full enough to read Arabic
poetry by. The tree in the neighbor's yard is still bare from Winter
and the branches open their hands to a swath of glowing sky.
I walk back
inside, play a song on the oud and then shut the curtains to utter
darkness, crawl into the single bed, and go to sleep.
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| Me on my Balcony |
