Now, the sea was in me like blood pounding or retreating into the daily thrum of existence. Sometimes, it would come to me fresh, startling me with its persistence and at those times I heard nothing but the waves bursting on the shore. Those times when the sound took over I had to force it away, close the sliders, go to a back room or go out, moving from the shore far into silence.

There had been years of that sound.

I had passed through my crazy phase, through my Proust nights, and slid shut my Karl eyes. I had been through first and later swims, the back and forth of city life. The new rituals had become habits and then daily life. I began to take things on the island –an orange moon over a still black ocean, a black swamp snake in the bushes– for granted.

In The Thief of Baghdad, the great 1940 Alexander Korda version, the Princess bends down to smell the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness that the evil wizard Jaffar has placed in her path:

“Who are you?” says Jaffar.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Why have you suffered?”

“It seems I was in love.”

“Whom did you love?”

“I cannot tell. I don’t know any longer.”

Ahmad, her love, appears and the spell is broken. The island had cast its spell on us. Our blue rose was the ocean. Everyday, we walked by the ocean and it seemed as though this was my only life: the heat, living in the weather, the elements, unnaturally near “to the sun in the morning/ and the moon at night” as the song goes.

I remembered my first visits to Amelia as I searched for a place to live someday. I felt the island had wanted me here. My first novel was already there, waiting on the bottom row of B’s in the one room Fernandina Beach Library. A man called Joe came across the hot sands in a suit and black shoes to find me under my beach umbrella and sell us the apartment with a bathtub in the bedroom to make sure the ocean was still there. A group of really old people, having drinks under a pergola at dusk, charged forward, smiling, gray and dusty, to welcome us to their townhouses. I had not found my beach on Islamorada, the purple isle of the Florida Keys, or swimming with the dolphins on Hawk’s Cay or near the watery caves of the Pacific Coast for the place was here.

“Enough love will cure any disease,” said my yoga instructor in that special soothing-the-rabid-dog tone—meaningless words to keep frothing creatures and twitchy women at bay. This was part of her end of practice spiritual passage. Enough love would not cure any disease, I knew this well. What frightened me was that within my resistance, worn down by good people and lulled by the dull, I had begun to listen.

I could not live within nature as long as I had, staring daily into the voids of beach and sky, breathing that air, without feeling different. My shoulders, hunched in self-defense, fell down, my walk slowed, and my tread, unusually heavy for a person my size, was lighter.

Occasionally, when I felt myself starting to cook inside, revving up for an outburst, I would step back, swim, walk fast, deep breathe, run, or just close my eyes and open them on inevitable beauty.

I had already come over somewhat to acceptance. I was getting to my own stillness, to almost not minding all that was gone, not resisting. I always threw the perfect shell with the living mollusk inside back into the ocean. Maybe it was age, the idea that merely being, not doing and getting more, might be enough.

Many, older than I was, felt they had to be again what they once were, they had to continue the struggle and have not just an “encore career” but the full comeback which is always somehow dimmer.

Or had I actually changed from the person with “shithead” as a password, from the writer who started her first novel with the sentence, “From the beginning they called me Little Shit.”? Had I abandoned my old life as a holder of grudges, a veteran of feuds, one who never forgave slights and fought with those before they could leave me?

I had brought a green date fallen from one of the palms upstairs to watch it rot itself into sweetness. It shriveled, turned in on itself, collapsed, hollowed, went from green to brown, and finally became sort of sweet. Like me.

But what if… this beach bum life was only a phase, something to be outgrown? I had seen it happen to the designer Diane Von Furstenburg. I spent time with her when she was in the throes of a fevered beach bum phase with her Paolo.

She had been in Bali walking through the rice fields, past a boiling volcano, when a shadow crossed her path—Paolo, a Brazilian who lived in an open house off the beach and would inspire her Sun Goddess collection and her new perfume, Volcan d’Amour.

“Bali was just the place to die and become something new,” she told me then. It was the island where she could shuck off the old black-net- stockinged corporate DVF and become a barefoot Hesse-reading sun goddess, a jungle queen or, in her case, jungle Jewish princess.

At that time she had broken off with Barry Diller, then the chairman of Paramount, and moved way on to Paolo, who she brought to New York. She was in kind of a vaporous haze and there was Paolo padding through her lush ten room apartment in yellow silk lounging pants and a pink T shirt, sometimes a rainbow jacket that said “Time Traveler” on the back, a man from the beach now ensconced on Fifth Avenue..

“I had needed an evasion,” she said “not work, work, work…I realized the true escape is me.”

Of course by the time the perfume Volcan d’Amour, in its volcano- shaped crystal bottle failed, Diane had moved on. Her ever twisty life road eventually led her back to Barry Diller, a new place in the corporate world, and the presidency of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

She was one who left her island behind. She was one who returned to city life and I, the one who, much later, went to and stayed on the island.

Often this impulse to chuck it all, move to an island and live a simpler life, came over my subjects just as I was writing about them. Weary of the fame and the daily magnificence surrounding them in their various homes, they would point to some little shack and sigh “if only…”

Regine, the queen of the international nightclub world when I wrote about her, saw a large white house on the island of Itaparica in Bahia, Brazil. “There I could find tranquility,” she said to me and immediately tried to buy it. In her singing life she had recorded a song “Un jour je quitterai tout” (One Day I will Give It All Up).

As far as I know, she and all the others never have. But we did. We answered all their what-ifs.

I had my guides and accidental teachers to help me: Kimie who taught me yugen; the imprisoned boy who had said “Days like this only come once in a lifetime;” the riptide sign that cautioned let go/ don’t fight/ you will be safe; Ton who had rejected the things of this world; the peacock who seemed to say “slow down”; and finally Dothee who said: reculer pour mieux sauter –step back to jump further. Had we stepped back—not to go forward, but to stay back in the shadows where all was forgiven or obscured? I still did not know.

One August evening, I confronted my first fears and went to see the baby turtles being released from their eggs.

A small cluster of people stood on the evening sands looking down at the nest. The Turtle Watch woman was explaining that the pregnant turtle drags herself up the beach to the dunes, a great labor that leaves deep tractor tracks. She digs down about a foot and a half, tilling the sand. When she gets to the bottom, she flaps her flippers so the walls hold up and the bottom is firm then heaves up and down. Once the first egg is laid, she will stay with the nest, whatever the danger, until all the eggs are laid and covered. When she crawls back to the sea she has tears on her face from the effort.

The hatchlings eat the egg sac, their first food. They use their sharp beak to open the sac, and use their flippers to free themselves. The eggs are stacked, the top ones, always the females, open the roof of the hole, those in the middle push to the sides to make room for those on the bottom.

The baby turtles move toward the brightest light which should be the light of the open horizon, the moon reflecting on the water. Too often it is the light of the condos or some beach jerks with their firecrackers. The turtles come out at night to avoid their main predators, the birds, and no one knew where the birds went at night—perhaps out to sea or a place called Bird Island.

The female turtles, up first, lead the others out to the sargassum in the sea where they will hide for a year. It is 25 or 30 years of swimming the seas with this vagabond memory of home before the females will return to this beach. The hatchling’s first trek to the sea imprints her with her home beach. This is the circle of life in its purest form. I found it very beautiful and a bit sad.

I was furious at the idea of raccoons and dogs, boat propellers, oceans full of plastic litter, and people who did not fill in their holes and sand castles and moats at the end of the day. These could confuse the turtles in their first crawl and they would become lost, dehydrated and die. I knew, too, that the odds were very bad and only one in a thousand babies would survive the predators.

Turtles did not mean death as I had thought when I came here, they meant the scramble and fight that is life. Maybe I was jealous that the turtles could always hide within themselves, their ability to withdraw was even better than my own. They were the very definition of the hidden creature, the unknowable being, the fight to endure.

Turtles were just one of the many things I had gotten all wrong. It still amazed me that two very experienced journalists had descended on this place having done no research at all. I came to a state where ninety per cent of sea turtles nest lugging a sea turtle carapace wrapped in towels.

Now I knew Edward and I were among those who just had to get out of town fast.

Of course, I thought I knew what I was doing when I went to the Turtle Excavation and Release. I was going to stare at death, or at least doom.

Recently I had gone to see two dying men —Ton Luyk first, and then Clay Felker, the founder and first editor of New York magazine. Both had been very close to death, and, in the past, Clay had been very close to me. He had assigned me the first stories that led to a journalism life, a profession that let me meet and, ultimately, have power over anyone I wanted, for I wrote in the days before public relations had its death grip on them. I lived with my unmuzzled subjects in a way no longer possible now.

Only Clay could have coaxed me into my other modeling stint when I put on a pair of red suede hot pants, an ermine trimmed cape, red lace up boots, and a diamond tiara borrowed from my father’s business and posed, to my eternal embarrassment, on the cover of New York for an article I wrote on the Jewish Princess.

I went to Ton and Clay to say, without saying it, my “adieu” to them, to us, to then. My other friend and teacher, the poet William Meredith, had also died in my time living on the beach. He had gone to Florida in his last years to live by the sea which he, a naval aviator in World War II, understood (“The ocean was salt before we crawled to tears.”) so well. Abie Nathan, my pirate, would die soon, broke and neglected in a nursing home in Israel, too far from those he had helped too long ago.

I walked back down the beach, to my apartment still filled with its tortoiseshell artifacts. Time had changed everything here. Now I knew the dates would not fall every year from the palms. The Ritz, once a reassuring symbol of the rest of the luxury world, had torn up the tennis courts where the Williams sisters played and turned them into a parking lot. In tough times, it had decided to build a ballroom for six hundred.

The parents of the boy who said “Days like this only come once in a lifetime,” were convicted and sentenced and the boy put in foster care where he was not expected to fulfill what once might have been his potential.

I know now this is exactly the place where children walk out of their lives and disappear forever.

Soon, Raven was to dismantle her studio, Image and Style, and I and a gang of friends would go to help her pack up the last gasp of flair on the island. Kimie and I would continue to speak of the unreality of this world and her belief in another.

In the three Ocean Place buildings ,I am the woman who swims. I am all too aware of giving a daily performance for the many windows and terraces. I swim harder and feel I am cheating my fans if I do fewer laps.

I have lost my urban pallor and my driving speed after another warning from the Sheriff’s Department of Nassau County. When I got out of the car to show the officer my platform shoes and blame them, he took mercy. I cannot help myself. I still sometimes dress like Milan and that other island with pavement where I live only occasionally.

I am now a slow-driving, clog-wearing, beige-colored person. My life has been a series of escapes with this as the longest and fullest.

The beach last winter seemed in a perpetual tilt, shrunken, with fewer shells and fewer birds. It was no longer just a bleached graveyard to me, but rather a place for new crawling life. The first shells I found have lost their color, the air ate the silver off a mirror and the gold off the eagle heads on a table. A bright red- bird I saw last year has gone, flown off or toppled. My first impressions are muted as a piece of sea glass. And there is almost no sea glass now, none of those smooth blue and green chips of my childhood— sea plastic is what washes up on shore as the ocean turns acidic.

Our empty apartment without sofa or carpet is still perplexing to some and a bit too different. The house has stayed bare, but now I can fill it with some friends.

“Your new friends all seem to like you,” Lily said in wonder, one night after I had given a party for Edward’s birthday. The air conditioning had broken, everyone headed for the terrace where a temperate wind blew in from the water, lifting their hair and whipping it round, tinkling the wind chimes.

This, my first party, was an entertaining disaster. I served pigs in blankets with an irony that was missed. The inferior smoked salmon with a curl of dill became translucent in the heat as it melted into the only dark bread –neither very good nor very dark–I could find. People were looking around for food. They were waiting and sweating.

I should have learned by now that cocktails here, involved an ample table, platters of stuffed stuff, i.e. dinner. But I was beach calm now. Whereas once, seated in between Ralph Lauren and Donald Trump (never a forgiving man), at a small dinner in my house, I went sobbing into the kitchen when the root vegetables failed to emerge to find the chef drunk and slapping at flames, now I just shrugged and poured more booze.

It turned night. Far up the beach a nest opened in the moonlight, and the hatchlings, ladies first, raced for the water.