The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  She is returning from work. She wears a business suit and walks barefoot, carrying smart shoes in one hand. She needs the beach, he thinks, maybe more than she knows. He wonders about her name. It is certainly not Polly or Molly or Jill or Francine; it is exotic, like Nadia, or simple in its elegance, like Catherine. He quickly reminds himself that she, too, would ultimately find him turgid.

  She stops and sits on the sand. She watches the red-haired boy surf. The boy launches into a snap-air floater, then drives off the bottom and carves improbable arcs all over the bowl.

  The Surf Guru applauds, quietly, with his fingertips. As he watches the boy paddle back out to deep water, he tries to call up images of a long-ago self. He fails; his memory feels diffused, diffracted, dishonest.

  He leans forward in his chair and pets the dog, asleep at his feet.

  Musings from an orthopedic deck chair

  If the Surf Guru felt like expressing himself verbally on the subject of feelings, he would say, “What I am currently feeling is a peculiar mix of longing and fear, of nostalgia and hope, of power and restraint, of shining and fading.” His voice would tremble for an instant, but he would smooth it out, so as not to let you notice.

  Sunset

  The red-haired boy undoes his leash, tucks his board under one arm, and walks through shallow water toward the girl. He shows her his LoweRider board.

  The Surf Guru imagines the boy telling her that the LoweRider HyTyde fins shred, that they give him more control than he ever dreamed possible. With the boy’s voice—an easy tenor, unroughened by time—echoing through his head, he closes his eyes and conjures up a design for a New & Improved GOO-ROO HydroRip Mark II fin.

  Drainage, Part III

  The numbers do not work out.

  Olivia scans the reports one more time. The numbers still do not work out.

  She pounds the desk. She looks up at Chad with wet, puffy eyes. “I don’t understand,” she says. “It’s as if the money is disappearing.”

  “Yes,” Chad says. “It’s as if.” He sips his martini, then traces his finger around the rim of the glass, coaxing forth a high, quavering tone. With much satisfaction, he recognizes the note as an F-sharp. He has been working on his ear.

  A salt-rimmed glass

  The girl takes pen and paper from her blazer pocket and writes down her phone number. She presses the scrap of paper into the red-haired boy’s hand, and they hold the contact an instant longer than they need to.

  The boy glances up at the dull-green house and notices the older man sitting high up on his deck, hands tented in front of his face. “See that guy?” he says, pointing. “Dude controls the tides.”

  She proposes that they head back into town together, maybe grab a margarita at Imelda’s on the way. This boy, after all, has stories worth hearing.

  The mother of invention

  The Surf Guru closes the sketchbook in which he has calculated the specs of the new fins. He takes a swig of Chianti from the bottle.

  As the sky darkens, he thinks about those kids—that Madonna in a blazer, that boy who surfs LoweRider—and he thanks them. He cannot describe what they have given him, but he knows he could never have received it from the GOO-ROO faithful, with their cash-register receipts and ninety-day warranties and worshipful online reviews.

  Gulls squawk. Wind blows. Waves break. On a boardwalk in the distance, a glowing Ferris wheel spins.

  He stands up and stretches his back. He walks stiffly into the house and looks through his collection of hats for something appropriate. He looks and looks.

  Drainage, Part IV

  Chad and Olivia arrive at the dull-green house to give him the bad news but find the deck chair empty. Olivia fears the worst; she knows his mind has been darkening. She searches the house, terrified of what she might find. Meanwhile, Chad fixes himself a martini, humming the lead line from Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time.”

  “He’s gone,” Olivia shouts from downstairs.

  Also gone: the dog and the wide-brimmed petasos, the hat of nascent defiance.

  Passage

  Underlined in blue in his wine-stained paperback copy of The Compleat Yeats, left on the dinette:

  Winter and summer till old age began

  My circus animals were all on show

  Payoff

  Three weeks later, Olivia receives an envelope in her mailbox at home. It contains the designs for the new fins and a short note, hastily scrawled: It’s all yours now. Just don’t change the dog food. The postmark is smudged, unreadable.

  A fine vintage, Part II

  The girl waits as the boy gets his things together.

  Dinaburg’s Cake

  The man at Kacy’s door was smaller than she’d expected. His voice on the phone had been deep and rich and confident, full of the urgency of business. Now here he was, slightly built and barely up to her nose. Patches of sweat darkened his pink polo shirt under his arms and in a diamond shape over his chest. He thrust out his hand. “Joel Dinaburg,” he said. “That’s Dinaburg, as in dynamo. Father of the bride.”

  She invited him inside, where the air was cool and whispery. “I’m surprised you came alone,” she said. “I usually get to meet the lucky girl.” Their footsteps were silent on the thick hall carpet, which was the color of eggshells.

  “My daughter doesn’t think the cake is important,” he said. “She told me she’d be happy with Pop-Tarts.”

  “That’s cute,” Kacy said, not meaning it.

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. “There are guests at a wedding, and they want cake. So dear old dad has to fly in and spend his weekend tasting cakes all over town.” He patted his forehead dry with a handkerchief. “Thing is, I haven’t found one that I’d feed to my dog. Or my neighbor’s dog, the one that keeps crapping on my azaleas. You’re my last hope.”

  “Good choice,” Kacy said. “I’m the best around, and I don’t mind saying so.”

  “I don’t mind, either, as long as it’s true,” he said.

  In the dining room, seated at the long mahogany table, he explained that the wedding would be there in Austin, not in New York, because his daughter and her fiancé were grad students at U.T. and wanted to keep their own distractions to a minimum. “These kids,” he said, “they think the wedding’s all about them.” Kacy liked his accent. His hard consonants could hammer in nails.

  They looked at her portfolio, a leather-bound book filled with photos of her finest work: wedding cakes rippling with seas of perfect buttercream waves; a trio of croquembouche pyramids atop a sprawling expanse of chocolate; an abstract, sharp-angled sculpture in hazelnut dacquoise; buildings, logos, and faces all reproduced with perfect, sugary accuracy. “Most people want something simple and traditional for weddings,” she said, “and I’m happy to oblige, but when I’m allowed to be creative, I really shine.” She played up her twang. Oblahge. Ah really shahn.

  He pointed to a cake she’d made for the opening of a club at Second and Brazos—a replica of the building’s interior, which was an unruly clash of I-beams, steel cables, and rebar. “Nice. That’s pastillage, right? I never had much luck with pastillage.”

  “You know your stuff.”

  “I was a pastry chef once,” he said. “Before I got into wealth management.”

  Kacy smiled—not her saleswoman’s smile, but one that had risen out of her unsummoned. Here was someone who could appreciate her talent, unlike those Barbie-doll mothers and daughters who waved their Martha Stewart magazines in her face and demanded that she smother their cakes in poured fondant and gum-paste roses! She served him three samples: white genoise punched with amaretto and layered with strawberry cream, Kacy’s Four Chocolate Delight, and spicy carrot cake. “The carrot cake is fresh,” she said. “The others have been frozen. I run a small operation. I can’t keep fresh samples of everything.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what freezing tastes like. I can account for it.”

  Kacy settled into her chair and watch
ed his little plum-shaped face as he ate. He chewed thoughtfully, silently, with his eyes closed. He tilted his head back and worked the taste over in his mouth, his eyelids fluttering in what she hoped was bliss. She sat with her hands in her lap, rubbing her knuckles, twisting her ring, and she waited for him to choose.

  “Excellent,” he said, finally. “All of them. But this one’s the winner.” He tapped a fork on the plate where the Four Chocolate Delight had been.

  “It’s my favorite, too.”

  “Would you be willing to work with me on the design? I have some ideas.”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “You’re the customer.”

  And they talked. They talked about the different shapes they’d woven from spun sugar. They talked about roulades and pistachio nougatines. They talked about how so much depends on the quality of your butter. Before he left, he asked if he could see her kitchen. “Someday,” he said, touching her arm, “I’m going to quit the money world and start a business like yours.” She covered his hand with hers and held it there, just long enough to suggest there is something passing between us. And if she was mistaken, so what? She was a saleswoman. Nothing wrong with a little flirtation to grease the pan of commerce, so to speak. Forty-two years old, and she could still catch a man’s eye when she chose.

  She led Dinaburg into the kitchen, which was all polished white and gleaming silver. Three years before, when she’d decided to go into business for herself, it had been built as an addition to the house, connected to the family kitchen by a set of pocket doors she could close when she needed to work in peace. She had watched as the new kitchen took shape, watched as the raw floor was tiled with perfect white hexagons, as cabinets were installed and industrial refrigerators were fitted into nooks, as ovens and cooling racks were wheeled in, as the last dusty boot print of a contractor was mopped away. The business—Kacy’s Kitchen—took off immediately. Some nights she’d stay up long after Roger and the kids had gone to bed, sitting at the small desk in the corner, planning her schedule and sketching designs until she drifted off to sleep, lost in the room’s warm baritone hum.

  “Hello,” Dinaburg said, looking away from the sixty-pound mixer he’d been admiring. “Who’s this pretty young lady?” Kacy’s sixteen-year-old daughter was standing in the doorway, a ring of car keys swinging from one pudgy, quick-bitten finger. She was wearing her new hat, a white cloche with a silk sunflower on the front. She peered into the kitchen, as if she weren’t allowed to cross the threshold. Which she wasn’t, of course, because of the hair situation. One stray hair in a cake could ruin Kacy’s reputation.

  “Mr. Dinaburg,” Kacy said, “meet my daughter, April.”

  “That’s a beautiful hat,” Dinaburg said.

  April stared at her shoes, as if the compliment had come in a language she didn’t know.

  “What do you say, April?” Kacy prompted.

  “My mom picked it out,” April said.

  “Thank you would be a more ladylike response,” Kacy said.

  April stuffed her hands into the pockets of her baggy jeans, which Kacy thought made her legs look like tree trunks. “I’m going out with Skillet,” she said.

  Skillet. Like some gap-toothed idiot popping out of a cornfield on Hee Haw. Dinaburg probably thought they were all a bunch of hicks. “His real name is William,” Kacy explained. She turned to tell April to be home for dinner, but her daughter was gone. For a big, clumsy girl, she could disappear quickly.

  “Pretty soon you’ll be making a cake for her big day,” Dinaburg said.

  “Oh, we’re not in any hurry,” Kacy said, with the carefully cultivated lightness she used whenever she talked about April. Frankly, with each bride she saw while assembling her cakes on-site, with each pink-cheeked young woman suffering radiantly through jangly nerves and sprayed-stiff Jackie O. hair, she found herself less and less sure that April would ever get married. All she did was mope, mope, mope. Only sixteen, and already her ankles were disappearing in fat. And, of course, the hair. Good Lord, the hair. “No,” Kacy said, “we don’t want to push her.”

  After Dinaburg left for the airport, Kacy poured herself a glass of wine to celebrate. He’d told her he’d call as soon as he got the go-ahead from his wife. A January wedding at the Four Seasons. Five hundred guests, many of them wealthy and important: a software mogul from California; several congressmen; even Rudy Giuliani himself! It could be the break of a lifetime. She’d be called for jobs in New York, Washington, San Francisco. She’d have to hire employees. Down the road, if April matured a little and stopped with the hair strangeness, maybe they could even work together, mother and daughter.

  She drank the wine in three large sips and allowed herself the luxury of stretching out on the couch and closing her eyes. The wine spread warmth inside her, and the central air purred and breathed cool air over her skin. Five minutes of peace. Then back to work: Marisol was coming to clean in the morning, and Kacy had to tidy up. She took the vacuum upstairs into April’s bedroom. She opened the curtains, and golden afternoon sun lit the room. The pink walls were bare—no photos of friends, no posters of pop singers, no prints of horses, nothing. As if April were unwilling to let slip even the tiniest bit of information about who she was.

  She pulled the bed away from the wall and looked behind the headboard. A layer of April’s mouse-brown hair was spread over the baseboard molding and the carpet. Goddamnit. She’d expected this, but that didn’t make it less of a disappointment. She kicked the vacuum on and watched the hair disappear into the nozzle as the motor whined. She cleaned it all up—every strand, as far as she could tell—and pushed the bed back into place.

  Kacy had discovered the hair behind the bed when April was eleven. She’d stared at it for minutes, trying to understand how it had gotten there. There was only one explanation, hard as it was to believe: her daughter would lie in bed and pull her hair out, over and over and over. The image sickened her. It was the kind of behavior you’d expect of a sick dog or a lab rat, not a healthy young girl. She’d cried, then, right there on April’s bed. After a while she decided the best plan was to clean up the mess and keep mum. Her daughter wasn’t a freak. Her daughter could work through problems on her own. And at least you couldn’t see any bald spots.

  Four years later, on the day of her mother’s funeral, she noticed a patch of scalp in the center of April’s head, just above the hairline, as obvious as a third eye. That night, she walked into the bathroom while April was brushing her teeth. She faced her daughter in the mirror, pointed to the bald spot, and said, “Do you want people to see this?” April stared at the reflection of the two of them while toothpaste foam leaked sadly from the corner of her mouth, until finally she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head no. The next day, Kacy bought four hats and left them on April’s bed. She could cover herself up until the hair grew back. It would be their secret, and they’d get through it together, the way Kacy and her own mother had when Kacy was seventeen and got pregnant in the bed of Tommy Odom’s truck. She and Mother went to the doctor together, took care of business, and never spoke about it again.

  April’s hair grew back, but new bald patches had appeared on her head in cycles: at her temple; at her pate; in a ragged circle at the back of her head; then at the temple again, after the hair had grown back in. Kacy was reminded of cattle moving from pasture to pasture, grazing each space barren before moving on. And Roger? He’d never seemed to notice, and for her money, if he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to how his daughter looked, then he didn’t deserve to be part of the solution.

  It’s a stage, Kacy reminded herself. She’ll grow out of it, and later, she’ll be amazed that she ever did this to herself. She went to close the curtains and paused at the window. A hummingbird darted between honeysuckle blossoms. Next door, Mr. Weeks, a bent and sun-scorched old man, was tending his tomatoes. Through the trees, a sliver of Town Lake sparkled in the sun. A world of whites and golds and greens where nothing was hopeless, where no cau
se was lost.

  Kacy was sitting on the living room sofa with her sketchbook open on her lap when Roger arrived home with Kenny, their five-year-old. Before she could ask Kenny how his T-ball game had gone, the boy spotted Mooch, the family beagle, screeched joyfully, and chased the dog down the hallway. It was a typical entrance for Kenny; ever since he’d learned to walk, the dog had of necessity developed quick reflexes and a streak of paranoia. Kacy listened to them run up the stairs, to the dog’s collar jingling and Kenny’s little feet pounding. Roger sat next to her and kissed her hello with sweat-salty lips. His skin was flushed, and he was breathing heavily.

  “I thought the idea was to tire him out,” Kacy said.

  “I did my best,” he said. “I’m no superhero.” He took off his Astros cap and ran his hand through his thinning, sweat-soaked hair. “He did well today. His swing is getting better. He actually hit the ball a few times.”

  “But,” Kacy prompted. Kenny was a sweet kid, but there was usually a but.

  “But he kept running to third base instead of first. I don’t think he was confused. He just seemed to like running the wrong way.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “Could be worse. The Poirier kid wet his pants in right field.”

  There was a thud from upstairs. “Please tell me he didn’t hit his head,” Kacy said. Little accidents were part of life with Kenny, a kid with so much love to give that he usually ran into things in his haste to give it.

  Almost immediately, they heard him start running again. “He’s fine,” Roger said. “Remind me to check the wall, though.”