East Hampton

East Hampton gives Rabo Karabekian both the immense house in which he lives alone and the shore across which his solitude is interrupted. The Long Island setting gathers the novel’s contrasts between inheritance and belonging, private wealth and local land, and the self-appointed museum guard and the people who unexpectedly cross his boundaries.

House, inheritance, and belonging

Rabo’s nineteen-room waterfront house came to him through his second wife, Edith Taft, who died two years before he tells the story. The property had belonged for three generations to Edith’s Anglo-Saxon family from Cincinnati, Ohio. Rabo recognizes the strangeness of this inheritance: a man with an Armenian surname now occupies a house whose ancestors presumably did not expect it to pass into his hands. He imagines that any family ghosts would object with Episcopalian politeness, and answers their imagined claim with a pointed appeal to the Statue of Liberty. The joke turns the house into more than a comfortable estate: it is a test of who may claim America as home, and of how migration and marriage can redirect the inheritance of a place.

The house’s former liveliness is measured by the people who once filled it. During Edith’s life, the gardener, two maids, and cook lived there; after her death, the servants left, saying the house had become too lonely. Rabo hired replacements at great expense, but the household contracted to a live-in cook and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Celeste, who has no duties to him and brings her friends to the tennis courts, swimming pool, and private oceanfront. They ignore their employer as if he were a senile veteran assigned to guard a museum. Rabo accepts the comparison because the house also shelters what he regards as the most important private collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings still in existence. The domestic estate and the collection become inseparable: he is at once owner, custodian, and a lonely presence among objects visitors want him to explain.

A landscape of solitude

The narrator describes East Hampton as a place where loneliness becomes tangible in the scale and use of property. Since Edith’s death, the friends in the couple’s life have proved to be hers rather than Rabo’s. Painters avoid him because the ridicule directed at his own paintings helped encourage the claim that painters were charlatans or fools. He says that he can endure loneliness, recalling that he did so as a boy and during several years in New York City in the Great Depression. After his first wife and two sons left him in 1956 and he abandoned painting, he even went looking for solitude, living as a hermit for eight years.

The coast is not simply an empty backdrop to that withdrawal. Rabo’s private beach gives his isolation a literal border, and his afternoon swim makes that border a source of embarrassment: he dislikes having anyone there because he must remove his eye patch before entering the water. One afternoon, Circe Berman wanders across the boundary without knowing that the beach is private. She has walked from the Maidstone Inn, where she is staying, to the public beach and then onward onto Rabo’s shore. She has never heard of him and dislikes modern art; he encounters her fully dressed, seated on the sand and looking out to sea. The meeting begins not with shared artistic interests but with a mistaken crossing of property lines and a shared act of looking seaward.

Neighbors and contested land

The cultivated estate sits beside a landscape changing under the pressure of property values. On a walk around his boundaries, Rabo meets his northern neighbor, John Karpinski, at their mutual border, about twenty feet north of Rabo’s potato barn. Karpinski is a local potato farmer, as his father was; land that had supported generations of the family is now worth about eighty thousand dollars an acre because houses built on it would have ocean views from their second-story windows. The view that makes the land valuable also signals the development overtaking its agricultural use.

Rabo describes three generations of Karpinskis as having been raised on that property, which gives it the weight of an ancestral homeland. His comparison to the Armenians’ attachment to the foot of Mount Ararat links a local farm boundary to the novel’s larger concern with displacement and the meaning of inherited ground. The analogy does not make the histories identical; instead, it lets Rabo read a neighboring farmer’s attachment through the history of a people who lost their homeland. East Hampton thus holds competing kinds of claim at once: a family’s lived connection to farmland, the market value of an ocean view, and Rabo’s own uneasy possession of a house inherited through marriage.

Companionship and narrative significance

For all its wide grounds and private shore, East Hampton does not protect Rabo from the need for companionship. His closest friend is the novelist Paul Slazinger, another wounded veteran of the Second World War, who lives alone in a house next door to Rabo’s old house in Springs. Their friendship offers a counterpoint to the loneliness of Rabo’s current household: someone is near, but neither man’s solitary life is thereby erased. The landscape organizes this distinction between physical proximity and emotional isolation.

Circe’s arrival changes the meaning of the private beach and the large house. She is a forty-three-year-old widow whose husband, Abe, a brain surgeon in Baltimore, died of a brain hemorrhage six months earlier. She has chosen Rabo’s house as a place to live and work while writing her husband’s biography, having found it after arriving in the Hamptons without knowing anyone there. Rabo emphasizes the age difference between them and says there is nothing erotic in their relationship. Their first encounter instead places two bereaved strangers on a stretch of shore, each alone with the sea. East Hampton’s decisive narrative role is to make isolation visible in houses, boundaries, and empty expanses, then to provide the accidental crossings through which that isolation can begin to change.