was nothing more than a half-formed idea, but one that might, in this instance, give my visit—and my role in the dinner conversation—some purpose. I was a writer, after all. Shouldn’t I have a book?
“What’s it about?” Jeff asked.
“It’s about the weather?” I’d never said aloud what the subject of this nebulous, unfocused writing project was until then. It—if it could be said to be anything at all—hadn’t taken shape yet, but I supposed that was right, it was about the weather. Or rather, this tenuous idea (“It’s about the weather?”) presented itself before me and made immediate sense as my subject. My poems, essays, and short fictions, the things that I hadn’t published but was grouping together in a single “Untitled book thing” folder on my computer, were about disaster, hurricanes, and storms. In these texts my sense of weather had enlarged to include the turbulent atmosphere of human events, the ways in which we face or avoid crisis, the ways we skid toward crisis, helplessly, together and alone. Crisis, the mom of us all. I didn’t know if it was a book or not, but maybe now it was one, finally.
“Sounds interesting,” she said. “Is it non-fiction?”
I wasn’t sure. “I’m thinking it’s a novel or something.”
“Cool,” Jeff said.
Residents carried out plates of risotto and large wooden bowls of spinach salad dressed with cherry tomatoes from the garden. At this, we dropped the subject of my work. Marissa and Jeff explained that they were both from New York. (Marissa was a journalist and essayist and Jeff was a painter.) They hadn’t known one another before joining Helen’s colony, but they’d become close almost immediately despite the project’s insistence that people not develop “exceptional” friendships or “alliances” that might disrupt the whole, whatever the whole might be—neither answered with any clarity when I asked how friendship might disadvantage the group. We haven’t disrupted anything, they said with a wink. Are you two together? I asked. Of course not, Marissa said. I couldn’t tell if this was some coded language they were letting me in on, and so I attempted code myself and asked what the gossip was, miming scare quotes with my fingers as I said gossip. A potent energy zipped between them, like a toy racecar speeding up on a roundabout track, and whatever combustible desire existed between them was so obvious it was almost insulting to hear them openly deny it, even if I was a stranger.
“Gossip?” Jeff asked.
I thought, how stupid, yes, gossip. Like what’s going on between everyone, who is sleeping with who, anyone leave suddenly in an unexplained rage? Or, more delicately: “Do people ever leave early, can’t handle these particular rules?” I was drinking too much—and too fast.
Marissa shot me a suspicious look, so I pulled back and wished I hadn’t finished my risotto so quickly, leaving me with nothing to do. Jeff distracted himself by opening another bottle of wine before saying, “Not really. Why?”
“Just curious.” Hadn’t they been the ones who’d almost confessed or at least hinted at some secret romance to a stranger? Had I taken my curiosity too far?
What had they been doing on the porch? Or what had they been saying? I wanted to ask, but I hesitated to confess that I had snuck out of the barn before the end of the third lecture.
“I’m interested because, like, I don’t know much about this place.”
“Why’d you come?” Marissa asked.
I considered this—whether we were all still playing a game that I was suddenly losing—and decided to excuse myself with the truth: “My friend Simon knows Helen and he thought I’d be interested in what she was doing up here.”
“Are you thinking of applying for the residency?” Jeff asked. “You can’t be a writer here,” he joked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I could give up writing.”
“Give up your book about the weather,” Jeff said.
“The weather is so amazing here,” Marissa insisted, her tone becoming friendlier. “You would have material for years.”
Two other residents approached our table carrying dirty dishes. The dinner is wrapping up, they told us, can we take your plates? Marissa understood. She grabbed our empty risotto bowls, stacked them, picked up our silverware and left, adding flatly, “I’m on dessert duty.” She followed the others into the open kitchen.
“Is she OK?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, she’s got dessert tonight, which means she’s on the cleaning shift, too. It’s the worst part because you work while everyone gets drunk.”
“Terrible!” I said. He laughed.
Simon sat at the opposite corner of the porch. He was in deep conversation with two nonresidents—an older gay couple who’d been on our tour—whom he’d said he thought were very attractive. They were. Fit and probably in their mid-fifties, both had wind-swept gray hair, commercially beautiful faces and looked like models for men’s shampoo, though it was hot and the air was still, so their perfection was slightly askew in the aftermath of the sweaty afternoon. I was jealous, in a way, though I knew I had no reason to be. But this was why we struggled with one another, even at this early stage of the relationship, and I was largely to blame, since I was animated by both indifference and jealousy, a competition of awful feelings that trended in a narcissistic, downward spiral that moved me away from Simon. Work on that, he told me, when I once told him that I was upset that he had kissed someone else at a party. This was our trouble. Perhaps Simon would fuck or want to fuck these older men because we weren’t boyfriends. What would I do in the mean time? They all laughed together and I turned back to Jeff, who was getting up to help another resident struggling to clear the table. “Be right back,” he said.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps until Helen sat down opposite me with a bottle of wine. “No phones,” she said, refilling my glass. “That’s our rule.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just waiting for …”
“This?” She handed me back my glass. I took it, raised it to hers.
“So you’re a writer,” she said. “Simon told me that you’re working on a book?”
I nodded, “Yes, I guess so.” I tried out my new theme on her: “It’s about the weather.”
“We’ve had so much difficulty with that. What kind of weather are you writing about? Good weather, I hope?”
“All kinds, maybe good. Mostly bad, for now. I just wrote something about Hurricane Sandy for a magazine. I think that’s the start.”
That, the storm, was already a year and a few months back, though it continued to stalk us with the frequent news that the city was not prepared for the next one, or any one for that matter.
Helen’s cheeks were flushed a rosy, drunken pink. Tipsy, she coughed up a “hmm” as though she were preparing to make a speech. She topped off my already-full glass.
“George and I had had a home on the Rockaways before Sandy,” she said. “Did you know that?” I shook my head no. I knew almost nothing about her life. OK, well, she said, let me tell you about my house on the Rockaways.
While she spent most of her time upstate with her residents at the project, Helen had two additional homes in New York, one on the Lower East Side and another in Belle Harbor. She was seldom at either, except in the summer when she would spend occasional weekends at the beach house with a few close friends, a dwindling group of artists who had once been force-labeled East Village Art and were subsequently dismissed by the critical establishment after they’d become passé and before any enterprising grad students could dig them up. They were George’s friends, too, but he rarely—if ever—saw them. “George is never in New York anymore,” Helen said. “He’s famous now,” with a faint pfft. Though they rarely spoke, she used to allow him to stay at either home whenever he was in town unless