If this book were a movie, specifically a time travel movie, it would have to show the hands of a clock racing around two years, shops and restaurants being boarded up, the peacocks disappearing from Scott Road then reappearing, Wicked Davey’s vanishing, Raven selling her studio, people losing jobs, the Plantation in bankruptcy then being bought, the logging trucks driving by in an endless caravan, Edward and I being taken to and from airports to find the UPS cartons we had sent ahead at our doors. We would pick up the same few people in each place, catch up, and begin again. It would see John Grisham building two houses on our beach road, water gushing into and through our apartment, Arley Quick and his workmen returning to pry up the warped floors. I am waking up, again and again, putting on my sailor sweatshirt, and going out into the dark with Kukla, now white around the muzzle, past the pansies crumpled from the night rain.

But I am not at all the same–not since my brother Buzz died suddenly enough at age 64 after the third attack on his weakened heart. We had been together from the age of two when I tried to drop my infant brother in the toilet, through our entire childhood which changed when I was eight and he became sick. That was the year he picked up his first tennis racquet and became a boy champion with whom I played my first and last mixed doubles tournament. Our lives rearranged again with his early marriage and children as we moved further apart, but there was always the binding force of our mother and his personality for he had the both the masculine sweetness and the charm of our father.

Jill Clayburgh, my first real friend, died three months after my brother. She would be forever paused in that moment when we first went to lunch after years apart, and both arrived too early, so I walked around the block and she stood outside the restaurant until I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around.

It was midnight New Year’s Eve 2010-2011 on 73^rd street and, for the first time in a long time, my mother was alone. She went to the refrigerator to get a lemon tart and, as the year changed, she fell and broke her hip. New Year’s Eve is when her own father died. Kimie’s husband died three weeks later in Hawaii. In March, I returned to the island with a pastrami sandwich for Raven’s husband and left it at the door, where I found a condolence letter because Bill Shelton had died the night before. Four days later, my French cousin Dothee, who had walked down the Eiffel Tower with my mother and was one of those people who just stays young, died of cancer and the next day Bettye’s husband died in Boston.

I suddenly knew four widows and I suppose I could have counted myself because I found out then that my first husband had died of a heart attack the year before my brother. These women were each entering closets of big shoes and plastic- sheathed suits, finding files of papers and those private things men store and wives discover later. They had to deal with financial matters and agencies and boxes of photographs turned painful, sometimes staying, and other times leaving homes where they had been for years.

By this time, I had no faith left and, with the aid of Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great, no belief. Unlike Kimie, I did not believe the good in people conquers the bad. My superstitions, however, stayed strong. After all, a sparrow had flown into my New York kitchen window, ever an omen of ill luck and death. It circled, rising and swooping around the room, crashing into a cabinet until I opened the window wider and it flew out and away.

I sunk slowly into a kind of two-year stupor. I did not work. I got out of the water. I decided that I hated yoga and quit. I walked and walked. I read mostly Scandinavian crime novels and developed a narcoleptic interest in clothes that required me to click through all the seasonal designer shows, and go on fashion sites a number of times a day. It soothed me.

I watched the Real Housewives and crime shows with their daddy and mama figures, competent sisters and antic brothers all solving unlikely problems in an hour. Perhaps, they were what I had lost in my own family.

Inert, I again treated the beach as a kind of sanitorium. The only thing I can say for myself during this lost time is that I did what had to be done and functioned for my mother and Edward. Otherwise, I distracted myself as the days went on with new narcotics in my narcotic place—fashion, beauty, unreality, far away crime– these were my new ikigai ,my reasons to wake up in the morning and a way to ward off the omnipresent and growing fear, for I now felt quite vulnerable.

 

And then, months later, I was at Joe’s Produce stand on the island with my hand on a jar of Thomas’s Lake City Florida honey. Should I give it to my New York psychiatrist friend as I had every year, something sweet to mark the Jewish New Year though neither of us believed?

She had not called me after my brother died so, of course, I was angry and still, I bought the honey. I deliberately bought a jar with a dented lid and left it with her doorman when I returned to New York.

She thanked me, she could not see me and, something in the way she said it, made me ask if she was all right. In fact, she had progressive supranuclear palsy and, being a doctor, she knew there was no hope or effective treatment. She had been getting diagnosed just when my brother died.

My mother had entered the iron world of walkers and bed rails and dangerous physical instability and now this was my friend (who had run marathons and climbed to Machu Picchu) also bound into the metallic cages of extreme old age and illness.

I cannot remember if it was that day my friend told me she was going to kill herself. She had not told her children or anyone else yet, and I could not think why she would tell me unless she knew I would approve. I told her to tell her children, who were both grown and far away. We were sitting then in a corner of her living room overlooking Park Avenue. The doors that were closed when she had patients were open now, her patients had gone forever, and the room, as usual, gleamed – polished floors, waxed furniture glowing, important contemporary art, silver candlesticks from the family that had abandoned her and pronounced her dead with her first marriage. I had looked up her disease, it all made sense to me because nobody valued control over her life as she did.

I looked around the rooms where I had been for many dinner parties. She was a well known Freudian and also a great balabusta, the Yiddish word for housekeeper—perhaps I had never told her this.

Now there would be last parties and luncheons with organdy luncheon mats a bit too good for the occasion and no one knowing. She went to the theater and museums with a walker, then in a wheelchair, then a motorized wheelchair. Still a few hard months to live. Her clock had started for me and from then on everything we did had this last, this terminal importance about it. That would be her final jar of honey.

Let’s go to see the Daphne Guinness show at the Fashion Institute of Technology, I suggested. Daphne Guinness is what is called a “fashion icon”, a collector of couture, famous for putting herself on display. In my two lost years I had learned well the solace of something stupid. I knew that, along with her profound mind and genuine seriousness, my friend loved clothes as did I, especially then. It would have to be in a wheelchair. My mother, twenty years older, was too proud, but the doctor knew it would be her only way. She was a foot taller than I but still I thought I could manage, even in the rain–even with a person who hated any loss of control which being pushed around defines.

We had to walk from the curb, then get the F.I.T. wheelchair, then get downstairs for the exhibition which was quite dark in so many ways. The dandy looks, the armor-like clothes, the snakes, the shadowy black-cloaked figures of pseudo Daphnes on their frighteningly high, heel-less freak shoes—the exhibitionism, fetishism, naked narcissism, the uniforms—all slightly deranged, were on display. What a rich Freudian field lay before us as we wheeled around the dark, passing the translucent scrims, pausing here and there in the murk before an Azzedine Alaia or Alexander McQueen or Gareth Pugh. I was a bit of an expert which she, even now competitive, did not like. What must have been going through her mind? Why didn’t I ask? What a waste! Daphne Guinness was like one of those white marsh egrets landed by accident among the grey gulls, daintily pacing the seashore, hopelessly lost and fabulous.

I had to leave my friend leaning on a lamppost, fiercely proud, as I hailed us a cab in the ripping cold rain and, as with my mother, I was in that hyper-vigilant mode, with that unsought sudden responsibility, always thinking of all the things that might go wrong—the fall. Hard to say which of us was more helpless.

There was still time, no date had been set, and I returned to the island and things were worse when I returned a few weeks later.

I perched on the couch where her patients lay as she packed up her office, throwing out case histories.

“A lot of novels there,” I said, as we laughed and she sorted out the seven cases she was obliged to keep and gave me a bit of free psychiatric advice. We were in that room where she had sat for years in her profession, listening and knowing too much of the truth, and then, in the ten minutes between patients, calling to invite her New York worlds to dinner parties of her overtly healthy, totally salt-free foods which we encountered with a trepidation that was never disappointed.

She set aside a bag of things for her children, including a copy for each of the Bill Cunningham picture of her in a $29 dress from Outer Mongolia that had run in the Sunday Times Style section. The lower shelf of her bookcases was filled with travel guides of all the truly remote places she had ever been.

To prepare herself, in her typically methodical way, she had read a book about suicide and had a low-dose practice run (she was too nauseated) and now was getting ready again. She told me she did not want an obituary or a funeral or memorial service and that her husband, who was not well and not there, would be provided for. She showed me her suicide note saying that no one had helped her, and then she wrote me a prescription for the 30 Seconals I was to give to her.

I had no problem with this. This was not a helpless unchosen death like the others. I told Kimie and Edward and my mother what I was intending to do. My mother was very interested. After all, her best friend had killed herself and lethally injected her sick husband and another best friend had fallen or jumped from her window and there were other suicides in her long life. Kimie’s father had tried to kill himself. A Japanese doctor had marked his chest where he should shoot, but he, shooting with his left hand for he was left-handed, just missed his heart. The Americans rescued him, imprisoned him, and put him on trial with the other Class A war criminals. They hanged him, after which the Japanese had put his ashes in two shrines. Kimie called me from Hawaii and told me not to give my friend the pills, for I would get in trouble. Then Edward decided he also did not like the idea. The Seconals stayed in a drawer.

Some weeks later, at her dinner party, again mysteriously featuring taste-free diet foods, my friend told me the date she would kill herself. Her children would be there. Later, I went to a last lunch, patted her on the back of her brown cashmere sweater and she rolled away.

On her last day she had wanted to see The Clock, a twenty-four-hour video installation of movie clips by Christian Marclay at the Paula Cooper gallery. It was a perfect thing to do to mark each last minute of a day when there would be no next one. Zadie Smith, in The New York Review of Books, had said The Clock was “sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen” and “the first film in which time is real.” There were images of clock faces, racing hands, movie stars asking the time and looking at watches concurrent with the hour, even clips from execution scenes for she who would be her own executioner. It was an idea just as brilliant and right as she was, but it was not to be. I believe her daughter got the date of the showing wrong or so she said -missing by a year, and so my friend was stymied in perhaps a most Freudian way.

“I’ve had a good run,” she said in the last call.

“Happy trails,” said I, immediately regretting—where had that come from? Yes, my childhood–having answered her unexpected cliché with an even worse one, but it really was too late. I wish I could have seen The Clock for her. Or smashed the clock or turned it counterclockwise for all of them.

No one had been more interested in this suicide than my mother who, knowing my friend’s prominence and, having met her, still scoured the paper for her obituary. She would have been interested to know that most of her last wishes were defied. My friend, making a brave escape from an almost depleted life, dying like Ton Luyk by refusing to live longer, had done what my mother could not do and what she would come to envy.

As my mother struggled to regain her life, I felt I had lost control of mine. How almost blithe I had been before, imagining all my dead ones drifting under the ocean waters. Now I saw a huge flock of white birds circling over a rough ocean and plunging down, dropping one by one as though shot.

Months later, my mother had a brain scan on the March day I returned to New York. I found her at her table with her Hermes blouse unbuttoned, a shocking sight, one I had never seen. I told her she looked so tired and that she should rest. She had never gotten into bed during the day in her 92 years, but this time she did, and she never got out of bed again.

When I called Edward early one morning on the island, he said we had had a “disaster.” I thought he was fooling but, in fact, our apartment had flooded. Mike, our investigator friend, immediately came over to photograph the ruins and floating detritus. The condominium had installed a high pressure valve in each apartment’s water heater so that people on the upper floors might have more water pressure. It exploded the tank only in our apartment, surely the revenge of the condo gods. The water sunk through the floors and down, coating the walls of the lower apartments.

Edward, alone in the apartment with Kukla, let in the team with the giant hoses and industrial dehumidifiers. He packed up everything that was not ruined and moved it into storage. Somehow I did not care.

Back came Arley Quick, back where we began nine years ago—prying up the wavy warped floors, painting all the walls with the same tinge of pink, laying in new dark wood throughout, putting things back exactly the way they had been so many deaths before. Maybe Ton and I had gotten it right in the first place. Or maybe it was a lack of conceptual energy. All the shells, with their whispers of the eternal ocean, now irked me. I banished every trace of seaside-cute that had crept in. Everything that had been destroyed made the apartment even starker than before—like my life, a series of eliminations.

This was our Restoration—Napoleon climbing back on the eagle throne after Elba but not for very long. The clock hands were still spinning: tips of palm trees bleached and greened again, the birds flew south, then north, the pool man skimmed the surface of the pools, the beach pavilions were put up and taken down in the evenings, the ethnic foods expanded to fill a whole aisle at Publix, the shrimpers crossed and re-crossed the horizon.

Arley did a fine job and still, “Ma’am” I was and Ma’am I am. We were restored to the apartment even as my mother was dying in New York and my daughter quit book publishing and moved, for what looked like forever, to California. We were all on the clock.