“They’re so young,” he said, seeing the waitress now head inside to the bar for the wine. “Here’s a story. A reasonably attractive young woman is sort of lost. She’s a surfer, better than average but not a headliner. She gets dumped by her boyfriend. Bummer. And then instead of a new Brazilian bathing suit she buys herself a thirty-dollar pair of frilly knickers and puts them on her smiling ass, and men clamor to talk to her. She meets an older man, with money. Just this change of clothes, this one thing, and her whole life is transformed.”

“In England it wouldn’t happen that way. Some posh bloke might be tempted, but as soon as she opened her mouth she’d be slagged off as an oik.”

“An oik,” he said.

“A scrubber.”

He faintly understood. He said, “An American would pounce.”

“Because Yanks are randy little monkeys,” Olive said. “Most men are.”

“But you like me—and we’re so different.”

“Yes. Utterly.” She leaned at him; she said, “I like friction.”

“That’s the good news,” he said. He pushed at the half-rolled blind of split bamboo. “They call these chicks in Singapore—these shades.”

“I forget you’ve been everywhere.”

“I had to, or I would never have found this place. And now that I’m cured of travel, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“What about the surf in Indonesia? In South Africa? The eighty-foot waves in Portugal? What about Jimmy’s, the break on Christmas Island? That you named after Captain Cook.”

They were new enough to each other that she deferred, and listened, and asked for more.

He sipped his beer. He said, “There’s enough here, all the surf I need or want.”

“There’s Joe’s.”

Joe’s, the left-breaking wave at Sunset, named by others for him. The waitress returned with Olive’s glass of wine and another beer for Sharkey. He said, “And there’s Joe’s.”

Surfing had turned him into a traveler; he had taken his board around the world, to the places Olive had named, and to Brazil and Tahiti and Cornwall too; to the break just beyond Hue on the midcoast of Vietnam, to San Sebastián, and to the harbor at Hanga Roa in Rapa Nui. He knew the world by its surf breaks, by its bands of surfers, a compulsive and secretive and single-minded tribe of barefoot, big-shouldered gypsies.

“Cheers,” she said. But he was frowning. “What’s wrong?”

“I was looking at that junk on the shore. There’s junk at Joe’s. There’s junk everywhere.”

“It’s so gross.”

“There’s a whole mess of it in the mid-Pacific, an evil wheeling tangle of marine debris—rope, plastic, chemical sludge, a floating junk pile, getting bigger. Some of it gets loose and floats here.” He pointed to a fragment of plastic bobbing in the water. “We’re part of it. The great Pacific garbage patch.”