Introduction
Although called a surfboard by Fitzgerald, Judy Jones rides an aquaplane, connected by towrope to the motorboat:

It seems highly unlikely that they could converse (page 51) while Judy Jones was riding the board and boat was travelling at speed.

The page numbers are from the 2013 reprint, the passages describing "surfboard" riding, behind a motor boat, appear on pages 68-69 in the original edition.

A short story,Winter Dreams first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, and was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926.
It is considered one of Fitzgerald's finest stories and is frequently anthologized.
In the Fitzgerald canon, it is considered to be in the Gatsby-cluster, as many of its themes were later expanded upon in his famous novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.
In June 1925, Fitgerald's editor, Max Perkins, wrote that Winter Dreams was "A sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea."

Wikipedia: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-194
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald

Wikipedia: All the Sad Young Men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Sad_Young_Men

Wikipedia: Winter Dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Dreams

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Page 49

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry rustling night of western summer.
Dexter watched from the veranda of the golf cub, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest moon.
Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet.
Dexter put on his bathing suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard.

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming.
Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before  that - songs from 'Chin-Chin' and The Count of Luxembourg and The Chocolate Soldier* - and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened.

The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had played it at a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of proms, and he had stood outside the gymnasium and listened.
The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what happened now.
It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might now again.
 
A low pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of the island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motorboat.
Two white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out behind it and almost immediately the boat was beside him, drowng out the hot tinkle of the piano in the drone of its spray.
Dexter, raising himself on his arms, was aware of a figure standing

Page 50

at the wheel, of two dark eyes regarding him over the lengthning space of water - then the boat had gone by and was sweeping in an immense and purposeless circle of spray round and round in the middle of the lake.
With equal eccentricity one of the circles flattened out and headed back towards the raft.

"Who's that?" she called, shutting off her motor.
She was so near now that Dexter could see her bathing suit, which consisted apparently of pink rompers.

The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted rakishly he was precipitated towards her.
With different degrees of interest they recognized each other.

"Aren't you one of those men we played through this afternoon?" she demanded.
He was.

"Well, do you know how to drive a motorboat?
Because you do I wish you'd drive this one so I can ride on the surfboard behind.
My name is Judy Jones" - she favoured him with an absurb smirk - rather, what tried to be a smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it was not grotesque, it was merely beautiful - "and I live in a house over there on the island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me.
When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock, because he says I'm his ideal."

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the around the lights lake were gleaming.
Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she explained how her boat was driven.
Then she was in the water,swimming to the floating surfboard with a sinuous crawl.
Watching her was without effort to the eye, watching a branch waving or a seagull flying.
Her arms, burnt to butternut, moved sinuously among the dull platinum ripples, elbow appearing first, casting the forearm back with a cadence of falling water, then reaching out and down, stabbing a path ahead.

They moved out into the lake; turning, Dexter saw that she was kneeling on the low rear of the now up-tilted surfboard.

"Go faster," she called, "fast as it'll go."

Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at the bow.
When he looked around again the girl was

Page 51

standing up on the rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted towards the moon.
"Its awful cold," she shouted.
"What's your name?"
He told her.
"Well, why don't you come to dinner tomorrow night?"

His heart turned over like the flywheel of the boat and, for the second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.

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Fitzgerald, F. Scott: All the Sad Young Men Scribner's Sons,New York,1926. Alma Classics, London, 2013.

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