Two Time

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SOMETIMES AT SUNSET over the East End of Long Island God plays artist, spraying pinky red paint all over the sky. If your timing is right, and you’re sitting on the deck of the Windsong Restaurant in East Hampton, you can catch the whole glitzy performance.

I’d already ordered an Absolut on the rocks and was settling in to watch. Jackie Swaitkowski hadn’t shown up yet, which was no surprise. She was never on time for anything. She lived by an Einsteinian concept of space-time. It was all relative. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, she could do what she wanted. She was a pal.

Two stories below the deck was a small parking lot where cars could line up along the edge of the lagoon. It served the restaurant and a small marina catering to big sport cruisers and a handful of fishing scows owned by the tattered remains of the local Bayman population. On the opposite shore of the lagoon was a small scrub-covered island with a single two-story house perched precariously over a short sandy cliff. Beyond that was Gardiner’s Bay, named for a family who’d owned a big island out there since the middle of the seventeenth century. Until recently, one old Gardiner had it more or less to himself. I don’t like that many people, but I think I’d be lonely living on a huge island all by myself. Maybe not if Jackie showed up once in a while. Wouldn’t have to be on time.

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