“You have miles of beach, and you decide on the spot right here,” the guy says. “Right in front of me.” He is shirtless, wearing a white bucket hat, and has zinc on his nose. A woman around his age, which is approximately my age, is seated beside him, also in a beach chair. They are under an umbrella. I stare at him dumbly because I am still unclear if he is kidding and being friendly or not kidding and not being friendly.

“It happens every time,” he continues, in an irate tone that suggests he is not kidding.

“It’s because you are so attractive,” I say. “People are drawn to you and want to be in your orbit.” I smile, trying to situate the somewhat obnoxious remark I just made in the quadrant of amiability.

“You could go anywhere on this beach!”

“Are you being serious? We could move,” I say.

In response to this, the woman sitting next to him, presumably his wife, starts shaking her head, no, and gesturing with her hands in the manner of an umpire calling a base runner safe. The implication: Don’t move, don’t worry about it, ignore him, it’s fine. But I am flustered and don’t trust my interpretation of her gestures. Better to cut our losses; you don’t come to the beach to get in a shouting match.

“Spatial awareness!” he continues. “You have to have some! Otherwise …”

The phrase “spatial awareness” makes me want to call back, “You mean situational awareness?” but I refrain. I had read about the collapse of a hedge fund of that name, Situational Awareness, just the previous day. The fund was focused on investments in artificial intelligence. The drama was partly that it had collapsed, and partly that the billionaire investor Ken Griffin had made a middle-of-the-night deal to bail it out. Previously, Mr. Griffin had been in my thoughts because he had bought an apartment in 2019 in one of those buildings along Central Park South — the ones that look like they’re giving the whole city the finger — that is the most expensive apartment in New York. I had thought about how that apartment, and so many others in those buildings, must be empty for most of the year, and how nice it would be to be able to set up a laptop at a desk and work there in solitude for a few days. I had recently read a profile of Mr. Griffin in The New Yorker, and the other detail about Mr. Griffin that stayed with me from that piece is that apparently he rarely blinks.

I stare at this guy on the beach who has been yelling at me in a mode of incredulity. I blink, but not that often. “It’s not a big deal to move,” I say. The fact is, his irritability has lent him a slight aura of integrity, even if I think he is essentially being a jerk. In a different context, I think we could even be friends. I always feel that fights have the seeds of friendship within them. Not always. But sometimes.