Thinking of this, she was uncomfortable, she shifted on the bed.

It came to her then, almost as a shock: he had relied on her for too long, too. Her life at the margins of his marriage to Annie had been something that he wanted, that he had made happen.

He had held her too tight, he had kept her from other possibilities. The first Mrs. McFarlane.

Suddenly she was thinking of Annie’s misplaced anger at her for what she understood as Frieda’s having kept Graham’s secret about Rosemary.

But that wasn’t the problem, she thought. The problem wasn’t that she’d kept Graham’s secret. It was that she had been told Graham’s secret.

She shouldn’t have been told. He shouldn’t have told her things he didn’t tell Annie. She shouldn’t have been his confidante, his second wife. It wasn’t fair to Annie.

It wasn’t fair to her.

Her throat tightened.

30

He’d looked nothing like a writer, Annie had thought when she met him. Ian.

She’d spent the afternoon, her first at the colony, out at her studio, unpacking her stuff. It was getting dark when she walked slowly back up the road that led to the main building where they would all gather to have dinner—and where, on the second floor, she had a tiny, monastic bedroom. She stopped several times in the dimming gray light to listen to the rustling noises in the woods on either side of the dirt track, spotting only a chipmunk once, and then, as she rounded a curve in the road, a group of wild turkeys, frightening in their size, in their primitive ugliness. They didn’t even bother to hurry away from her, just moved off at the same glacial pace toward the woods, lifting each leg with what seemed like dramatic deliberation, slow-motion monsters.

As she came up the porch stairs, she heard the hubbub of many voices. Earlier in the day, when she’d come to the main building to announce her arrival, there had been one person in the large living room there, reading. He had looked up briefly to answer her question about where the office was.

Now the room was crowded, the noise of the voices almost overwhelming as she opened the door. She hung her coat up and started to try to mix with the others.

There were too many people there for Annie to remember names, but after they were called into the dining room, Ian sat at her table and introduced himself again. He was slender, clean-shaven, pale, with disorderly brown hair. His voice was soft—faintly southern, she thought. (This was wrong, it turned out.) He was handsome in an almost androgynous way. A writer, he said. Fiction.

She said she was a photographer, and he asked about that, about how she would characterize her photographs, about what she planned to work on while she was here.

He spent some time then talking to the woman on his right, Amelie, also a writer. She was beautiful, Annie thought, in a wiry, tense way, her skin tanned a dry, nutmeg brown. She’d “broken the back” of a chapter in her book that day, she said, and for a moment Annie didn’t understand what she could possibly mean. But Ian apparently did, and he spoke with enthusiasm about it to her.

Were they a couple? she wondered. It seemed possible. There might be something sparky going on there.

She watched them for a moment, and then turned to talk to the young woman next to her on the other side. Melinda. A painter. She was flippant about her work, nearly every sentence punctuated by a breathless short laugh, a dismissal of whatever it was she’d just said. She was into glazes, she told Annie. She did a lot of still lifes, then glazed them over and over. “Which will get me nowhere, of course.” The laugh. “I mean, who even does glazes anymore? Me. Little me. The only one.”

But Annie was intrigued. It seemed to her it might be a bit like developing a photograph, the slow changing of the tone and sense of depth that a glaze would create. “I’d love to see them,” she said. She and Melinda arranged a time the next afternoon when she could stop by.

She had scattered conversations with others at the table. There was the composer, elderly, originally from Poland. He had an accent so thick that it was hard for Annie to understand most of what he said, but she smiled and tried to respond when it seemed he’d asked her a question. There was a printmaker from San Francisco, and an African guy doing a book on the damaging side effects of international humanitarianism.

After dinner, nearly everyone went back into the big living room, which was divided into two areas. In one, a large fireplace with a big couch and chairs arranged around it. In the other, beyond the couch, a pool table took up most of the space. Melinda was over there, beginning to teach the game to Samuel, the African guy. A group of about six people was milling around, gathering their coats. They were going to a movie in a nearby town, clearly something planned ahead of time. There was another cluster of people settling in around the fireplace, but Annie would have had to ask someone to move over to make room for herself, and she felt a sudden, nearly adolescent sense of social incapacity. She’d go back out to the studio, she thought. Finish organizing things there.

She got her coat and waved goodbye to the room—jauntily, she hoped. When Josh, the printmaker, noticed her, he waved back. Then, just as Annie turned to go, several of the others looked up and called goodbye or waved too. “See you, Annie,” Melinda called from the other side of the room. “See you tomorrow.”

She was on the dirt road, flashlight in hand, watching the circle of white light dance ahead of her. She was scaring herself a little—the city girl, imagining bears, imagining a vaguer, more ominous animal life—when she heard footsteps behind her. Running. She turned. A man.

“Hey,” the figure said. She flicked her light up, to his face, and he lifted his arm to shield his eyes. It was Ian.

What she remembered their talking about that night—he’d invited her to his studio, where he had a bottle of wine and some glasses—was mostly work. Though he also offered her information on some of the other residents. “Campers,” he called them. He’d been there for almost a month, and he knew everyone pretty well. He had another month to go.

“Two months!” she said. “I’m only here for three weeks myself. Any longer, and my husband would shoot me.” (Why had she been so quick to bring it up, the fact that she was married?)

Ian was squatting by the fireplace now, trying to start a fire—balling up newspaper, jamming more in under the kindling each time the paper fire dwindled. Annie watched him for a minute. She felt conspicuously useless. She began to move around the room, looking at everything. There was an old wooden desk in front of the windows, a typewriter on it. Next to it were several stacks of paper, covered with print that had been scribbled over in ink here and there. The room had unfinished wood walls, walls that were studded with Post-its, a line or two on each in the same nearly indecipherable longhand. “Isaac needs to be more comfortable with himself.” “Changes in the scene with Ruby—she’s the angry one.”

“There we go,” Ian said, and she turned. The fire had caught. He gestured for her to take the armchair set by the fireplace, and he pulled his desk chair over on the other side of the hearth. They sat in silence for a moment, a moment that stretched out too long. Annie was aware of the noises of the fire. They both started to speak at once, they both said, “You . . . ,” and then both stopped.

He smiled and said, “Okay. Really: you.”

She made comments then, as she thought of it later. How little stuff he required for his work—gesturing at the desk. How it was just a matter of him and the paper and the typewriter. “That must be so lovely,” she said.

“Yes. Lovely,” he said, exaggerating the word. “I don’t usually think of it that way, but there it is.”

She began dramatically listing everything she’d brought with her, all the equipment.

He seemed to be amused, sitting, listening.

The fire popped, noisily, and little embers jumped onto the outer hearth.

Why was she going on and on? Annie thought. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to be alone with a man anymore.

Or maybe not exactly that. She was fine with male friends, with the writers and photographers she knew. With other women’s husbands. She was thinking she’d be fine, she’d be comfortable with Ian, if they were both single, if sex were going to be a possibility. There was just something anomalous about this situation in her life—not knowing what the possibilities here were. Or weren’t.

Were there possibilities?

In the next silence she said, “Why did you ask me here?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh! Well, I guess I supposed you might like some company on your first night.” He smiled. A slight smile, though. “You don’t have to stay, you know. I like sitting by the fire perfectly well on my own.”