The Drowned Man at Sanderlings

Down the beach, carrying a surfboard under his arm and wearing a rubber suit, a young man was making for the water. His suit was green and his board was yellow, and he looked to Mason like the flag of Brazil. He walked into the surf.

Left of where the boarder had gone in, a single fisherman was rigging up. He was standing just within the wash where the sea ran out on the sand. He began to cast, reaching for the trough behind the breakers.

As the sun went down, there would be other fishermen, but the boarder would remain alone. What did he think he was doing? You don't board at night. You don't board alone. But, Mason said, the boarders make it on skill. They make it on skill, and some of them make it on looks. They don't make it on brains.

Mason watched the boarder, fifty yards out but still walking, pushing his board before him. He took a wave and launched, lying on the board, paddling with his arms, driving straight out toward the mouth of the little bay. Mason turned and started up the steep path toward Sanderlings. He could see Ian on the side porch of the old house with a woman wearing a swimsuit. That would be the weekend guest. Mason reached the top of the path where the lawn began. Ian saw him from the porch and waved. Mason raised his hand. He felt for the pager on his belt and turned it off. Then he turned it on again.

"Some girl," Mason's sister had said on the telephone. "Some young girl he picked up. How should I know?"

"You don't mean to say you're going?" Mason's wife had said earlier, as he shaved.

"Sure," said Mason. "He asked us, didn't he?"

"He did," Emily said. "Yes, he did. But that doesn't mean we, it doesn't mean you, have to go, does it? You act as though it was no big deal."

"Is it a big deal?" Mason asked her. Emily was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, behind him. They looked at each other in the bathroom mirror. Mason saw Emily raise her eyebrows.

"Oh, I guess not," said Emily. "Just an informal dinner, right? A quiet evening with old friends. Drinks. Sit around. Break bread with Ian and his new piece of ass? No problem."

"You're sure you wouldn't like to join us?" Mason said.

"I don't think so," said Emily.

To have a famous parent is hard. To have a famous child is fun. To have a famous brother is puzzling. To have a famous brother-in-law is another kind of thing. It's subtle. It changes. The difference between a famous brother-in-law and the opaque mass of famous people nearly vanishes—but never quite. Never quite, and in Mason's case there was added the fact that Ian was his oldest friend, his friend since distant years at their boarding school, miserable and beloved.

Who predicted that Ian, at fourteen weighing ninety pounds and hollow-chested, would in youth be accounted beautiful and in middle age something better than beautiful, something rarer: handsome, experienced, adult? Who imagined that Ian, shy and solitary, would discover a gift for acting—or, if not for acting, precisely, then for graceful presence, for being at ease in the scene? Who suspected that Ian, the son of a penniless minister in a little town in Kansas, would become rich and generous, prodigal, buying by the job lot automobiles, boats, houses, friends, wives, pieces of ass? Who conceived, for the unpromising, unremembered, and almost invisible boy who was Ian Stock, this destiny?

I did, Mason cried. I did.

"Old Mace," said Ian as Mason came up the steps onto the porch. "You're looking well." They shook hands. "You know Gerry," said Ian.

"I don't think so," Mason said. A man he hadn't seen from the beach rose from a chair set back against the house in the shade. He was...