But the other implication, that he hadn’t remembered telling the story before—that shamed him too, as much as his being a bore. He had been quietly proud of his memory. His good memory had made up for his poor education, and no one knew or cared that he’d dropped out of high school. Travel had taught him, and he could recall the peculiar curl in the contour of a barrel and the slope on the face of the wave that drove him to go left on the heavy wave at Teahupo‘o in Tahiti, and the soft lips of his first lover, Nalani, whom he’d kissed in the darkness of an old van after school, and the down, like golden leaf fuzz, in the declivity in the small of her back. He remembered names; his memory for details he’d been told was phenomenal. He often said, “I forget nothing” or “I am cursed with total recall,” when he felt his head was buzzing with trivia, his whole life and all its sounds and images crowding his brain. Some memories he would have been happy to delete, many things he wished to forget—scenes and accusations that visited him at night—but he was burdened with them.

Or so he thought. Now it seemed that by some obscure puncture his memory was leaking, as Olive was reminding him, and that he had no access anymore to his memory. He associated the smiling droning bore with the celebrities he’d known. One characteristic of the celebrity—so many of them idolizing surfers—was that he or she was on familiar, even intimate terms with the whole world.

That was the oddity of fame, not that everyone seemed to know you but that you were always confiding to strangers, speaking in general, everyone a potential ally or well-wisher, as though on a lifelong campaign, the guest of honor at every table, the brightest light at every party, always the talker among rapt admiring faces—it seemed that way. You were everyone’s friend, holding conversations with the multitudes, and so you had no real friends, but that didn’t matter, because the intensity of one intimate friend, or a loving wife, was an obstacle to talking to the world. The world was your friend.

The surfer celebrity was the sort of hero who strode into a room, smiling, with confident eyes, and a hush fell, and the celebrity spoke to the room and did not linger; after the talk—no questions—the celebrity departed. Because of being known so well as a power figure, the celebrity was like a visiting friend—his history in everyone’s mind, no introduction needed, and he launched into his talk so self-assuredly that it could pass for the authority of preaching. No one answered back, there was no defiance or disrespect; the celebrity’s presence indicated agreement, since he was the superior elder brother, not to be challenged.