Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

He moved out of the well-appointed kitchen and sat before his floor-to-ceiling window, watching the stormy night darken the borders of the canyon. The black clouds brought down the night sky, the moon that had been rising; the first stars all disappeared. He took his glass of wine outside to the patio, walked down the stone steps to his pool and switched on the poolside lights and underwater illuminations. The sleekness of the lighting was comforting at first. Then in the blue-tinted light he saw that lapping against the tile of his pool was another soiled piece of plastic like the one in the tree. He felt a wave of disappointment — in things, in the sorry aspect of his rewards, blemishes on good fortune. It seemed like the work of a spoiler, and it frightened him. He looked around him. Somewhere in the sunken canyon behind his house thunder broke and echoed massively; the sound of it felt as though it might shake the house on its stone fortress. A fork of lightning struck rimrock overhead, and whether by reflection or a second strike, it lit the canyon below in stunning detail, displaying precisely the coloring of each cliff, its cuts, layers and scars, its geological history. Leroy stepped back against the rock wall of his house. There was a smell of scorched sage and burning pine. The air was bone-dry, and not so much as a drop of rain fell.

He went back inside, finished his wine and poured another. The drink made him hungry — on the trip up he had not given any thought to food. All that was in the house unfrozen were the eggs and milk he had bought at Craw's, a half stick of butter and an unopened jar of caperberries the beautiful Ilena had brought him months before. The caperberries were imported from Romania, from a place called Cluj, which happened to be in Transylvania, where Ilena herself came from. She had always described herself as Transylvanian, which meant she might have been Romanian or Hungarian or descended from Saxon or Slavic settlers. Leroy had never asked her. He required only that she be as beautiful as she was, and as accommodating. To be seen with her was to command envy and respect and to display the superior quality of his life. Any fool could see her out in Valentino and Cole Haan, and that, Leroy thought, was all they needed to see.

He opened the berries with difficulty and took out the butter, milk and eggs. He broke an egg onto the Teflon surface of the frying pan. Looking at the yolk under the kitchen light, he saw that there was a bright blood spot in the center of it. This was mildly disturbing to such a perfectionist as Leroy and he tried to remember what it might signify. Perhaps, he thought, the egg was not fresh. Or the opposite. He stood reflected in his kitchen window against the black night outside, seeing his own blank face. A flash of lightning lit the rock landscape outside, revealing the aspens, the plastic flag at the top of one tree. He sipped his wine, put the pan aside and dialed Ilena's number in San Anselmo.

"Allo, Leroy," Ilena said in her husky voice when she heard who it was. "How may I serve you, my kink?"

"I miss you," Leroy told her. "Why didn't you come with me?"

"Aha. Your punishment, cheri. "

"Punishment for what?" He smiled wanly at his reflection. "I've been good."

"Good? Ho ho. A good one."

"No, really. Come up, get a morning plane to Rock City. Get one tonight. I'll get you picked up."

"Naah," she said in a vulgar comic voice. He hated her speaking that way. "Naah," she said. "No fuckink way."

Leroy suspected Ilena might be drunk. She had a drinking problem.

"But why, sweetheart? Don't you love your king?"

"Naah," she said.

"Come on."

"Come on," she mimicked. " Come on. Leroy, you're a noodle, eh?"

"Please come."

"Naah."

"I'm opening your caperberries. Thinking of you."

She laughed charmingly. "Don't be so stupid. You make me pissed off."

"If you don't come," Leroy said, "I'll make you sorry."

"Ya? I don't think so. How about: Fuck yourself, dollink."

"Listen," Leroy said, trying to change the subject. "I broke an egg into the pan to cook your berries. There's a red spot in the yolk. What about that?"

She gave a soft canine yip. "Break other egg."

Leroy reached for a second egg and broke it. It also had a red spot in the yolk.

"A red spot," he told her. "Honestly."

"Yes? No shit? Whoa."

"What?"

"Break next egg. Egg next to it."

Leroy did. There was a red spot. He told her so.

"Somebody playing a joke on you, boss. Like the jokes you like. Put-on, pain-in-the-ass jokes you like."

"I thought you liked my jokes, Ilena."

"Naah."

"You always laugh at them."

"Tell your name for me," she said.

"Oh," he said, trying a laugh. "It's harmless." His nickname for her was Strangepussy. Harmless. But who could have told her?

"I laugh when you put-on somebody else," Ilena said. "You too, when someone hurts. You're cruel motherfucker."

"When did you decide this?"

"Lewis tells me."

Lewis was a business associate of whom Leroy had had enough.

"Lewis! He told you? That nitwit?"

"You think? Screw you! Hey, kink, what looks like? The red spot?"

"It's just red."

"Look like skull, no? Tiny skull."

"I don't see a skull."

"Yes!" she insisted bad-humoredly. "You will see. Ask your other girlfriends. Ask Ludmilla, the gypsy."

"Ludmilla's not a gypsy," Leroy said.

"Fuck she ain't. You cheating cul. You get what you deserve. Your money is cursed. Your house. Your dick. Skull in the eggs. You will see."

Leroy cleared his throat. "Please, Ilena."

She cursed in her language and hung up.

Holding his silent phone, he looked out of his dark kitchen window again and saw the face of the fugitive Alan Ladd, the ape's face, the tiny eyes. Smiling. And what to call his mouth? Disapproving. A homicidally disapproving mouth. But it was only a vision, imagination. Alan Ladd, his crushed face, his tiny eyes. Alan Ladd was at the wheel of some murder victim's car, perhaps driving on a transcontinental superhighway, otherwise driving a back road in the woods, prowling. Prowling for victims. Beside Alan Ladd a dog was seated, an exquisitely trained pooch, a mechanical dog actually, its teeth honed and gleaming. Maybe Alan and his dog were seeking out a lonely house in the woods marked by a filthy plastic banner.

But there was nothing in the window. The thought was a worm of the brain. Leroy's phantom, the torment of a too busy man dedicated to his work.

"I can and will make life sweet," Leroy said aloud. As frightening as losers are, he thought, I am more. I have the high ground.

He went into the part of his den that served as a library. Lightning flashed beyond the glass wall, thunder boomed in the rock. There was still no rain. On Leroy's reading table was the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. It stood beside Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, whose citations he used to crush underlings. The dictionary came equipped with a magnifying sheet that could be applied to the page to make the small print more readily legible. Leroy picked up the sheet and took it into the kitchen. He had not turned the stove on, so the eggs sat coldly in their pan, complacently three-eyed in the light, innocent as unborn Cyclopean babes. Leroy set his magnifying sheet on the pan's rim.

Yes, he saw. The spots might be skulls. They were elongated, cephalic, with inward curves that might mark cheekbones. The tops were rounded, maybe cranial. There were two tiny rounded darker marks against the blood red that might represent eyes, little rectangles that could stand for teeth. A hollowed snout.

Blood spots, though, not portents, nothing intentional. Whether random biology or a poisoner's mark, Ilena had made them appear as they did. Out of secret hatred or jealousy, out of the sheer evil of the weak, which he had seen often enough. As so often with the helpless and self-deluding, she had turned the strength of the strong against her betters. The tactic of sly inferiors: to set his mind against itself in a lonely place. All day, he realized, he had been thinking negative thoughts. Was it something fated, a test of confidence to be proved, as though there were some superforce that ruled strength, constantly sorting out the chosen, making them risk their gifts and qualities against the little strategies of the lame? Was there some kind of supernaturalism in the law of survival?