Fun With Problems (3 page)

"I think you should make an exception this evening. Really," he said. "You've been fighting the good fight." The words were ill chosen, he knew that. It was hard to stop making fun of her. The devil drove him. He labored to recoup. "I mean, you want to forget all that, right?"

"Well," she said, in the manner of one about to explain thoroughly, "see, I've been doing a play."

"A play?"

Amy told him about her second career. "I went to New York for a year," she said. "I did some off-off-Broadway. I almost got Shakespeare in the Park."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding. It would have been fun."

"Shakespeare in the Park? Sounds like fun."

"But it was almost, right? No cigar."

A different Amy. Animation. Still, though, tinged with regret. "Anyway," Amy said, "I did some great stuff. Odets. Do you know Clifford Odets?"

"Sure.
Waiting for Lefty.
"

"We didn't do that. We did two minor short plays. And we did a dramatic reading of
John Brown's Body
"

"Really? Who were you?"

"Don't tease me," she said. "Don't tease me about my year in New York."

"I wouldn't," Matthews said, because he had not been. "I think it's great."

"Well, not so great," she said, "because it's over and I have to make a living. And clinical psych is what I do."

"You do it very effectively."

"Yeah, sure," she said. It turned out she was not drinking because she thought alcohol interfered with remembering her lines. "I blank. I go up. You know, forget the cue and the line."

"I see."

"Drinking gives you these glitches," she said. For a moment, she put the tip of her tongue to her upper lip and looked around the place. There was one other occupied table. Two youngish faculty couples were finishing their chocolate cake. "I don't know, maybe it's just a superstition."

"I bet it is. What play are you doing?"

"
Cymbeline.
It's Shakespeare."

"I'm not very familiar with it."

"No, it's not often performed. It's kind of ridiculous on the level of plot. But it has its moments."

"Why don't you join me," Matthews said. "Have a drink. And we'll have something to eat."

"Do I have to?" she asked.

Afterward, he would have to ask himself why he had pressed her so hard. As though it were the senior prom and she were a high school virgin he wanted to addle with fruit wine. Asking him that way, she had seemed so gravely passive, supine, absurd. Asking for it. She would drink if he made her. So he did.

"Definitely."

"And what shall I drink?"

"What do you like?"

"I like margaritas," she said.

So they ordered her Teutonic margaritas, of which she consumed quite a few, straight up with salt, and a weight fell, finally, from her pretty shoulders. She told him about
Cymbeline,
which, on the level of plot,
did
sound ridiculous. They laughed about that. But when she professed to discover the other levels, they grew properly serious. She had plainly thought a lot about it, and about her character, named Imogen, an apparently ridiculous figure.

"And what's strange," she said, "is to come from rehearsal, to come from Shakespeare to the life of all these young community males in the jail."

For a moment, he did not know what she was talking about. "Don't say things like 'young community males,'" he told her. "Don't use jargon."

She got huffy, blushed, and withdrew for a while. Ironic, because it was one thing said to her in friendship.

She lived in Hampton's old downtown, in what had been an office building but was now living space for a variety of the place's ambiguously connected people. "Nontraditional households" was how she would have put it.

"There's nothing to drink," she told him. "I don't keep it."

So they made a detour to the package store in the square to get Scotch, tequila and cheap margarita mix.

Her apartment had high ceilings and many windows adorned with plants. He thought that in the daytime it must have lots of light. On one wall there were theater posters and a few photographs of Amy in costume. He inspected them while, staggering ever so slightly, she went to change clothes.

In the kitchen, he worked loose her ice trays and made sloppy, overboozy drinks. She came back in gray-green tights with a sort of short, hooded burnous a shade lighter. Her glasses had lightly tinted lenses; she had let her hair down. They sat one cushion apart on an outsized brown leather sofa that looked as though it had come from some dean's office at the local college.

Settled on the sofa, she did a little snug wiggle.

"Oh, I like leather." She leaned her head back happily, then turned to him. "But it makes you sweat."

That should have been the moment, but he was distracted
by drink. He got anecdotal, told some favorite jailhouse horror stories at which they could laugh comradely progressive laughter. Not too many. The subject was too depressing, and he did not want to spoil things. Amy began to tell stories about some other place, a place she did not identify. A hospital? He paid closer attention.

"So there was a woman at this place where I was."

"What place?"

"A woman at this place," Amy went on, "but it wasn't a woman at this place."

"No?"

"No," Amy said. "It was me. It was"—she corrected herself with a humorous theatrical flourish. "It was I. It was a spa, right? A really expensive health spa. Ever been to one?" she asked him.

"Yes. Once."

She laughed at him, in the bag, unstoppable.

"I'm not talking about a drunk farm. Although I've been to those too, I have to tell you."

"I have to tell you," he said, "I have too."

"But this," Amy said, "the setting of our story, was a very fancy desert health spa." She stopped and looked at him as if making sure she was among friends. Matthews did his best. "I was going to tell this as somebody else's story. But it was me."

"I see."

"Well," Amy said, "at this really expensive health spa there was a clairvoyant? The clairvoyant picked me. Me, right? He read my thoughts—that was the number."

His instinct was to stop her. A lawyerly impulse. A human one? He didn't.

"And the clairvoyant revealed to me, and to everybody in the fancy spa, around the beautiful fire in the evening, the clairvoyant revealed to me that there were two men in my life. And that was right. It was God's truth. I had a husband who was not a very nice man. And I had a lover who, it turned out, was not so absolutely great either. As it turned out."

Her free hand, the one not holding the drink, began to tremble a little. As much as he wanted to, Matthews did not put out his own hand to steady it.

"So, when I went home, the spa gave me a record of my session with the clairvoyant. A recording—a tape, a CD, I don't know. And would you believe I forgot all about it? I forgot it utterly. Until—"

It was Amy's guessing game. She teased, grinning, tears beginning.

"Until your old man found it," Matthews said.

She pointed her index finger, bingo, at him.

"Until he found it. The prick. Excuse me. Until he found it. Whereupon he divorced me."

"I see."

"And in fact I began to drink. And in fact I later went to ... the other sort of place you mean." She looked closely at him again. "I might have known you there."

"Yes, you might," he said, "but actually no."

"By then, my friend—" She stopped herself. "Ah, we're talking me, aren't we? Not my made-up friend."

"We're talking first-person."

"After the divorce, I needed a hospital, not a health spa. Get it?"

"Yes," he said. "I understand. I've been there."

"Of course," she said, "you've been there."

"Twice," Matthews said. "For varying lengths of stay."

"You and me," Amy said. "It might even have been the same place."

"That it might."

Amy stood up and leaned on the arm of her leather sofa.

"Drinking makes me want to smoke," she said. He looked up at her; leaning, she had cocked a hip in a kind of Attic stance, lifting the hem of the top she wore, turned away from him, searching for all the cigarettes in the world to smoke at once. Turned away but, as it were, presenting.

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.