Long Island is the setting of a bleak two-month episode in Eduard’s life: after Jenny leaves him, he takes under-the-table work at a country house, living in its empty rooms while doing manual labor for four dollars an hour. The island’s elegant beachside villages promise neither comfort nor company in the off season; for Eduard, they become the landscape of a private collapse, where the loss of a relationship and the rejection of his writing converge with cold and solitude.

An off-season refuge

After Jenny tells Eduard she is moving to California, where she plans to marry another man and raise their child, he is left without the refuge he had assumed she represented. He remains welcome at Sutton Place for coffee, but no longer as a resident. When Steven Gray learns that a friend needs someone to work at his country house, he suggests Eduard, who is skilled with his hands. The job takes Eduard to Long Island for two months.

The setting is an affluent coastal enclave emptied by the season. The owners of the elegant beachside houses come only on weekends in the fall; during the week, no one is around. The country house where Eduard stays is unfurnished and unheated. Its physical emptiness makes it a makeshift shelter rather than a home, and the contrast between the owners’ wealth and the worker’s conditions defines the episode’s geography.

Work and cold

Eduard works with a shovel and trowel, earning four dollars an hour. Inside the house, he sleeps on a foam mattress, placing a tarp beneath it as best he can to keep it off the humid floor. He makes instant soup on a hot plate and puts on sweater after sweater, but cannot get warm. The details of shelter, food, and clothing register the daily cost of his precarious employment without turning the episode into a single dramatic hardship: discomfort accumulates through ordinary routines.

When the sun comes out, he sometimes goes to the beach to scare seagulls or drinks a beer at the bar in the nearest village. The walk back can leave him soaked to the skin. He then crawls into his sleeping bag, shivering, and dreams of Jenny with the man she has chosen. The landscape offers brief intervals outside the house, but even those excursions end in exposure and return to the same cold room.

Isolation and rejection

For weeks at a time, Eduard speaks to almost no one beyond the owners of the bar and the small supermarket where he buys groceries. He gives the house’s phone number to the few people he still considers close—Gennady Smakov, Lenya Kosogor, and Jenny—but it never rings. The silence makes the house more than a place to sleep: it becomes the measure of how completely he feels forgotten.

The one call comes from his agent, who reports that Macmillan has rejected Eduard’s manuscript as too antagonistic. The agent says he will seek other publishers, but hurries to end the conversation. Eduard is left alone in the empty living room, sitting on a bag of cement as rain lashes the windows sideways. He tells himself that he has failed and imagines a future of seasonal work, boring holes in concrete, painting wealthy people’s houses, and dying unknown.

Narrative significance

Long Island brings together two setbacks that Eduard had not expected to suffer in this way. He believed he would be the one to leave Jenny, and had taken comfort in the certainty that she loved him; instead, her departure leaves him with no refuge. At the same time, the rejection of the manuscript threatens the artistic future on which he has staked himself. The country house, unheated and unfurnished amid wealthy weekend homes, gives those reversals a concrete form: Eduard is physically present in a place of abundance but lives there as an isolated, low-paid worker.

The episode’s movement is from the beach and village back to the sleeping bag, and from the hope of a published book to the agent’s hurried goodbye. Its final image of Eduard alone as the rain strikes the windows turns Long Island into the scene of his conviction that he has tried and failed. The place is not a permanent home or a destination of escape; it is a temporary worksite where abandonment, economic insecurity, and artistic rejection become inseparable.