Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  When his turn at the phone came, he called collect, in violation of the instructions on the sign over the phone. To his relief it was Otis herself who answered. Otis who must know that it was him she really loved. Otis, descendant of an insane signer of the Declaration of Independence. But when he recounted his story, she was bad Otis.

  "I'm so sorry," Otis said weepily. A false voice, Duffy knew. "My purse was stolen in the supermarket. I've canceled all my credit cards. Each and every one."

  "You gotta be shitting me," Duffy suggested.

  "Alas not."

  "Well, how about a check?"

  "My checkbook is with it, Jim. I've stopped all payments."

  Duffy swore so foully that even his fellow inmates at the county jail were dismayed.

  "Honestly," said Otis, "I am sorry, darl. But I'm not sure I can cover what you need. Frankly, you've been in the drunk tank before. All things pass, big guy."

  "This is no drunk tank," Duffy pleaded. It was, finally, a lie. "Do you know where I am?"

  "Yes, I think so. How funny! Because I was just reading about the state prison there. The book is called Worse Than Slavery."

  Duffy paused to gain control of himself.

  "Otis, sweetheart, I need your help badly."

  "I know, my dear. My help isn't what it was."

  "Please, baby." Duffy's fellow inmates, a generally semiviolent lot of drunks and panhandlers, laughed openly. It was impossible to converse discreetly. "What about your boy toy there? He's got bread."

  "Bread? Aren't you quaint. Do you mean Prosser? Yes, he has 'bread,' I suppose. His latest novel is pretty successful for a literary book."

  "Isn't that nice?" Duffy said. "So get three grand off him. I'm good for it."

  "I'm surprised at your lack of—what shall I call it?— pride?"

  "You tell that illiterate pinhead he better cough it up. Otherwise his ladylove's rightful spouse will—in the fullness of time—go up there and make him eat a hardcover copy of his successful literary book."

  "He's not afraid of you, Jim."

  "Really? Then he's made real progress in fear management. How's his ex, by the by? Still cochair of Lesbian Gardening?"

  Otis tittered wickedly. Once, to hear Otis titter was to possess her.

  "You may not be ashamed to ask for Prosser's help, Jim. To tell you the truth, I'm ashamed to ask on your behalf."

  "Oh, bullshit, Otis. Stop fucking around! Is he there?"

  "I'll ask him to call you, dear," she said delicately.

  Duffy stopped to consider his options. It would not do to have her hang up. All at once it occurred to him that Otis, in her abysmal deviousness, was helping him out after a fashion. Only by knowing her as well as he did could he realize that she was distantly suggesting a strategy: that he lean on the husband himself, man to man, as it were. As to whether she had really lost her bag? Unknowable.

  When the call came, it was Prosser phoning from his office. As if, Duffy thought, he felt he would be safer there.

  "Hey, Prosser! Oho, man!"

  The response was a charged silence.

  "Hey, how's everything, Pross? How's the wife?"

  Prosser did not ask which.

  "Ah," he replied without much inflection. "How are you, Jim?"

  "Prosser?"

  More anxious silence. Good, thought Duffy.

  "Prosser, I'm where the prisoners rest together. They hear not the voice of their oppressor."

  "Really?" the novelist asked uneasily. "Where's that?"

  "It is hell," Duffy said. "Your old friend is in hell." He was moved to pity at his own condition. "Honest, can you help me?"

  "I don't know, Jim. How?"

  "Listen, can I tell you something? May I presume? I know our relationship is awkward."

  A sniff of distaste. "Yeah, sure."

  "The thing is, Pross, I thought I had found Jesus Christ. He was my personal savior. Honestly! I know you'll scoff."

  Prosser did not scoff. He seemed to be listening quietly.

  "But the individual I mistook for Jesus Christ was not. He wasn't Jesus at all. Can you guess who he was? Can you, Prosser?"

  "No," said Spearman. After a moment he asked, "Who?"

  Duffy looked over his shoulder to see whether the duty deputy might be eavesdropping on his plaints. But the man was occupied with the color ads for phone sex in his copy of Penthouse.

  "He was Satan!" Duffy cleared his throat for resonance. "Yes. The Prince of Darkness himself. Horrible," Duffy moaned spookily. "Satan," he whispered thickly. He tried not to overdo it. But Prosser had a craven's imagination.

  "Jim, you ought to seek ... You know."

  "Seek! Seek! Their name is legion, Spearman. They are many!"

  "You probably need help," Prosser said.

  "Oh, shit, man," Duffy said. "I do."

  "Medication." Prosser suggested.

  "Poisoners!" Duffy told him in a breathy stage whisper. "Listen, Prosser, I'm beside myself with terror. Satanic voices are telling me I require closure."

  "Closure?"

  Duffy did what he could to make the word sound truly terminal.

  "A dreadful closure, Prosser. They say if I can leave here today I can get into treatment." He looked around to make sure no one was watching too closely. "But if I can't, Satan says I must seek closure where the most wrong was done. He says I must"—Duffy inhaled to aspirate his words most portentously—"return to my long home. For closure."

  "Why?" Prosser croaked.

  "They won't tell me until I get there. I hear insect laughter. I'm so afraid."

  "If you tell me where you are," Prosser said, "maybe I can call someone."

  Oh, tricky, thought Duffy, but he would have to know.

  "Here's the deal," Duffy said, trying to fend off madness while pretending it. "They'll let me out if I agree to go into therapy."

  "Therapy where?" Spearman asked in a small voice. He was afraid, Duffy knew, that it might take place at the same establishment in western New England where he had been purged of drink before. It was not far from the house Prosser shared with Otis. Whether Prosser liked it or not, it was where he was likely to end up.

  "I think it's Alaska," Duffy told him. "They'll release me in care of my mother."

  "Your mother?"

  "Her estate," Duffy hastened to add. "It's absurdly complicated. I'll need some money to get there too, Prosser. Congratulations on your new book, by the way."

  A short time later Duffy heard the police dispatcher taking down the numbers and expiration date of Prosser's credit card.

  "Bacon tells us," he said to the deputy as he packed his soiled belongings to leave, "the coward is loyal only to fear."

  "I need you to shut up," the young deputy said.

  The locals were vindictive, especially the hotel people. For three days Duffy was forbidden to leave town, and he was threatened with deformed bounty hunters if he did so. The first day he was homeless, which, in Pahoochee, was itself illegal. His overnight bag contained a single change of clothes, and the venal bubbas who ruled the town owned all the hotels, all the soap and all the potable water. Earning a little more of Otis's mocking solicitude, he was finally able to buy two nights in advance at a washboard-sided welfare motel on a fetid canal a few blocks from the Gulf. The university, for its own reasons he presumed, fixed things with the city. The motel chain hand-delivered some letters to him and to his lawyer in Boston threatening action for damages, though nothing came of it in the end. They also produced a form requiring his signature on which he agreed never again to seek hospitality at their establishments.

  While the paperwork and money changed hands, the law required Duffy to remain in Pahoochee to await the disposition of his case. Duffy spent his first hours in the Spray Motel avoiding the public spaces where crack was sold. His solitary window opened on an alley—that is, it failed to open on the alley. An ancient air conditioner aspirated its prolonged death rattle. Mounted on the spastic springs of his sofa bed, he p
assed the time doodling on available surfaces and trying to sort hopes and dreams from hallucinations.

  By nightfall the darkness gave forth only cries of laughter, pain and distant small-arms fire, along with the emphysemic cooler's soldiering on. Duffy told himself that the machine was deciding his fate, that he could keep going not a moment longer than the air conditioning, that its vital signs were measuring his. Like the unhappy man in the Good Book, he had prayed that eve be sudden. At night he preferred that morn be soon.

  After first light he looked down the alley and saw the Spray Motel's contingent of moms and welfare children lined up for the school bus. They were all black except for one bedraggled and overweight pale mom with a speed rack of front teeth, who chattered continually to the other mothers regardless of whether they answered her or not. The Spray was no place for any kid to have to live, Duffy thought. But the kids were clean, carrying books, even if their mothers and grandmothers were dressed for a day on their knees with a brush. Or for a previous night of heavy dates. The high spirits of the children lifted his heart briefly, but he soon found the preschool assembly as dispiriting as everything else. It was not right, he thought; another presentation of how things so often were not. And as so often then, things made him want to have a drink. Also not to have one. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment. He was getting too old for it, and presently he would be too old to change.

  He took what was left of Otis and Prosser's money and bought some art supplies at the college end of the beach. He also bought a new cell phone and a cheap wristwatch. Cell phones and wristwatches were items that cops looked for on the persons of sad old men in crummy beach towns. They were signs of some right to sociopolitical existence, of access to human rights. On the other hand, if someone's gad-getry had gone missing in the mall, for example, elderly loser types like Duffy were one of the favored profiles the cops hassled. To crown his respectability, Duffy treated himself to a haircut and beard trim, which rendered him more or less identical to the male section of his demographic.

  With his colors and a good-quality sketchbook Duffy picked out a bench supported on its right flank by a Confederate cannoneer and facing the widest flat space between the paved walkway and the rippling Gulf. There he waited for Pahoochee's Sunday to unfold.

  The first spectacle that assembled itself was a volleyball game, played by teams of kids from the university. They were a pretty pack, mostly fair, the girls and some of the boys blonded up beyond nature's providing. There were also dark-haired Hispanic youths and a few Asians and African Americans, lending variety to the flesh tones. In the same cause, there were plenty of tattoos, bright new ones with particularly nice greens. Down in the water, a couple of optimists were trying to invoke sympathetic magic with their surfboards. A few managed to draw enough swell out of the insipid shore to get up and stand and surf the film of oily water over the near sand.

  There was lots to look at if you were not in a hurry, if it did not bother you that you had seen it before, if you were observer enough—well, he thought, let's say artist enough!—to look it all over one more time. In the early afternoon a passel of extremely self-conscious punks sauntered along the beach sidewalk, looking about as scared and scornful as adolescents could. They were depressing and also frightening in ways they might not have imagined. Duffy expanded his scene to bring in a grove of suffering palm trees, a memorial plinth, an abandoned sandwich sign advertising a psychic. He kept adding: part of a ruined merry-go-round, faded and stripped, between the public beach and his estranged hotel. A bag lady with a Winn-Dixie cart sat on the edge of it; some of the punks draped themselves across the rusty poles and peeling painted horses. He drew it all in, regardless of scale.

  Late in the afternoon people came out of the casinos, some half drunk and cheery, more of them looking as if they had lost money they could not afford. Sniffly women complained to the men they were with and got ignored or yelled at or sometimes smacked in the mouth. Men got smacked too, and children who were trying to be somewhere else. Drivers fought at intersections.

  Panhandlers turned up and three-card-monte men whom the cops would sweep away as though with a fire hose, looking so angry at the hustlers that you had to wonder if they weren't taken behind some bleachers and beaten senseless to discourage the others. Or to impress the casino owners that there was scant tolerance for competition. Around twilight, several very young hookers came out, dressed to show more skin than the damp wind made comfortable and to match the neon. Their pimps, Duffy thought, would be just out of sight, laughing in the darkness of the side streets, smoking dope, getting in and out of unlighted cars that took some of the girls away and brought others to replace them.

  Actually, the evening was lovely, gathered up as it was in sea and sky. Its transcendent light resisted all the defacements organized Pahoochee could inflict on it. Duffy kept drawing as late as he could. When the beach lights and tiki torches and fluorescents came on, he colored them into the rest.

  Back alone with his air conditioner in the unquiet night, Duffy put the sketchbook to the maximum brightness of his lamp and looked over what he had. A chaos, he thought, like old times. Long before, Duffy thought he had given people a few lessons in entropy, how it looked, how you got it down. He felt he badly needed a drink, but securing one was too much work. He went to sleep instead.

  The next day he packed his bags and sat beside the motel's laundry lines while the children assembled to await their school bus. To pass the morning he mapped out a sketch with crayon to use for a study if he should want to repeat the work in oil. In daylight, he was well pleased. It seemed to him the piece had turned out properly strong and could be made stronger with the right colors. Over his teaching years, Duffy had developed a regrettable academic eye that led him too readily to comparisons. It was bad for his morale to see other people's earlier sensibilities in the things he did. But in ironic ways his beach scene reminded him of turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies of Coney Island. If all of Stella's good early stuff, all those wild whirling colored lights, was about the teeming overripe possibilities of the coming age, maybe his, Duffy's, was about the exhaustion of those possibilities, the disappearance of that time, the great abridgment of the popular age. The ghost of a century, a show closing down for lack of interest. But, he thought, somebody had to be around to tell that story. It was too easy to mock the tag end of it, to do a burlesque on the failure of public joy. Someone ought to show it with a degree of compassion, he thought. Someone ought to have a heart about it.

  Ready, he called a taxi on the hall phone to take him to the airport, to start the long day of jammed flights and wall-to-wall junk-food stands. Pahoochee was a composition of grays at that hour, clay-colored sand, dun skies, tin ocean. An old black man drove the cab, listening to a radio on which a white preacher peddled prayer cloths.

  As they passed the parking lot of the hotel from which Duffy had been ejected, he saw a young dark-haired girl with flushed fair skin getting out of a beat-up Corolla. She was wearing a Pahoochee State sweatshirt. Duffy saw that it was young Staci, the waitress who had so innocently and disastrously attempted to bring him bogus crab. He asked the driver to pull over beside the lot and rolled his window down.

  "Staci?"

  She turned to him, shading her eyes. Duffy told the driver to wait and got out of the cab. On an impulse, he tore the crayon study he had made of the beach from his sketchbook.

  Staci, facing the declining sun, looked at him without a flicker of recognition.

  "Hi," she said, and smiled.

  He wrapped his drawing between two sheets paper and slipped it into a large cardboard envelope.

  "I have a drawing I'd like to give you. It's of the beach."

  "Oh," she said. "How come?"

  "What do you mean," he asked her, "'how come'?"

  "Well, like, why?"

  "Okay," Duffy said. He sighed at the burden he had inflicted on himself. For all he knew, it might all end with his getting ar
rested again. "My name is James Duffy. I'm an artist." He had been about to add that she might easily sell it, but he simply handed it over.

  "Wow," she said.

  "Yes," he told her. "And I was due to lecture at your school on Tuesday. At your university. But unfortunately I was detained."

  "Yeah?"

  "So, because you're a student at Pahoochee—you are a student, I think?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Because you missed out on the lecture, you see..."

  She shook her head energetically, interrupting him.

  "No! I wasn't gonna go. Even if I heard about it. Which like I didn't anyway. And on top of which I had to work."

  Looking past her, he saw that there was a cartoon of a crab pasted over a window on the restaurant side of the hotel. He frowned, and seeing him do so, she frowned as well. But thankfully, from his point of view, she did not turn to follow his gaze.

  "Because you missed out on the lecture, Staci, I'd like you to take this."

  Staci took it and shook her head fetchingly in some confusion. As it had occurred to Duffy that Staci might profit by selling his drawing, another random inspiration struck him: he might ask her to pose for him in the nude someday. That, he understood, would never do. If he presented such a notion, she might even suffer a ghastly attack of recovered memory.

  "Wow," she said. "Okay."

  "See, I'm on my way out of town," Duffy told her. He turned and looked over his shoulder, sort of miming "out of town."

  "Great!" she said.

  He smiled and extended his hand. She switched her awkward grip on the envelope and shook his right hand quite heartily.

  "So adios, Staci."

  "Right," she said. "So ... did you have a great time in Pahoochee ... um, James?"

  "Thank you, dear," Duffy said. "Yes, I did."

  And, leaving, he felt much better than when he had arrived.