Our apartment was still an emptied shell, a long white flow through the living room, the eye pulled out to the ocean. Edward opened the bedroom shutters, and there, where my desk would go, was the sea and a lone distant bird flapping away into the blue.

The truck arrived and we unpacked, slitting the silver duct tape I bought after 9/11 to seal ourselves into our New York closets in case the anthrax spores floated in. I was already sure where everything would go. I wanted everything bare and empty, the opposite of the way we lived in New York. There we faced north looking into grey- streaked buildings, walled in by thousands of our books. There the restless eye leaped from thing to thing, bits of my past, my parents’ and grandparents’ pasts, all the accumulation of almost thirty years of marriage and periods of collecting. I brought none of that here—only one small carton of essential books and some pictures. It was like I had been through a fire or hurricane or some form of uncontrollable disaster. I had emptied our weekend house in Connecgticut which was on the market and sent down what I thought would translate.

Months before, my Dutch friend, the designer Ton Luyk, had flown up from Miami to help me. The attendant wheeled him to me in the Jacksonville airport. He was wearing a tan safari jacket and a little silk scarf and he held a big leather bag full of fabric swatches on his lap.

“Hello darlink,” he said, and off we went to see Arley Quick and the painters in the days of the sequin pumpkin. Like all good decorators, he had everything in his head—the bit of pink in the walls, the dark floors. And I had it all in mine, the image of something incomplete, new, opposite. And so we put in the two white plaster Donghia tables he had bought me long ago, and Hansen swing lamps for the walls. My mahogany gate-leg table would disappear into the dark floors. There was no sofa. From Connecticut, came a big brass sun that had been over the fireplace, the iron bed, glass lamps, a French café table, an Orkney Island chair. We brought a painting of a man in a tweed jacket sitting on a beach with his pants rolled up, his legs splayed in the sand. Another of a beach house filled with four Botticelli Venuses. Ton ordered two chairs on wheels and the rest came painlessly from Crate and Barrel, Conran’s, and West Elm.

But there was very little. I was opening up my life and my space. Now I shed. I cleared out. I refused. I sprayed some shells silver and put them over the bedroom door with wax, I glued trim with seed pearls on two round mirrors. My husband got his big screen flat television. We plopped onto our two double chairs. And my tired eye rested. At last I was in the void.

I lived for the first time with light. I never turned on a lamp until nightfall. The morning light rose from the sea. In the evening, the sun setting over the Intracoastal streamed into the rear of the apartment with an almost blinding radiance, one so strong and hot that often I closed the shutters. I had grown up on Fifth Avenue in a back bedroom with deep brown moiré walls. When I married Edward, I moved into his dark apartment facing masked windows. In the Connecticut house, the beams hovered and old dense trees shut us in. Now, I turned up my face and let the sun poison me a little.

The local magazine had pictures of island homes. After a few issues, I realized that everything I had pulled from the apartment—the tiles, the ceiling fans, the dark wood entertainment center, the glass dining table, the ponderous sofa and the plates on the wall was exactly the taste here. My home, like us, was different…

 

A lot of people when they first came to the island thrashed around. They did not know what to do with their new freedom, how to fill their empty days. I had no such problem. I plunged right in to the torpor of island life. I did nothing. I savored the full dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing much.

I did it outdoors because it felt healthier. I began living a physical life— running on the beach and swimming in the ocean which was unusually warm. I walked around all day with a blank mind worrying about nothing but what I might cook for dinner. The irresponsibility was exhilarating. I felt as I did when I burst out of the library after a long day of research. Or the way I felt in the down elevator after a hospital visit. I was free, I was OK. I was out of there.

Perhaps I was meant to do nothing much, to drive around, buy and cook some food, watch Oprah at four with my Oprah juice, a glass of red wine on ice. I drove over to K Mart and cruised through, touching towels, fingering things. I began buying Martha Stewart everything. I no longer felt any incongruity or disconnect in being there. Like the hotel next door, like the island itself, K Mart seemed to be waiting for people. Living in the sun, in the blue, driving through the green, grazing through this cool neon emptiness, I knew I was half-living, but so what.

I fell in love with the unfamiliar—the Georgia voices saying “Mawn-nen” on the beach. “Is this Tammy?” said a wrong number on the phone. I was fascinated by the Southern ways, the Southern crimes, Southern news (“Quavious Brown, 16, was caught in a riptide”). Places unabashedly called themselves “Plantations.” Words broke into unfamiliar syllables with strange emphasis. IN-surance. EN-tire. Around me were people called Misty, Darlene, Deatra, Marques, Bubba, Mason, Wayne.

The radio played:

She left the suds in the bucket

And the clothes hangin’ out on the line

The young girl in the song had run off with a man in a white pickup truck for love. She was as irresponsible as I was. She too had left her life.

Niceness surrounded every encounter, every daily transaction. It was like an infection of kindness. I was not used to this. It seemed like everyone wished me well and tried to help. There was an absence of irony. When I had lived in the whirlwind, I was used to people who wanted others to fail, daily bitterness and envy, real pleasure at defeat and downfalls and twitchy discomfort at success.

Not a lot of people here were thin. Perhaps they were nice because they were not all starving themselves. My husband called our beach “Botero Beach”, and yet the natives exercised, they ate, they smiled. I saw a yogic calm, an absence of agony and longing as they waddled happily along the aisles of the Publix market filling their carts with things that were not totally healthy.

Beach life was refreshingly cheap. Our maintenance was a third of that in our New York apartment. I carried big bags of food to the car for the same price as a few little Upper East Side morsels.

It took me about a week to see I had chosen a place where nobody looked like me or talked like me or probably thought like me. Certainly no one dressed like me. Little bits of the past clung to my wardrobe. My clothes reflected the duality of my life. I exercised in T shirts that Giorgio Armani had given me in the days he used to greet me with “Ciao Bella!” They said “Armani Private Party” on the back and nobody gave a damn. Down here GA on a shirt just meant Georgia.

I had landed on an island that didn’t seem to care about status or, if it did, the forms were so obscure that they eluded me, the once sharp-eyed social observer. I could not figure it out and then, I did. I was a New Yorker and a Jew and there did not seem to be any others around. I had never been this much of a stranger before.

I, who had almost never walked out my door in New York without meeting someone I knew—faccia la bella figura always—was anonymous here. It was very freeing. No one knew or seemed to want to know me. I had already started to see this happen to us in the last days of New York.

When my husband retired, we drifted first to the corner of the big New York room, and then quickly, while all eyes were on the stage, we just slipped out. With the kind of exhaustion that prefaces change, we left the city that defined us and he had helped define. As well as editing Newsweek and Esquire, Edward had been the editor of New York magazine for thirteen and a half years and the city’s largest paper, The Daily News, for four. He had chosen to leave the News, an office of hundreds of employees in two rooms the size of football fields, without a party or farewell speech. He just walked out the door and the boxes followed. Years before, I stopped writing for magazines and entered the silent room of novels. I had written for New York since its first days and been hired by three editors at Esquire. My last job was at Vogue, which I quit to work on my second novel, the one in the trunk of the car.

Edward and I knew that New York, like all cities, belongs most to those who are working. Somewhere on the drive down, we both entered the uncertain land of “former” and “once was.” If either of us felt the loss we did not and could not say it aloud. And, at first, there was too much to do.

The island was full of new seductions. The shrimp boats poised on the night horizon were like stars that had fallen into the dark water. They sold big pink shrimp of amazing sweetness. I took a pot of boiling water off the heat, dropped them in for two minutes and, when they cooled, dropped them into a bath of Florida orange, lime and lemon juices with some Texas Pete hot sauce. I had Georgia peaches, thin skinned Georgia pecans, and big rich Vidalia onions from right across the border.

I knew I was loafing, but there was this sweetness to the life. My family, with its considerable problems and obligations, was distant. It was too soon for my aged mother and our young daughter, Lily, to feel abandoned. Deadlines were of the past. I owned my time, and in the warm sea broth it seemed eternal as the drift of the tides.

I saw the rare green flash of the setting sun, heard the slap of my flip flops on the weathered boards as I walked to the ocean in the good salty air. There were rainbows all the time. I had the ease of getting dressed from three baskets—sweatshirts and T’s , shorts, and swimsuits– none of them black. Sometimes, I’d sit in the warm sand and fall into a vacant reverie staring at the waves. I was weary of my own previous seriousness.

Every night, the sea would write a different story and each dawn the beach would display one of its themes. One day, I would see mostly large pen shells lined with mother of pearl, another day a million tiny paired coquinas, or shells with holes, dropped by birds. Often the beach wrote murder stories. Every night, the sea would deposit small corpses for me to find each morning as I walked over the night’s death, the occasional crumpled bird or torn fish. I would see hundreds of starfish curled and dying on wet sand trails, or lumps of dead jellyfish their tentacles sunk deep, and always the empty shell tombs—twisty, ridged, encrusted with other shells full of dying life. I saw the struggles of the small creatures in their washed up shells, losing life as the tides went out without them and the acres of shells abandoned by life, pieced, crushed, sucked hollow. Once there was a huge sea turtle splayed out, sightless eyes bulging, that I tried to push back into the surf. I would see the corpse of a baby shark or bird, or sea snake. I saw birds struggling to live, too weak to take off, just sitting in the surf. This death beach was frightful within its beauty.

I lived by the tides. Low tide meant I could walk or run for miles, high tide meant sinking into soft sand and walking with one leg up like a peeing dog. I adjusted my days to the tide chart in the local paper, the clock meant nothing. Every day and within every day and night I would have many different seas.

I waved to the men fishing at American Beach and they said mawn-nen back to me. This area had been called “Black Beach” and was the first place in Florida where African- Americans could go to the beach. Abraham Lincoln Lewis, the founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, had bought up two hundred acres here and his descendants had tried to resist the developers. The men and women stood there, their poles propped in white tubes in the sand, with buckets of bait and mallets to hit the fish. NaNa, the largest sand dune in Florida, rose behind them. One morning, a fisherman in white rubber boots told me about MaVynne Betsch, famous as the Beach Lady, a descendant of Abraham Lincoln Lewis. He told how Ray Charles, James Brown and Cab Calloway came here to play at Evans’ Rendezvous Club, El Patio and The Honey Dripper back in the glory days.

I sleepwalked through vegetation on the verge of primeval—little lizards, geckos and snakes slithered away into the palmettos and frangipani. Green dates fell down from the palms. The air was wet and fogged my new dark floors, my skin was damp to the touch and salty. This was a place of growth and quick decay, sudden violent storms with thick orange bolts of lightning.

I drove without traffic, lived without fear of small nuclear bombs in abandoned suitcases. Here, north of Jacksonville and south of Savannah, I felt safe from the electric threat of New York. We were too small to attack, saved by our obscurity in a place where the alert level never felt yellow. The Mayport naval station was a ferry ride away across the St. Johns River and there sat the aircraft carrier JFK growing extinct.

What caused this mass placidness–this feeling of sleepwalking that came with living inside a perpetual dream?

I met a tall blond woman at beach yoga who was a life coach or, as she liked to describe herself, an “intuition teacher.” She was the one people went to when they could not handle the simplicity and freedom of their new lives. She helped them with the experience of “clearing.”

She was the one who told me about negative ions– molecules in the air at beaches and mountains and around waterfalls that make people feel good. They take away depression, clear out the toxins, relieve stress, increase energy, tranquilize those in pain. They make people stop jabbing at elevator buttons, snarling at dawdlers, telling cabbies the route, shouting abuse and acting with the barely contained hysteria that had ruled my first fifty-eight urban years. The sun breaks the molecules apart. The seashore is full of negative ions, the surf creates them. The oxygen was faster getting to my cells and tissues so I felt clobbered by an almost constant euphoric jolt.

Of course, there was another force at work in me, a familiar anti-force– guilt, the residue of generations of Jews who stayed late at the office, bent over piles of diamonds on one side of the family, and records of buildings fated to be sold at the wrong time, on the other. They were educating their children and keeping their families safe. I knew I was not the first to escape, but I knew very little. My grandparents never talked about the past, and I was too young to ask before they died. Every minute of every idle day they were rebuking me for doing nothing. They were scolding away—you are wasting time, achieving nothing, getting fat (that last was my mother’s voice with a question mark in it)

I liked not having to struggle. Shopping for and cooking a simple dinner, sweeping the sand from the floor was enough for most days. And there was a lot of sand to sweep. And endless shells to collect—pen and oyster, olives and the occasional slipper, cockles and arcs and scallops, angel wings and whelks. And then one day, the windowsills and shelves and baseboards were full. I began to fill the empty house. I bought handwoven baskets from a Gullah man. I hung pictures. I bought rag rugs at the Shrimp Festival. The spareness was evolving into coziness. I had to stop.

And still the voice nagged: You have a novel about to be published with gold on the cover and your name in raised type. Not very big type, but still, raised type. Years of work, a translator turning it into Russian, a British actor mimicking a French accent for the audio edition, an airbrushed Richard Avedon portrait on the back flap. The full guilt did not hit me right away, it took time. I was bewitched by the negative ions, blinded by the salt water in my eyes. I was not ready to introduce Napoleon and the decadent French courts to my sunlit island of strangers. As Seneca said, “He suffers more than is necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

The voice would not leave me alone. It was beginning to sound like my terrifying Grandpa Louis: Stop sweeping sand and boiling shrimp (shrimp?!) and looking at the sun setting over the bayous and get out and sell it. It was not yet the time.