Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

The girl waits as the boy gets his things together.

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 watched 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.