One day, I heard the whistle of a distant train passing through and realized just how lonely I was.

The tropical world swelled and pulsed around me. I had the ocean with its moods and the changing light and birds to watch and sometimes it seemed enough. But other times it was not enough. My remaining friends and family, increasingly resentful of our liberty, were in New York. No one was in my way, nobody spoke to me or jostled me or cared what I said or did or wore or where I went or if I combed my hair and stroked on mascara. Sometimes when I spoke, my voice was hoarse from hours of silence.

Like a good wife and pimp, I had found some Southern ol’ boys and mid-Westerners for Edward to play tennis with. In the afternoons, he closed the door and began to write his memoir.

I rewrote an earlier novel, and then started three others. They were all, as the turtle people say, false crawls. A false crawl means that the turtle comes out of the ocean, drags herself up the beach to the dune, but then turns around and goes back to the sea without making a nest. Something is wrong.

In the evenings, as my spirits sank with the last of the sun and the liquids in my glass, I wondered if I had found the one place where I would have no one whatsoever to talk to. At least when Napoleon went into his two island exiles he brought along his court, soldiers in wilting plumes and ladies sweating in silk, crested silver at the table, the remains of an empire tarnishing in the tropical damp. When he sat down to lunch, twelve Frenchmen in various stages of depression were always there.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau managed to stroll to the neighborhood village every day or two “for gossip” and had constant visitors. We had moved to the island with small hopes of a friendship, but really knowing no one.

So I did something I had never done before and sought out the company of other writers–writers in a group, a true contradiction in term. I had seen in the local paper that the Nassau County Writers and Poets Society was meeting in the First Coast Community Bank .

I looked up their website and read the titles of a few of the submissions: “The Day the Outhouse Exploded,” “Elvis Meets Mary Cassatt,” “Remember Sunday Drives,” “Leroy’s One Flag Marching Band,” “Fernandina Fog.” Still, I went.

I put my shiny bound galley with a detail from a Jean Louis David’s painting of Napoleon down on the conference table. It was my letter of introduction, my proof that I was a fellow Nassau County writer and not just a comparative girl in a white miniskirt. I heard a clanking from the side door of the Community Room and in came a WWII veteran and poet to take one of the seats that had been vacant on both sides of me.

He and the other elders, most of whom had brought a single sheet of paper looked at my lush fledgling book. I felt waves of a familiar city emotion coming at me. Yes, I understood– here it was, the green fairy on the wing–jealousy, green and strong as absinthe.

They, the self- published and non-published, were pricked with ambition, full of hope, somewhat peculiar in the way of people drawn to the coast and the writing life.

 

Our leader, the Hemingwayesque figure of our group, was a big, bearded man who wrote action stories and looked somewhat familiar. He asked me to talk about The Diamond.

“This is just the galley,” I said looking down, immediately sorry I had brought it, unable to explain I had told the true story of a famous diamond in Napoleon’s sword from its beginning in the river mud of India through centuries of the French courts to the Louvre.

They wanted to know who the publisher was—the name was followed by a murmur then a silence full of yearning. By then my own life was beginning to embarrass me.

There was one other book, a paperback original. On the cover, a girl galloped a horse on the beach. Both her hair and the horse’s tail were streaming in the wind. This had to be Gracious Jane Marie, the romance writer whose website had offered jewelry, recipes, crafts, and gardening tips. The heroine in her book dropped dead on page three in a “heinous pirouette of extinction” after her horse was spooked by a sea turtle. Yes, turtle equaled death again.

That night, I found our leader in a familiar ad in the local paper. He was wearing a white smock and standing in front of a dental chair promising not to cause pain. I was glad that I had his phone number.

I kept on going to the monthly meetings which were like school reborn in my nightmares. It seemed our mission was elusive and required a lot of debate. Every meeting, we talked of projects we might write as a group– all of which baffled and filled me with dread. Yet, strangely enough, this was refreshing compared to the whining of my New York friends seduced and abandoned by their major publishers.

Somehow in this climate of gentle old people full of hope and battling failure, all my snobbishness went away—almost all my desire to see the Writers and Poets as a comic novel in the making vanished. I had not quite the heart.

On a trip back to New York, I walked around the reservoir with the most powerful publisher in the city and began to describe the group and saw him smile in wonder at me. But how could he know? A few months here and I was turning from a pent-up monster into something resembling a nice person. I still had a whole contrarian’s self to shed. Take my email pass word: “shithead.” I typed that in every day. It said a great deal about me and the way I once thought.

Eventually, I left the Writers and Poets group. They had their poems to rhyme (and rhyme they did) and stories to tell and perhaps so did I. I would do it, as always, by myself, alone.

 

And then, at last, it was my turn…

I lurked around the shelves of our three island bookstores and would come darting forward with a picture of my book jacket. On the back I had written “I’m local” with my phone number. Often, I just left it on the counter. This was my idea of promotion. In my newly lazy way, I was waiting to be loved. If I was not going to get big New York love, I needed at least small island love.

The book was the biggest relic of my past life and I was shedding it, too. For me those years of my life existed, thousands of pages, in big plastic tubs in a basement storage bin. They were part of the dark and not this new runaway life. They were history, they were old Europe, they were stories of the ancient dead strolling vanished courts.

I went to New York and had a party in a townhouse, another in a store full of diamonds with a red carpet rolled onto Madison Avenue. I read in the Fernandina Beach library, the librarian gave me a sweatshirt and then it was over. The Diamond was loved by the Russians and a few mature academic men, and I was back in the quiet of the sea.

I returned to the island, to the toot and shriek of the midnight train, and invisibility. I had absorbed the lesson of the old movie stars that there comes a time to go into seclusion, shut the door, and let the wrinkles crawl across your face.

All the stars I used to watch as a teenager, sunk into the brown plush of our den with the little blue light of the television flickering on into the night, did this eventual vanishing. At the end, Marlene Dietrich was just a voice in a dim apartment as Maximilian Schell interviewed her for a documentary. Some, like Joan Crawford, or Mae West, who reemerged for Myra Breckinridge, could not quite live without the starlight. Some, like Greta Garbo, who once spit into the gutter as she walked by me, used to stalk the fringes. Others, like Doris Day and Kim Novak, made a noble choice and turned to animals and animal rights. Crawford and Dietrich shut the door and took up vodka and Bourbon. They lived shut in with their memories, their old movies and photos of their young extreme beauty, becoming famous voices, slightly slurred, on the phone late at night when they dialed old friends, forgetting the time because, for them, time no longer existed except as an enemy or as the past.

As a girl, I went to see my favorite, Veronica Lake, frantically tapping and hoofing it in a too brief costume, her hair gone, her flesh wobbling, in an off- Broadway musical. The desperation poured off the stage and broke my heart. Still, I sent a note and invited her to lunch. Resuming her celluloid cool, she never came or answered.

“When I am old and gray,” Ava Gardner said, “I want to have a house by the sea…With a lot of wonderful chums, good music and booze around. And a damn good kitchen to cook in.” This fantasy became London, her dogs and the bottle but, before that, at 37, she made On the Beach, one of the movies that took away my childhood. The world has been destroyed by atomic bombs, clouds of radioactive fallout are drifting in, and the few Australians left alive are doomed. The last people on earth are “on the beach” with packets of suicide pills and the ominous “Waltzing Matilda” playing.

I had tried to look for my own with the writers, then with the yoga women. After class, I rolled up my mat and walked on down the beach, suddenly incapable of chitchat. The intuition teacher had gone away and a new wariness had come over me. How to begin? How to make the first connection, the tentative barstool pickup? In New York everyone I knew I had known for thirty fraught years. We had histories long enough to include children, divorces, breakups, illnesses, recoveries, triumphs and failures, letters of apology. Neighbors? No luck yet.

In fact, very few people ever were my type. I had to change– or did I? After a year, I discovered solitude—never unfamiliar to the writer– was to be my state.

Thoreau had written, “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.” I heard the wind, I smelled the ocean, I felt my feet in the sand, I saw the edge of the world on the horizon, and I tasted the sweet tea and pungent tomatoes of the south. Aside from Edward, and the hiss of waves, I lived in silence. The horizon does not talk back. The sun does not disagree. I could not be jealous of the moon.

Then, too, those who read all the time have the characters of their books for company. And thus I found my way to In Search of Lost Time. I fell into the book and this time I stayed.

I would get up at two or three in the morning, go into a back bedroom and read Proust until dawn. I had the old silver Vintage paperbacks. Time and the sea air caused the books to fall apart into sections and splinters of tan glue covered my lap. Outside I heard the raspy scratch of the palm trees bending in the night winds and then, in the morning, the invisible birds. I read to retrieve my own past, to stop time, to understand as Proust did, to find in his sensory triggers to the past some of my own. It was an escape within my escape, to enjoy the pleasure one takes in mastery (especially when the master is dead). I never felt sleepless and then I would hear birdsong as the light slit through the plastic shutters and I would stop reading with regret.

My empty spaces were filled by Proust’s intense inhabited worlds. I had gone away to escape the thrusts of that hyper-perceived world that now scooped me up. Proust returned me to the crowded rooms I had left, but now they were safe. I could enter as the voyeur, no longer judged, and see love in its various ever deviant forms. I was returning to the lure of the French. I had given them ten years of study for my last book, but it was not enough and they reclaimed me.

Nothing could be more different from the way I was living. Nothing could give as much happiness. Proust filled my world with these people. With the characters of these three torn books, finally held together with black ribbons, I never could be lonely or frightened. “Marcel” was my guide, my companion, and escape. I was taken away to the French countryside where a neurasthenic little boy waited for his mother to kiss him goodnight. When he finally got what he wanted, even more than he wanted when she came to sleep in his room, he no longer wanted it. When he had taken Albertine away from the world to live with him, again getting what he thought he wanted, he no longer wanted her. Was this some kind of message to me? I had gone to find my dream by the sea, was it really my dream?

What was I learning about myself in the “sea fogs and shadows of night?” Something in me must have thought that by going to the sea I could get back to my happy childhood when my father pulled me over a rocky beach in a sled.

Over many months, I read the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time almost three times—by now the books had fallen completely apart and were in chunks. I read ten books about Proust.* I reread How Proust Can Change Your Life, and Harold Pinter’s brilliant contribution, The Proust Screenplay. I read unpublished dissertations, I read Ruskin because he mattered to Proust, I read Louis Auchincloss and Christopher Hitchens on Proust, and saw all the Proust movies I could find.

Quite possibly I was going crazy. I was in a back bedroom, which is where they put the crazy person down south. Here they say, “The cheese has slipped off her cracker” for those gone round the bend.

Reading Proust all night was not a very beach bum-like thing to do. I should have been surfing and mixing complicated cocktails. I had to stop thinking. Reading Proust and Proustiana was a setback. I entered into a Proustian paralysis, a floating world of ideas, drifting, half-forgotten and elusive. I began to write The Crawl, a novel about swimming and captivity. And then, I could not write a word.

I had to be broken down before my new self could be born. As I had shed my possessions, I had to discard my old wearied self.

It was time to return to the sun and surf. I jumped into the pool and ran to the ocean. Both were beckoning and hot. But I needed more. I needed the stare, the love jumps, the dark all knowing eyes of my next dog. I needed consolation and what better than dog love, one sure thing. I needed to rescue a creature who would rescue me and so I found my way to D.A.R.E (Dachshund Adoption, Rescue & Education). It was not easy. We had a two-week evaluation period with a home inspection visit that took place during a fierce rainstorm. I had my entire family—all, except my mother, dog slaves– questioned for references: what was my personality (uh oh), would we be frustrated by a dog who thinks it’s smarter than we are, could we give her the exercise she needed, how had I treated previous pets? (No problem there since my truest friends have all had tails that flapped hard at the sight of me.) We flew to Atlanta and met the family that had rescued “Mitzi” from a cage where she had been imprisoned with a huge hairy cell mate who ate all her food. She was a little black dog, only vaguely a dachshund, sitting on the tarmac. She gave a single whimper as I held her in the car and she looked back. We drove to the island, and she entered her life of running free on the beach, tidal pool dog paddles, home cooked tasty treats, bird chasing, squeaky toys, and bon bones without end as she became Kukla the Dog– our buddy. She was the first of my dogs that Edward considered his.

Kukla understood the beach right away. Whenever she came across a heap of something mysterious and dead, she gave it a sniff, squatted, and peed right on it.

 

 

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* The World of Proust, A Night at the Majestic, Andre Aciman’s The Proust Project, The Year of Reading Proust, Proust by Richard Hayman, Proust and Proust’s Way by Roger Shattuck,The World of Proust by Paul Nader, Monsieur Proust by his housekeeper Celeste Albaret, Edmund Wilson’s A Short Version of Proust