The Hamptons is the coastal setting where Rabo Karabekian’s secluded life is interrupted and, ultimately, reopened to other people. A private beach, a potato barn, farmland edging toward ocean-view development, and a whaling town turned tourist destination give the region more than a scenic role: it is at once Rabo’s refuge, the ground on which Circe Berman enters his life, and the place where the contents of his locked barn become a basis for friendship.

Setting and Boundaries

Rabo’s home in the Hamptons gives him a large, solitary domain, but the boundaries around it are not absolute. On an afternoon walk, he encounters his northern neighbor, John Karpinski, at the border they share, about twenty feet north of Rabo’s potato barn. Karpinski is a native and a potato farmer, as his father was before him. Although the fields have become extraordinarily valuable—Rabo estimates that they must be worth about eighty thousand dollars an acre because houses built on them can look out over the ocean—the property also carries the weight of generations. Three generations of Karpinskis have grown up on it. Rabo compares their attachment to their land to an Armenian sense of ancestral ground, invoking the foot of Mount Ararat as a measure of what inherited territory can mean.

The contrast between long settlement and rapidly rising real-estate value makes the Hamptons a place where the land’s older uses remain visible beneath a newer economy. Karpinski’s farm is still worked as farmland, yet the ocean view has become part of its price. Rabo’s encounter with his neighbor therefore locates the region between an intimate idea of home and the market’s conversion of land into a commodity.

Beach Encounter and New Company

The region’s geography also brings strangers together. Circe Berman, a widow from Baltimore, arrives in the Hamptons hoping for peace and quiet so she can devote herself to writing her husband’s biography. She does not know anyone locally and has never heard of Rabo, since she dislikes modern art. Staying at the Maidstone Inn in the village, she walks to the public beach and inadvertently crosses onto Rabo’s private stretch of shore.

Rabo finds her there during his afternoon dip. Fully dressed, she is sitting on the sand and staring out to sea, a posture that recalls Paul Slazinger. Rabo’s initial concern is not artistic or social: he is embarrassed by his appearance and by the need to remove his eye patch before entering the water. The accidental crossing of a property line thus becomes a meeting shaped by his self-consciousness, while the beach offers the quiet that has drawn Circe to the region.

Circe’s stay soon changes the uses of Rabo’s home. She moves in uninvited, energetic and opinionated, and objects to watching him do nothing. Her challenge prompts his attempt at literature: if he cannot think of something else to do, she suggests that he write his autobiography. The Hamptons is consequently not only where Rabo has withdrawn from public life; it is where another person’s presence provokes his late career change.

Solitude, Writing, and Social Satire

Circe’s reasons for coming to the Hamptons are stated plainly when Paul Slazinger asks what brought her there. She wants quiet for her work on her late husband’s biography. Slazinger, a published novelist, responds by patronizing her as an amateur, treating the wish to write as something nearly everyone entertains. The exchange sets two kinds of authorship beside one another: Circe’s biographical project and Rabo’s newly prompted autobiography, both undertaken in a place associated with retreat from the noise of the city and the demands of ordinary company.

That retreat does not mean the region is socially empty. Slazinger observes that the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, whose economic success he regards as having extracted more than enough from the economy. He imagines a Money Hall of Fame displaying busts of arbitrageurs, hostile-takeover specialists, venture capitalists, investment bankers, and recipients of golden handshakes and platinum parachutes. Their statistics, he proposes, would be cut in stone and record how many millions they had legally taken and how quickly. The imagined monument turns the region’s concentration of money into a satirical public exhibit.

Rabo asks whether he belongs in such a hall. Slazinger distinguishes him from the figures he condemns: Rabo’s wealth, he decides, came through accidents rather than greed. He would therefore deserve a place in a Dumb Luck Hall of Fame, which Slazinger first imagines in Las Vegas or Atlantic City and then relocates to the Klondike, where visitors would have to arrive by dogsled or snowshoes. In this joke, the Hamptons is both the setting for wealthy people’s display and the vantage point from which their fortunes—and Rabo’s very different relation to money—can be mocked.

Art, Storage, and the Potato Barn

The region is also where Rabo’s collecting habit acquires a practical and lasting form. Rather than put his paintings in the potato barn, as Dorothy suggests, he rents dry, clean storage under lock and key at Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage. The rent absorbs a major part of his income over the years. He continues helping painter friends in trouble with whatever cash he can obtain and accepts their paintings in return; pictures that settle debts go directly from the artists’ studios to the storage facility. The Hamptons setting holds this private accumulation alongside the public image of expensive property and conspicuous wealth.

The potato barn remains significant precisely because it is not used as the paintings’ first repository. It has long been filled with potatoes, earth, bacteria, and fungi, and Rabo cannot bring himself to store valuable canvases in that musty space. Much later, the barn becomes the site of a different decision. On Circe’s last night in the Hamptons, she persuades him to unlock it and switch on the floodlights. The region’s neglected agricultural building, previously closed off from the collection, becomes the place where Rabo lets Circe see what has been kept from view.

Departure, Return, and the Meaning of Place

The Hamptons is not a permanent answer to the characters’ needs. After finishing her book, Circe returns to Baltimore. On her last night, she asks Rabo to take her dancing; he refuses, but takes her to supper at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. He hires a boyfriend of Celeste’s to drive them there and back, so neither has to drive after drinking. Their meal is shaped by Rabo’s contradictory feelings: he is sorry to lose Circe’s lively company and also relieved at the prospect of the peace and quiet he wants while finishing his own book.

Sag Harbor gives their farewell a longer local history. Once a whaling port, it still displays the mansions of captains who sailed to the Pacific around the tip of South America and returned rich. In the hotel lobby, a guest register is open to March 1, 1849, a date from the height of the whaling industry. Looking at that historical trace, Rabo reflects that Circe’s ancestors were then in the Russian Empire and his in the Turkish Empire, a past that would have made them enemies. The tourist destination thus preserves reminders of both the wealth built from maritime extraction and histories that precede the characters’ present-day meeting.

Rabo and Circe are still acquaintances when she leaves; months of living together have not yet made them great friends. That changes when he opens the potato barn and shows her what is inside. The movement from an accidental crossing onto a private beach to the deliberate opening of a locked building gives the Hamptons its decisive narrative shape: its boundaries first protect Rabo’s isolation, then become thresholds he can choose to cross. In the same landscape, Circe finds the quiet she came for, Rabo begins writing, and his concealed paintings provide the occasion for a closer bond.