Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

"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."