“When?” He looked bewildered, as though she’d tricked him into talking.

“The thrill is gone. No magic.”

“So you know?”

“You left out the part where she was going to drown herself in your swimming pool.”

“Motel swimming pool. I told you that?”

“The cure for an unhappy love affair, ‘Wait twenty years.’ That’s what you said.”

“Sunny Jim” Olive sometimes called him, and had often said that his great surfer smile and his beautiful teeth and sunburned and satisfied face, even the scar on his cheek from the old dog bite, showed he didn’t worry—she meant he didn’t reflect, but that seemed like an accusation. He would have said himself that he wasn’t a worrier and not reflective but active. All he wished for were sunny days and big waves.

“I’m not into sitting around, man,” he’d said. But he was sitting now, and in his enforced idleness, resting his back, allowing his sore foot to heal, he became reflective, remembering vivid images rather than stretches of time that involved his saying, “And then . . . and then . . . ,” which he hated.

“I had two boards in South Africa. I asked the African guy who drove me to the beach to help me with the second one. He says to me, ‘I don’t carry.’”

Olive said, “Sometimes a whole year or a whole trip or a whole relationship is summed up in an image, or an injury, or a something someone says. ‘I don’t carry.’”

“One thing that stands for everything.”

“But you told me about that too. Your African driver. It was Jeffreys Bay.”

His fingers flew to his cheek as though he’d been slapped. He’d told her those stories before? It was bad enough to repeat yourself and be boring, but the look on Olive’s face was one of pity, as though she was hearing an old man blab about the past. Repetition was the trait of the bore, and it was lazy-minded, arising from indifference, or contempt: to the bore, all listeners were the same, and repeating a story meant that it didn’t matter whom he was telling it to, filling the air with his talk was a sort of compulsion, the bore being above all an impatient listener, whether a celebrity bore or a hero bore.