“Ton has decided to die now,” said Ginger, Ton Luyk’s assistant for twenty five years in his design business. In her rusty voice, she told me the name of the hospital outside Coral Gables.

I told her we were coming.

The next morning, driving down the Florida coast, I thought of when I lived there before, hanging over the infallibly azure waters of Biscayne Bay. I had a French friend named Fannie who was a champion water skier. I had a tall and handsome doctor husband with the last name of a Swedish film director. I sat down to dinner with five neurosurgeons at the table. In one year of marriage, I had lived in many apartments and Ton Luyk had decorated my last one. It had sisal on the floor and white duck fabric. It had a stainless steel table with red Queen Anne chairs we bought for a bargain. It had two white plaster tables with legs ending in paws and Hansen swing lamps on the walls. Ton had designed it for a life I would never have.

That had been another time, when I was young, the worst of my life, and I left it so quickly that the movers ripped off the front door and left it hanging from its hinges. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, a beach bum with a deep water tan, had saved me, taken me out of Miami to The Busted Flush anchored at Slip 17 in the Bahia Mar Marina. We sat on the deck of his houseboat sipping Boodles over ice and then we went below deck. He was a salvage consultant who claimed half of what he retrieved as his fee. And what he retrieved in my case was half of me.

That was a year I spent driving to hospitals, flying to other hospitals for my father, sitting in the parking lot of Jackson Memorial or the Veterans Administration Hospital, waiting for my husband and wondering why I was not with my father, who was dying. Sometimes, I would crack open a John D. MacDonald paperback and be back with Travis McGee, a man who could make things come out right. Sometimes, I’d be with his friend, the hairy economist Meyer, who had a law: “In all emotional conflicts the thing you find hardest to do is the thing you should do.” Sometimes, I would be bleeding when I shouldn’t be, at first a little and then a lot, and I was in the silver Firebird with a towel between my legs. My husband was driving, and his parents who had moved down to Florida to join our marriage, were following in their car as I lost my first child.

I picked up my head—“Go away! Go away!” but they never did. And soon enough he returned to them.

Now, we were driving down to Ton at ninety miles an hour, but it was not fast enough to outrun the images of that year —fleeing to South Beach at twilight to sit alone on the empty sands in a reverie of regret, the packing and unpacking and packing up again. I had moved to Miami in the era just before “Miami Vice,” when the city still rested in shabbiness. The first Cubans then were young. The old Jews sat slumped on the porches of their Miami Beach Deco hotels, not sleek, and undiscovered by roller-blading models and developers. It was before even that image of a pastel city, the cars cutting through the wet night streets, before “I can feel it / coming in the air tonight.” What I felt then, before the glamour and out of sync, was trouble. But most of the time I was waiting for my husband or planning his dinner. Since boyhood, he had sat in restaurants eating complicated foods wrapped in the adoration of his parents who had no other child. His mother neither cooked nor drove nor worked, still he had expectations of me.

After a morning of fits and sobbing off my professionally applied makeup, I had married him in a very lavish way. A prophetic “Wedding Bell Blues” was playing in the lobby of 944 Fifth Avenue at my request. There were gardenia bushes, two dresses for the bride, a wine, Leoville Las Cases, with the name, strangely enough, of the narrator of my second book, and a certain segment of New York sitting around blaming Florida and knowing it could never work. Florida was the good part of our marriage, the old Florida of the dark places, of the thick rooted banyans and the avocado trees and the Coral Gables streets with Spanish names like Alhambra that McGee and I sought and valued. But then I was in a glass box, hanging over the water, and I never seemed to reach it. I never swam or even searched for shells.

Soon enough, I was squirming inside my life and so was he. We were both spoiled and babyish and miserable, with our parents paying the bills. He was working hard, operating on brains and backs, and, though I was briefly on two mastheads, I had lost my life as a New York journalist. Inside the glass box, over the water, on the new sweet smelling sisal, I was foolish and defiant as a wife, uncomprehending and unmerciful as a daughter-in-law.

It was hot then, the true tropics where women raised umbrellas against the sun, a place of sea grape and coco palm and lizards like pieces of speckled green enamel in the undergrowth. In the nights, in my final apartment, I looked down at the people who came to fish with lighted nets and salsa music coming from the old dented cars high up on their big wheels. I stood and danced alone at the railings.

That year, when I was young for the last time, Ton and I became friends. My small chic European friend would pick me up in his little car and we’d go to the Miami design center. He’d wear a little safari jacket for the expedition and we would laugh all the afternoon as we created an apartment that was daring and bare and sure to baffle my husband. I was in the Travis McGee mindset—fix up the boat, scour the decks, get new friends aboard, ramble along, work only when you need the money (we never did) or felt morally impelled ( I was tired and bled out). Tell all the rest to Meyer or Ton. Things would get solved in the end. They would come out right. My father would live. My husband’s parents would leave us alone. There would be another child. Travis, the old scarred beach bum had a code, and he had a good character: He righted what was askew and he never abandoned what could be salvaged.

I could not see then that Travis McGee lived, not only a fictional, but an unreal life and did mostly what he wanted. Though he got banged up, he was a virile healthy animal—a drifter, a rambler, sleepy-eyed but with quick reactions, an impossible man. He lived a life that was completely different from what my husband and I had lived and were living. We had spent our young lives filling other people’s expectations so we — neurosurgeon, writer– looked good on paper.

I spent four hours a day driving my husband to and from the hospital in the car which was supposed to be a gift to me (but at the time of the divorce, somehow was not in my name). The doctor would call and say he was ready, but then I would wait an hour or two or more for my baby man, who did not have a good character in the end. There he would be, his white coat flapping open, his soft hair flopping on his forehead. He’d be coming across the tarmac with his toes turned out in his funny dancer’s walk, his pockets stuffed with rubber tubes and a few of the big fat trachea needles in yellow plastic sleeves that he always carried with him. Once, he had stood by helpless as a man choked to death on the floor of an airport. Now, he would always be ready in case I or someone else keeled over and needed him to rip open their windpipe.

There was something basically infuriating in this doctor-wife life into which I had eased myself. I was made to drive and wait and I did not like to wait. Now, I see that if we only had two cars and some anti-depressants for him, we might have saved the marriage. Of the three couples we knew, two of us divorced. There was another friend, Dr. Youssef Ibn-Thomas, a Black Muslim neurosurgeon, a bit older. In his first year in practice, his wife came in to his office and shot him dead when he was sitting at his desk.

Once, I made the mistake of going upstairs in the hospital, opening the door to a lab, and finding my husband standing over a chimp with a metal box inside its open brain. Opening that door is what I most regret, the sound of the shrieking chimps in the cages, the sheen of their tortured eyes.

He operated on a man with chicken pox, got chicken pox and went home forever to have his parents take care of him. He was clinically depressed, and I had no understanding of depression and no one to explain it to me. His feelings seemed irrational. But my father is dying soon, I said. I just lost our baby. And so the movers and I broke the door leaving the apartment just as it was finished for the life I would never have there. Now it was really bare and my things were traveling north with me.

MacDonald had written: “It was one of those Florida houses I find unsympathetic…When they are emptied after occupancy they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.”

At the end of that year, I did return to work. I flew to Los Angeles to write about Robert Evans. He had a pretty house crowded with things that never were moved and a round dark pool with fountains pouring and rose petals falling into it. The old movie star turned producer was handsome as could be then and a very bad boy, about as far from a beach bum as anyone could conceive. I certainly was not his type, but one night at Trader Vic’s he asked if I could stay on a bit. I was then as broken as could be and his invitation, unaccepted, helped me mend. He, of all people, turned out to be the salvage consultant. Then the call came and I rushed home on one of those interminable flights with death or, at best, dying, on the other end.

Now I was driving to another dying. At the end of seven hours and the whole Florida coastline, I drove through Coral Gables to the hospital where Ton lay quitting on his life. All his organs had failed and he did not want to live as an invalid with dialysis and other indignities. He was in a hospital gown and held the simplest wooden cross on a rosary. He was the same yellow color I remember seeing with my father. It is the dread yellow of bad bilirubins and liver failure. “Chrome Yellow for Dying,” as MacDonald might title it in one of the McGee books.

Ton’s Cuban carpenter, who had brought his own wife and children, were in the room with me. I recognized the man because he had driven my desk and some chairs from Miami up to the island.

Ton said he was at peace with his decision, a last brave decision from an invariably graceful man. He had lived in a small house in Coral Gables filled with bold art and rare things collected all over the world for much of his seventy-one years. The house was layered with paintings and sculpture ferreted out before opening nights at galleries, the Edwardian bamboo furniture or the Empire gondola chairs snatched up at dawn in the Miami warehouses we had visited when shipments came in. All the insouciant touches, the careful arrangements that would never be quite the same on a return visit, all the taste of an educated eclectic architectural eye had come down to this final elegance of refusal in a bare room: no mas.

In the end he turned his back on all of them. He told me he did not want to die at home, all his things no longer mattered to him. He wanted an empty room and the family who had come from Holland to be with him.

Ton had been there for so much of my life—in Florida, in New York, showing up on the red carpet that strange night of the Graff jeweler’s party for The Diamond. I still had all the things we had once bought (my father paid) and I could see rooms with something of his eye now. Maybe in this new beach life I had been trying to get back to that other time by the water. Then I had not done things right. Maybe I was trying to swim my way back home, to redo, to make it come out right, to find my father, to redecorate in the profoundest sense.

Edward and I drove back that afternoon and went from ninety to a crawl as we passed an accident. The lower half of a man in shorts lay on the highway, flung from a car hit by a truck and cut in two. No sign of the other half. We drove by—could we be seeing what we were seeing?– picked up speed, and sped off into the night, away from the dying and the dead. Without Travis, without Evans, and without Ton, I would salvage what I could of myself.

I said goodbye to Ton and when I called in later days he was sleeping his way into death. I hoped he had no pain when he “went home to be with the Lord,” as they say in the obituaries down here.

Then came the inevitable notice: “The Elegant Ton Luyk Estate Sale!” One October Sunday, 2007 on Viscaya Avenue in Coral Gables, they were selling off the detritus of his life. I did not go to buy what he had left behind; and, why should I, for he had left me everything that mattered.