our second bottle of wine and both feeling drunk.
“No, you don’t.” She laughed.
“I do!”
“No, people who want to change the world go on disaster relief missions in Haiti and deliver vaccines to babies in Africa. You just want to be outside and feel like less of a yuppie dick.”
I considered this correction as I studied the pattern of the blanket beneath us. We were sitting on the floor in our tiny Brooklyn living room having a sort of indoor picnic.
“It’s okay,” Pia went on. “I’m the same. I’m too selfish to do something truly good, but I think choosing to live a life that doesn’t make the world worse is okay, too.”
“Shit, you’re right,” I conceded. “So how do we not make the world worse?”
“Smaller ecological footprint, conscientious consumerism, freedom from prejudices, that sort of thing. It sounds trite, but I don’t think it is. You live a more thoughtful life than your parents did, and you teach your kids those values, and voilà: the human race evolves. That’s meaningful.”
“I’d rather actually be a good person, but I guess you’re right. Maybe that is meaningful,” I agreed. “So let’s make a pact to live that way. Somehow.”
Pia stretched a hand toward me to formalize the agreement. “I love that. It’s a deal.”
We shook on it.
“I feel like a good person already,” I said.
“Not good, just a not-bad person,” she corrected.
We set our wineglasses aside and I dived toward her. She enveloped me with her legs and fell back.
Pia was a marvel to me in those early days—as witty and esoteric as she was sexy. It was just nice being together and we never wanted to stop.
* * *
Dinner was served on the dirty porch furniture, which looked perfect in the glow of a dozen tea lights that Pia had carefully arranged. We sat across from each other, drinking wine and discussing the superior origins and experiences of the dead animals before us. There would be no mention of her ovulation cycle or my quiet resistance to the project. This was a good night. After some discussion of the strange and beautiful sky, we eventually turned to the most obvious topic.
“So, what are we going to do, love?” Pia asked, more excited than scared. “These storms are just terrifying! We need a plan.”
I nodded. “We do need a plan. I can’t imagine that our little landlocked state is in all that much danger, but I guess we should err on the side of caution and get this leaky old house sealed up. I assume that we’d stay here, even if a really big storm came, right?”
“Of course—we have to stay!” Pia said, gulping her wine. “This house is our baby. And where would we go anyhow? Certainly not to your parents’ place. And certainly not to mine!”
I was surprised that she hadn’t considered the possibility, but it was true that there wasn’t really any reason to go to either of our parents’ homes in the case of an emergency. We were adults and we were no less equipped to handle disaster than they were, though I felt as though they’d attained a level of adulthood we hadn’t yet graduated to.
Pia’s parents, both academics, lived in a tony Connecticut suburb outside of New York City, which was where they had raised their one beautiful child. They were aloof and opinionated, but they had always been kind enough to me. Pia spoke of them as if they were monsters. And maybe they were. I once assumed that she liked believing that hers had been a cruel childhood because it made her more interesting and tortured. But I was wrong about all that. Something had been missing from her childhood; there was a chaos inside of her that I couldn’t account for.
I didn’t like Pia’s parents, but not for the reasons she provided. They offended a Yankee sensibility in me that valued industriousness and discipline. I couldn’t understand what justified their haughtiness when, as far as I could tell, they hadn’t left much of a mark on the world. It wasn’t that their pretensions were unfamiliar to me—there was no shortage of artsy liberal affect in the corner of New England I grew up in. I just hated playing along with it. Pia’s parents attended the symphony and followed culinary trends and read theater reviews, but they didn’t create anything themselves and this bothered me. They seemed to believe that, by virtue of association with greatness, they, too, were great. They told us stories about so-and-so who just produced a one-act play or wrote a book about his trek across Nepal as we nodded with appropriate awe. Visits with them required pretending that we weren’t having cocktails with appreciators of great art, but with the artists themselves. All of this was made even more maddening by their undiluted disappointment at the lack of formal culture in our lives. That was their term for distinguishing the kind of culture that we enjoyed from the established arts of the aristocracy they believed themselves to be part of.
My family was less complicated in every way, a point that Pia liked to make when she was annoyed with me. My father was a lawyer at a local firm in Rutland, where I grew up with two sisters and a brother. I came second, which secured my rank as neither the most successful nor the most screwed-up of my siblings. My mom stayed at home and I believe Pia disapproved of this, but she never said so aloud. My parents volunteered at our schools and picked up trash on green-up days and supported local theater. Since moving to New York, I hadn’t met anyone who cared about their community in the way my parents cared for their struggling town. I like my parents and, although my younger sister’s kids and my brother’s drug habits had commanded most of their attention in recent years, we were all okay. (My older sister lives in London with her wife. We had always gotten along well, though we’ve fallen out of touch in recent years.) This is what family looks like to me. It’s not always joyful, but it’s big and messy and kind of fun some of the time. I expected to have something similar one day, when I was ready.
“Yeah, we have to stay here no matter what,” I agreed, pulling the collar on my sweater a little higher. It was cool outside now and so dark that I could barely see Pia’s face floating above the candles.
She moved our bare plates aside and took a small notebook with a matching pen from the pocket of her bulky sweater. It was list time. Pia loved the idea of being a writer, someone who writes, so she was forever collecting pretty little notebooks to have on hand in case inspiration struck. But inspiration never stayed with her for more than a few minutes, so her notebooks were mostly used for frantic list making, which struck much more frequently. She listed books she planned to read, organic foods she wanted to grow, yoga postures that would heal whatever was ailing her. Her lists were aspirational instructions for a life she wanted to live. They rarely materialized into much but served a constructive role nonetheless, as if the mere act of putting her plans in writing set her on a path to self-improvement. I didn’t object to the positivity of it all.
Pia had begun a shopping list of home supplies we would need for The Storms. She wrote, “canned goods, multivitamins, water filtration system, solar blankets.” It read more like a survival list for the apocalypse than a storm-preparation plan.
“Babe, I was thinking we would just, like, board up the windows and try to seal up the root cellar a bit,” I said. “Do you really think we need all that?”
“It can’t hurt to be prepared.” Pia shrugged, still writing in the dark. “And if nothing comes of these storm predictions, then we’ll have some extra supplies the next time we need them. No harm done.”
Her
