“She was a college professor I’d met in a coffee shop in Santa Cruz. She was small and kind of sallow, with one of those drowsy, hungry faces, pretty in a girlish way but not unusual, with greeny-gray eyes, the sleepy kind. She looked like a grim little monkey and she was combing her hair at the table when I saw her.”

“Without a mirror.”

“I mean, what woman combs her hair without looking in a mirror?” Sharkey said. “I sat at the next table, and there was something”—he sniffed, twitching his nose—“in the air. She seemed to give off a warm damp odor of sexuality. Maybe a pheromone, but it smelled to me like bark mulch, something of the earth, something swampy. She seemed to be freaked by my leaning into her space and she went to a table outside. I followed her and pestered her—teased her, that was always my method.”

“When boys tease you it’s usually because they’re attracted to you.”

“Someone told me that once.”

“I know.”

“It worked. It wasn’t love, it was desire, an animal urge to possess her. I hung around, I told her I was single, I talked about places in the world I’d been surfing—Cornwall in England got her attention, South Africa too. We had sex that night and the next morning. That great swampy smell got stronger. I wanted to eat her, I felt like a cannibal. We left bite marks on each other. I was half mad. I couldn’t leave her. I almost cried when I had to fly back to Hawaii, and I’d wake up at night and smile, thinking of her. I went back two weeks later. By then we’d talked a little on the phone, but I hated the phone. When we were together she said that she’d found out who I was, that I was married, that she was angry. I told her I was divorced. But she was demented too, the same desire. We had this full-on physical thing, fastened to each other, thrashing, insane. Later she called me, she cried, she wanted me, she threatened to kill herself, she raged at me. I needed to surf, yet I was still obsessed with her. I began to understand what addiction is like, how meaningless it is when people say, ‘It’s bad for you. It’ll kill you. You’ll have to give it up.’ No—I wanted to devour this woman. Crazy, I remember the obsession more than I remember the woman.”

“Then it ended.”

“In the worst way,” Sharkey said. “And a long time afterward I saw her in San Francisco. We had lunch. She was pinched and disappointed, a little old woman with white hair. I barely made it through the meal. I thought—”

“No magic.”

Now Sharkey raised his eyes to her. “You’ve had that experience?”

“You’ve told me that story before.”