“Let’s run at the waves and be hurled back to living”

—Day Lewis, translating Paul Valery’s “La Mer La Mer”

Early every morning, I go down to swim. The pink moon is at my back and a hot wind shakes the date palms and ruffles the surface of the pool.

The pool waits, glimmering in the moonlight, warm as a tepid bath, lively with ripples and shivers. For me there is nothing like the white air that floats above morning pools. The pools have stored all the sun of the previous day and they wait full of mystery, the promise of healing and dawn beginnings. I take off my robe, pull up my goggles and slip into the warm water. There is never that shock to the system of old New England pools that hurt on contact—each step in the gradual dunk meaning a wince and shudder.

I am happiest wet. Sometimes I swim three times a day. I alternate pool and ocean, artificial and natural.

Iris Murdoch, that river swimmer, felt that swimming cured longings and cultivated the imagination. I hope so. I swim and think even when I count laps.

Our downstairs pool is one of those turquoise ovals, fourteen strokes will cross it. As I swim, the sun comes up and chicken wires of light vibrate on the pool floor. The bottom of the pool gets divided by the light into cells and I am swimming through a giant honeycomb of wobbling light, pulling down strings of bubbles with each stroke. At the end of the summer, my upper arms are marked by the water and sun, mottled into a Florida tattoo.

When I go down early, which I do because I like to swim alone, the pool reflects the moon. When the wind blows across the lines of tiny wavelets, it disturbs the reflection making it shiver, then fracture. By then, the stars have faded, a sliver of red sun crawls out of the ocean. But I do not see it longer than a breath for I am blind to what surrounds me. I swim between the pink moon and the red sun. For a while they both hang there as though the sky is trying to decide and then the moon disappears. I swim back and forth but I see only my blue world through my blue goggles. I hear the ocean when I raise my head on turning. I do the basic crawl with the flutter kick, a little breaststroke, sometimes I turn over for backstroke and elementary backstroke. I stand by the side of the pool, panting a bit and then I get my second wind. I push off swimming harder and better than before. At the end of my laps, I swim underwater and do a racing dive just because it says NO DIVING on the side of the pool. My fingertips are wrinkly, my stomach is flat.

For a long time, I counted my laps. I competed with myself to do a few more each day and then one day I figured out that I did not need to count. I forced myself to stop the hypnotic mind-numbing competitive counting. I dove to the bottom of the pool. I began to play and when I gave up on the numbers, the thoughts, the voices and the ideas began to come back, but it took time.

In the afternoons, I go to the ocean which is more like real life because there are currents to battle and I get slapped down—that is the rule of the ocean. Sometimes, I get bitten by No-Seeums as happens in life. Peaks mean tumbles. I leave behind all my fancy pool strokes and dive the waves. I move through them to the horizon and ride back to shore. I fight the waves or surrender and float in my marine cradle. I am no longer the defiant girl of fifteen who used to swim out much too far, take off my top, and twirl it around in the air. Unlike the pool, the ocean is full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. I have come close to drowning a number of times, but now I feel I have mastery and that is a danger in itself. At my age, there have been so many waters, so many seas, so much pleasure mixed with danger. The salty sea of Itapoa Beach off the coast of Bahia took the stone out of my ring, the Sargasso sea of Little St. James in the Caribbean gave me a branch of coral that is still purple as the day I dove for it. I never know as I go into a wave or to the bottom just what will be swimming against my legs.

It is in the sea that I am weightless, limitless and eternal. Dali, whose pool at Cadaques in Spain was shaped like a penis and filled with live lobsters, believed in a theory of “salutary weightlessness.” The swimmer loses his anxiety because swimming is returning to the womb and diving is the expulsion from paradise at birth, but pleasant now because one knows the fall will be broken by water. Certainly, I lose what remains of my diminished anxiety when I am in water. This is my sport, the only one I am good at–a bit of exertion but not too much, being solitary, lifted and held up by water. Maybe I have not chosen my one exercise, but rather it had chosen me.

I float— I am two-thirds water, a water sac — bobbing along on the water with my face to the sun. No sunscreen, because we of the beach like to defy the odds and besides the sun’s D vitamin raises adrenaline in the brain and is necessary for my weak bones. The slosh of the sea matches the sloppy slosh of my heart, for I have a slight heart murmur. What is internal in me is made manifest in the water.

Once I met Esther Williams at a party and she asked me how I stayed so slim (I was in one of my thin phases).

“Swimming,” I said to the great mermaid and we both laughed.

Sometimes at night, I would have a ghost swim reliving the morning crawl, turning and turning back until sleep would claim me.

To be a true beach bum requires a Zen surrender of desire for things of this world—things gotten by striving– not swimming the days away and then flopping in the sun. While I am lollygagging around, the real life of the island is going on—people working in the paper mill, going to school, teaching school, cleaning, servicing two hotels, tweaking the plantings and carting the trash from the beach condos, making out tax forms and wills, hairdressing, cooking and taking drugs, and doctoring—all the toil of everyday life is here and yet not for me. I am swimming laps while men with lines of sweat down their chests and backs trim the grass and blow off the fallen palm fronds. I drive past trucks bearing twenty- foot logs of Southern pine on A1A and sometimes the wind brings up the harsh chemical smell of the pulp mills as a reminder.

The checker at Publix is talking to the bagger. The checker is divorcing her husband, who is on crack and has not been home in a year. She is waiting for the deposition of her 22-year-old daughter just home from Iraq.

“She is reenlisting,” the bagger tells me.

The major commerce of Fernandina Beach, the island’s town, seems to be tourism. It is a postcard town with old cobbled streets and big Victorian mansions hidden on side streets. Deep in the recesses of these old houses under the crepe myrtle and sage plum live the fifth and sixth generations of some old families full of the gothic stories and wandering ghosts of the south. I keep away from the town with its fudge shops and southern wares, phony sea chatkas and souvenirs. Always interested in other pasts, I go to antique shops to look at worn, imperfect, slightly dirty things, things touched before, things cloudy with the past, things picked up again and again, judged and put back down, rejected. I spend hours with these other shells imagining the memories they contain.

I can think of my life as a progression of pools like John Cheever’s story The Swimmer (the movie of which was filmed, in part, at my great uncle’s house) each of which had its associations moist and vaporous: Bayville, Long Island (infancy),The Deal Casino in New Jersey (trauma, a pervert lockerboy), Cos Cob in Connecticut (Red Rover games), camp lakes (cold), Hotel de Paris Monte Carlo (teenage heartbreak), Greenbrier (as a child, as an adult with child), The Fontainbleau in Miami Beach(as a child, as an adult with child), off Brickell Avenue in Miami (end of an affair, thrown in pool by Supercop), same location (trauma of first marriage) Robert Evans’ pool in Beverly Hills (brief reprieve, rose petals, music, spores in pool) Redding, Connecticut pool ( Jerzy Kosinski floating, the killer Robert Durst sitting and staring), rock pool in Jamaica (scene in my abandoned novel The Angelfish Club). These were formative pools, places where things happened to me—far flung places because I was a rich little girl. It’s as though I have been trying to swim my way home, pool to pool, to what I have been and who I have met at each of them, to the people who pulled me out and wrapped me in warm towels. They are the sirens calling me back.

I am being reborn, swimming myself back into life, into the island. I have arranged for my own painless renaissance.

Now, as I write, it is winter and I go next door to the indoor pool at the Ritz. I sneak in because I won’t pay the daily rate of $50. Early in the morning, I enter the mother ship through a side door. It is like walking through a deserted palace, this generic Ritz-Carlton ornateness, with no concession to the tropics but the palms outside. All is in luxurious readiness.

It reassures me that the Ritz is next door, all geared up and shiny, the shops full of golf bags and expensive sweaters. At all hours lit by great breasts of crystal, piano tinkling in the bar, ships drowning in generic stormy seas in giant pseudo paintings. Luxury close by has always comforted me, reminding me of what my family once had. In all its fakery and carefulness, the Ritz is a denial of all beach-bum life—sandless, clean, with gleaming dark woods and marble. I walk into a full Ritz-Carlton-via-Charles Dickens Christmas with lit-up trees, a giant gingerbread pirate ship, dolls in velvet costumes. Often, I walk right into a convention of business people in blazers with name badges standing around enormous tables of breakfast. I walk through them as if I am invisible, feeling guilty about not working. They are full of purpose standing over their pyramids of muffins. I have my goggles dangling round my neck.

The pool is in a glass atrium surrounded by lounge chairs, each with a towel rolled tight by the towel man. Hotel-lobby-type music is always playing, often seasonal, usually inoffensive. Under the glass pyramid, the walls are a mosaic of pale blue and iridescent gold tiles which my goggles turn aqueous green. The water offers no shocks, just spurts of warmth from the sides. It is a big blue pool and I am usually alone, often slightly worried because I have trespassed and not paid, but that speeds my strokes. And now I am Esther Williams without an audience. I can imagine anything, even dying and being found–a floater at the Ritz, a scandal for the island.

On my way back, my hair still dripping a bit, I see the business people outside bent into their cell phones. They pop outside to get better reception or to have private conversations in the break from their meetings. Somehow we are a rebuke to each other.