Once, when my parents were visiting, I broke this tacit compact on a drive to Philadelphia with my mother and her cousin Janet. Janet and her son had been in a heated email exchange about whether Israel was an apartheid state, and then, she said, his emails had simply stopped coming. “Well, and so we shall cease to speak of such things, and our generation shall rise,” I snapped from the back seat, like I was suddenly the Bible or something. Everyone was quiet; it isn’t nice to tell people they will be swept away by time.

My building is not very tall but it is wide, with wings folding out from the lobby like a parliament. Legally speaking it is a co-op; our landlord converted it in the 1990s in a real estate ploy, then bought and sublet nearly all the shares. When quarantine began, the world shrank to the building’s size and everyone became a mad housewife in their cabin fever. There were frenzies in the tenant WhatsApp thread: a package thief, tacos for 2L abandoned in the lobby. Chimney swifts were spotted on the roof of the haunted 19th-century institutional building — now a Seventh Day Adventist school, someday slated to be dwarfed by condos — across the street. Once someone saw turkey vultures. “Sure it wasn’t management?” someone else asked. It became clear that if rent continued to drain from the apartments, the neighborhood would wash away. We formed a committee and slipped flyers under doors. They came back covered in complaints. Upstairs a patch of black mold was growing in a baby’s room; it measured less than a square foot, so the housing inspectors couldn’t be bothered. I desperately wanted to learn everyone’s problems and names.

There was Selma Gardinsky, a red diaper baby from Brooklyn transplanted to Boston by marriage, where she took a unionized office job and became an organizer in an attempt to catch the party’s eye. She left her husband “without so much as a backward glance” when the union offered her a position back in New York; there, she was recruited by the Communist Party and went to work for it for “the best ten years” of her life. “Whatever else we were or were not as Communists,” Gardinsky told Gornick, “we were not lonely.” There was Bernie Sanders, a socialist from a Brooklyn immigrant family who does not appear in Romance. He became the mayor of a small city in Vermont, then a senator, and finally ran twice for President. “I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns,” he wrote in 2015. “But I do not feel lonely now.” I don’t feel lonely anymore, but it isn’t nearly enough. An infinite amount of care seems necessary. While we gather our strength, the lucky ones among us will grow old.