For One More Day at the Office

Every only child knows there is a difference between being lonely and being alone. Growing up in Manhattan, I was a master at entertaining myself; I had an older half sister, but she didn’t live with me, so I was usually my own favorite company.

There was one phase I went through — I was 6 at the time, maybe 7 — when I would get home from school, race upstairs and close my door. I didn’t have homework yet. I was working on something far more sophisticated than coloring books or puzzles. I was playing Office. In order to play Office, I had to get into character. I would don one of my dad’s suit jackets — I preferred a nice gray pinstripe — and would attempt to balance a spare pair of his glasses on my small snub nose. Sometimes I would shuffle around in his wingtips. Then I would organize piles of papers on my desk, filing them away in folders once they had been properly reviewed. If the mood struck me, I pretended to read The Wall Street Journal.

My mother would sometimes come up to check on me; she would knock gently, ask if I wanted a snack. “Not now, Mom!” I’d call back through the unopened door, my voice strained with urgency. “I’m working!”

If you had asked me then what my father did for a living, I would have given you a very specific answer. He wasn’t a banker or a businessman. He was a mutual fund manager. I went to private school on the Upper East Side, so I probably wasn’t the only kid in my class who could articulate the difference between a mutual fund and a hedge fund, an investment bank and a commercial bank. But because I was an only child, and because my dad ran his own business, I probably spent more time hanging around an office than your average first grader.

My dad’s office, in those years on Maiden Lane in the Financial District, felt like Cheers: it was a place where I could relax after a long day, where everyone knew my name. The car ride downtown was part of the thrill: dad’s driver, Angel, would sneak me contraband gum or Life Savers, and gossip with me about his latest crisis with his latest girlfriend. Going through building security never got old, either. I liked signing in and getting a sticker with my name on it. It made me feel like part of the team.

Upstairs I could go to the trading floor, where the traders would high-five me and teach me the occasional curse word. Dad’s secretary, Louise, always seemed happy to see me. She would let me sit at her desk and color while I waited for Dad to get off a call. The walls of Dad’s office were adorned with my artwork (his favorite, later a source of deep humiliation for me, was a pink stick figure holding a fish, which I had provocatively titled “Naked Girl With Fish”). Dad was always willing to give me tasks that made me feel important. I would help color in stock charts (“This makes it easier for me to read,” he would say, nodding approvingly). Sometimes, I was allowed to answer his phone.

And as at any good party, there were always favors. I almost never came home from the office empty-handed. There were supply closets brimming with anything I could ever want for my own desk: paper clips, highlighters, Post-it notes in every shade. There was a kitchen with free Cokes and little packets of ketchup and mustard, which I hoarded in case of emergency. During the car ride uptown, I would show Dad my stash, and give him a breakdown on the new supply goods I had the inside track on. “You gotta get these,” I would tell him. “These new pens have four colors — you click ’em like this. Oh, and Louise said she’d order you a mini-stapler if you wanted.” Once home, I’d run to my room and organize my new wares on my desk, typically by rainbow order. Then I’d get to work.

A few years ago, I stumbled across a touching article in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik about his daughter Olivia’s imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli. Ravioli is a true New Yorker; he lives on the corner of Madison and Lexington, and his defining characteristic is that he is always on the go. In fact, Ravioli is often too busy to play with Olivia at all. She laments that he “had to run”; he regularly cancels lunch with her at the last minute. When he is too busy to answer Olivia’s calls (made from her toy cellphone, obviously), his assistant, Laurie, relays the bad news. Her parents wonder: isn’t there something wrong with a child inventing a friend who is too busy to play with her?

I gave this article to my mom, assuming she would find it as amusing as I did. Instead, she called me to discuss, her voice heavy with worry. Did I associate with Olivia? Was I trying to tell her something? Did I feel that she and Dad had been too busy to play with me? Why had I spent so much time playing by myself in my room?

Now I was worried. I thought the whole Olivia-Charlie Ravioli relationship was adorable. The kid was precociously aware of her own environment, right? New Yorkers are busy. Lunches get canceled. Dates get rescheduled. You could analyze her relationship with Charlie Ravioli to death, or you could appreciate the upside: the kid had a big imagination and a pretty sharp eye for detail. Besides, I found it way less weird than Eloise, the only child in Kay Thompson’s children’s books, who plays with a turtle named Skipperdee that wears sneakers and eats raisins, and everyone thinks Skipperdee is endearing.

The article offered a more profound explanation. After talking to his sister, a developmental psychologist, Mr. Gopnik writes that children create imaginary friends (and also paracosms, invented societies or universes, which is more along the lines of what I was doing by playing Office) “not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction … as observations of grownup manners assembled in tranquility and given a name.” It’s a sign, his sister told him, that the child is “confident enough to begin to understand how to organize her experience into stories.”

More and more, I think that’s what I was doing. My dad was then, and remains to this day, one of the few grown-ups I have come across who truly loved his job. He would come home filled with stories about Wall Street. His enthusiasm for work was infectious. Dad loved playing office; why wouldn’t I? The grown-up manners that I was observing weren’t necessarily stress or busyness (though both of these existed in abundance in our house) but rather excitement and passion. Dad’s office was the source, so I recreated that in my own bedroom.

And 26 years later, I’m doing it — or something like it — again.

“Isn’t writing from home lonely?” My friend Anne asked me over coffee. “I have this vision of you stuck in your apartment all day, talking to imaginary people.” She squeezed my hand, looked concerned. Anne works in public relations, the professional antithesis of writing. Her day is spent making calls, meeting people, networking. Anne is also one of five children, so she’s accustomed to constant human contact.

“I’m an only child,” I shrugged. “I like being alone.”

It took me a while to get here: back to my home office, where my imagination can take over. I tried my hand at finance first, then corporate law, driven perhaps by a desire to recreate my father’s professional life. A few years ago, I worked up the nerve to start a novel. I found, I suppose, the confidence to organize my experience into stories. I do occasionally miss office life, but I’ve realized over time that it’s Dad’s office I miss, not my own.

Some days I wish I had Dad’s supply closet to raid, or Dad’s colleagues to joke around with. More often, I just wish I had Dad, so we could chat about how much we love our work. He died far too young, and far too suddenly, on Sept. 11, 2001, in the office that he loved. One small measure of comfort for me is my firm belief that he would not have lived his life any differently if he had known that would be the case.

Dad would like my new office, I think. He would see how much I enjoy working here. Whenever I have a successful day of writing, I wish I could share it with him. But not once have I ever felt lonely.

Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com.

---

Cristina Alger is the author of the novel “The Darlings.”