MacArthur Park. Andrew Durbin

their money. After the purchase was completed, they spent a weekend at the house and never went back.

      The floors sloped oddly with the land. The appliances, held over from the previous owner, were long out of date and no longer practical, almost comically old, but Simon kept them because he couldn’t afford not to. A total modernization was out of the question, his father had insisted, mostly because they never went there and even Simon’s stays were too infrequent to justify the amount it would cost to start over. In any case, Simon maintained his faith in things, especially old things, including the house, and he thought of it as a gift he liked to honor by sharing it with friends whenever he did make the trip upstate. Zachary, who came infrequently, was flippant and complained about the cold water. Julia considered any home of Simon’s hers.

      “Bye, bye,” Zachary said. Julia rolled her eyes and followed him out. They would borrow Simon’s car, and we would take the Jeep his father kept at the house.

      Simon went upstairs to change before we left for Helen’s project. I sat on the porch and waved Zachary and Julia off.

      I could not make myself belong to them. Though we were “dating,” Simon and I didn’t fit easily into the mold of a couple. We went out a lot, but he didn’t like books all that much, especially poetry, and only seemed to care about art because it was something that one was supposed to care about, while they were things that I liked because they were what I did, write poetry, write about art, so he refused readings, openings, dinners. We went instead to clubs and gay bars, Julius, the Cock, Spectrum. Drugs made him horny and break the code of indifference we swore to one another in public, want to kiss me whenever we passed each other at the bar or the backroom. He had mentioned, after one speedy night of a vial of “good” cocaine from an uptown dealer who prided herself on “blending in” with the local set—her local set, so the manor-born of Madison Avenue—that he thought of me as “his” boyfriend. His real boyfriend. I hadn’t at all.

      “Really,” He said. “You don’t? Why not?” I couldn’t say, mostly because I refused to allow my feelings to cohere into some notional, if provisional love. To do so would have been to court a calamity. I just wanted to have fun. He was crushed but high enough to carry on fine without my agreeing with him. We were sitting in front of his computer as dawn set loose its pale colors against the dark silhouette of the city. A video of David Bowie and Cher from sometime in the seventies played on YouTube. It was an improbable but gorgeous duet, their two wraith-like figures flickering in the bad transfer on the screen, rumored to be so high on “good” cocaine themselves as to have no memory of their performance once it was done and yet, in Bowie’s steady canter, there was an almost totalizing sense of the memory that he had performed this before, that this song, like all the events to which a song belongs, was an act of memorializing a previous song that had already been sung, a past performance, the last rosary bead before the next he threaded through his fingers, all the same, so what was remembering it, it’s a continuous, unending loop. There was no song outside that song. Bowie had the sharpest teeth it was like he was sucking the blood out of the air. Cher was crowned with a dome of orange hair.

      “Not really,” I said. “But I like you a lot.”

      The project, conducted with a steady rotation of artists who lived on Helen’s land (some for only a few weeks, some for a few months), worked along the line of relational aesthetics, as Simon said, insisting that anyone who lived there discontinue their normal work or “practice” for the benefit of the community, which was never ours or mine, but was itself to be considered a work of art (though Helen didn’t use that phrase, “work of art”) that had no single author, and so none of the artists who greeted us were actually artists anymore. Instead, they were farmers, cooks, cleaners. They said this with a pride I admired but didn’t believe. A few told me they were writers, but no one wrote anymore since there was so little time to do so. “I used to write experimental poetry,” this guy told me. He’d relieved himself of that burden by cleaning toilets. I got it. In any case, it didn’t seem, as we peeked into the almost bare living quarters of the residents, that there were any pens or paper or computers, only a scattering of science textbooks and magazines, including predictable stacks of old copies of National Geographic in several cabins. They were cut off. Everyone had the cheerful daze of a member of a cult, their zealotry betraying no expression other than radiant pride for the gorgeous landscapes they’d worked themselves into, together, the tripartite home, the cottages, the white linen, Helen, the food, the view of Pennsylvania, the visitors, all of whom were to gather in a barn set off about fifty yards from the big house to listen to lectures on art and a climate that we would someday no longer recognize as our own. It was all so much for them, these true believers in the cause of not-making-art. In the cause of stopping. And they appeared to want nothing else. A man conducted Simon and me to the barn after we’d strayed from our tour. Pointing to the entrance, “The lectures,” he said, “will begin shortly.”

      2

      After Miami, I returned to New York. Fall progressed to unremarkable winter. At a party someone said, “What do you do?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Right.”

      Nearly everyone I knew asked everyone they didn’t know, “What do you do?” This is one way to account for the days, by what you do, and everyone seemed to want to know what I did, whenever they met me. The truth was not much.

      In the waning intervals of winter daylight I retreated to my windowless room in my railroad-style apartment to read and write, lounge bored with books I couldn’t finish, fiddle with sex apps and chat with strangers whom I’d meet after several vodkas, wait for spring, the spring that would force some change, whatever that might be, though that January and February were warmer than usual and everyone was always out, elsewhere, and so it was always a kind of spring, and no change ever came about other than the weather. I sometimes temped at an academic publisher near Central Park and spent my lunch breaks eating near Columbus Circle, on the rocks just past the memorial tower to the merchants who guarded the southwestern entrance. With time, the subway returned to reduced service. One tunnel would be closed until the following year.

      Except for work I rarely went out during the day. I tried to write a novel—my first—titled The Shopping List. It was no good, and mostly concerned unappealing losers who scammed rich uptown families by shopping on their behalf, and eventually I consigned it to the trash bin on my laptop. I didn’t know if I could write. The Shopping List suggested that I couldn’t.

      I climbed into bed with anyone. Climbed into bed with too many friends, too many strangers, and two different men in my building, one of whom had a boyfriend who was always away, though I suspected, finally, that there was no boyfriend and that he was just lonely but incapable of admitting it to strangers. Climbed into bed with a poet who was married and who later divorced his wife because he realized he’d liked men all along. I wanted to climb into bed with her, too, or at least with him while she was there, but neither of them would have the ruin I wanted to make of their lives. Their separation was amicable, though its spirit was greatly improved by an agreement, brokered a month into their separation, that I had to go from the poet’s life, and in their goodbye to me they both said how much they loved each other. I was another matter.

      Went to poetry readings at night, tiny gatherings of the culturally dispossessed in the back of outer-borough bars with cheap beers and sometimes long-winded poets, each more hopeful than the next that their otherwise private genius might finally captivate an audience of ten to fifteen that, should the night be a good one, might also include a friendly small-press publisher who would print their first, second, or perhaps third chapbook.

      Fourth reader of the night: “Hi, I’m going to read from a manuscript I’ve been working on, a project about …”

      I loved it, that we would come together and not only listen to but believe in poetry as a real thing, as a thing worthy of all our inexhaustible gossip, hook-ups, friendships, the poems usually being somewhat secondary to all of this, an excuse to get drunk, extraordinarily drunk. I often stumbled home from the readings alone because I couldn’t afford the subway, cab, or bus back, and, in any case, I wanted to