Page 29 of On Fire Island

It felt like a nice way to mark the end of the week, and he figured he would replenish what we had collected over the years, like a carbon footprint of sorts—paying it forward to some kid in China searching for treasure on the shores of Yalong Bay.

Like most beach lovers, Ben and I took many a long walk looking down in search of shells and sand-turned glass. Bay Harbor sits somewhat in the middle of the island, so a beach walk always began with a simple question—east or west? Walking east, for us at least, was a more secluded, introspective journey. Once we traversed the first couple of inhabited towns, one where we knew some people, and one where we knew none, we would come upon a board-walked nature preserve called the Sunken Forest. We sometimes made the detour inland to walk through it, but just as often kept trudging across the sand. I picked up some of mygreatest finds on that desolate stretch of beach, including sand dollars, shark teeth, and the rarest shades of beach glass—red and orange.

Traveling west was a whole different animal. In that direction, we could barely walk ten feet without stopping to schmooze. Collections of friends or acquaintances gathered along the shoreline, their beach chairs arranged in half-moon formations facing the ocean, holding court, playing Scrabble, or trying to get through a page in their books without interruption. Ben would stop to throw a football or play Kadima any chance he could. When it came to sports of any kind I was more an observer than a player. I was happiest plunking down next to whomever and infiltrating their conversation. These groups had been talking to each other ad nauseam day after day, summer after summer, making a passerby like me feel like a Vegas-worthy guest attraction. That was my favorite result of a beach walk, even though the only part of me that truly got any exercise was my mouth.

Ben turned his cell phone back on, lay down on the lanai, as we had taken to calling the porch since his fourth book,Lanai, came out, and listened, or half listened, to the endless stream of messages. When he got to the first from his agent, Elizabeth Barnes, he paused and poured a shot of vodka into his morning orange juice. He had never mentioned it, as we tended not to discuss the “after” part of my dying, but I knew he was dreading dealing with Elizabeth without me. She was tough, his agent, like a Waspy version of Judge Judy. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since both the writer and his editor were pushovers. She was known to be the best in the industry when it came to negotiations and had dedicated her life to her career.

“Publishing is my one true love,” she had told Ben when selling him on representation. It was the warmest thing she ever said.

While he was a grown-ass man and she was nearing sixty and all of five feet two, Elizabeth scared Ben. We used to do once-twice-three-shoot for who would answer her calls, and when he lost he would sulk till I dealt with her anyway. I knew she cared for him, I was sure of it actually, but he was never convinced.

Now Elizabeth would be just the straight shooter that Ben needed. She didn’t give a damn about how she came across, and this is not conjecture. She said it to me once after a publicist got annoyed that she sent an email to him in all caps.

She said, “I could care less what anyone thinks of me.”

I remember it well, as I had the greatest urge to correct her with, “it’s ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” but refrained. I was scared of her too.

Even a brooding young widower with no game and a looming deadline would be no match for Elizabeth Barnes. He would have little choice but to answer her, no matter how much he dreaded their interactions. I remember only one time he felt otherwise: his proposal of our three-island tour.

“She loved the idea!” he’d stormed into our bedroom, shouting. He got himself together and added, “I’m pretty sure she was smiling!”

We jumped up and down on the bed in happiness chanting, “A three-island tour!”

The idea for the three-island tour—always sung instead of spoken to the tune of the theme song fromGilligan’s Island—was mine. Our biggest success to date,One Date in Berlin, had already spent a year on the bestseller list, and Ben was suffering from an awful case of writer’s block. I woke up one morning and proclaimed, “If the story isn’t coming to you, let’s go to the story.” We put together a proposal for a series of books set on islands, which we intended to live on and breathe in for a month at a time,tacking my personal days and vacation time on to the standard winter break. It was a daring idea—and it worked.

After what felt like a high school group project in which one person suggests a topic and the other quickly disagrees, we finally, and delightedly, settled on our first stop—Lanai.Settledmay have been the wrong word. The two of us were ecstatic. The success of Lanai was followed by Sicily, with the proposal for the third book in the series being due this past fall. With all that had been going on, the publisher (my boss), and Elizabeth had tentatively moved the delivery date to April, and when that never happened, to September. From the look of Ben, that was not going to happen either. It was a problem, especially if they made him return the advance, which was long spent.

Seeing her missed calls now, he knew he should call her back, and finished his drink to summon the liquid courage to do so. He listened to her message again—and deleted it. There was really no deleting Elizabeth—and of course, he knew that. She would find him, probably when he least expected it. The apprehension was enough to drive him to drink. And it did.

He topped off his glass, which rendered him unable to think clearly, let alone return a call from his formidable agent. With the past being far more palatable than the future, he lay down on the couch, closed his eyes, and thought about our time in Lanai.

Unlike Sicily, which we chose just because we were both dying to go there, the plot for the Lanai story precipitated our journey. I had seen it all coming together in his mind. It’s funny being married to a writer. There are only short periods of time when they are all there with you. They may seem to pay attention as you are talking about this or that, but they are really off somewhere else, and having you pull them back into reality often leads to resentment. For a good part of the time, they are happiest elsewhere. Ididn’t have a problem with it, especially being Ben’s editor, but I imagine other spouses might be less forgiving.

Lanai, the least inhabited of the Hawaiian Islands, was paradise, and I often found myself going back there in my mind as well, especially during chemo treatments. I would bring a book with me for the sessions, but it was hard to concentrate, and I would catch myself reading the same page over and over again. If I didn’t love the book, I mean if it didn’t grab me by the boots and I couldn’t put it down, I would spend more time worrying that I should stop wasting my precious time than reading. Unlike most editors, who were quick to toss aside a title when they weren’t crazy about it, due to the scarcity of time I had to actually read for pleasure, I was not a DNF kind of reader. I would finish a book if it killed me. I’m sure there’s a joke there somewhere, but it’s almost too easy.

After a while I started rereading my old favorites:A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,To Kill a Mockingbird, evenAlice in Wonderland. I still ended up closing my eyes and daydreaming about Lanai.

There was one spot on the island that we visited often called the Garden of the Gods, a windy road lined with towers of rocks set in such perfect formations that it’s hard to imagine that anyone created them but the gods themselves—ergo the name. On one end sat Shipwreck Beach—an eight-mile stretch of shore named for the hull of an old oil tanker that eerily rose above the waterline. There you can wade, but because of the current, swimming is not advised.

At the other end of the road, plus a short hike, sat Polihua Beach. The waves there were insane—huge, mesmerizing swells that even seasoned surfers didn’t attempt. Images of those giant waves, rising and crashing and rising and crashing onto the flatnarrow beach would put me in a trance when my mind needed to escape. And it needed to escape quite a lot.

We had rented a bright blue house outside of Lanai City—all eight hundred square feet of it, beachy and quaint. Given its relatively few visitors, it was easy, as a tourist, to stand out among the locals in Lanai. Unlike on Fire Island, where, I have to admit, renters are sometimes treated like second-class citizens, the people of Lanai were quite welcoming. Life was simple there, with Ben spending time on research at the pineapple plantation and me miraculously reading for pleasure, in between finishing up an edit that was due the week we were to return home.

We learned to paddleboard in Manele Bay, and I was surprised how quickly I took to it. I loved being on the calm clear waters, strengthening my core and gliding over the coral reefs. When we returned to Fire Island that summer, Ben surprised me with his and hers boards, but it wasn’t the same. The waves of the Atlantic were much more daunting than in “our” cove in the Pacific. Try as I did, I couldn’t get past the first break.

But in Hawaii I was righteous.

Most nights in Lanai, I would make a dinner of fresh fish and vegetables and we would eat out on the actual lanai. We would sip mai tais from scooped-out pineapples and play gin or Scrabble until our eyes got tired and it was time for bed. It was most definitely one of the most calm and peaceful times in my life.

The story of Lanai came together quickly for Ben, and when it did, he spent hour upon hour typing away on his laptop. His plot was a take on a famous Lanai legend—a tale of a beautiful young princess captured by a Hawaiian warrior and held captive in his fortress so that no one else could experience her beauty. One day, when the warrior was out warrioring, the princess drowned.Heartbroken and unwilling to live without her, he leaped off the rocks to his death.

Ben modernized the story (to the 1940s at least), turning it into the tale of a pineapple plantation owner who courted a young Hollywood actress visiting the island and kept her captive on his estate, even coercing her to marry him. In his story, the actress faked her drowning and the plantation owner dove off the rocks to his death without knowing the truth—leaving the actress to inherit it all. She fell in love with a pineapple farmer who had always been kind to her, and the two of them lived happily ever after growing pineapples.

Loving to be all in, Ben ate so much pineapple while writing the book that the keys began to stick on his computer, slowing him down. It made me laugh when I would walk by and hear him griping about it.

At night, we would make love like the actress and the pineapple farmer, and Ben would narrate his moves straight from the book, in his most dramatic voice.

“ ‘Her back arched as his hands traveled down her torso, reaching her hips. He sat back and drew her into him. She nuzzled her head into his chest, languishing in his tropical smell, his sweet taste. He lingered and teased and taunted until she couldn’t take it any longer and quietly begged for him to take her.’ ”

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