With time, sunlight, and oblivion the ghosts blew away, though sometimes they returned in dreams that left me sitting up in bed moaning and swatting at the dark air. I now began to fight against seediness, island decline, the collapse of all previous standards.

Things had not ended well for two of my fellow beach bums.

In Noa Noa, Paul Gauguin had written: “I have come to an unalterable decision—to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.” He believed “Barbarism is rejuvenation.”

He returned to France briefly, but came back to his islands and died of syphilis. So did Beau Brummell, who lost all his money, lost favor with the Prince Regent, and fled England for France. He used to walk on the beach picking up seashells, carrying them home, and painting them with vinegar to restore their brightness. He could not do the same for his own luster. He, who defined the dandy, gave in to black silk ties which he had always hated. He, who once washed each part of his body and changed his linen twice a day, lay in filth, raving mad on dirty sheets.

Virginia Woolf said that when Beau Brummell left London he lost his “preservative.” He may have known how to tie his cravat—chin up, chin down to crush—but he didn’t have the mental resources to fill his derelict days. He went to seed, had mad visions and wound up in an asylum.

The beach bum’s bad end even came to Jeff Chandler, the prototypical beach bum of Female on the Beach. The image of him scooping Joan Crawford (who approached beach living in stilettos and silk dresses) into his arms faded with the image of him in his own big dresses. Esther Williams, who had a three-year affair with him, tells how she found him one day in a dress and heels and makeup. In an unforgettable scene in her autobiography, Million Dollar Mermaid, she discovers his secret closet. The mermaid confronts the beach bum at last and tells him, “Jeff, you are too big a man for polka dots.”

But had I lost my own “preservative” when I left New York?

I was determined to fight off mental decline and tropical rot. I was going to keep things in our bare apartment clean and trig like a ship. It was a constant struggle—the air conditioner vents dripped with brown rust, sand blew in under the door and through the screens, carrots crumpled with age in mysterious corners of the refrigerator. Cleaning was relaxing, endless, and curiously fulfilling. I was my own housekeeper, driver, shopper (Edward helped) and cook. Since the day we arrived on this servant-less island, I made the beds, did the laundry, cleaned the toilets, dusted, swept, occasionally vacuumed and mopped. I also did windows, but I did not iron. I began to worry one day when I found myself crawling into a corner with a fistful of Q-Tips. Both my husbands, only children, had mothers who cleaned with Q-tips. What did this mean?

I had been raised by a great Southern cook, a Seventh Day Adventist named Sophie Rice, who could cook anything in the world and who, when she was unsure, had only to consult her Fannie Farmer. She was born to make everything taste delicious– a cheese soufflé that swelled from its ramekin to melt like a hot puff on the tongue, an apple or lemon meringue pie, both sweet and tart, that called us one by one to the kitchen deep in the night. She was so brilliant that all our party cooks learned from her. Sophie often told me I would never have to cook, that I would never find myself in a kitchen. She said this to me in the kitchen of our fourteen rooms on Fifth Avenue where we had her to cook, a laundress, and a chambermaid/waitress and why should she have believed otherwise. With her faith in the Lord, she assumed I would always have a cook and not be one, and, after she climbed Jacob’s ladder, it would be the same for her.

I could happily live on french fries or a BLT on rye toast, but I was married to a man who for the last forty years had lunch and sometimes dinner ensconced in the booths of media-friendly four-star restaurants. He expected what he called, much to my fury, a “meal.” He would handle his own unvarying breakfast and his sandwiches, but the dinners were all mine. When they did not quite work out, he would be silent and push little mounds to the side of his plate. Through his glasses, his eyes glittered with disappointment, his lips turned further down. The forlorn little mounds grew higher. Silence spread like a dark fog. He took such pleasure when I got it right that I began to really try.

When I began, my specialty was burning things and having the toxins seep from the charred non-stick pots into the dish. I progressed, but Edward and I had shared an impossible vision of perfection.

One night in New York, we went downtown to have dinner with a new English friend, Tamasin Day-Lewis. She had just walked in the door from a root canal and plopped brown bags of food onto the counter. It was a new apartment, no kitchen sink yet so she had to use the bathroom sink. As the Novocain wore off and her tooth began to throb with that familiar root canal pain, she put out Robiola, Vacherin Mont d’Or, and Beaufort d’ete. She sliced some fennel and braised it with cardamom seeds, white wine, and olive oil until the anise melded with the oil. Then she cooked the veal chops into a moist tenderness and made an apricot tart from scratch and all with the insouciant ease of a pro.

Of course, Tamasin was a pro–a television cook in England, the “Queen of Tarts”, an inspired food writer with eight cookbooks and countless food columns in the English papers. She was the daughter of the poet C. Day Lewis and the half-sister of Daniel Day Lewis. She was also a great beauty.

Obviously, I had to learn to be a better cook, which I did by reading cookbooks with “easy” in their titles and watching the Food Network. The food channels seemed to go with this life. I sat slumped and numb, narcotized and bewitched by the hosts, one after the other. Sipping but idle, I stared at these whirlwinds of industry chopping, stirring, shredding, slamming open oven doors, racing pot to pot, smacking their lips. Jacques Pepin, Emeril, and Tyler Florence, smiling, beautiful, decolte but ever thin Giada (“Perfect!”), grumpier Ina (“How easy was that!”) with her nervous giggle and band of Hamptons slaves, jolly Paula Deen with her y’alls and her then unrepentant “buttuh,” Sandra (“Now it’s cocktail time, the best time of the day!”) Lee who spent the time she saved with her semi-homemade food going to the craft store for her tablescapes.

“Tablescapes? really?!” said Tamasin.

 

Edward and I ran through the island restaurants pretty quickly, the two of us with our spoiled palates did not match the island tastes. The sweetness of the complicated salads, the fancy combinations, the monster portions, the cubes of other cut up things heaped on top of fish and meats were not what we liked. Our cheeses came in plastic so thick I needed a scissor. The cold hard lumps emerged to lie on breads of a defeated limpness, a taunt to the memory of ripe stinky cheeses sliding over sunny plates to be scooped up by the crusty breads of other lands.

A firm seeded rye and all Jewish food was non-existent but for one sad Hebraic shelf full of ancient jars of gray gefilte fish in the Exotic or Ethnic Foods section of the markets. And that was what we were, sudden ethnics, off to the side exotics, a brand new feeling for us both.

When friends sent us grass- fed beef from their Colorado ranch at Christmas we pried open the wooden crate to stare into the frozen purple slabs, caressing the frost off their cold plump sides. But I am not telling this properly. The crate is stamped RRL and the steaks are from Ralph and Ricky Lauren and every year we wonder—will they still send them? We don’t say this to each other, but the dozen steaks mean we, though powerless and absent, are somehow still valid in our former carnivorous world. They are an affirmation of status, rank, memory, being alive, whatever.

Yet here in the land where people talk exactly like Paula Deen, I often fry green tomatoes. I have Clabber Girl Baking Powder, White Lily flour, and Miss Dixie cornmeal, shrimp right off the boats that cross the horizon of my sleepfree nights, watermelon with taste, fuzzy Georgia peaches and lots of key limes and key lime pies. We have giant hams in burlap sacks, Virginia peanuts, and markets with four or five aisles of wine and beer. If we drive down the beach road, behind the Hammerhead where the motorcycles park, we come to Island Barbecue where the world’s best ribs –born of a secret recipe–are shrouded with Wonder bread and smothered with pickles southern style.

Beach living means compromises, keeping things simple, remembering less is more and learning substitutes. Like finding in Kukla a substitute for the media establishment —I make do, rise above, try to adapt, eventually absorb.

We have learned this place from others, acquiring the island in little bits of information. “What is Auce pasta?” I said to Edward, having seen it on a road sign. One day we just knew it meant all you can eat.

We found our way to an organic farm where they cut the lettuce as we stood in the fields, the Sweet Grass dairy with its fresh cheeses. Food quests meant getting in the car for the right tomatoes from Joe on 14^th street, the fish right off the boats in Fernandina.

Like Proust obsessively pasting little scraps of paper to his manuscript up to the end, I keep changing or adding on ingredients. This is the way I now cook—“layers of flavor,” as it’s called on the Food Network.

I learned a little trick. I could get by with seven official “meals.” Men like things that are the same. Seven things in rotation will satisfy most of them, and Edward was no exception: Crab cakes, Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken, Chili con Baumgold, Salmon, Shrimp in maybe 1000 Ways, hamburger, and anything from Italian Easy—recipes from the London River Café (until he decided he didn’t like pasta) this was my beginning repertoire. What made this official Island Cookery was the same secret ingredient –red pepper flakes—in everything. A second secret ingredient was a few ample knobs of butter and a third was plenty of hefty red wine before and during and/or a hearty white when called for.

As I evolved into a quasi-domestic goddess, I learned presentation. Instead of saying “We’re having that tagliatelle with string beans and tomatoes” I would say “We’re having that tagliatelle with cream” leaving Edward to focus happily on the one unhealthy ingredient.

The more nervous I was (Have we gone to the wrong place? Will I ever have friends? Will I write another book and get it published?) the more I cooked. I stopped needing to measure for recipes, I stopped needing to taste. Then I abandoned recipes and invented my own. I almost always loved my own cooking.

Unfortunately, the better cook I became, the more was expected of me. Now I understood women who indulged their helplessness and simply refuse to drive or cook. Once the rule was made early in the marriage, it would be accepted.

 

In a chapter of one of my false crawls, I wrote a fantasy of mixology in which one of my characters spends half a year on the grounds of an asylum studying a smuggled-in copy of Here’s How, a 1941 guide to mixed drinks (sequel to the 1939 Just Cocktails, both with wooden covers, brass hinges and bound with leather thongs). Wrapped in blankets and slumped on a deck chair, he spends his afternoons mixing phantom cocktails and when he gets out, half himself, attractive in that kind of “Light in the Piazza” vacant way, he sets up his bar—a thing of wonder, a forest of many half-empty mega bottles surrounded by silver jiggers, bar spoons, ponies, a dish of dried peels and shriveled maraschino cherries. There he concocts his Cuba Libres, Bon Soirs, Tom Collinses, Gin Rickeys and Singapore Slings. Without looking up the recipes, he can whip up a Brandy Custa, an Applejack Fix, a Bacardi Peach or a Knickerbocker, as well as highballs, toddies and skins without end. I thought briefly about attempting these magisterial concoctions and then I thought better. It was alarming enough when I went to the dump and began shoving my bottles—brown, green, clear (rose, vodka)—into the recycling containers.

No longer quite so delusional in my vision of beach life, I had shipped the organdy Porthault tablecloth embroidered with silver bees and other fripperies back to New York. I also sent back various useless items of clothing. Now I called things back. I planned outfits to go to the outdoor market just as though I might run into one of my laser-eyed old chums.

Or Karl Lagerfeld. I internalized Karl Lagerfeld’s unforgiving eye. I digested his harsh Germanic diet book in which he confessed to spitting out forbidden food after tasting it, a disgusting habit we shared.

I began a small but fairly complete study of Karl Lagerfeld, a minor version of my Proust lunacy. This could have led me to starvation, despair, and a total reevaluation of my life. Karl seemed so definite about everything at a time I was so uncertain. I wasn’t sure how he felt about beaches, but he did a Chanel collection based on seashells that he showed at the Raleigh in Miami. He had a house in Biarritz, a self-destructive early love. Like Gore Vidal and me, he had this love, long dead—“the unfinished business of my life,” as Vidal called it. Karl was scared of the small talk of people who do nothing. Like Karl, I always wore sunglasses. Long ago, he had been to my family’s business on Fifth Avenue to discuss diamonds.

“I danced whole nights away,” Karl wrote in his diet book. Well, so had I, or at least half-nights. We might have been dancing back to back at Castel’s in Paris or New Jimmy’s or Regine’s (for an article, I had gone with Regine to every Regine’s in the world). After a while, however, I pulled back, but he was now there, my inner Karl, Karl’s eyes on my beach world, his quick viperish tongue hissing in my ear: pull yourself together.

One day, we were going down to the beach with the ever dainty white-pawed Kukla. Usually Edward was in tennis clothes or khaki shorts or a Villebrequin bathing suit—thick haired, dark skinned, ever thin—not bad for an older guy.

That day Edward had skipped his morning shave and looked exactly like a crusty old tar. He had never once picked up a shell. He would not be polishing them like Beau Brummell but still…He began to roll up the bottom of his warmup pants. This was too much.

I am old… I am old….

       I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled..

An image entered my mind. I heard the sound of swishing plastic bags that used to begin our mornings. Every day, Edward would rip a plastic bag from a freshly-pressed suit on its pink tissue paper shrouded hangar. Then he would tear the plastic from a shirt on a similar hangar. He would knot the Paul Stuart or Hermes silk tie under his scrupulously shaven sometimes slightly bleeding chin. He would put on shoes newly polished by the shoemaker across the street and, after breakfast and the four newspapers, he would pick up the leather Peel attaché case and the elevator man would take him down to where the doorman was waiting to crack open the door of the car purring with noxious emissions at the curb. The ex- New York City detective would drive him away and he would LEAVE.

He would leave for the entire day, and I would remain in the war zone of destroyed plastic bags and tissue wrapped hangars—the kind of detritus I would now in full repentance take to the dump—those were the sights and sounds of my former mornings.

 

Now, I was ready to turn my new Karl eyes on myself. My nails were broken, cuticles chewed. My hair, caked with salt and stiff with the sea and chlorine, was ragged and broken, too. I was a little on the fat side. I was starting to look like the female equivalent of those white bearded men walking their motorcycles off the St. Johns River ferry with the sun shining on their tats.

All my repair facilities were in New York—hair, nails, the rare facial injection. I had tried the island versions of the first two with poor results. I had to face the fact that sun and salt pickling looks best on someone young—someone exactly like the streaky -haired surfer trotting through Sticky Fingers with my tray of dry ribs.

My nights were no longer filled by children of the night and their beautiful music, but by night oceans full of moray eels, rock carp, jack mackerel and bat starfish.

It was time for a sea-change. A tax crisis, unrepentant vanity, and clothing lust had precipitated Karl’s drastic revamp, when he sold his houses in Brittany and Melun, got rid of his 19^th century furniture, felt the lure of Japanese minimalism, lost half his body weight, applied multiple rings to every finger, lost his fan, wore collars up to mid -chin and bought really tight clothes.

As I had made my house ship-like, as I had cleared, I would have to work on myself. Unlike Karl, who boasted he was always unsatisfied, but had vast resources, I would have to be realistic.

Since there was not a single clothing store on the island that might satisfy my inner Karl—even in his late biker phase, I ordered a pink Versace sweater on line. It was lacy and silken and light with little silver fretwork buttons. I looked at it in its cradle of tissue and sighed. I really had no place to wear it.