Crouched in my laundry room, in my La Perla underwear, holding a vibrating Ryobi Variable Speed Clutch Drill/Driver, I stripped the rust from one of my terrace chairs. I had fitted a Black & Decker Wire Cup Brush into the drill/driver and the rust bits and chips were zinging through the air. Brown flakes hit my Professional Chemical Splash/Impact Goggles and my Sanding Respirator Mask from Lowe’s. The floor was filled with hillocks of rust dust.

Suddenly, I pictured a line-up of my lost New York friends outside the laundry room watching me.

There was the meticulous and hyper-organized Francesca, who no longer spoke to me but might just half-heartedly graze my cheeks were we to meet by chance. I imagined she was in one of her homes shifting her antiquities or spinning the days away in the gym. Louise, who buys twelve of the same Armani pantsuits every season and sells real estate in the $20-40 million range, was there, too. She lives in the same fancy building as Kimba, a Federal district judge. Judy, the fashion critic, is taking in my Semi-Naked Toolkit look as is the scholarly Joan, recently decorated a Chevalier de Palme by the French government. She does not approve nor does Susana, the English doctor, who, as a psysiologist, stands ready to heal my upcoming injuries. There, too, is the beautiful Amanda, who runs the New York City Planning Commission and conceived the New York High Line; Marie, who writes for Vanity Fair; the majestic Arianna, dancing thumbs a-Tweet; Teresa, who has businesses in China and has a personal shopper buying from the collections; Shirley, a lawyer and a broker, who just sold the townhouse where she once lived for $50 million; Laurie, the managing editor of Vogue; Jan, the wild glamour girl who ran through her inheritance and now must work; my dearest friend Bettye from Boston, who first told me about the island; Geraldine of the New York Times; the writer Renata who is both reclusive and sometimes around; a Freudian psychiatrist, who will not be named, but who has her own interpretation of this sight; also my beloved chum, Mario Buatta, a man of celebrated taste. Most of them are sorry for me– a few of them are quivering, alit with schadenfreude.

There, too, is my mother, duly appalled, and Lily, who immediately would help with my chair stripping because she understands writers and their sudden need for home improvement projects.

All of them are sharing the same thought—so this is what’s happened to her. It’s worse than the Proust—it’s all the way now. Half-naked, holding a smoking tool, hanging out at Low Country crab boils. I don’t get this disguise. What is she doing here still? Is this the girl–and most of them knew me from the time I was a girl—we knew? Now absent from all book parties and crucial annual gatherums that prove one is still NOT DEAD. Our fugitive friend, hair dark and completely unstreaked, visible naso labial folds, down the rabbit hole, lost to her own Witness Protection Program. (And, in fact, the FBI did keep witnesses here at Ocean Place).

Of course, I took a perverse pleasure in this imaginary judgment and looked back. I had assembled them in a line in the doorway to the laundry room. They were filling the small hall, all craning to look since the doorway was narrow. I had dressed them in real clothes—swingy double faced coats, the thinnest sweaters clinging to concave abs, pencil skirts with slits, cashmere flings, leggings ending in what we once called “fruit boots.” I hung them with major bags, spiky with hardware, and buttery briefcases full of real work. They all had phones to their ears or were texting their judgment to the indifferent world beyond, where the sea was only the sea, something to dip a toe into or fly over. Some had come from the magazines I once wrote for and still read, cornering the pages of things I would never wear again.

I heard their hum, that dreadful scary rising clatter of women’s luncheons. I had to consider them en masse. I had known some of them for forty years. A few, emerged from modest backgrounds, had acquired expensive lives in large apartments and sizeable country houses which they left to go far off, sometimes in private planes and even yachts. They were lives for which they had paid with occasional suffering, bad marriages, long hours, well fought divorces—sacrifices much greater than mine, so perhaps they deserved their scale. They were all leading they same lives they had led for a long time—working, getting paid, some more successful than ever. None of them then had stepped aside.

It jolted me a bit, made me feel at a standstill, as they moved, if not forward, at least in place. And to me—I had not seen most of them for a few years– they now looked just the same. It was as if the soot, the fumes, the shrieks of chaos, the frozen winters, the competitive images of the other walkers of Madison Avenue– had preserved them—my judges. I see them as they were when we moved from their orbit years ago, not frosted with age, while I, like a little date I carried upstairs from our tree, had browned and wrinkled in the sun.

I thought of one of my favorite movie moments from the end of Splendor in the Grass when Natalie Wood, fresh out of the mental institution, goes to see her old love Warren Beatty. His abandonment had led to her breakdown—a screaming fit in the bathroom with her mother, throwing herself into the raging currents of the reservoir. But now, after years of therapy and finger painting, she is back, engaged to a former inmate, looking good in a white dress and big white hat, very beautiful, and Warren has lost all his money and dropped out of Yale to be a farmer and has married Angelina, the nice Italian girl from the New Haven pizza parlor, who is VERY pregnant and barefoot with a child crawling on the dirt floor and she is wiping her hands on her stained house dress before she can even shake hands with the impeccable white gloved Natalie. Natalie touches her white silk lapel and shrugs—oh well. And then Angelina, mirroring her gesture, looks at her blue marinara- stained house dress and shrugs—oh well.

And soon the voice over goes to Wordsworth:

 

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of

splendor in the grass, glory in

the flower; We will grieve not rather find

Strength in what remains behind.

 

Up comes the swelling plangent David Amram music….

My friends were the Natalies and I was now dowdy grease- streaked Angelina (Zohra Lampert) stirring my spaghetti sauce. Who was happier? Zohra with Warren Beatty or Natalie with her ex-mental patient doctor? Or neither?

“I’m like you…,” Natalie says to Warren, raking him with the eyes of lost love, “I don’t think too much about happiness either.”

“Well, what’s the point?” says Warren. “You gotta take what comes.”

Or, in other words: It is what it is. The corollary of which is: it could be a lot worse.

Years after the movie, I met Natalie Wood at a party at the boat basin in Central Park. Rex Reed once told me she had a deformed bone on her wrist and always wore a bracelet to cover it. As soon as he told me that, for some strange reason, I felt I, too, should wear a bracelet and so I adopted forever a big gold cuff sort of in tribute to the heroine of Rebel Without a Cause. When we met, I found I was helpless not to look. I fought my impulse as long as I could and then gave in. My errant eyes, disobeying my wishes, went from her exquisite face down to her left wrist where I found indeed a filigreed bracelet, more delicate than my own, hiding a jutting bone—a somehow reassuring affirmation of imperfection.

But now, as I wrote this, I was suddenly uncertain that it was the left wrist and so I went to Google and typed in “Natalie Wood’s deformed wrist,” and what should come up but a small article I wrote for Esquire, “Hammering Down Clark Gable,” in which I wrote about an auction of Clark Gable’s effects at Christie’s and referred to a picture Natalie Wood had signed to Gable from “The Madame of the House.” I had no memory whatsoever of this piece and read it as though it had been written by a stranger. Natalie Wood, long ago drowned, had a deformed bone from when she broke her wrist at age eleven, and I had become one of the experts to testify to this. This is what Proust’s book is about in part—time, vanished until it is pulled back somehow, by a smell or taste or the clink on a glass, the stumble on a cobblestone, a starched napkin or the will of a writer in a brass bed in a cork room emptying his notebooks in the silent dustless dark, living and dying on café au lait and cold beer from the Ritz. Even then it may not come back. I cannot recall so much of my past and when Edward or my brother Buzz or a friend says “Do you remember…?” I invariably say “No” and mean it.

 

The deck chair, which had been outside on the terrace now for years facing the corroding salt, the storms, the lashing winds, looked worse than ever, at once encrusted and eaten into. This was a metaphor for what I had done in my time on the island—stripped off the rust and was beginning to layer on the new paint and sealant, and it was a slow process.

On another day, I might have taken my Natalies out onto the terrace where they could see the beauty. It would be new to them and a bit shocking– not just a broad beach and ocean and sky, but a confirmed magnificent sight like the Alps or the desert at sundown or a waterfall in the rain forest. As we looked out it was a bit of each climate—the sand and cacti and little flowers of the desert, the gorse and heather of a Scottish highland with the rolling hills and miniature mountains of the dunes—all before you reached the sea. If they stayed on a bit, I would not have to explain or justify my life– it would become apparent.

They would see a thousand seas, the ocean change and rearrange itself like a kaleidoscope: white caps to the horizon or glassy flat, a golden pink or the color of old pewter, fierce and foaming, sideways waves, liquid turbulence, the genealogy of the sea. And they would breathe the air, clean even in the heat, and stay on for the extravagant showoff displays of sky and the private dance the moon does at night on the water.

Maybe some obliging horses would saunter or canter by as they often did or some dolphins might choose that moment to arc from the water. A wind surfer running the beach, would be pulled up, somersault in the air, skid his feet in the sand, be aloft over the water, and fall into the waves until another rescued him by flinging the kite back up.

The Natalies, my urban sirens, now were murmuring. Were they saying “Return” or “You were first to leave. You were right. Do you know a real estate agent? What’s Marcy Mock’s email?”?

There, out on the circular terrace, we would stand together, their shoulders to my rust-streaked shoulder, in a reunion of sorts, all the tiffs and rifts and old tangled resentments and jealousies forgotten. My mistakes and negligence would be made right so I could, at least in fantasy, go home and claim them all again and the effort would not be too great. Time lost, time regained.

All this might be a bit much for my old chums still living in the world and still dominating their particular universes whereas I lived in mine as a visitor still just passing through.