On the island I wake up at 2:22 every morning. The sleep demons have been poking at me. The room has gotten strangely hot or chilly. The bites on my leg start to itch. The tiny click of the digital clock has turned over and the sheets are bunching. I thrash around hoping to wake Edward, who, with the aid of a single Excedrin PM, sleeps through every night with the calm of the fulfilled, the untroubled, and innocent.

After a while, when I have sorted through my daily life, my past, my obligations and some mistakes, I realize that I am not going back to sleep. I heave myself up. Edward does not stir. I slide back the doors and walk out onto the terrace and, wrapped in a $5 New York street pashmina, sit in a lounge chair and look at the sky over the tossing ocean. To my right, four floors down, is the pool, lit at all hours and quivering turquoise and, in the distance, other shivering blue ovals. Some nights there are more stars and more of the moon streaking the ocean with platinum above swaying meadows of seagrass. And there are the rare window lights of those who have forgotten to turn them out or those who have arisen to the bluegray flicker of their televisions. The plants around me are growing in the night circled by luminous green moon moths, their long tails streaming light. The fishing boats and coastal freighters, ten or twelve in a row, cross the horizon in a slow procession and stay there past the dawn.

Once I knew the constellations, but now I can’t remember except for the Dippers, Big and Little—the rest are supposed to be bears and seven sisters on full display, a pole star, a fire star, one glowing green under a crescent moon—they look like a set arrangement, just a bunch of stars to a tired brain, one that gets called to action at the mysterious hour, 2:22.

I like to settle myself with a poem by my old professor, William Meredith, a man much honored in his life, and the teacher who meant the most to me, even after his stroke when he could not speak. “The Open Sea” begins:
We say the sea is lonely; better say
Ourselves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes or no for company.

Oh there are people all right settled in the sea—
It is as populous as Maine today—
But no one who will give you the time of day.

It pleases me to think of all my dead ones and put them together in the ocean, even when I know their ashes have been thrown to the wind and earth in other places or that they are living on inside urns in my closet or shelved in a marble vault. I put them all together in the sea, which becomes a sort of paradise full of chatty happy souls drifting and floating along , bobbing weightless, skimming over the ocean floor, getting along, mermen, mermaids, lost dogs, creatures of the deep, swimming down into the navy blue abyss and up to the sun shafts in the water. Stone-weighted crime victims, the shipwrecked, Amelia Earhart, soldiers and civilians and all those who fell from the air over the oceans are there. Who says heaven has to be up in the sky.

A little more time, a walk round the small circular deck, another look at the boats, and I am ready to return to bed where Edward sleeps on, unaware of my rambles. This privacy within a marriage is a precious thing.

 

I have always thought that no one summed up love quite like the old singer Peggy Lee for she sang both “Fever” and “Is That All There Is?” The latter was not a question as she sang it.

And now I could answer it.

In the bright white laboratory of our apartment the answer played itself out. With its dark gleaming floor, clear surfaces, pinky white walls flooded with the glare of sunshine—without the New York of offices and home with its walls of books and tables of bibelots– it reflects the self back on the self. Edward and I have to focus on each other because there are no distractions. We have always had a close, if turbulent, marriage but now it is all day and night with no distance.

We think and feel differently here. The same things are different in this setting and even Kukla plays a central part in this limited sensory environment. We focus ourselves on her demands. And here, where the natural world hovers and looms, there are no diversions –no newspaper or magazine to run or write long pieces for, no appointments aside from tennis or yoga, no store or movie temptations—(a subtitle has never crossed the seven screens of the Carmike unless it was an alien speaking)—no family, we are forced to dwell more on what bothers, on imperfections, on fears of what can happen.

Edward used to be thrilled to go to work because there he could worry about other, external things and, as boss, solve them with teams of colleagues.

I have had to replace a great deal to him—offices full of people who usually said “yes” (I often say “no”), the entire grand mechanism of a national magazine or newspaper, the fun and fulfillment and challenge of making constant and difficult decisions. I have become the focus of his demanding attention.

Is that all there is?

I suppose the answer is yes. This is all there is with spasms of fever and fury and a tender forgiveness as a replacement. Sometimes I even, as my grandmother warned, bite my tongue and my lips say kinder words than my mind is thinking.

Edward and I, truly alone with each other throughout future time, have a better marriage because neither of us is looking for anyone or anything else.

“Richard Widmark”, my first brief rescue fantasy, he who embodied the idea of temptation—albeit very ancient temptation—was quite absent.

We live in a place without lures. We live without distractions. Our focus is each other and sometimes on ignoring each other. We shut the doors.

“How was the tennis?” I ask. “How was the yoga?” says he, each of us used to having the other around, of having our “hello’s” instantly answered when we walk through the door. An answer, a hand on the shoulder or the back of a dampish neck, that’s all there is.

 

If I am very quiet and do not bang pots, I can even cook something on these endless nights—a midnight risotto or a rice pudding or just a scoop of fresh Publix peanut butter on Edward’s soft white bread, the kind the food people abandoned long ago, and a true pleasure in this most fattening hour when all food magically becomes comfort food and sticks to the body forever.

A recent reading of Marjorie Rawlings North Florida memoir, Cross Creek, has awakened strange cravings, and briefly I can imagine bringing true Cracker cookery back to my red dining room on 79^th Street. Frogs legs and gator and squirrel and cooter—which is turtle—racoon, okra, the occasional rattlesnake, and hush puppies, balls of cornmeal fried in fish drippings which were so good that the hunting dogs would howl and the hunters would toss them a few and say “Hush puppies!” –not exactly standard fare at Citarella, but here, where the Okefenokee swamp waits close by, mostly available.

Kukla, ever roused by an opening refrigerator door, is awake and watching. She has turned out to be a remarkable dog, a creature of the beach where she runs free with her little limping hop as she races along eating beach treats that it is best not to know about. Her snout is deep in the tangles of sargassum and seaweed. She finds a reed and, pretending it is a badger, as her distant heritage prompts, shakes it to death, all the while racing in circles, scampering and prancing, fierce in her triumph.

When I put on my flip flops or sneakers, she know it is time for the beach and tears all over the apartment with one of her rubber toys, thus combining two of her life’s great pleasures.

Out on the grass, near the beds of Joseph’s coat or the pansies and spider lilies she finds one enticing spot and flings herself onto her back as she rolls, white paws up in the air, her legs scissoring in ecstasy.

When Kukla is not on the beach, she sits on top of one of our two armchairs and stares out at it. She finds a little patch of morning sun and waits for that time. Often she turns over into her trusting “dead dog” posture and looks at the ocean from upside down, one happy hound.

Kukla hops on the bed to watch me at my computer as I whisper my words—this is how I write—just like a crazy woman. I go down for the mail and on my return she leaps waist high for five frantic minutes as though I have been long gone. All departures are abandonment to her and she always knows and goes to hide under a table, her face on her white paws, and gives us a look of misery and reproach no one should endure.

The main thing my two younger brothers and I can agree upon is dogs. Much of what life has failed to supply us, has been found and then some in our dogs.