He was relieved by the decision; she was maddened. In a crazed whisper, hot against his ear, she threatened to drown herself in their motel’s swimming pool. He felt obliged to calm her, though he wanted to run—fear had killed his desire. Holding her, he was depressed, imagining the indignity of drowning in the small, shallow, fenced-in, and cracked motel pool. Her suicide in a big blue five-star hotel pool, he reasoned, would have been just as tragic but not as shabby and pathetic, and nothing like drowning in a wave. In her sadness she lost all her allure, and then became fierce, someone suddenly much older and indignant. Stripped by rage of her sexual attraction, she was powerless, and he pitied her but was still afraid of what she would do to herself.

He fled to Hawaii. She called him and screamed abuse and sobbed. Hating the phone, he forced himself to listen, trying to be patient; and noticing that she always talked for a full hour, he was reminded that she’d once told him she saw a shrink every week, always for one hour. He was relieved when she stopped calling. But the following Christmas the phone rang. Sharkey was serving turkey to his surfing buddies, spooning gravy onto his mashed potatoes.

“It’s Stella,” she said, announcing herself in a victim’s voice, sounding sacrificial. She spoke as though addressing a large audience, loudly, like an exit line. “I’m coming apart!”

“Find someone else.” He was in the house at Jocko’s as he passed the gravy, looking out the window at the winter swell—another big day. “I can’t help you anymore.”

“You’ve got to do something,” she said, pleading, with tears in her voice. “What are you going to do?”

“Catch some waves.” And he hung up.

The sea never failed him. He was cured of his sexual obsession by fear, then boredom; but there was no end to the big waves. It was all he wanted, to be along the shore, alert, alive, afloat.

15

“I Want Your Life”

What’s your secret?” was the usual question—seldom from surfers but often from hangers-on and interviewers. Saying he had none sounded like an insincere denial, as though he were boasting that he had many secrets he was keeping to himself. He sometimes said, and later in exasperation pleaded, “I surf every day!” This was obvious, but who else did that?

“The best training for surfing is surfing” was his mantra.

“And getting pounded,” Garrett McNamara said. His North Shore neighbor, big-wave surfer Garrett, made no secret of the fact that he too was traveling the world, looking for the hundred-foot wave.