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didn’t see her little boat coming out from behind the floathouse. I almost ran her down. My boom slammed her shrouds and knocked her over. She clutched the gunwales, but had the good sense to leap to the high side to right her boat. There was fear in her eyes, even more beguiling than before. I veered hard short of the dock and had to go back out and try again. The yacht’s skiff rushed out and towed her home.
     
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING the cabin boy rowed over as soon as he saw me on deck. The lady sent profound apologies. He handed me an envelope with much too generous a payment for the half day’s work of rigging. Then, just as he pulled away, he looked up and said, “The lady would like to know if you could teach her how to sail.”
    We began the next day at ten. I must say I owe God an immeasurable favor. Can you imagine being with her in a small boat, a sailboat she barely knew? Anywhere else I would have been at her mercy—on the street corner, I couldn’t think of a word to say—but here, it was my world. I knew every damned thing: a hundred names, a thousand tricks, how to get her into danger and how to get her out. In a sailing dinghy at sea, she was mine.
    I rowed over with enormous pulls, then long glides—childish, I know—and reached the yacht in a dozen pulls, each so forceful that I almost ripped the oarlocks out of the wood. She arrived in a thin dress, no sleeves; just her bare arms glowing like some goddess statue in the sun. We pushed off.
    There was no wind near the yacht, so I skulled with the rudder to get us away. “No broken masts today,” she said with a laugh.
    “You never know until the day is over.”
    When we were out of hearing distance of the yacht, I stopped. She was sitting on a narrow fore-and-aft seat to starboard, I in the stern-to-port at the helm. Her eyes were attentive.
    “Everything on a sailboat has a particular name,” I said. “Do you know them?”
    “Try me.”
    “What’s this?”
    “That’s the rope that you pull to tighten the little sail up in the pointy end.”
    “Jib sheet.”
    She laughed out loud. “You’re kidding.”
    “No. Jib sheet.”
    “What’s wrong with ‘the rope that you pull to tighten the little sail up in the pointy end’?”
    “When we’re in a typhoon, and the mast is about to break and crush us, which do you think more likely to save our lives, me yelling: ‘Slack jib sheet!’ or ‘Would you mind unraveling the loops from the little horns and letting out a foot or so of the rope you pull to tighten the little sail in the pointy end?”
    She laughed heartily. “Touché.”
    “We’ll do the names another time,” I said. “Now. At sea only one thing counts: the wind. You always need to know where it’s coming from. Do you understand?”
    “Yes,” she said, but looked as if the word “wind” had never crossed her mind.
    “Where is it now? Can you tell?”
    “There is no wind,” she said, after surveying the bay.
    “There is almost always some. Land people don’t sense it, but there’s some.”
    She looked at me with hurt and admiration. I turned away. “Look at the water there. It’s just a little darker. Not perfectly reflecting the light. A breath of air. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it.”
    I thought she turned away from me, but she looked around and pointed with much enthusiasm. “And there.”
    It was there, all right, a breath pushing a shadow over the sea.
    “Very good,” I said. She turned back to me, basking in her triumph. I looked her in the eye. “Lift up your hair,” I said.
    She blushed. Her long hair draped over her shoulders, and she touched it, slightly unsure. The gust of wind reached us then and tossed her hair like a veil across her face. “There’s a spot on your body,” I said softly. But she pushed the hair off her face and turned her head away. “The back of your neck. That’s the one spot that always feels the wind.”
    She gathered her hair and raised