We paddled out and joined the two surfers already enjoying the roping lefts. We traded waves, one after the other, and as the day wore on, the sun poked weakly through the sky, adding a soft edge to the billowing gray clouds. The wind began to slacken and the waves glassed off, creating perfect, gray-green cylinders. I sat on the shoulder and watched as Bill took off impossibly late on a huge set wave. He dropped in, free-falling through the air before he set his rail as the wave jacked up behind him. Jamming his left arm into the wave face as a sort of brake, he stalled slightly as the wave enveloped him, then let go, shifted his weight slightly forward and cruised deftly through the tube to the shoulder. A picture of perfect timing in trim, he eased his little 6'2" potato chip off the edge of the wave and paddled up to me, his face a crooked grin.

“One more wave?” he asked.
“Sure. Then we gotta go.”

We paddled back out to the line-up and each caught two more waves, my last one close to perfect. I took off way outside on an overhead set wave, faded to the right, before turning hard left to slide my old G&S nine-footer into the pocket. My hand skipped across the surface of the wave as I cross-stepped to the nose and

then crouched down, letting what was left of the wave barrel over my head. I rode it all the way into the shallows and stepped off onto the sand.

“Pretty good, huh?” I asked him.
“Yeah, not too bad, for New York,” he said.

When we stopped into The Fin for a beer when he told me about her.

“I met this girl when I was in Oz, and she’s, umm . . . .” he paused. “She’s perfect, Jim. I mean she’s hot, totally hot, but not like Tre.”
“Good.” Teresa, his last girlfriend I’d met was hot, too, and dumb as a bag of hammers.
“ I’m totally in love with her. With Tre it was always, like, whatever. Just fucking, you know? She was just hot and dumb. No, man, this girl is smart. Really smart. She’s in med school and she reads a lot. Novels and shit. She loves American fiction. Hemingway, Carver, shit, she even knows about guys like T.C. Boyle and Harry Crews. We just really connected. I met her on the west coast of Australia and we traveled across the country together. Then she came with me to Indo and New Zealand before she had to go back.”
“Back where?”
“Well, that’s sort of the problem. Jim. She’s Norwegian.”
“Yeah? Norway seems OK. A little cold, but they have waves, I hear.”
“She lives in Denmark.”
“D’Oh. I hear its kind of like Ohio.”
“Yeah, well that’s the problem. Who the fuck wants to live in Ohio, man. I mean what the fuck am I gonna do there? I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak the language. Do you know they have, like, six extra letters in their alphabet? How am I gonna learn how to speak the language when I gotta re-learn the alphabet? What the hell am I gonna do there, anyway?”
“I don’t know man. I mean, I always envied your situation. You were living out there in Cali, doing whatever you pleased. You could come and go at your leisure. You financed your lifestyle by parking cars and selling buds, fer chrissakes. Nobody has her hooks in you. Nobody tells you where or when or for how long you can do something. I mean, shit, we gotta finish these drinks and get going or Laura’s gonna be standing at the door, arms crossed, tapping her foot when we get home. Do you really love this girl? Because, and I don’t care how cool you think she is, the same thing that happens to me everytime I want to do something without her, is going to happen to you. You have to be willing to accept that and add to it the fact that you’ll be living in Belgium.”
“Denmark.”
“Denmark, Belgium. Whatever. You know what I mean. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m happy where I am, but surfing was just never as important to me as it is to you. I get out now a couple times a month, and that’s fine. I’ve accepted that fact and I realize that I will never get any better. You, on the other hand, were ripping out there.”
“I had more fun surfing with you this afternoon than I did on almost this whole trip. I’ve come to a realization, Jim, that it doesn’t really matter. I mean, my whole life was surfing. I lived it and breathed it out there. Driving around endlessly looking for spots that were perfect. Working the lineup, maximizing wave counts. What the hell for? It stopped being fun. Even on the trip, I mean, don’t get me wrong, surfing places like J-bay and Margaret River was amazing, but until I met Mette, it all just seemed kind of blase, you know? Like I was going through the motions. I guess, I don’t know . . . . I guess I want what you have.”

I pull into the international arrivals gate at Kennedy and see Bill, his red hair easy to spot, as always, leaning against a sign. A big grin spreads across his face when he sees my truck. He looks a little heavier around the middle.

“Denmark’s been treating you well, I see”
“Those people love to drink, man” he says.
“So how’s it been? You jonesin’ for surf or what?”
“You know it. I’ve surfed twice in the last year. Once in Norway, which was a trip, and once in Madeira, on our honeymoon.”
“You surfed on your honeymoon?”
“If I recall, maestro, you dragged Laura to freakin’ Portugal on your honeymoon just so you could get some waves. It was on your recommendation, in fact, that we went to Madeira.”
Oh. Right. So . . . . You ready to surf?”

Once again, his arrival in the fall coincides with a good swell. This time he doesn’t ask about the boards on the roof, since he called me to make plans for the pick up and told me to grab one for him. He knows. As we head out toward Long Beach he fills me in on life as a married ex-pat living in Denmark and, for the first time since I’ve known him, he actually sounds happy.