It was the brief season of the butterflies—big pale lemon ones, some almost green, the familiar speckled orange ones more numerous after the storms. They hovered over the pansy beds and the wind blew them sideways and whistled dry the tips of the palm fronds.

Edward wanted to go to Paris. The fares were good and the time felt right for our little hotel off the Boulevard St Germain, the cheese store with three tables for lunch, oysters and butter-drowned sole at La Coupole, scrambled eggs at the Flore, croissants and café au lait on the corner, Colette’s expensive toys on Rue St. Honore, where I once spent many formative afternoons at Rene Drouet, my cousin’s gallery. Since going to the island, I had lost my wanderlust. We were as “away” as we could ever hope to be in a foreign land, still it was Paris, always a different city. Paris was all the traveling I wanted to do now.

We returned to the Left Bank of my young days. The expense account time of the Meurice and Intercontinental was finished for us. All the overdressed restaurants seemed peculiar and felt wrong to me since I released myself from pretense and pretend. We were sandy creatures on the Paris streets, someone blown in from very very far away.

Now that I was of the sea, I would always look for it in other places. Paris, like Jacksonville was a river city—its symbol since the 13^th century was the ship, and its motto: Fluctuat nec megitur–“It floats without being submerged.”

I thought of the Maritime Museum in the Chaillot Palace, a place I had never been. This was a whole new Paris for me—one of ancient royal galleys, ship models, chronometers, hourglasses, octants and sextants and nocturlabes, Tritons blowing conch shells and gilt sirens from the prows—ornements de poupe— in the vacant rooms What a wondrous place this was!

There was a giant head of Napoleon in his garlanded god mode and a life size one of his barge. Long dead sailors rowed him to shore with a golden fish on the end of each oar. I smiled at my old friend with the big statues who now followed me everywhere. He had sailed for two months to Egypt with his soldiers and savants and his last voyage to St. Helena had taken 100 days at sea. His life began and ended on an island—Corsica to St. Helena with Elba in between. Though he failed at sea battles, he loved ship models and installed them at the Ministry of Marine and at Versailles. The museum had models in ebony and ivory and even cloves with sails of cotton. Tiny ivory models had been worked by prisoners. Big ships sailed the rooms—La Creole, L’Ocean, La Belle Poule which was painted black to bring Napoleon’s body back from St. Helena to France. The ships of Louis XV and XVI docked here with sailors’ chests and clothes, the fantasies of Jules Verne. I saw many paintings of ports and naval battles and often one small ship struggled through heaving spray just like in the seascapes favored by the Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton lobby.

Prowling the rainy Paris streets, it suddenly occurred to me that we had spent years living on the beach and had never gone out in a boat. I had not ever been on the St Johns River or even to the harbor of Fernandina’s once famous port. I was in the ocean but not on it, like Capt. Jim, who ran the fishing charters on the island and wrote“Tight Lines,” a fishing column in the local paper which I read.

In all ways in my southern life I had stayed hugging the shore, swimming out only so far. Where was the romance of the sea, the ships and briny spray? I had taken up only what the waters washed in to me. I had forgotten about boats. I might as well have been Proust’s “Marcel” seeing the ocean only from behind glass in the Balbec hotel’s fussy frozen dining room. Maybe people go away to see what they have missed of life at home.

The French had put the gifts of the sea to maniacally beautiful uses. Andre-Charles Boulle had inlaid Louis XIV’s furniture with tortoiseshell and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs had a whole darkened room full of black nacre furniture. Mollusks had secreted the mother of pearl for these splendid objects. The inside of oyster and mussel and my abalone and pen shells had been boiled soft, flattened, cut and applied to black lacquer papier mache and wood to make a whole shimmering iridescent room.

My Parisian cousin Dothee came to tea at our hotel. Her father was the painter Arbit Blatas, her mother had owned the Galerie Rene Drouet. Dothee had married a descendant of Degas and was now married to a doctor. She had had five children; her son Alain was run off the road in a motorcycle accident involving anti-Semitism and killed along with his girlfriend.

Dothee and I revisited each member of our large and scattered and variously estranged family and realized that we had all—American and French and English, in Alaska and Thailand and God knows where– come to various kinds of ruin. The big rich old family at my maternal great grandfather’s summer table in West End had, with good humored grace or perverse will destroyed themselves, indulged themselves and thrown themselves out into a world where their descendants would have to struggle all over again. Relatives on both sides had stolen from each other—cousin from cousin, son from father, son from mother, causing breaks and family rifts and terrible ends. We had some bums and loafers in my family, but never, until now, a beach bum. Dothee’s mother’s gallery, where I wasted my young summer days, had become a rug store, the paintings all disparu.

Dothee asked about our old Connecticut house, which had lingered on the market for three years. It was uninhabited and untended, deer had devoured the garden my mother and I planted, weeds and bamboo pushed between the stones. The brokers– four of them—came and went and held their open houses with Swedish meatballs. My family pumped in more money but there was no one there to tweak and tend it. The Lily of the Valley, abashed at the neglect surrounding them, refused to bloom one year and sank back into the ground. Finally it sold for half our original price. The champion irises, big as a baby’s head, were abandoned to the new owners. Though I thought about digging them up in the stealth of night, where would I plant them? By then I knew that replanting didn’t always work. So another terrible end. It was not a happy history as we sat in the small basement of the Duc de Saint-Simon on a rainy Paris afternoon.

Dothee wanted to know about our island in the south and living on the beach.

“Oh, reculer pour mieux sauter—backing up to get a better jump,” she said.

I suppose that was what we had done although I was unsure where the jump would take us.

We were in slacktide, the time when the tide neither goes in nor out, but rests.

 

When we got back to the island, the winds were wafting the silvery beards of the oaks on canopy roads, ruffling the water into peaks, bending the papery clacking palms. I was going to get myself onto a boat with Edward, a new friend Dotty and her husband, Mike, who had both been FBI agents. My friend, the veteran of many stakeouts, brought along a thermos of hot coffee and dressed warm. I, still clinging to the last of my pretensions, wore a leather jacket and bounced along in two-tone patent leather sneakers from 10 Corso Como in my Milan days.

Captain Kevin McCarthy took us over the backwaters of the Intracoastal. We were sailing in a saltwater soup of crabs and sponges, clams and shrimp, past hammock islands where the spartina grass glowing in the sun gave this area the name The Golden Isles. We passed two of the backwater shrimpers, those allowed to fish within three miles of the coast. They trailed nets with turtle excluder devices and were followed by gulls and pelicans after their bycatch. We motored over rivers of yellow grass to Martin Island, an uninhabited 105 acres bought out from developers to be an ecotourism center. The island was full of threatened and endangered species like peregrine falcons and wild boar, bald eagles and wood storks.

A naturalist, Carl Watson, was on board our boat. He was a thin old blue-eyed Southern man who looked like he had been born into his jeans and denim jacket. He carried a big strong stick as he led us over the island pointing out where the wild hogs had rooted and the armadillo tracks. He told us armadillos are night creatures that jump up in the air to startle their prey. They always have four genetically identical offspring (useful for medical research), and they can’t see at all, which is why you see often them paws up on the roads. We saw cabbage palms, which the Indians used to make baskets, bay leaf trees, the ilex vomitoria vine, which the Indians used to drink until they threw up.

We walked under a canopy of magnolia trees, slash and loblolly pines, Eastern red cedars (used to make pencils), vines of wild grape and Spanish moss (not Spanish and not moss) where the yellow bats rest. The wild oaks were used for ship hulls and keels. Watson told us they take 100 years to grow, 100 years to live, 100 years to die. We were stepping high, looking down for rattlesnakes as we came to the beach and the oyster shell middens where the Indians dumped their shells.

I hadn’t thought I would care about this natural history lesson but, as we tromped through the whirring vegetation, I did. The naming of things mattered. This was what I lived with—unpaved, unclipped, unplanted. It was what waited down the dirt roads if I made a wrong turn. I felt like I was at last inside the Florida of long before, a place where slaves grew the rice and indigo, now returned to jungle and air that smelled spicy and sweet. The thick vines might part on a giant Timucua, high on holly, his hair in a bun, with long finger and toenails, eyeing me as a human sacrifice.

The captain and his wife, Cecelia, the descendant of four generations of shrimpers from a family that had come over with James Oglethorpe, took us back on the Jolly River. We passed Cumberland Island, where wild gray horses roam the ruins and John Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette at the First African Baptist Church. It was an island of bad luck and young deaths even then.

The island, the closest neighbor and the twin of Amelia, had a history fraught and tragic with mansions burned, magnolia matriarchs, slaves in revolt and lurid accidents. One of the ruins was Dungeness, in its third incarnation the home of assorted Carnegies. Once 54 rooms with a staff of 200, it had burnt down twice. The young rich Carnegies liked to drink at the Palace Saloon in town and sleep it off in the cells of the town jail which their mother redecorated for them.

When I first heard of Cumberland because of the Kennedy wedding it had seemed like the other end of the world. Now, it was my closest neighbor.

A flock of rare white pelicans were catching the sun on a shell midden. The captain took the time to go in close and stop as the big birds, their wings tipped with black, circled overhead.

“We’re going to be home late,” he said heading into the wind. The salt spray hit the deck and flecked our faces. Nobody minded.

When we got back to the beach, I found that my sort of neighbor Richard Widmark had died, at 93, in Connecticut. I was not sure I ever saw him, but the idea of his presence had been comforting as nearby glamour often is.

Once an old boy in pale linen pants, a black silk shirt and a Panama hat, looking fierce in the early morning parking lot came at me out of the drifting mist of a long ago noir. It might have been Richard Widmark. I said nothing, knowing he was one of the last dignified and private stars. I’d like to think it was the “two bit cannon”of Pickup on South Street, the grifter who crawled under Jean Peters’ skin. I could almost hear his voice, which a critic compared to “dirty dishwater sliding down a drain,” calling her “muffin” as he stroked her face and clamped his mouth on hers, a very sexy scene.

“He’s shifty but I love him,” Thelma Ritter had said in the movie. He was all the really bad boys of my past or maybe he was just another old WASP going out at dawn to buy The Wall Street Journal. Well, now Richard Widmark could never, even in fantasy, take me away from all this, but that was all right because I no longer wanted to leave and neither did Edward.

 

A few weeks later, I had lunch with my G-woman friend Dotty, who is small, dark, thin and determined looking. She is quite pretty, easy to talk to and a crack shot. She has a doctorate in bi-lingual education and is the only person I ever knew who drives at the speed limit. (After being stopped once on the beach road, I wound up with a $231 speeding/ driving without a license ticket.) I invited her and Mike, who was now a P.I., to dinner. The agents, who were from Jacksonville and had worked in that bureau and others, did not talk about their previous cases; we did not talk about stories we had covered. We talked about the beach and the town and food and the pleasure of small dogs.

Both ex-agents kissed me goodbye and drove off in their new Jeep, equipped with gun racks and the latest spying and tracking devices. I hadn’t been that close to law enforcement since I carried a boyfriend’s .38 in my Chanel bag many years ago. We’d had a very good time over martinis and my tomato soup—highly hot from my over enthusiasm with the red pepper flakes– and crab cakes, and Edward and I sat down to discuss our new friends.

It was good that we had never known each other in our previous lives. There could be no comparisons and also no illusions. There was no history. They would not know the triumphs or the embarrassing things. We could not play “do you know?” We could not be liked for what we had in common for we had very little in common (not life experiences or friends or background). Thus we had to be liked for our differences.

We had wiped out the past, both good and bad, and we rarely talked about it even to ourselves. The radiation cloud of past life did not follow us here “on the beach.” Later I found that Mike had a thick white FBI scrapbook and a blanket with the Department of Justice seal tossed over a chair. Edward had some Newsweek cartoons, and Daily News front pages on the wall in his green room. I had many pictures of Lily and one of myself at the Metropolitan Museum on the night of New York Magazine’s 25^th Anniversary party. I had my books but none of my journalism which, incomplete and interspersed over Google, had disappeared.

All these friends were “formers” and “exes” and it did not matter. We were no longer just what we did, so we could be the rest of ourselves, the selves that had begun to form with our various journeys.

Edward and I had our own separate set of friends by now. Edward had the middle-western engineers and doctors and businessmen who played old-guy tennis with him. They were nice men who traded anti-Obama and old fart jokes by email. They were not at all like Edward’s lifelong city friends. They volunteered in hospitals and the churches and became Big Brothers.

When some of them grew too old to play tennis or had heart attacks and other health problems, when their knees or elbows gave out, one of the men organized a weekly breakfast just to keep the others company.

Dotty and I became good friends and I became close friends with Raven, too. We began by having lunch and telling our lives. We got to things quickly, caught up on the first forty years in a few sentences, got right to the painful stuff. Somehow, I was more honest with these women than with the people in New York. In the city, things always had to be la-dee-dah and perfect. Unhappiness was weakness and failure, and in New York no one could fail, at least not long term. Sickness, job loss, money problems were all invisible. Being listed with the weeks’ Losers in the Sunday New York Post or a huge negative story in the Business section of the Times while we were swanning around the men’s shows in Florence were things to shrug off and live down.

I saw different things in these women, qualities I hadn’t valued enough before. Somehow I knew each of them would be around if things went wrong.

Two of the celebrated beauties of the 1980’s whom I knew—Gayfryd Steinberg and Carolyne Roehm– had removed themselves from the New York scene after assorted all too public tragedies. Roehm’s stepson died in an accident, she lost her design business and got divorced;  Steinberg was forced to sell her apartment at 740 Park Avenue and her husband had a serious stroke, business reverses and died. They bowed out and were reborn—different, maybe better.

When I thought of those who had to drop out of New York life, there would be a hiatus, some invisible interim years, and then an invitation to the well-attended immaculately- crafted, amusing and effusive memorial service when each would live again, spotlighted for the final hour.

On this island, in increasingly hard times, we had outgrown the charades, at least those that I called my friends did. I could see myself as an old lady with them. After lunch a few of them took home doggy bags. Here it seemed to make sense.