MacArthur Park. Andrew Durbin

seemed his most distinct trait, and the one that had cost him the most friends and institutional support. In the absence of much interest from the contemporary art world after the late nineties, he’d decamped to France to bum around their patron system. In Paris, he worked out of his apartment in the ninth arrondissement, where he kept a large studio on the ground floor of his building, making occasional work for his American and French galleries, though his exhibitions were less and less frequent on this side of the Atlantic. “He never goes out,” Helen said, “which nobody minds because he’s an asshole.” She was ready to talk. He was a monk in an order of one. Few appreciated his pieties, though many admired his dense, research-heavy art and he remained a respected antique, someone whose death would likely prompt a major reevaluation of a body of work most had taken for granted or simply forgotten about. Being alive, puttering about western Europe, would provoke no such reconsideration. Still, George was smart, knew how to work obscurity to his quiet advantage, and his work conveyed this genius with an unapologetic charisma unique to male artists who have never been told a firm no.

      “How do people get together?” Helen asked, tacking on a dramatic sigh to her odd rhetorical question. I considered my wine.

      Despite their years of agreed-upon silence, Helen still loved him, sort of, she said, and she thought fondly of her time with him. But their relationship, beginning when he was her professor at RISD, eventually “stopped making sense.” George liked Paris. Helen New York. George did not want a regular rotation of residents at the project. Helen did. George preferred to summer in Sainte-Maxime, a French resort town. She preferred upstate. She hinted at infidelity. I guessed George liked to sleep with young girls, picking them up at the beach while they lounged topless on the white sand. A charming, befuddled man, I bet that he had a certain academic attitude that somehow construed itself into sex appeal, one that made it easy for him to find undergraduate girls to bring to the hotel room while Helen had whiskey on the resort veranda and practiced her French with sleepy locals.

      Once, I imagined, on their final vacation together, she came back to the room and found him with two sixteen-year-olds. Refusing the invitation to a fight, this very last one, she packed her things without saying a word while George shouted at her because this was her fault, her stupid jealousy, very quaint, Helen, very quaint of you. She waved him off, idiot that he was, and left for a nearby hotel, a blue cube deposited in the green hills outside this town on the Med, and a tabernacle to the lost and dispossessed, where one goes when one is starring in a movie about the fuck-up of a lifetime. She did not want to cry but she did. She scolded herself in the room for coming with him to France when she had known their marriage was ending, for trying to restore whatever had been between them, for thinking that France would remedy anything. She hated France, really. But France is easy to hate. She was terrible at French, even after a year of private lessons. He didn’t ask her to stay when she called the next morning to tell him she was going back to New York early.

      She went over the course of these events in her head. On the veranda, a waiter had mentioned to her, cryptically, “Madame, I believe your husband has been upstairs for some time.” What a very odd thing to say. She hadn’t understood so she went up to her room on an impulse, what she later realized was the lizard part of her brain issuing its animal warning of betrayal in the den. Ah. How long had the waiter known, how many girls had he seen accompanying George to their room while she read Middlemarch in the open air, before he felt some vague moral responsibility to nudge her to face facts? I’ll keep upstate, at least, she assured herself. She rubbed her eyes until her vision blurred, then stepped in the shower for forty-five minutes while the hot water ran cold.

      George would never have the energy to maintain the nascent colony. In their divorce settlement, he argued for nothing, which was itself a painful gesture, since it conveyed to her that there was nothing from their life that he wanted to keep.

      Years later, Helen told me, Sandy carried away the beach house and, with it, a substantial archive of her works, including many of the project’s early written materials and some financial papers related to the deed on the project’s land. She also lost her diaries from the second half of the nineties along with letters that detailed her early relationship with George. (Her eighties notebooks were safely upstate, in a box in the basement marked “Unpublished journals 1978–1989.”) In many ways Sandy erased her—and ever since she’d felt like she was etching herself back into the picture. A month after the storm, an upstate newsletter ran an article about her loss. They published a photograph of Helen at the site of the ruins, taken by her neighbor a few days after the storm had passed, standing in a splintered pile of broken furniture. In the rubble, she recognized nothing of her past life. The fragmentary parts of what had been hers were foreign to her. In the image, gray clouds hang low over the blasted coast. She told the reporter she would not rebuild and she didn’t.

      “We were stupid not to think that would happen, to be honest,” she said. She poured us both another glass. “I was here, freaking out, when I saw what was happening downstate.”

      Her eyes darted this way and that as she recalled the galloping fear she felt as she lay prostrate on her bedroom floor upstate. If she was lying or exaggerating about something, which she might have been since none of this had come up in my admittedly cursory research of her, her home and all that, her voice quivering at moments with a distinctly false note, did she mind its easy verifiability? Did it matter? Crisis gives us shape, the contours of sympathetic form, whether we call it forth or not, whether or not it happened to us as we claim—or remember—it did. I decided not to tell her about my own experience in the storm, which amounted to nothing more than that of a casual, removed observer, standing safely from afar, my face briefly lit in the white fire of the power-plant explosion. Was that even true—or had my mind added that detail later, to place myself among accountable things since I was otherwise left in the abstract space of someone else’s apartment, just at the edge of disaster? I could have said anything about my past. It seemed, in any case, that one condition of the mediated present was not simply disaster itself and its immediate and obvious effect on a given reality, measurable in loss of life, loss of capital, loss of property, but the peripheral warp in the communications systems that had become central to our lives: stray tweets, hashtags, Facebook posts, news alerts, text messages, all of it evidence that something is happening, something often on the edge, in some close or far elsewhere, whether you are “in it” or not. A jittery, closed-circuit paranoia of an “event,” where it remains unclear who’s there, and whether it is even happening as it is said to be happening, given the diffuse authority of the speakers, the tellers of disaster. Helen was “in it” as I was “in it,” even if our relationship to “in” differed so substantially, both between us and between others and us. I was “in” the storm, but in a luxury apartment. “In” being a function of privilege, one’s “in” never quite resembles another’s, and I did not trust Helen’s description of hers—as I did not trust my own. She was elsewhere, as I was elsewhere, and this gave the lie to our shaky stories.

      Whatever her politics, whatever her responsibility to her community, she seemed, to me, driven by untruths.

      Last month, in June, she had spent two weeks at Sainte-Maxime against her better judgment to work on a memoir about her early years and the founding of the project. She told me it would be her story of this place. “There are many stories of this place, as there are for any place, but mine will concern the land, which I’ve been researching for years, including the Irish family that first purchased the property in the late 1870s.” She hadn’t told George she was going to France, but part of her expected she’d run into him on the beach. Never happened. While she was once again practicing French on the veranda at the hotel of her betrayal, he was in Bern, installing a show at the Kunsthalle there. He emailed her an invitation to the opening and the dinner with an offer to pay for her flight to Switzerland, but she didn’t check her inbox until the day after the show opened. She would have gone.

      “George is a sweet man and I love him dearly but I don’t want to see him again.” Around us, the candlelight rippled as the residents rushed to clear away the remaining dishes for bowls of homemade vanilla ice cream, coffee, and more bottles of wine.

      “I hope you like ice cream,” Helen said.

      “I do.”

      “So