Eight Wall Street

Dale Hutchins is talking about giving up the second floor, which would mean me moving into the back room with the window onto the alley. I have been in that office four years. It has a bad radiator, a chair I have never liked, and a window that gets about forty minutes of direct light in the late afternoon in summer, and about two hundred people have told me the truth in it. That is the thing nobody warns you about with a room like this. It accumulates. Every difficult thing anybody has said to me in four years was said within eight feet of where I am sitting, and I have no idea whether that is why I find the room restful or why I find it heavy, and on different days it is clearly both. I said I would think about the back room, which I will not. I will say no, in the corridor, badly, with nothing prepared, because that worked last time. Priyanka Rao asked me once whether I ever reset the room between clients — moves a chair, opens a window, anything. I said no. She said she turns her chair ninety degrees and back again, which sounds absurd and which I have thought about at least monthly since.