On The Beach

In 2007, the television show Bewitched was revived; the original actors were dead, or old, so the network located new actors who bore a very close facsimile to the originals. "Darrin" was discovered by talent scouts as he read The Wall Street Journal on a bench outside his insurance office in Manhattan. The scouts placed his photo side-by-side one of Dick Sargent and admitted--he was a virtual reincarnation.

Finding Samantha proved a bit more problematic. Locating witches was much easier than it had been in the 1960s, but most did not want to prostitute their talents for a such a short-lived commercial venture.

The producers chose to film The New Bewitched in black-and-white, to give it a historical patina.

Immediately, unexpected problems arose. Ten years earlier, Darrin had met a young divorcee, down on her luck. He guided her and her children to the nearest battered women's shelter, loaned her money, gave her advice. Soon, she began calling him, daily. They met in Central Park for surreptitious meetings, or took long rides on the subway, to nowhere, discussing life, love, and a make-believe future. He often photographed her posed against the cherry trees, or in her small apartment, or framed against the Flatiron building.

He fancied himself a contemporary Stieglitz. His attention to the insurance business suffered.

"Marry me," she said. He hesitated. Samatha became suspicious, and his secret was exposed. He burned the letters, the photographs. Those he could not part with, he hid in the rafters of the house.

The woman met another, and married. She sent Darrin a wedding invitation in the mail. Samantha found it. "Let's attend," Samantha taunted, her nose twitching. "I want to attend. I will wear my best gown. I can still fit into it. Could she?"

Darrin filed the invitation somewhere... somewhere in the antique accounting ledger his brother-in-law had given him. He thought. He was never sure.

For the next year, he continued to stumble upon relics of the woman, which he hastily burned before Samantha could find them, sometimes without success.

She was forgotten. She was expunged. She did not exist. She had not existed.

He filled the holes in his photo albums with post cards of Italy.

Until last year. Darrin had been walking down Fifth, when a car pulled up beside him. A window rolled down; it was Her. The Her of the photographs. Her hair had been chopped off, and she wore sunglasses, but they recognized each other. "Hello, Darrin," she said. Unbeknownst to him, she had been working in a nearby building for several years.

It took weeks for them to work up the courage to meet for lunch. Over cocktails, she spilled. Her marriage had gone south. Darrin twisted and twisted the straw in his ice water. Samantha, he confessed, had become a stranger. And his company was near bankruptcy. He was not sure of anything, anymore.

They met, surreptitiously. America had changed completely in the space of a year, since the second attack. A curfew was in effect. Concrete and iron barricades and razor wire blocked many entrances now, manned by Homeland Security "personnel" with M-16s. All-seeing cameras peered behind invisible monocles, everywhere.

Darrin, like most, had accommodated himself to the new reality without grumbling, for the sake of national security. He had become the invisible man again, and his instincts dropped into place. He met her, at cafes, or dark booths in public places, their subterfuge aided by the cloak of constant surveillance.

He allowed himself to caress her hand, but in the years that he had known her, he had never kissed her. Now, ten years older and wiser, he could see the wanting in her eyes.

Finally, after a cadence of lunch meetings and innuendos, they agreed to meet for one last time at the only place they knew would be both public and private—on the beach.

Much of the beach had been closed off and barricaded since the attack, but the guard posts were often unmanned. It was all an elaborate Potemkin village. Darrin, with his connections, knew this.

Standing in the sand, the only illumination being from the lights of nearby Manhattan, Darrin clung to her and felt her warmth beneath her summer jacket. Cancer had ravaged her. "I’m fragile," she warned him. He found her lips; cold, at first, as he sought to warm them. Unlike ten years before, he did not care how many men had kissed her before him. In the shadow of the valley, it no longer mattered. She was what he needed at that moment—someone to hold. "We are all dead souls anyway," he rationalized.

When the producers of The New Bewitched discovered this affair, they came close to canceling the project. The first week’s rushes had been filmed and were in the edit room. Their "Samantha" had been discovered tending bar at a truck stop in North Dakota, and she had been lured to New York City with the promise of extra rations. Finally, it was decided to integrate the story as a subplot, in a dream sequence, as a sort of surrealistic cinéma vérité, to be broadcast near the end of the first season.