After some time, I no longer heard the sea. Even with the glass doors slid back, the sound disappeared into the background. The sound was in my head only when I cared to hear it, to calm myself, to breathe at night. Sometimes it would come to me fresh, startling me, and I would again hear the sea spitting its moods onto the shore. Or was I hearing the traffic of 79^th Street? Sometimes I would wake into a dark bedroom and not know where I was– for the bedrooms in New York and the island were about the same size and layout.

Every six weeks or so, the Northern part of me reared up and I felt the pull of old tides. The island was not enough. I ate the boiled peanuts from the corner farm stand and got sick. I would wake up and remember I was now a resident of a state whose official song, written by a white man, goes: “Way down upon de Swanee ribber/ Far, far away/ Dere’s wha my heart is turning ebber,/ Dere’s wha de old folks stay.” I had the bad beach feeling; the idyll had palled. I looked at the bulletin from the Metropolitan Museum, where I was now an out- of -town member, with longing. And so we would zip a lightly drugged Kukla into her carrier and return.

I missed the tumult, dressing up in real clothes, talking to people other than my husband and dog. I missed the agitation of New York, the spur of jealousy, people talking under ashy skies with streams of steaming breath coming out of their mouths. I heard a certain tone in my mother’s voice when I called after being here a while and, though I talked to her at least twice each day, there was no mistaking the nuances. Also, she would ask, “When did you say you were coming home?”

I could not tell her, she who always had pure contempt for Florida, the island was home now. New York was that other place—off island.

It was clear we could not go back in the same way. Now, when we returned, we were like ornamental hermits—those figures that English eccentrics hired to roam their grounds looking mad and rustic, something quaint and shabby from another time. They would install one in a little hut to appear at certain times and startle their guests.

And that’s what we were when we returned—our clothes not quite up to date, a few months behind after an absence of weeks. We were a feature at New York parties, approached with ill ease. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? said the natives, as though we had just come out of the woods on the grounds of the estate—hoary, bearded, ancient (for I, alone among a certain set of a certain age, retained my original face and weathered neck). People had begun to suspect us of having done the unthinkable and rejected their entire fabulousness.

We had become George and Marion Kirby from Topper,  invisible, or worse, peripheral to the aims and evergreen ambitions of those around us. We were no longer in a position to do anything for any of them. Thus, we had dematerialized, lost our value. Using is the point of so many New York friendships and, since people can use each other again and again at different stages of their careers, friendships tend to last. Until they don’t.

I walked Madison Avenue in wonder—women had gotten even thinner, and they were wearing different Upper East Side uniforms—blazer and jeans or gold flats– each time we returned. I was now a stranger in my homeland. Restaurants had died, stores had closed, old friends had grown even glossier and tighter. Now they all looked about thirty five, though not really. Despite extreme efforts to look just the same, somehow they did not.

I would charge into my New York apartment and think what are all these things? I went around turning on all the lights but it was still so dark. How had I gotten so much stuff? I began to put away things that had once seemed important, wrapped in bags in closets. I took down the Fortuny curtains that once were precious. I took up the rug and left a bare brown floor I hadn’t seen in years. Diana Vreeland’s Venetian chandelier came down in the bedroom and went into a closet. There still wasn’t light.

We already had given up certain expensive rituals like PEN dinners, Literacy Volunteers, the Costume Institute at the Met, Fete de Famille. Quite naturally all our PR chums had dropped us when we were no longer our publications. In the past, I had seen photographers closing in on us, then a few of them would take pity pix, which meant they would raise their cameras and not use the shot. Finally, no one bothered even to raise the camera—which was all right with me (so unphotogenic that my own mother has forbidden me to step in front of a camera ever again.) In fact, I welcomed the absence of my crowded past. Or did I?

It all looked pretty good from the island where I read Gawker and the New York Social Diary on line, both of which were filled with absent old friends. But, also now, unfamiliar names, people I did not want to learn about or get to know. People, increasingly remote, in clothes increasingly irrelevant.

Like my father, I had run out of small talk. As though he knew his life were going to be short (he died at 67), my father, Joseph, a diamond dealer with a big business, never stood around parties with a glass in his hand. A private quiet man, he used to say to my mother “Let’s see how many things we can miss.”

But then, back on the island, in my T shirts and shorts with my sandy often dirty feet, sitting against a cotton leopard cushion that had been a freebie from Dolce and Gabbana, I would look at the collections on Style.com and think of our days in the front row at Ralph Lauren runway shows or our trips to the men’s shows in Milan twice a year when Edward was at Esquire. Nature was outside but I was reading Vanity Fair. Perhaps this was a healthy pull back, a refusal to completely surrender to the beach. Maybe I was not indulging in what Thoreau’s friend called the “grand process” to “build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive.” By now, I consulted Thoreau rather frequently and no longer found him quite so boring. I was beginning to understand…

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? A big gold-encrusted stiffie came from the American Friends of Versailles inviting me to Le Grand Bal and asking me to donate to complete the restoration of a pavilion at the Petit Trianon, a cause not high on my list of concerns. Again, I was sitting barefoot hearing what Marquez called “the desolate breath of the sea.” Above my computer screen the sun cut through the white vapors, a silver haze hung over the dunes, the last people out on the evening beach were packing up, carrying their equipment like defeated troops as they stopped to watch the dolphins. A few brown pelicans folded their wings and hit the water.

Sometimes, New York entered my dreams. In one dream, I was at the wedding of the Duchess of York, which for some reason was taking place in a cramped New York townhouse. I was sitting on a small bench chatting with her fiance and parents. In the weird logic of dreams, I was dreaming myself back in the front row.

The sense of missing things passed with time. But then, one day, we were invaded and our two worlds collided. From the back bedroom, where I had holed up trying to write, I saw a certain familiar commotion down by the Ritz tennis courts. Venus Williams, there for the annual women’s tournament, was hitting tennis balls with her sister Serena. Their father stood at the net facing them, his arms crossed. I went down with the ever eager Kukla.

Martina Navratilova, in a warm up suit, was on her back on the grass. A young woman in tennis clothes was holding up her leg and moving it in circles. I walked past them, past circlets of pansies, along the path that divides the courts and sat down to watch the sisters rally. Their father, a big man in electric blue spandex shorts, looked me over.

A beautiful young man came out of the big white Ritz tent behind Martina Navratilova. His chest was bare and his jeans sank so low they reposed themselves carelessly on his iliac crests, those two L shaped bones above his pubic hair, threatening at any moment to fall off. He walked slowly to me, barefoot on the white path. The thinnest line of gold hair threaded his very lower abdomen. Then another bare-chested boy in jeans, almost a duplicate of the first with the same young golden color, came out of the tent. The two of them, unaware of how startling they were, sauntered up to where I was no longer watching the sisters. And then a third, and then a fourth came out in a line, as on a runway in an old queer’s heaven. I contracted my stomach when the fourth appeared, also blond and tousled, this one in a white undershirt with white linen shorts suspended perilously low, the flesh barely covering the muscle pouches. At this point, I thought God had stricken me dead and transported my shade back to the Milan men’s shows. To the land of the iliac crest and the nagashime glance—the flowing eyes, the sideways glance. The boys were of a color, as though they had been dipped in a radiant harmless sun. They stood behind me watching the tennis, negligent of their beauty, completely relaxed and indifferent as though nineteen years was enough time to get used to it. I felt a kind of animal warmth from them gathered behind me, still holding in my stomach and still completely invisible.

“How come you are all so good looking?” the ace reporter asked.

“We’re shooting the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue,” the first one answered just as though it were an explanation and then a bunch of girl models in overcoats and shorts and tiny skirts and drifts of summer scarves burst from the tent of narcissism.

Inside the tent, in the dark, there were racks and racks of clothes. The hotel had set up tables of food, great silver-domed useless preparations. A team of hairdressers was curling or straightening the long hair of these children so little past childhood, not really like silky magazine models but just a kind of perfected youth. Every few seconds, the flash of Bruce Weber’s camera would piece the dimness and a few more of them, a pasture of white cattle, would graze by the food, ignoring it, busy at their profession of being beautiful.

“Well, I can’t complain any more that I am isolated,” I said to myself. Yet, I was again invisible, lost between two groups of humans who were used to being stared at—tennis stars and beauty stars, bodies and sports brains, sweat and no sweat, two forms of professionals but neither quite free, neither able to kick back at the beach. I could not locate myself within either world, but was enchanted by both. I listened to their chatter, the ping of the tennis balls, the grunts and moans of the players. Some beauty pros I knew from my other life were in the tent. I did not say hello.