It’s an idyllic Saturday afternoon and I’m sprawled on a wicker chaise in Westchester, having tagged along with a friend on house-sitting detail. It’s easy to get nostalgic for an actual house — a foreign novelty after months spent condensing your existence into a New York-scaled diorama. We shrink and compartmentalize to fit inside apartment walls, forgetting that one room can be connected to an entirely different set of rooms, with even a staircase in between.

“Take me with you!” I begged her. “I’ll cook! Clean! Do yard work! Tell dinnertime jokes!”

“You had me at ‘cook,’” she replied.

As promised, the house is spectacular, 10,000 square feet of pure domestic fantasy, each room spotless, unique, and absurdly comfortable. Driving in, I gaped at the sprawling nineteenth-century exterior peppered with white-paned windows. Inside is just as perfect, the floors covered with rich chocolate hardwood set in slightly uneven panels, polished smooth by socked feet. Serpentine hallways connect a seeming-limitless supply of bedrooms, each lined with built-in bookshelves displaying titles from Dominick Dunne to a complete set of Henry James’ Bodley Head. The ground floor evokes images of baking birthday cakes on sunny mornings, and winter afternoons spent curled up on love seats in the library (a charming luxury, given that books cover every wall in the house like fertilized vines). It’s the kind of house where every day is Christmas morning, where every flatweave rug and Shaker rocking chair radiates safety and serenity. Walk in the front door and you’re home.

After a few hours of reading and strolling the grounds, we’ve relocated to the patio, a slate tile space off the dining room that’s surrounded by three levels of Gatsby-esque lawns. We sit guzzling Bloody Marys and scarfing brie on baguettes, propping our bare feet on a weathered table and pondering vital questions of the universe, like whether Botox counts as plastic surgery and how bald men wear yarmulkes.

“Do you think we’ll ever evolve past men?” she asks suddenly.

“Past them?”

“I mean, assuming that the human race keeps on evolving beyond where we are now. Do you think that, eventually, we’ll push them out?”

“I get it. Select them out of the natural equation,” I ruminate, ripping into a piece of baguette slathered in cheese.

“Exactly! Theoretically, it wouldn’t be all that hard. It’s already technically possible. If we can clone sheep, a few billion sperm can’t be that difficult.”

“I’m up for self-pollination — takes care of all the ‘So is this relationship going anywhere?’ crap.”

“Exactly. Think about it: getting rid of all the dating BS, the games, the sexual politics. All that anger and aggression over relationships, stressing over when and how we’re gonna get pregnant, with whom, whether we’re already too old, our ovaries are wasting away, blah blah. Wipe it all out. We’d just live with each other in communes, planning our exact reproductive futures, having careers and taking care of each others’ babies.”

“In houses like this?”

“Sure, why not.”

“Sign me up.”

“Perfect! So that’s settled.”

“But … what if we want to have boys? Teenage girls are murder. I was a nightmare at 13 - if giving birth to girls predisposed to act like me was a guarantee, I’d seriously consider passing.”

“Hmm. Well, I guess we could keep them around for experimental purposes,” she says with a wry smile.

I grin. “Or something like that.”