Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  Things improved slightly. For instance, he was able, catching Otis in one of her wayward moods, to engineer a reconciliation of sorts. The fact was he had missed her unruly companionship, and he felt grateful and meanly satisfied to conduct a ragged liaison with her. Lying beside her on what had once been his living room floor was both exhilarating and distressing. To creep with the stealth of a burglar out of what had been his own natural space was a sordid humiliation. Sometimes he made up his mind to leave the job and the town and the proximity of Otis altogether, but necessity kept him bound. Sitting in ambush on that fateful winter night had nourished his taste for single-malts, which he went on buying and drinking for the length of time he could still afford them. Eventually he found other, less costly stimulants. In the years following his divorce from Otis, his drinking and doping increased, along with his tendency toward anger and melancholy. He occasionally encountered his rival in town and had to endure Prosser's fear and deference, a craven, insolent submission that might well be taken for sympathy. Plainly, Duffy thought, when the boards of Prosser's usurped house creaked in the night he must imagine—whatever the literal facts had been—that Duffy and his crossbow had finally come for him.

  As time passed, Duffy increasingly took up the academic craft lecture circuit to escape the heart of the dark New England winter. Winter was hardest for him, the season of his sorrows, and it was especially hard when he passed what had been his own house, swathed in its warm hibernal glow. At the beginning of one winter break, with homely winter celebrations of goodwill thickening the air, Duffy drove to the airport by a route avoiding the house he had shared with Otis.

  He was headed for Pahoochee State University on the Gulf of Mexico, via a change of planes in Atlanta. Years before, Duffy had looked forward to these escapes to what had been, then, almost exotic parts of the country. Lately, and on this trip in particular, he became increasingly distressed. He drank Scotch from his concealed flask in the lavatory, coming and going under the toad-eyed inspection of the chief flight attendant. Wary, he gave her no more provocation than a cheery countenance.

  "Is everything all right, sir?" she asked him on his fourth trip. Hoping, he supposed, that in answer he would roll in the crumb-speckled aisle and foam at the mouth, curse God and die.

  "Outstanding," Duffy told her.

  As the aircraft, jammed to within a single breathing expanse of claustrophobia, swooped low over alligator-infested pastel swamp, Duffy was already thinking with loathing of the subject of his Pahoochee lecture. Contemporary American painting, more or less, and how it had got that way. What flashed through his mind unbidden was the late works, the fulsome tropical mannerism, of Joseph Stella—the poison-colored palmettos, the mercury-colored syphilitic sunsets. The interior of the plane on landing seemed so impacted with flesh that it would have required only one neurasthenic's psychic break to be transformed into a thrashing tube of terror, a panic-driven, southbound rat king of tourists headed for the offshore ooze.

  By the time Duffy arrived at his hotel, a swollen country fatboy of a sun was sliding under soupy ripples into the Gulf. All along the shore, lights were coming on in the conglomeration of entertainments that had piled onto the reeking mudflat between the interstate highway and the beach. Squat paddlewheeled casinos were fast to what remained of piers and fish houses—faux bateaux, they might say—in keeping with the phony Cajun ambience where the good times rolled and roiled. Lap-dance joints and triple-X fuckbook stores abutted ten-story hotels jimmied into one of the four-story barracks buildings left behind by the Navy. Layers of stuccoed box bungalows leaned on thin concrete walls lit by tiki torches, enclosing tin pastel swimming pools. As far as the point at the end of Atocha Bay, this swirl of notional construction followed the curve of the coast and the highway. It was all as polymorphous and promiscuous as the contents of a shopping cart, as tightly packed and equally replete with bright plastic. There were all sorts of illuminations—beguiling digital billboards, flashing bulbs and bright fifties neon. In the trailer parks people had wound strings of Christmas lights.

  Duffy leaned on the railing of his room's jerry-built balcony, risking death, defying it. This particular expedition, he thought, had perhaps been a mistake.

  To provide an exoticism to match the tiki torches, palm trees had been planted along the noxious interstate—new ones every year, he happened to know, to replace the ones poisoned by fumes and salt. Their fronds hung despairingly in nets of Spanish moss or stiffened in the slack wind. The doomed palms with their spiky crowns reminded Duffy of a crucifixion. Insolent posters were affixed to their suffering trunks with cruel nails the size of industrial staples, threatening passersby with the judgment of Christ. Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the doomed natural ones. The tiki-torch fuel, together with road stench and beach barbecue pits, gave it all the aroma of a day-old plane crash.

  It was all too much for Duffy. He considered climbing over the rail and splattering himself on the hotel marquee or at least vomiting into the parking lot. Instead he wept. There was nothing he hated so much as to be where he was among the dirty-smelling rivulets of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Very shortly, as he knew, the phone would ring and they would come for him. He was dining that evening before his reading with a professor from the university. And also, it seemed, with the professor's entire overextended family, wife, children, in-laws, all visiting from Mrs. Professor's homeland, wherever that was, a land of healthy palm trees and subsisting folk. The professor had proposed to bring them all. Would it be all right? Sure, Professor, Duffy had assured him. A pleasure!

  Before going out, he cut himself on the cord that secured the lock of the minibar, scattering small gouts of blood on the carpet and his television screen. He tried to ease the flow with cold water from the bathroom tap, but the tiny wound kept bleeding. He bent to drink from the faucet; the water tasted of baitfish and the Confederate dead. In desperation he wrapped a wad of toilet paper over his finger. Finally, as he knew it must, his telephone rang. He cringed. In desperation he took a sip from his liter of booze. Nothing good came of it, neither comfort nor light.

  "Hi, Jim," the voice on the phone said. "Hank Rind down here. Got the folks with me."

  At first Duffy could make no sense of it. But of course, Professor Rind was the man from Pahoochee State University, where he had come to lecture. He had signed his letter "Henry Rind, Head."

  "Hello there," Duffy said.

  "We're all here!" Rind said. "Can we come up?"

  "Up?"

  "Up to your room, Jim. The boys would love to see the water. They like to ride the elevator too."

  Duffy was silent.

  "No, really," Rind said. "They like to look out the window."

  "Maybe they'd like it," Duffy said, "if I threw them out the fucking window. How many are there?"

  There was no answer for a moment. Then Rind said in a merry voice, "Only two, ha ha."

  Duffy was frightened by the force and vividness of his imaginings. He envisioned the professor's children, although he had never seen them. He saw himself pitching them over the balcony to descend into the hellish night, like bales of tea into Boston harbor. The image was so congenial it seized his troubled mind with a maniac's grip. He realized he had spoken inappropriately.

  "Just a bad joke, Hank. A dumb gag. Trying to be funny again, you know?"

  "Oh, I do, Jim. So what floor is it again?"

  The place was of Moloch, Duffy thought, and deserved a rain of screaming children to incarnadine the tin pool.

  "Don't move," Duffy said. "I'm not dressed. Stay where you are." He hung up and hurried to the bathroom, splashed some polluted tap water on his face and wrapped more toilet paper around his bleeding finger.

  The narrow hallway outside was lined with trays of spoiling food that rested in front of many of the room doors. Duffy struggled with claustrophobia in the mirrored elevator. To accompany passengers on
its funereal descent, it played them the Pahoochee State fight song.

  At the lobby, the elevator doors opened with a plink on the Rinds. The professor was tall, pale and sneaky-looking. His wife, like his Otis another professor, was outrageously beautiful, silken-haired, almond-eyed, ivory-skinned. He had heard she came from an ex-Soviet autonomous zone beyond the Artaxes, where Nestorians and Yezidis worshiped Gnostic angels. Her name was Eudoxia; her smile was polite but disappointing. With the couple were Eudoxia's parents, a sharp-faced, eager old man and his lady, withered and fatigued. The two boys who enjoyed vistas were round-faced and lustrous-eyed, and Duffy thought one was making insolent faces at him.

  "Say hi to our guest, guys," the children's father said. The children said nothing.

  "Hello, everyone," Duffy told them.

  They all went into the Petrel's Perch, which was the name of the hotel's nautically themed restaurant. The two young Rinds fought silently but viciously over chairs, each one landing masked tae kwon do strikes. The professor and his wife took seats at opposite ends of a rectangular table. Duffy eased himself in between their parents. The old pair conversed past him in French, which they seemed to be certain he would not understand. It was so.

  "A pleasant trip?" the professor's wife asked Duffy. "One hopes?"

  "Very nice," Duffy said, sniffing Eudoxia's sandalwood scent. Only ex-Soviets were so haughty and serene.

  "Tell Mr. Duffy where you saw his work, Tanko," Rind urged his elder son.

  "In Copenhagen, I think." The boy smirked. "It was hot. Like deliberately nutso," he added, glancing mischievously at his mother. Her disapproving frown half concealed delight in his insolence.

  "It reminded us all of the German expressionists," Hank Rind hastened to say. "Like Otto Dix, maybe."

  Duffy stared at him.

  "Otto Dix?" He dutifully tried to remember the painting that had been to the Louisiana Gallery in Copenhagen. "Otto fucking Dix?"

  "Sort of," Rind said uneasily. "Expressionist paratroopers attacking a woman. Blue sky, clouds. Soldiers in green cammies. Nude woman."

  Antiwar period, Duffy thought. Ghastly stuff, if he said so himself.

  "Of its time. Great stuff."

  Duffy thanked him as courteously as he could manage.

  "To leave a mark in history is good," said the senior Rind, the dignified arrogant old man.

  "Damn right," Hank Rind said.

  The children stopped shoving each other under their mother's gaze. Duffy ordered whiskey, and the thin waitress told them no alcohol could be ordered. Sunday in Pahoochee. Duffy was upset. Regardless, he had brought his flask from the plane. When the waitress's back was turned he took a slug from it, ignoring the Rinds. Although he was not quite aware of it, he had passed an undetectable line between inebriation and riot.

  "Ah, fuck me," said Duffy the artist.

  The children stared at him. The adults studied their kidney-shaped menus. The waitress, apparently a hard-living old salt, waited.

  "Do you serve crystal on Sunday?" Duffy asked her. She seemed amused; it was a pretty tough town. "Sure," she said. "No alcohol, though." She turned and walked away.

  "What is crystal?" the grandmother asked.

  "It's what we use instead of betel nut," Duffy told her. "A related substance."

  The émigré Rinds looked blank but were sensitive enough to know they had received a deeply wrong answer. Duffy, distracted, was picturing Eudoxia Rind nude and crushed by roses for her beliefs. Something about her name.

  A new waitress appeared, a virtual child, wearing a little blue badge that said "Staci." Duffy noticed that the menu made much of crab. Crab salad merely, but there were happy crab caricatures with antennae and puns about crabs and claws and Claude and on and on. He began pouring whiskey from the flask into his water glass, holding them under the table. Staci came back and caught him but stayed gamely cool. Thinking somehow to reward her discretion, Duffy ordered the advertised crab salad. The Rinds ordered the soup. When the child returned she carried a tray lined with cups of thin, gruelish gumbo and a heaping serving dish full of iceberg lettuce and pale tomatoes and red-veined crablike stuff.

  "Oh, wow," Professor Rind exclaimed. "What a lot of food."

  Duffy grunted and tasted his.

  "Looks mighty good, though," Rind said. His in- laws only watched him. One of the kids sounded a raspberry.

  Duffy sipped his whiskey and looked down at the stuff on his plate. "This isn't crab," he said softly.

  "Oh, sure it is," said Professor Rind.

  "The fuck it is." He looked around for Staci. The place was fairly crowded. When he had spotted her, he motioned with a crook of his finger.

  "This isn't crab."

  Staci's neck was very long, the painterly Duffy saw. A duckling, though not a dreadfully ugly one. Something of a ducky, in fact. But confused.

  "Oh, sir," she said, inspecting his plate. "Yessir, it's all crab." Staci smiled cautiously. "Like real fresh."

  "It may be real fresh," Duffy said. "It may be fucking alive. But by Christ it ain't crab."

  "Oh," Staci said.

  "Let me tell you what it is, sweet thing." He had risen to his feet and raised his voice. Among the Rinds, only Hank looked at him. People at the adjoining tables looked also.

  "It's some rotten thing out of a tube. Made by people who hate us and think we're stupid."

  He looked around and gave the room a hateful glare.

  "Because we are stupid! They've invented this red crap, oozes out when they squirt it. So it's red, see. Because Americans are moronic cupcakes who could be induced to eat their own shoelaces. So this shit makes it."

  Mrs. Rind rose majestically, nudged her plate aside and spoke an order in Indo-European to her children. The three marched away and Duffy looked sadly after them. His favorite Rind had bailed. He turned his disappointment on poor Staci.

  "Especially on Sunday in Pahoochee. Where I'm sure it's a favorite."

  Staci's nestling's neck reddened. The older Mrs. Rind stood and hurried the way her daughter had gone. Hank Rind and his father-in-law kept their chairs.

  "You go in there, pumpkin," Duffy told the girl, "and you tell the thief that employs you that he's a liar. Tell him that if he keeps on selling painted fish guts, I'm going to put him in jail." The young waitress started to flee, but Duffy called her up short. "And you're going up with him, Staci, Magnolia, whatever you call yourself professionally. Unless you stand up in court and rat him out. I mean only to frighten the child," Duffy explained to the other people in the restaurant. "She's not the one to blame."

  There was a disturbance in the kitchen. Shrieks and incredulous roars emerged from it. No one in the dining room was eating. Security men in blazers had gathered at the door leading to the hotel lobby, awaiting orders. Shortly, from the kitchen came a fat perspiring man. He wore a black-brimmed sea captain's hat with red stains on the white part. There was a blue-and-white sailor-style neckerchief around his rubbery neck. Duffy thought he looked like neither a chef nor a mariner. He looked at Duffy, shaking with fury. Duffy stood his ground.

  "Were you off somewhere?" he asked the cook, looking with contempt at the man's attire. "Was your riverboat about to catch the evening tide? Keeping steam up, right? Then, when the health department shows up, you disappear into the bayous. Mammal on the menu, folks!" Duffy shouted at the top of his voice. "Chef Boyardee here is a-gonna skin us some muskrats. When he runs out of fish-flavored toothpaste and red dye."

  "You damned drunk," the enraged man screamed. "What the hell are you calling me?"

  Duffy's rage increased.

  "I'm a-saying you a warlocky witch, motherfucker. Bad man wizard. I'm a-saying you bad food poison man. I'm a-saying they gonna send you back to the swamp to be drowned in shit."

  Duffy managed to sidestep the fat man's expertly executed kick, intended to painfully disable him. Two waiters caught their boss and only with great difficulty held him back. The small waitress looked on in tears.<
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  "You no-good bastard," the cook cried, indicating Staci. "You bastard, you made her cry!" Altogether beside himself, he paused for breath.

  Duffy drew himself up to his full height, which was about five foot nine.

  "That's because her time to weep has come," he said viciously. He pointed his finger in the cook's face. "Yes, M'sieu Escoffier." Duffy turned to look over his shoulder, feeling, incorrectly, that a wave of support was gathering behind him. "The time has come when we must all weep. Because, goddamn you, you filthy poisoned rat, whatever you've done in there to that poor young girl—a child half your age, you scum—there shall be no more of it, I promise you." Blind to the chaos around him, Duffy carried on upbraiding the chef as a security man, aided by volunteers from among the male customers, wrestled him toward the door. At this point, in custody, he broke down and wept himself. "Christ's blood! Crab? Don't make me laugh. The only crabs you people got is in your pubic hair!"

  It was all he remembered of the evening. Next day, the Rind boys found their way back to the Petrel's Perch in hopes of seeing more of Duffy.

  Of course he had missed the lecture. At Pahoochee State College—or University, as it had been lately designated—colleagues rallied round Hank Rind to console and embrace him. Secretly, though, ill-wishers chortled and claimed never to have had any regard for him or for Duffy or his work.

  Enormity descended. He was awakened by a policeman—in his experience always a bad sign. An African proverb he had learned in the Peace Corps went something like, "The morning policeman shoots the mice to frighten the monkeys." The maddened policeman, morning's minion. Despite the early hour, a man who said he was the manager of the hotel appeared, another who claimed to be an assistant district attorney, and several of the hotel's security stooges. One of the stooges was charging Duffy with assault, the felony compounded by his brandishing of a ballpoint pen. Brought before the town justice, Duffy had no choice but to call his estranged wife for bail.