Fun With Problems (2 page)

Georgie's face fell. "Tomorrow? I thought today. You got my hopes up."

"You're too much of an optimist. Some things can't be done in a day. Make it through the night," Matthews said. "You'll be okay tomorrow."

Matthews watched his client walk out of the chapel. And sure enough, the man called Brand, ignoring his pretty adviser, turned predatory eyes on Georgie Laplace.

The prison-rights people called the place a "zoo," but it was worse, Matthews thought; it was a fish tank, a vivarium. The men in it had been reduced beyond apes; they were devolving into the stuff under the pine needles on the forest floor. Some of them bit. The big ones ate the little ones.

So Matthews had to picture Brand and Laplace back there in the supposedly secure new wing.
Jeopardy!
on the box, Georgie Laplace sitting on his hands, ignoring his baloney sandwich, watching for his enemy. On one side, Brand, precognitive superman; on the other, Georgie Laplace, Baconian villain.

Matthews stuffed his papers in the case and started out. He felt depressed and edgy; angry, too. It was the wretched, dangerous time of day, and he was all the things the program said you should not be. Hungry. Angry. Alone.

The pretty counselor still had her tarot cards spread out on the surface of the barrier. She called after her client.

"Don't forget to take your meds, Mr. Brand."

Brand turned and laughed at her, possessor of a beautiful secret. Matthews shuddered. He stopped in the chapel doorway for a moment and felt something move against his foot. One of the jailhouse cats, a huge gray eunuch, wrapping itself against his calf and ankle. Part Persian, with a fluffy neck and huge stupid eyes, the cat was a survivor of milder, homelier days at the jail. The old main section had looked like the Big House in a Cagney movie, but had been in fact a reasonable place where the sheriff and his family lived with their cats. There were no family accommodations now, and the surviving cats simply made trouble.

Matthews pulled his foot away.

"Beat it," he told the thing. On the whole, he liked cats. "Scram."

A broad-breasted, tough-looking, gray-haired woman came through the door and took the cat in her arms.

"Jackie," she said to it. "Hey, Jackie, watcha doin' in the chapel?" She was wearing a ski outfit and a New England Patriots watch cap. "Watcha doin', huh?"

A hack beside the chapel door said, "Hi, Sister."

"Hiya, Charlie." She stroked the cat under its chin and looked at Matthews. "Hiya, bub. Lawyer, are ya?"

"That's me," Matthews said.

The woman was called Sister Sophia. She was a nun or an ex-nun; Matthews had never got it quite clear. She functioned as a social worker, employed by one of the neighboring service agencies, and as the prison's Catholic chaplain. For her part, she seemed a jolly soul. She had seen him many times before but seemed never to be able to distinguish one lawyer from another.

With the cat slung across her forearm, she looked over the chapel, where the young psychologist was carefully wrapping her tarot deck in a beige silk handkerchief.

"I see something I don't like," the nun said. She carried the cat out through an open metal door, released it into the office area and came back. "I see a lot of superstitious—I don't want to use the S-word!"

"Are you talking to me?" the red-headed therapist asked.

"Yeah. I'm talking to you," the nun said. "What do you think you're doing, missy? Think you're playing cosmic Monopoly there?"

"Do you mean my Tarot Oracle?" the psychologist asked.

"That's right. I don't go for that kind of stuff."

"It's a therapeutic device," the young woman said. "The cards help them to talk about themselves." She turned for support to Matthews, who had been observing her. "It relaxes them."

Matthews thought her voice sounded local; her background was probably fairly humble, otherwise her family would have invested in some improving orthodontics for such a basically pretty girl.

"Maybe she's got something there," he told Sister Sophia, although he saw little point in making Brand crazier than he already was.

The lippy nun looked at Matthews for a moment and turned back to the psychologist.

"That stuff is diabolical superstition," she declared. "It stands between the soul and Higher Power." The gray cat came back through the metal door to listen like a familiar. Unchallenged, the nun grew triumphalist. "Ha! Here she is," she said, nodding toward the psychologist, "supposed to be helping these kids!" She looked up and down the visiting area as though in search of a larger audience. "Tarot cards!" she cried. "Phooey!"

An elderly prisoner with a push broom came out behind the cat.

"We're fucking entitled," the old man said.

"You just watch your language, Bobby," a passing guard told him.

The young woman blushed. "They
are
entitled," she said. "They're entitled to any kind of therapy. And it does not interfere with Higher Power. Insight promotes it." The psychologist was pointing at the crucifix that still stood on the edge of the altar at the near end of the room. "What if I say that's superstition?" Addressing Matthews now, she startled the cat. "I bet it's unconstitutional. I mean, where's the wall of separation?"

"Well," Sister said, outraged and gesturing at the psychologist's cards, "I better not find any of these magic doozies around the plant, because I'll get 'em lifted."

"I'm sure you can do that, Sister," the red-headed psychologist said. "You serve the county instead of the inmates. You're a snitch."

Everyone was horrified.

"Did you hear her?" Sister Sophia asked the men. "Did you hear what she called me?"

In fact, it was generally believed that Sister Sophia—though a good enough egg in her own way—had her own interpretations of the unwritten laws. And that there were certain things better left uncommitted to her discretion.

"Maybe you should apologize to Sister Sophia," the hack said. "Ya went too far there."

"Heat of argument," Matthews said.

Sister Sophia gathered up the cat and fixed them each in turn with a dreadful wounded stare. She was a person completely of the jail, and the accusation was a mortal one. Matthews wondered how well the psychologist understood this. She seemed not to have been around for very long.

Lights flashed. The amplified voice of the administration declared visitations concluded. The hack urged them out.

"Let's go home, folks."

Sister Sophia and Jackie, padding underfoot, retreated up the stone passageway.

"After thirty years!" Sister Sophia said, following the big neutered tom up the dank stone hallway. "Thirty years in this crummy joint!"

"Just a misunderstanding," Matthews said to the young woman. He extended a hand. "Pete Matthews." Her name was Amy Littlefield.

They lingered in the severe dark-wood reception room.

"You know," Matthews said, "your guy is threatening my client."

"Oh," she said. "He's always boasting. He told me the test of a tough guy was to break someone's fingers." A guilty smile appeared on her face and faded immediately. "He's trying in his way to impress me."

On Water Street, outside the jail, it was cold and cheerless. Fine hail rattled against the streetlights and the steps of the jail.

"Impressed?"

"He needs to take his antipsychotics. He doesn't belong in there. I mean," she said, "what can you do?"

"I was wondering that. I'm worried about Georgie."

"Really? Your client looks tough."

"No," Matthews explained. "No. The last time he was in there," Matthews said, "he was underage. I got him out on habeas corpus. Now he thinks I'm a miracle worker."

"Good luck," she said.

They parted ways in the gathering sleet. Matthews took the river sidewalk with his shoulder to the force of the storm off the river. He followed the embankment to the edge of the downtown mill buildings. Then he suddenly turned back and went in the direction that Amy had gone. When she heard him coming up behind her, she stopped and moved back from the sidewalk.

"What did you mean," Matthews asked, "he doesn't belong in there?"

She laughed. "What did I mean? I meant he was crazy. He should be in a hospital."

"Right."

"Did you think I was taking his side? That I thought he was a nice guy?"

"I wasn't sure. You're a social worker."

She shook her head.

He looked up and down the street and she watched. He thought she was about to ask him if he was looking for something.

"So, Amy," he said, "would you like a drink?"

She laughed in a strangely embarrassed way. The quality of her embarrassment was somehow familiar to him.

"I don't drink," she said gaily. As though the statement did not necessarily foreclose sociability.

"Well," he said, "have an
Apfel-schorle!
"

"I don't know what that is."

"You've fallen into the right hands," Matthews said. The young psychologist stopped in her tracks. She shielded the lenses of her glasses from the icy rain with one hand and pulled her plaid scarf over her bright hair. Little hailstones clung to the russet strands like coral clusters, not melting.

"Wait a minute," she said. "I haven't fallen into your hands."

"No," Matthews said. "Of course not." He was wondering whether she thought him too old for her. She did not seem much over thirty-five.

"Oh," she said. There was another slightly embarrassed laugh. Like the first, it made him hopeful.

"I'm not surprised you're a psychologist, Amy."

"Really?" she asked, as they hurried out of the weather. "Why?"

He had only been mocking her. Matthews's life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.

They went to the restaurant where, sober, Matthews had discovered
Apfel-schorle,
mixed apple juice and soda. The place was run by a German hippie who cooked and his
American graduate-student wife. Its ambience was not at all gemütlich, but gray-black Euro-slick. The waitress was a stylish, somber German exchange student.

"Funny," Amy said when they had ordered a
schorle
for her and a Scotch for Matthews, "that they'd still serve such a summer drink in the winter."

Matthews agreed that it was funny.

"Aren't you hungry?" he asked her.

She cast the question off with her peculiar gaiety. Matthews tried to inspect her further without being spotted. Her red hair seemed natural: she had the right watery-blue eyes and freckled skin. In her strong lean face, the long-lashed, achromatic eyes looked wonderfully dramatic. Effects combined to make her seem sensitive, innocent and touchingly plain. Vulnerable.

Across the table, he indulged in some brief speculation about her character and inner life. Her facing down fatuous Sister Sophia was admirable in a way, but it was also self-righteous and overwrought. Pretty ruthless, really, calling the poor woman a snitch. And Amy herself seemed not much smarter than the nun, all fiery bread and roses, the blushing champion of free thought with her fucking wall of separation.

In fact, at that moment Matthews did not want to care what Amy was like. His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught him detachment. The trick was to carry on indifferent to his own feelings and without pity for things like Amy's ditsy vagueness or the neediness she was beginning to display.

"Sure you won't have something stronger?"

She shook her head. Now, he observed, she was all reticence and demurrals—no drink, no dinner, no nothing. Yet, on a certain level, he thought, she acted like someone who wanted to play.

"I liked your standing up to Sister Sophia," Matthews told her when he had his second drink in hand.

She did not seem entirely pleased by his compliment. For a few seconds, she only looked at him without speaking.

"I felt kind of sorry afterward. I shouldn't have called her a snitch."

"I wouldn't worry about it. She's a bully." He watched her fidget unhappily on her big wooden chair. To make any progress it would be necessary to cheer her up. Win her over. "And she really is a snitch."

"Oh, God," said Amy. "That makes it worse."

"Yes, it does," Matthews said. He laughed at her in spite of himself. "Sorry."

"So," she said, "I was being stupid."

"No, no. I admired what you did." He felt a little ashamed of the contrived flattery. He had underestimated her.

"I was being pompous pious."

"You were fine," he said. "I don't think you did anything inappropriate."

"Inappropriate" had become such a useful word, he thought, so redolent of the spirit of the times. Everyone had dumb, disastrous moments and behaved inappropriately. Inappropriate anger led to attacks of bad judgment. Misplaced idealism was also inappropriate. And almost everyone had a little no matter how clean they were.

"Really?" she asked.

"Really," he told her. "Have a drink." Somehow the suggestion turned her around this time. Her state of agitated regret seemed to visibly depart. The look he saw in her pale eyes was suddenly challenging and flirtatious.

"No, I don't think so," she said firmly. The firmness had a pretended note.

The mournful fráulein desired them to stop fiddle-fucking, order dinner or go away. Matthews set her pouting with another drinks order.
Apfel-schorle
for the little lady, another Scotch for himself. Amy went to the Ladies.

When the drinks came, Matthews was reminded of the celebrations at a wedding he had attended the previous weekend. Someone had proposed the toast "
l'chaim
"—"to life." There and then Matthews had decided it was a toast he would never, ever, willingly drink again. Not, of course, that he would make a scene about it. Returned, Amy thoughtfully considered her glass of juice.

"I've quit drinking for a while," she announced. Matthews thought she might be getting admirable again. In fact, he realized, she was offering him a wedge. How much might he pry?