“No. Well, yes, my parents have a house there. But you were telling me last night you went to school near Kingston. You apparently love going upstate.” He laughed.
I couldn’t remember what he seemed to recall effortlessly: whatever conversation we’d had, in the last few hours at the Spectrum, hadn’t produced any strong memories through the blitz of drugs and booze that had erased nearly everything else in my head save a few flickering seconds of the cab ride, jump cuts of us kissing, stripping, my hips pressed against his rear as my cock found his ass, his right hand reaching back to grab my thigh, squeezing it tightly, before he ejaculated all over the sheets and apologized for it as though we were at my place and it was my mess to wash out. My confused, “No, no, I’m sorry, actually.”
I wanted to dip my head in the fountain at Washington Square Park. I wanted to jump in the river, stick my head out of a cab, scream off the headache.
Simon turned to look out the window as I struggled out of bed and began to search for my clothes in the pile of his laundry on the floor. As I leant forward to pick up my socks my brain imploded between my ears. “Worst. Hangover. Ever,” I said. I felt slugged, maybe still drunk, maybe even a little high. I waited for him to say something but he kept quiet.
“But sure, I’d go upstate one day,” I told him, not recalling our conversation about it.
I would like that, he told me, “Let’s hang out again soon.” Sure, definitely. We will. My head throbbed. I should stop doing this, I thought, in what passed for a fleeting acknowledgment that I needed to course-correct in my life, though I knew I didn’t mean it, not yet at least, and that I’d be out again later that night, at some party, having already forgotten the brutal hangover of the afternoon, which, when I stood up in Simon’s room, fully seized me in its awful grip, like it would never let me go. “I’ll see you later,” I said, trying my best not to throw up. Do I have your number? I did.
3
I woke up halfway through the third (and final) talk—delivered by a somber Canadian environmental activist-artist, a de-feathered buzzard draped in a large anti-fracking t-shirt, whose latest project involved dropping bags of an invasive, destructive ant species into the ventilation shafts of branches of Deutsche Bank, thereby shutting them down for days at a time—and went out for a cigarette I bummed from the woman sitting next to me. “I’ll come with you,” she whispered.
Outside, she moved to the other end of the barn to call someone. I was drowsy, stoned on the fresh air that rippled in a light breeze through the night. The rear of the main house, where the residents were setting out dishware on the porch, lit the slope of the field. There were about twenty visitors in attendance, maybe twenty residents, too, not counting Helen, and I wondered how she would fit all forty of us around two medium-sized tables. I dragged on the cigarette.
Two residents, a man and a woman, stopped setting the tables and peered inside the kitchen, seemingly to check whether anyone was paying attention to them. So, from my distance, finally, a plot, forming movie-like up the hill, with me its lone audience member about thirty feet away. The man, with sandy blond hair, leaned in to whisper to the woman, who stood across the table from him. Another woman came out and the man pulled back, though slowly, and the three stood together with rigid formality. The new woman pointed into the kitchen, put her hand on the man’s shoulder, and directed him back inside.
What was this? Everything about the project suggested two levels: the first the story Helen told us, and a second, the one that was truly taking place, organizing these elements—the residents, Helen, their collective politics, whatever those politics were—into actual, if cryptic, meaning. As a visitor, I couldn’t quite see what was happening or what this place meant, either to Helen or to its residents, nor whether it did what it said it did. I had no reason to believe otherwise, Simon had nothing but good things to say about the project, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, like I’d entered a room in which all the furniture had been moved just slightly, leaving behind a psychic imprint of the previous arrangement that suggested things were amiss. I had never been in this room before, but this was not the way it was supposed to look.
I dragged on the cigarette again, finishing it: a plot against what? The woman on the phone came back over with a sympathetic look, and retrieved two more cigarettes from her bag, one for herself and one for me. I took it and borrowed her lighter. Overhead, the stars constellated in bright hieroglyphics, caught in the clear white band of the Milky Way that fell faintly across the dome of the Earth like a sash. The house lights went out, as some of the residents were busy dropping mosquito nets around the porch, and the glow of the table candles set in. The thin sliver of a crescent moon hung in the sky like a tilted, archaic smile.
Inside the barn, the sound of clapping broke the mumble of the speaker. Claps. A pause. More claps. A definite “Thank you, thank you.” Another round of claps, likely because Helen had come to the stage. I put out the second cigarette in the dirt and went back into the barn as the audience members were rising from their folding chairs to leave. Standing before the crowd, Helen tapped the mic, “Excuse me, excuse me.” Everyone quieted or fell to a whisper and there was mostly silence, except for the mute shuffle of feet on hay as people quietly stretched, their attention strained with hunger. “So we’re almost ready for dinner. If you want to make your way to the house, we’ll be serving everyone on the porch. Please do not, and I’m very serious about this,” she added, “do not sit with a friend.”
Simon came over. “Guess we do it alone?”
“You have to sit with me,” I said.
“No, it’ll be more fun if we don’t!” The crowd pushed us out of the barn. “I’ll see you at the bonfire,” he said.
I took a seat between the blond man whom I’d seen talking on the porch (“Hi, I’m Jeff,” he said, taking my hand with both of his) and another woman named Cecilia, who had ignored Helen’s plea and was sitting with her droopy-eyed husband, Ron, his face bloated and red from the sweaty lecture his wife had forced him to sit through. Across from me, the woman who had been whispering to Jeff introduced herself with her full name, Melissa Halpern, hi, and started: “So what brings everyone here?”
I didn’t know what to say besides my name: “Hi, I’m Nick,” and stopped myself there. I wanted the residents to set the tone for the evening given that this was their territory, their “story to tell,” as Helen had put it. I swished my wine glass while Jeff introduced himself to Cecilia.
Taking my silence as her cue, Cecilia, frozen in a look of permanent disdain, recited her full CV, including curatorial work, editorial work, museum work, major-donor-liaison-whatever work, frequent travel to Europe for work, and so on. She told us that she went to Europe a lot, mostly France, where she “has an office in Paris” because she was very interested in the art scene there (she named names, dealers, artists, fairs, something about the board of the Palais de Tokyo), until it seemed she’d run out of work things to tell us about and, when I started to say that I occasionally wrote about art as a way of introducing myself to the conversation, abruptly turned to her slumbering husband and never looked back at the three of us again. “I’m a writer, that’s what brings me here,” I started again, though that wasn’t, in fact, what had brought me to the project. Nevertheless, it gave me a role to play.
“What kind of writer are you?” Marissa asked.
“I’m a poet, but I write other things.”
A poet, ahh, they said. They liked poetry, both read it often, though nothing very new, they assured me. Jeff liked Byron. Marissa said she enjoyed T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.
“Do you have a book?” Marissa asked. She was grave, a serious person who took other people seriously, with eyes that seemed to record rather than see, as though everything around her were being carefully cataloged for later reference. She pinched her glass at its stem and pushed it back and forth on the table.
“I’m working on it,” I said. In fact, I didn’t