There was Paul Gauguin leprous, syphilitic, addicted to morphine and absinthe, painting and wasting away, killing his pain in his Polynesian beach “House of Pleasure.” And here we were on the island, still assaulted with glossy brochures for other, even further away places with pictures of sepia sunsets cresting over piney mountain woods and slightly older couples engaging in much too vigorous sports and all of them promising some version of “Paradise” which for many people seemed to mean golf–or maybe fishing.

“Your responsibility is merely to enjoy Paradise.”—that was the promise of a lake community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia. My heart sank for those with that illusion. We could only be here on the beach because we had never expected any form of “paradise” and because we could leave it whenever we liked and return to New York, to the dangerous cozy appeal of the verge.

It took me a long while to realize our part of the island was a Hampton for those from Atlanta and Jacksonville. The people who came here from elsewhere were those who came for business conferences, or golf outings, liked what they saw, and returned. The idea was that, after a lifetime of work, they would move to a kind of pre-Paradise to wait for the real thing. And sometimes, sometimes, people came to places like this just to get out of town.

Part of the concept of Paradise, dating back to Eden, was the idea that it could and would be corrupted and spoiled. Here this meant it would be overbuilt, overrun, discovered by those left behind. That is why on our later returns to the city we always underplayed it. Edward talked to our friends using as a metaphor the beautiful vegetables that had no taste. Those we invited, with the exception of my mother and Lily and my sons John and Anthony, found excuses. It was now our secret, we were protective: Don’t come!

When we left New York we knew just what we were leaving—we’d had the full experience with many weakened repetitions. You can’t really surrender until you know what you are giving up or, as the wise Karl Lagerfeld says, “To have no sense of possession it is better to have owned a lot.”

The island, rimmed by rolling fields of golf courses, pocked by sand traps, certainly was not Paradise, not Paradis, Paradisus, not Shangri-la, the Garden of Eden or Heaven on Earth, not the Swahili’s Peponi, not Olam Haba (the world to come) of the Jews or heaven of the Catholics.

Not Nirvana. “Where there is nothing; where naught is grasped, there is the Isle of No-Beyond,” said Gautama Buddha “Nirvana do I call it—the utter extinction of aging and dying.”

I knew for I had been there long ago.

 

I had tried Nirvana in a seaside villa built because its owner had a hole in his heart. In the weekend of a solar eclipse, Hugh Hefner left his Chicago mansion and the financier Bernie Cornfeld left his 12^th century castle to come together in a villa called “Nirvana” in Acapulco. My editor Clay Felker had sent me down to Mexico with Cornfeld who was meeting up with Hefner to build a 32 story condominium with a Playboy Club. Both of them brought their planes, their dependents, their games, and their fleet of toy girls and competed furiously day and night to out-awe each other and me.

I was small, young, and inexperienced enough for them eventually to forget about me and this was as close as I ever got in my journalistic career to the state I most desired which was complete invisibility.

After a heart operation, our host Oscar Obregon came to rest in Acapulco and decided to build “Nirvana” as a present to himself for having survived the hole in his heart. This was a house built as a reward, for a lifetime already mostly lived and, like any paradise, it had that final stage aura around it.

The two sybaritic moguls, then aged a mere 43 and 44 , classic disregarders of time and all proportion, devoted their weekend to impression-making—competing at games of chance (backgammon, gin), games of time (who made who wait) tests (the absolute loyalty of the men, the beauty of the girls). There would always be people to play with these two, to answer the phones, screen and shield and lower the ropes. When they spoke, a silence would fall, when they stood up to leave, suddenly it would occur to the retinue that, yes, it was just about time to go.

After this training in clownish mogul antics at such a young age, I would never again have to stand in awe and all future mogul subjects:the technology pioneer John Diebold, the producers Robert Evans and David Geffen, the head of The Limited, Les Wexner, Donald Trump again and again and again, would somehow seem to be repetitions with minor variations. The later ones were all as one, and inside each of them lurked a frightened boy who could not swim, or one who lost his brother through drink, or could not shake his mother, or had some other key for me to find. We would view each other with that brief intensity, caution, and temporary affection (“I love you and greatly respect your talent” Trump wrote before he turned on me) that occurs before the article appears.

Writing this now, I would ask which of us living in “Nirvana” during an eclipse of the sun, found his true Nirvana? Hefner went back into his pajamas in his mansion and saw the decline but persistence of his empire. A month after my article ran in New York, Cornfeld was ousted from the United States and, that year, his fund, IOS, collapsed. The Nirvana deal never was made.

I cannot say if either man was freed from the anger, the cravings of this world. I had first entered “Nirvana” with two rampant hedonists, steeped in earthly desires, far off the Eightfold Path. We would all emerge from our time in “Nirvana” somewhat changed. Perhaps it was then that I first achieved a certain detachment, a cessation of thirst, the extinction of a desire for wealth and power that would persist over the years.

I had been foolish enough to bring my grandmother Rose’s diamond pin along to Nirvana in a vain effort to impress the un-impressible. Thus, I too had violated the spirit of the place. The pin was lost or taken, and so, my idea of Nirvana then was that of some important piece of my past gone missing.

One who felt Nirvana truly was the other half of my particular bi-valve, Edward, who never went to the house “Nirvana” and who, without trying, when he entered our Isle of No-Beyond, felt he had left nothing undone and had nothing more to do. He felt the extinction of craving and thus he was one lucky guy

 

“There is nothing to do here,” I complained, having exhausted the little museum in the former jail, the funk of the shrimper bars, the tai chi pace, the isolation.

I needed my flights to the cruel rhythms, scarce smiles and urgency of the city of my birth. I needed my preservative, my tonic of civilization, my pavement prod. The soot dots resting on the snow. The crumpled apple blossoms behind the Metropolitan museum. The place Kukla chased pigeons, not sea birds. The place where I had to be thinner. I needed the Karl world of incessant achievement, hard earned frivolity, success and failing and being judged again and again.

Edward had left it and I really had not. I saw that I was still and always would be the song I had requested at my debut, a “Stranger in Paradise.”

I reminded myself that Charles Arrowby of The Sea, The Sea had left his seaside cottage and returned to London. Thoreau left Walden Pond after two years, two months and two days and constructed his book over years in retrospect. All the clues were there with Gauguin. Why did he need absinthe and morphine if it was paradise, why did he need to dope himself while living in oblivion? In my nights in my back room I might have listened to Proust who said “The only paradise is a paradise lost.”

I forgot all about the negative ions now, yugen, the peacock on the road who had challenged me to slow down. A week on the island felt like a month, which was both good and bad. Maybe the real idea behind paradise had been that we might stop time and never die.

Then the movie Sex and the City came to the Carmike Cinema. I went with Raven who was dressed, as usual, for a summer afternoon on the Via della Spiga. That afternoon, Raven and I wore our New York City chronic black, a kind of self-defense. Seeing the movie here in the digital calm of the Carmike with another New Yorker gave it an extra resonance. There it was, whatever its flaws, my native soil: my reservoir, my library, the night skyline with its fluorescent piercings, the Chrysler spire, the taxi drivers with turbans, the Brooklyn Bridge, the starving trees in their metal cages, shiny shopping bags with handles, hysteria, fits, the Bemelmans bar, even a few people I knew paddling hard in the rich murky “More, more how do you like it how do you like it…”broth of rampant New York pre-crisis capitalism.

Perhaps I tempted myself too much when I returned, stepping back into the former life. There were all the things we left behind—our books, our collections, little antique boxes that held nothing, rows of Edward’s unworn suits in their plastic shrouds, the long pretty evening dresses I would never wear again, jewelry that meant nothing but the past, the fancy now too tight shoes. I thought the desire for things had fallen from me. I had seen Ton Luyk’s rejection of his things. Pictures of crowded apartments in decorating magazines disgusted me—they seemed to tell me get rid of it all. And yet I could not. I was like a runaway child halfway down the road with his little bundle of treasures wondering what he has done and turning back for home.

Raven and I walked out. I was thinking of Samantha who leaves the California beach and returns to New York. Raven, already uncomfortable living in a place where facade was either obscured or totally unimportant, was quiet. She was stalking the hall of the Carmike like a catwalk, crunching popcorn underfoot. The people lined up either knew her or whispered “Who’s that?”

I tried to remember something bad about New York. Later, I looked up a review of the restaurant Momofuko Ko in New York magazine that I had tucked away to console myself:

These seats can be booked only a week in advance, and only by logging on to the Momofuko Website. The computer begins taking reservations each morning at ten o’clock, and thanks to the legions of devoted and increasingly frantic Chang groupies…they’re gone not in minutes but in seconds…So how do you crack this fiendishly egalitarian, New Age reservation system? It helps to have the services of many diligent assistants willing to peck at their keyboards like gaming zombies for an entire week.

Raven was hoping to take off sometime soon to give speeches. She told me she had come to the island to help her husband get healthy and figure out the next phase of her life. Just like the birds of the North Atlantic Flyway, she had thought of Amelia as a stopover. Perhaps there still were audiences waiting for her talks, her magic creams and the mastery of a runway strut for those random times it might be needed.

I went back and forth in full ambivalence—the movie images luring me. Perhaps, after all this time, I had only half moved down.

I had to do something, so I went home, counted and swam two hundred laps. It made me feel much better.