“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want people to think I’m only a summer girl.”

Tyler tilted his head in confusion, like he’d never heard the term, but before he could reply, Max appeared, and we were hugging hello, and then a group of famous artists stood in front of me, shaking my hand. Anele Muir, the sculptor who carved boat-size pods, was there. So was Kerry Bee, who made enormous installations of electrified fabric. Filmmaker Jeanne Petit, photographer Lena Addario, performance artist Rachael Krieger, and conceptual sculptor David Bird rounded out our dozen. They had all been guests here. Tonight, they would stay over, and linger through the weekend.

“Oh these plates, Marlin! I forgot about these,” Jeanne said, in her beautiful accent. She sounded like Isabella Rossellini.

“Me too. I made them for the Yokefellows dinner,” Jack said. “Now, that was a million years ago.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Oh, he threw them,” Marlin explained. “Jack is magic on the wheel.” She rolled her eyes. “He has a three-D brain. Some people have all the luck.”

“Before your babies,” Jeanne said, and Jack was already pulling out his phone. “Oh, these fat babies, I want to be as fat as this baby,” she cooed. “A little butterball of baby.”

“No,” I said, haltingly. “I mean, Yokefellows.” I nearly recited the line from the notebook: to yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause.

“Oh—it’s James Joyce,” Marlin said quietly, leaning in and putting her hand on my arm. “Do you mind if we—if we don’t right now?” She flicked her eyes at Tyler, the electric fence around everything Carey.

I nodded, chastened, and then I walked over to Max and clung to her skirts like a lost little girl.

It took forever to sit down to dinner. Everyone had to get cocktails first, and then they were smoking cigarettes and catching up. When Marlin and Tyler were back in the kitchen, still cooking, I found myself on the edge of a conversation with Tom and Lena and David and Max about the party they’d all been at, the one on the barge floating in front of Hart Island.

“Did you meet Suna? The woman from Pakistan who only creates forgeries?”

“I heard her telling the Browns that they should pay her to replicate everything in their collection and then they could sell the originals and keep the copies, and nobody would ever know the difference.”

“I love lesbians who wear hijab. It hits so many buttons.”

“Oh, Suna’s equal opportunity. She’s married to Spark Suleman.”

“For the passport?”

“No, I think they have a baby.”

“Did you eat those bananas he brought? They taste like oranges, apparently. I was too grossed out to try one.”

“Starting a farm of genetically modified fruit is a massive-scale project. At a certain point, aren’t you just a farmer?”