We kept going back and forth to the city. In a crisis and there were a few, we could appear in New York in two and a half hours, the small Comair plane landing at La Guardia. I had been there for my mother’s stroke, when she saw things that were not there and knew were not there, the hospitals and doctor’s appointments, the waiting rooms, by the bedside, and sitting on the floor outside rooms where some horrifying procedure was being done. All her children were always there. Never having been sick or dependent on doctors, and having been married to one, I held them in no great awe and spoke out when needed, a pain in the ass in my mother’s behalf.

What my mother missed, since her material needs were met and there was Marina Torres to cook her food, keep her house, walk Toby the biting dog, take her around, and finally sleep over, was the idea of my presence. I say the “idea” since the reality was often fraught. She missed my sitting across from her on the antique slightly torn chairs and having the arguments we still had, so diminished as to be almost moot. She had the sense I had failed her long ago in some way and there was little time left to make amends.

Seeing her beautifully dressed, sweet smelling, in full brain and wit but physically weaker and somewhat unsteady was very difficult for both of us. It frightened me that I was now suddenly taller than she and steadier, though her eyes were better and her bones were stronger than mine. Born almost on the same day (she went to the hospital to have me on her birthday after dancing with my father at the St. Regis roof and being unable to climb the stairs of our townhouse) we were seemingly alike and yet quite different. Unlike my grandmother, who ran a real estate business, my mother had never worked except for one day at the store Hattie Carnegie and the years of raising three squabbling, hair-pulling and biting children. We never completed a single dinner without one of us leaving the table or a car ride without my father pulling over to the side of the road and throwing one of us (me) out.

I often maddened her and she played me. There was some kind of game going on, a tidal push/pull that I never quite understood. I knew I had lost part of her forever when my younger brother got sick at age six with type one diabetes.

In so many ways, she was tired of her life. She had outlived her youth and young beauty and the only man she loved and all her friends, and yet she was fierce about living and living as well as she could with a cultivated, defining, almost helpless extravagance. She was careful to take her many drugs and do her exercise and yet she was disgusted by not being all she had been and lonely. She still read and had her rare and beloved books, her first editions collected over many auctions and John Updikes, but the theater and museums were finished for her, replaced by waiting rooms where she sat in her very good old clothes, girdled and impeccable, like a dowager empress cast out from her empire to rule the very small kingdom of her family.

She walked up Madison Avenue in the sun. It was still her turf but the shopkeepers of Hermes and Prada no longer knew her. Vera Wang no longer came rushing out of Saint Laurent to greet her. We were now two small and invisible women holding on to each other, my cradling the arm that hurt from the Pacemaker, she pushing me away. I’d be there every six weeks or so and she would say, “I guess you find me changed for the worse.”

Whether in the city or on the island, I was powerless to do anything. I could not make her healthier, younger or richer. I could not restore my father to her, or retrieve her big homes, her dead friends, the sense that life now was worth it. I could not give her a life in which the future remained undisclosed, suspenseful. Still I kept going back and forth, seeing my daughter and my mother, roaming the Metropolitan Museum with the fervor of a beachcomber, trying to revive friendships, feeling myself fading out of more and more of my old life.

When I got back down south after some of those early trips to the city, I realized I did not quite belong in either place. People would talk to me on the beach or in Publix and I could not understand them at all. I would nod and smile and hope they weren’t expecting a response. On the beach, I could blame it on the roar of the sea but in the market I had to wonder if in fact I was going deaf. Southern voices (low) plus southern drawls plus southern rhythms (slow with random peculiar emphases) bewildered me and I was not alone.

“Did you understand that?” I would ask Edward after someone had made a comment on the beach. He never did.

It was a different kind of loneliness and I had met it before. The only person I knew who had run away as we did was Richard Nixon. I wrote about him in his afterlife when he first moved back to New York. New York had been his beach, his runaway place.

In June of 1980, I went to see him in his townhouse. He walked out of his study to greet me, alone, without the inhibiting filter of pr flacks clearing their throats and arching their eyebrows. He was way beyond that. Despite his disgrace or maybe because of it, I had been plenty nervous.

“…You don’t need double-dome people to get stimulation,” he told me “You need a broad spectrum.”

His move was exactly the reverse of ours. He thought he had moved into the broad spectrum right within the city. Now that Edward and I had moved far from the land of double-domes, I saw that he was right. Like us, he was kind of an ex-pat in his own country. And, like us, by then he had had it all.

“We’ve already had the best dinners, been to the best homes,” he said. “We’ve seen them all.” When he and Pat went out in the Vice Presidential years, “thirteen, fourteen, fifteen nights in a row because Eisenhower did not want to go, it was too much candy.”

“Women just love to get horsed up and see and be seen, and some men, too.,” he said. “It’s one thing to go to cocktail parties and have a pop, but if you’re the center of attention, it takes concentration all the time. You can say one thing at a dinner party and it all goes.”

In the past, from time to time, I, all horsed up and maybe with a pop or two in me, had lost my temper and said that one fatal thing. For him, too, it was the old us versus them, his “them” being the “trendies”, the “sophisticates” , the “art crowd”, the Kissinger people, “ those over glamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are.” In other words, our old friends.

How prescient he was in 1980 speaking to me, then a minor trendy, a confirmed trendy spotter, a frequenter of known trendy hangouts. Now, far away and out, for the first time I could understand. In his unique position—ex-President of the United States, misunderstood, brilliant pariah— he felt that familiar outsider feeling keenly.

Nixon had fled into a house in another city but still walked the streets in a business suit at six am, double takes in his wake, plopped down in an afterlife with a cloud. Cast out of the thing he did, he wrote his books, and had been, like us, trying to find his next life in a new place. He had his obvious shields, the Secret Service then invisibly loitering, that face, that voice and that presence, but it was a transition into inactivity from the most fraught activity in the world.

He was about to go to Walker’s Key in Florida that weekend for “three days of surf.”

“I like salt water,” he told me. After he resigned, he had flown right to the sea, his beachside villa, La Casa Pacifica. He may have once walked the San Clemente sands in a suit and black wingtips but, inside, Richard Nixon was a beach man.

Like him, I found myself in limbo, neither there nor quite here, as I spent days waiting for the mail truck and the shiny magazines that would pull me back into that other life I was about to be drawn back in…

When I was in my twenties, the director Billy Friedkin had flown me to Hollywood and hired me to write a screenplay. I had spent a month as an overage D girl for the producer Robert Evans. In the fall of 2006, the movie director Andrew Jarecki asked me to a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel.

He was then “in research mode,” “opening the hood” on “a complex story” and thought “to make me part of his research process.”

He was going to make a movie, a piece of fiction, about my friend Robert Durst, who had been tried and acquitted of a gruesome Texas murder, and my other friend the writer Susan Berman, who previously had been murdered in Los Angeles. [This was long before “Jinxed” his HBO documentary.]

As Jarecki spoke, I touched the pearls Susan had left me in her will and again felt the pull of old tides.