After almost thirty years together, Edward and I finally came to think somewhat alike. We were no longer “lions and tigers”—there went that collection—but rather a bi-valve, two halves of a shell hinged together by the pulsating mollusk inside. We were clamped together by our children and living in this warm and foreign place.

Of course, this life was possible only because Edward had wanted to live on the beach as much as I did. He agreed that we did not want to stay in the city to become diminished versions of ourselves, living a gauzier life with fewer pleasures and only the empty repetitive forms. For him, too, the beach was a return to the boyhood summers that he had spent in the pseudo Venetian canals of Long Beach on Long Island. We had spent Lily’s young summers in Bridgehampton until the drive, the prices, and the agitation made all that impossible. None of the Hamptons were the beach for us. They were a continuation of the city, striving interrupted by seething, a place where the eyes looked ever sideways, a careful, foreign moneyland, already ruined. We moved to my family’s guest house in Connecticut for weekends and kept looking for another beach.

Strangely enough, he was even more able than I to relax into beach life. He’d had unfortunate previews of life without work in the two interstices between his time as the editor of Newsweek and New York Magazine and a longer one between Esquire and the Daily News. The sealed boxes from his various offices went to rot slowly in the Connecticut garage. Without complaint, he had settled then onto a sofa. He was younger then and still had more to do as an editor. I felt he was both too old and too young to spend the day in jeans, but there we were. Before, he always went back to work, but this time he did not.

We were living the life of delayed drop-outs. When others had abandoned real life to shave ginger over tofu in the geodesic domes of the Sixties, I was just getting started. The year Timothy Leary said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” was the year I graduated from college, and bearing a hefty sheaf of poems, tried to get a job writing, the year Edward was writing cover stories for Newsweek and supporting two young sons.

Any long marriage is full of the annoying habits of the other and now they were upon each of us full time and forever. My Grandma Tillie’s advice to “bite your tongue” was very hard for me. It was much easier to push someone than to push myself. I had to learn: There were some things he was never going to do. There were other things he would always do his way and, most infuriating, in his own time which was always “not now.” It was easier to do the thing, whatever it was, myself. Also, if he did a thing once in a certain way, it would always be done exactly that way. Once I accepted these basic life premises—it took over twenty-five years—things got easier.

We now had fewer epic fights. No plate throwing at Mimmo d’Ischia in London (me). No more PMS hormonal knife-wielding and picture tearing up in Redding, Connecticut (me), no more stalking out of Nobu on Lily’s birthday (me). No more stalking out at all, because we were stuck together, the functioning living bivalve washed ashore on this distant land.

None of our friends thought we would stay. It was Florida, an island in another country, a state with a vein of coconut patty-flamingo lawn ornament cheesiness and more than a whiff of dreaded old age about it. They wanted us to prove that there really was no life outside the city and the beach-cities beyond it: no life when the ambition quits. They were waiting for our island to fail us, for us to slink back and be welcomed in defeat. Of course, we knew others who had left. Most of them went to Aspen, an acceptable place, a sort of western Hampton. None were ever seen again.

We had come to a place where it was not so much “us against the world” as rather the two of us, misfits in an unfamiliar place that would become our world. We would not give up and move back. We would conquer the island, we would wait it out and let it take us up. We would encounter this different island together because in all the important things we saw alike: devotion to family, kindness, honesty, dislike of pretense and self-promotion, admiration for each other’s abilities and character. We had developed shared assumptions, reactions, knowledge of the other’s mind. I knew he would never betray or leave me and he knew I was dog-loyal.

Also, by day, we had separate cars– ending years of my wincing, flinching, and jamming on phantom brakes–and we had separate retreats. I could slip into my back room and he had his green study where he wrote book reviews for The Wall Street Journal and paid the bills and where he could play his opera, his Billie Holiday and Amalia Rodriguez and Yankee games all afternoon long with the door closed. He did not seem to mind not working as an editor. He had ideas that went to waste, but he did not think of it that way. I came to realize that just because an idea is not made public it is not any less valuable. He would not influence millions of people as he once had, but he was at peace with himself. Playing tennis until his shirt was wet, closely reading the newspapers and the books he had never had time to read (once he started an author, he read the whole oeuvre be it Patrick O’Brian, Philip Roth, Carl Hiassen, Alan Furst, William Boyd, Anthony Powell and more. He read everything about Shakespeare’s life and hefty histories and political books) doing his crossword, emailing and going to lunch with his old colleagues at the Century club when we were in New York made up a life that satisfied him. He had supported me in every way for years, I had no right to object.

We developed a cooperative co-existence. He cut my hair, learned his way around the markets, and I learned to cook and keep house to his taste. I found housekeeping a true gift for the obsessive because it can never be finished. Neither of us felt in any way uncomfortable with these tasks. They had to be done and now we had time to do them. After a while, doing them well gave us pleasure.

Early on, it was our instinct as New Yorkers to look for the people in power, the leaders of the island. But here there was no one to aspire to be—no houses or cars or jobs to want. There was no want. We were in our own world.

More than once in the past, I had told Edward the way to make me happy and calmer was to always say “Sure” in response. Now I knew this would never happen. “Sure” was never coming, and the best I could hope for was “not now” to become later, eventually, in his own good time, which was sometime after Kate Smith sang “God Bless America” in the middle of the seventh inning. I learned, if not to bite my tongue, to mutter under my breath and occasionally roll my eyes to the tropical lavender skies. I decided that marriage comes down to love, quiet eye rolling, and the frequent pulling of corks. Of course, he had his own little joke involving a ball peen hammer.