I nodded, squirming inside at the memory. “It was delicious.”

“Forty minutes,” the house told her.

“That’s the DANNI: the Digital Atmosphere Neural Net Infrared. It’s the ‘smart house’ thing,” Max said as she led me down the concrete waterfall that made up the central staircase. “It was designed after these ‘future houses’ that Charlie was obsessed with as a boy—those things they had at world’s fairs, you know, the ones that would show you how future people lived. He wanted to make one. The floors and walls contain the heating elements; the plumbing is a gray-water system that comes from the same stream that feeds the lake. It gets filtered, used, and eventually irrigates the property…this house is like a bunker, in its own way. It has a kind of self-sufficiency.”

The ground-floor courtyard was filled with a handful of extra-long velvet sofas and an enormous round dining table. When we got to the kitchen—a room paneled seamlessly in bias-cut bleached cedar, same as the doors throughout the house—she pressed her hand into the wall. It moved away to reveal a hidden wine cellar the size of a standard living room, with walls made from a packed, damp chalk, like a real champagne cave in France. Max strolled through the racks, turning over bottle after bottle until she came across something that met her standards. I pulled angled red wine glasses off a shelf near the door. She popped the bottle open easily and splashed some into the glasses.

“Did you see the house at the party?” she asked. “Or did Charlie show you around?”

“The courtyard, the library, your office, and the deck,” I told her. “Is there more?”

“Let’s walk,” Max insisted. She took me through each room in the house, through its seven bedrooms on the second and ground levels, where the beds hung on chains from the ceiling, floated on hidden platforms, were cast deep into the floor, or, in the case of the master, dug into the hill itself. Their bed was cocooned halfway inside a glass bay, stretching back five feet into the dirt of the hill. Tree roots, ants, rocks, and layers of soil were the only things visible through its windows, a layered, sedimentary view, a unique variation on the wide picture window. The walls were painted a glowing, velvety blue, and a ten-by-ten painting, a wild abstract made in the early 1960s by Joan Mitchell, was positioned opposite their bed. I stood in front of it for several minutes and let her colors pass through me. I felt them all: dandelion white, Kool-Aid pink, Italian teal, shining medieval goldenrod, the cold blue of the bottom of a rain cloud.

“Someone told me you were her aesthetic granddaughter at the party,” Max said as I stared. “I completely agreed with them.”