Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  He put it all together very quickly, an instinct for the logic of events. The presenting stance, the abasement.

  So he stood silently beside her. How easily he might have kissed her and held her. The impulse was there. He drew his hand back and whacked her, as hard as she might reasonably require.

  The hit stunned her. She put a hand to her bottom, flushing nicely and trembling very slightly with the sting of it. Then they stood in the moment, on the brink of it. Poised between what? Absurdity and death, eros and thanatos, the screech of lust and Cymbeline? What the boys in the jail called "down-low shit."

  But she did not call him vulgar names or question his sanity or turn in anger and astonishment. She said quietly, "I guess I deserved that."

  "I guess you did," Matthews told her. His voice was stern and cold, though he took her by the hand. So they went to bed and there was some down-low shit. Had he not been distracted by his pleasure, Matthews would have congratulated himself on the soundness of his observations and his quick reaction time.

  He was drunk but so inflamed there was no question of his flunking it. He let her guide him to what she liked; experience told him this was best. You let her guide you to what she liked and sometimes what she liked was a drag but often what she liked was delightful, an unsuspected turn, a novelty, warm and silky if not always very clean. So it was with Amy. Absolutely no rougher than she wanted it, he thought. Long-lasting and thorough.

  All of that, but in the morning, when he came back from the bathroom, she was quietly crying. He had forced her to drink. Why had he done it? Well. He leaned his arm against the lintel of the bedroom door and rested his forehead on it in a posture like grief. Some remorse. Too bad.

  After he had dressed in silence, he stood by her bed. Certainly he would have liked to reach out. Really, to reach out, to say, "I've been there, Amy, love. See how like you I am?" To lay a hand softly on the shoulder of which he had become fond. But she stayed where she was, and he went and left her alone with the first day of the rest of her life. Easy does it. Walking out to tears. So dispiriting.

  He wrote his brief in sobriety the next day and called the deputy master of the jail about his client and Brand.

  "The guy's dangerous. I was talking to his shrink."

  "Tell me about it," said the deputy master.

  He did all the things that duty required, but his first drink came not very late in the day. Happy hour at the Chinese restaurant in the strip mall that observed it early. Not-so-happy hour with the same Scotch he had been drinking. So anyone could see him take the same cup that late last night had killed his love. Atonement, the least he could do.

  He did not call her that day or the next. But he did attend a performance of Cymbeline at the Community Theater. Cymbeline's plot seemed ridiculous on every level he could imagine and he found its serious side impenetrable. The point of the production seemed to be the costumes and sets, which were inspired by Celtic art; there had been an exhibition of ancient Celtic artifacts at the college. The actors' gowns were clasped by torques like daggers, the cloth inset with disks that made them shimmer handsomely. The show had gone in for aromatherapy, perfuming the stage to enhance the sort of altered state it was after.

  Amy as Imogen looked tired and a little blowzy beneath her makeup. He sat a few rows from the stage so as to be able to see her. He felt ashamed of what had happened, and he had to keep reminding himself that she probably could not see him in the darkness. She did apparently forget her lines at several points and fell back on mock Shakespeare. It was hard to tell. But when it came time for Imogen to die or pretend to die or whatever fateful thing it was the disguised Imogen did, Amy was very convincing.

  The play had a few lines that reached him, impressed him enough to occasion a trip to the library.

  'Twas but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing,

  Which the brain makes of fumes: our very eyes

  Are like our judgments blind.

  How true.

  It occurred to him that her flustered reaction to Sister Sophia's prattle about higher powers should have clued him early on. It was the program speaking; the diction of addiction. Himself and Amy and Sister Sophia, all rummies together.

  In a better world, he thought, he might have been her friend. They might well have found themselves together in the place she talked about. On those grim rehab days that passed between hard, clear black lines, they might have had some fun. They might have formed a kind of madhouse friendship. Maybe more than friendship.

  And it was not even impossible for him to imagine them, out in the world, soldiering together toward sobriety's sparkling horizon. They would be serving humanity and their higher power. Holding each other upright in Hampton jail, talking about walls of separation and the Rights of Man. The rights of humankind, to be sure. Talking Cymbeline.

  But as Sister Sophia might have put it, he was her lower power. How could it be otherwise? He was the man whose ex-wife had once said of him, "You don't care whether you even get laid, as long as you can make some woman unhappy." In that capacity he had the goodness not to call her.

  He did see Amy once again before the winter was over.

  It was a small place. She was in a bar, still on the sauce, in the company of a man somewhat older than herself. Naturally, Matthews recognized the boyfriend as a sadistic creep.

  She did not seem to hold anything against Matthews. Of course they were both loaded. Amy and the Community Theater had agreed to forgive each other's limitations. She would be appearing again in the spring. Not Shakespeare this time. Chekhov.

  He wished her well. Seeing her again provided him a rush from a pump, a hit from the daily drip of regret and loss. It was time for a drink.

  There was a toast for everything. It fell to him, buying the round, to propose it. Here's to a shot at nothing? Here's to love in all its infinite variety? Not life—he was not doing that one.

  He touched her glass merrily and said, "Break a leg, Amy."

  Honeymoon

  HE WOKE to the trilling of an island bird in the traveler's palm outside their hotel room. The palm's outline shimmied in the morning sunlight against the aqua curtain. He was lustful and erect. He reached over to touch the young woman he had married.

  Feeling his hand on her skin, she slid into his embrace.

  "What is it?" she asked, laughing.

  "It's me."

  She laughed herself awake, leaned up on her elbow, her head back, blinking in the new light. The filtered glow of day gilded her fair, disordered hair. When she turned to him, her eyes were clear, guileless, happy.

  "Not you, dope. The bird."

  "In these islands," he said, "they call it a divi-divi bird."

  "Divi-divi?" she repeated, in burlesqued Caribbean. "Divi-divi."

  Then she bent to him. He could not stop marveling at the velvet quality of her skin.

  Later, from the bathroom, she called, "And what's the language?"

  "Papiamento."

  She came out naked and drew the curtain back.

  "Oh my God, it's heaven. Heavenly," she turned to tell him, already pulling on her bathing suit. "I'm going to the pool."

  And she was gone, disappeared like a fragrance in motion, young magic. In the sad afterglow of his pleasure, he called his ex-wife.

  "I can't believe you're calling me," she said.

  "I'm on my honeymoon."

  "Well," she said, "this time you get one."

  "I can't do it," he told her. "I'm lonely to the bottom of my soul. I can't cope."

  She began to cry. To cry for him. He wept himself.

  "Scotty," she said, "I tried. I hated it. One thing after another. I let you."

  "I want to come home," he said.

  "I let you," she said. "One goddamn thing after another. I hated you drinking that way. I hated everything, but I never questioned you because I thought, Shit, he loves me. But you didn't."

  "I swear," he said. "I do."

  "And you finally did it, hurrah
for you. And I said to myself, 'He's gone, I'll die, what will I live for?'"

  "I'll come home."

  "What will I live for? He's gone. Oh, poor little me. But now I think I'll live, Tiger. Fucking right," she said. "You wanted to be gone? Get gone. Have a great honeymoon."

  "I'll come home," he said. But she had put the receiver down.

  On their way to the reef, the dive boat cutting through the sparkling water, they saw flying fish.

  "It's heaven," she said, and licked her lips. She was afraid, he saw. It was her first reef dive; she had only just taken up diving.

  He thought she had never looked more beautiful. Golden-haired, tall and brave. Frightened, doing it to prove herself to him.

  "You talked about diving in your class," she said. "The first one I took. And I swore to myself—one day I'll go diving with him. Isn't that awful?"

  Maybe, he thought, she worried that God would punish her for adultery. She had been raised Catholic. The divemaster at the tiller looked at them in turn and smiled.

  She was trembling as they got into their wet suits and struggled with the equipment. Then he saw the little vial of tablets in her hand. Valium. You saw it at every dive site, the Valium pills awash in the scuppers, the unsightly tubes dropped on the coral heads. Couples—one dived and the other sneaked Valium.

  "Give me that," he said softly. "You won't need that. I'll be with you."

  "Oh, shit," she said, "you caught me."

  Neither of them wanted the divemaster to hear. When he was suited up, he slipped the vial into a utility pocket.

  The light of day, the first hour after dawn. Pure as creation, he thought. She took his hand. He kept hearing the other woman's voice, the one whose skin was no longer so smooth, though it had been, twenty-five years before. You wanted to go. Be gone.

  Helping her climb into the gear, her back to him, he raised the vial to his lips and took in as many of the tablets as he could. When her tank was in place, they each took a swallow of fresh water. She held his hand while the dive-master explained the currents. The morning sun found diamonds in the dun, quartz-veined rock around the bay.

  It was a wall dive, and the wall was sublime. Elkhorn and rose coral. There were clouds of damselfish, angels and tang. The brilliant sunshine dappled it all and descended in great columns of light to the blue-gray deep.

  He followed one and moved into the uncolored world of fifteen fathoms. The weight of the air took him down the darkening wall. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his tank. It sank with him in a dream, a gala of bubbles. Beyond pain and shadow, her fair, desired, long-limbed form diminished against the sky.

  Charm City

  AT A RECITAL one autumn evening Frank Bower heard Mahler's Song of the Earth, performed by four young singers. The part that moved him most was the faux Chinese poetry that ended in the poet's rapture. Bower's enjoyment was shadowed by anxiety and some distant unremembered grief. He was transfixed by the singer, a young Korean woman who performed with closed eyes in the posture of a supplicant. "Abschied," she sang. Rapture in spite of all. The music caused him some emotional confusion.

  At the close of the movement the singer held her pose as though she herself did not recognize that the song was over. Bower's gaze settled on a tall woman in a leather coat who appeared to be looking straight at him. Whatever it was she saw so preoccupied her that she did not trouble to applaud after the last movement. He thought she must be a friend of his wife's whom he might have met once and forgotten. When he left the auditorium Bower wandered into the museum's restaurant, a pleasingly simple room all lines and light, done in the futuristic severity of twenty years before. It had one glass wall transparent to the autumnal garden. Outside there were ivy and pines and leaves on the barren earth. It was growing dark but he could make out the shape of a metal structure and hear the sound of falling water. Bower was a technical writer for a software systems company in Towson who had briefly taught classics at Hopkins. He was naturally discontented with his work as with other things.

  At the cafeteria counter he bought a mini-bottle of cabernet along with cheese and slices of apple. He took a table by the window and sat until it cast him his own reflection. He loved music. Mahler's bittersweet notes echoed in his mind's ear, taking their own direction, producing unvoiced melodies. Abschied. It was a Thursday night and the museum was open until eight.

  Finally the wine made him hungry. He put his glasses and jacket on and prepared to go. About to rise, he realized there was a woman standing over his table. She was handsome, long-faced. The phrase "terrible gray eyes," read somewhere, occurred to him. She was forty-five or so, tall and well built. She wore a leather jacket fragrant with the rich piquant smell of hide. It was the woman he had locked eyes with in the auditorium.

  "What would you say," the woman asked, "if I proposed to buy you a drink?"

  He stared. Surely he must know her. She was laughing at his astonishment.

  "Don't strange women often offer to buy you drinks?" She set down the tray she was holding and put wine and another glass before him.

  "That's very kind of you," Bower said. "How can I say no?"

  "I hope you won't. May I sit down?"

  He rose from his chair to invite her. When she was seated across from him, he waited for her to speak. She looked comfortable there, sipping her own wine.

  "But we know each other," Bower asked her, "don't we?"

  "They say it's a small world."

  He thought her smile ambiguous. Maybe a little complacent and remote. Friend or foe? He laughed to please her, though he was troubled and embarrassed.

  "I'm sorry," he said. He was trying to make her sudden presence more amenable to reason. "I can't remember where we met. I'm still trying to place you."

  "What if I don't place? What if I'm a complete stranger?"

  It stopped him. She was not young or trying to appear so. She seemed cultivated, not at all vulgar. In the tweed skirt that decorously showed her figure and the dashing leather jacket, she aroused his dormant lust to capture. At the same time, he noticed she wore a wedding ring.

  "Will you tell me your name?"

  He experienced a certain vague caution. He thought she might have seen that in his eyes, because she laughed at him again. She took a business card from her smart designer bag that identified her simply as Margaret Cerwin, M.D. No specialty was indicated. As she went to buy them another wine, Frank considered her smile. It was intriguing.

  "What sort of physician are you?"

  "Guess."

  "Might you be a psychiatrist?"

  "Very good," she said.

  How had he guessed right? It might have been the knowing smile, distant yet confiding. The restrained availability was ever so slightly chilling. They talked about the concert. As they chatted she conveyed a warm familiarity with Mahler's music and with music in general. She also communicated, discreetly, a certain fascination with Bower.

  "I'm very curious about you," she told him, "my friend."

  He wanted to ask her how he could be her friend, but out of some polite instinct decided not to. In fact, he was at a loss for what to say next.

  "Really?" he finally asked. "I'm not much of a mystery." But he allowed himself to suppose she saw him that way. He was, he knew, a rather handsome fellow, or at least a distinguished-looking one. He sometimes felt the charge of a woman's awareness. And everyone was a mystery. He felt unable to focus his thoughts, something akin to panic. Still, her manner encouraged him toward adventure. All at once he thought that whatever her coming to him might mean, he ought to live it out with her. At least for a while.

  "You're wondering why I accosted you," she said. "I'll tell you why."

  Her stare held him bound and silent.

  "Life is short," she said. "At least it seems that way to me now. When I see someone who attracts me I try to meet them. I try to see what they have to say."

  "Oh," he said. After a moment he asked her, "How do you choose people?"

&nb
sp; "You mean, why you? Because you looked interesting. I watched you listening. I may be a psychiatrist, but I'm a physiognomist too."

  "Really?"

  She smiled and looked away for a moment, then locked on him again. A humorous double take. It was a small felicity but dazzling. Her eyes shone, long-l ashed, seeming barely to contain their own light.

  "No. Not really. I don't think there are real physiognomists anymore. Maybe in China."

  "You're always a step ahead of me."

  "Am I? It's because I'm leading." Her artful arrogance was irritating, but the faint sting was sweet. "Actually, I prefer to be led."

  Her smile troubled him. It was somehow familiar, secretive, imperturbable, maybe a little frosty. What it reminded him of, he realized, was the expression portrayed on very early Greek statuary.

  "I need a ride," she said.

  In the end, they left together, passing through the monumental entrance hall. On the way out they went by a bronze horseman rising from the saddle, brandishing a saber. The plate on its pedestal read ONE OF STUART'S VIRGINIANS. It was a tribute to wealthy, Confederately sympathetic old Baltimore.

  They walked across the chill, darkened parking lot to his gray Camry. Bower opened the passenger door for her. He started the car and they sat looking straight ahead, past the vapor of their breath, visible against the headlights beyond the icing windshield. Bower put his seat belt on, and after a moment she did the same.

  "Where to?" he asked.

  She told him she had taken a taxi to the museum and she lived downtown. He drove them slowly out of the lot. They had driven a block south when he was aware of her fidgeting.