Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

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?"