The full gainer was very easy. There was so much more time than when doing it from the twelve-foot board. But he had never before held himself rigid through so long a drop. He began the scoop as soon as his toes touched the water. In another moment he had glided forward to land lop-sidedly on the bottom, on his right buttock. He bumped hard, but not too hard. He righted himself and sat there, bubbling and grinning, then pushed himself off the cement and shot to the surface.

Everybody seemed unimpressed, but after two days of practice he began to participate in the shows, two a day.

The other new man, whose name was Jensen, turned out to be a beautiful diver, former varsity at Exeter and Brown. He was in graduate school, creative writing at Iowa, and was an unpaid playwright at a nearby stock theater. He touted Adam onto an inexpensive boarding house where at night there were mice as loud as lions and some noise and scuffling, but the mattress was firm. The weather held and so did his nerves. A girl in the water ballet with beautiful breasts began to squeeze him with her eyes and he made plans to take her to his bosom and vice versa. He had long talks about Eliot and Pound with Jensen, who maybe would turn out to be his friend. He dove like a machine, thinking a lot about how he would behave when he went back to school an enormously wealthy man.

The stories of accidents seemed like fables. But on the fifth day Jensen scooped prematurely and landed in the pool on his back. He was white-faced with pain when he emerged, but able to walk away and call his own taxi to take him to the hospital. He didn’t return to the show. When Adam telephoned, the hospital said his condition was fair and that he had been admitted for observation. The following day was gray but rainless, with a blustery wind that quivered the ladder and caused the platform to sway. They that stand high have many blasts to shake them. Shakespeare. Adam made his two dives without incident, and next morning was relieved to find that the sun was out and the wind had disappeared. That evening he made his first dive almost without thinking about it. During the second show he climbed the ladder and stood on the perch in the yellow illumination of the big spotlights. Far out to sea a trawler’s lights revealed her mysterious distant presence to him, and the lights of the boardwalk stretched like scattered jewelry.

“You goddamned fool,” he told himself.