Fun with Problems

Jul 15, Short story about a divorced, lonely attorney's brief relationship with a therapist he meets at the jail. The attorney, Peter Mathews, drives down.
Table of contents

What did it make us? When Scott had exhausted conversation by confusing himself beyond explication, he took a pair of sunglasses off the floor beside him, put them on and moved them up on his forehead. Weeks later Scott was removed from her apartment with the aid of many police officers, screaming about insects and imitating one. It was history repeating itself as farce, a particularly unfunny one. Lucy lost the place and the stockbroker sister was forced out.

The upside was losing Scott as well. Back home it was cold and Jennifer grew suspicious and discontent. When she was very angry her mild educated Anglo-Southern tones could tighten and faintly echo the speech of her remote sharecropping ancestors in the Dust Bowl. Sometimes her vowels would twist themselves into the sorrowful whine of pious stump farmers abandoned by Jesus in the bottomland.

You had to listen very closely to hear it. I had never heard the word "honey" sound so leaden until Jennifer smacked me in the mouth with it. She could do the same thing with "dear. I started going to bars. I listened to production assistants' stories about the new style dating services. I did not pursue these routes because I was no longer so young and beautiful and because I was bitter and depressed.

I did have a few one- or two-nighters on locations. The best, carnally speaking, was with a stunt woman with a body like a Mexican comic book heroine who, it was said, had once beat an Arizona policeman half to death. Of course bodies like hers were not rare in movieland.

Unaccommodated Man: Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems

Straight stunt girls were more fun, at least for me, than actresses. What they might lack in psychological dimension they made up for in contoured heft and feel and originality. They were sometimes otherwise limited unless you counted insanity as psychological dimension. Once I had a weeklong liaison with an unhappily married Las Vegas mounted policewoman who wanted to break into movies. I was not so obtuse that I failed to observe certain patterns in my own behavior -- not simply the greedy self-indulgence but all the actions that were coming to define me.

This seemed at the time a misfortune because I didn't reflect on them with any satisfaction.

See a Problem?

There they were however, beginning to seem like a summary, coming up like old bar bills. As for root causes, I couldn't have cared less. There were limits even to my self-absorption. Also I worried about getting ever deeper into drugs. I saw Lucy every few months.

Jennifer and I finally had it out around that one. She accused me of infidelity and I told her plainly that yes I was sleeping around. Safe sex of course, I said, though I don't know how much that would have mattered since we had not made love for months.

'Fun With Problems: Stories' by Robert Stone - latimes

However, I told her truthfully that I had not been to bed with Lucy for years and not at all since we had married. I also challenged her own virtue.

God, drugs and characters adrift in worlds of their own creation.

She was furious, naturally. You can't use that kind of malicious language about gays to most dancers. But I saw something else in her reaction.


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I resisted the impulse to believe her. I visited Lucy more frequently.

'Fun With Problems: Stories' by Robert Stone

One thing I went up for was dope. She had moved into a fairly respectable hotel just uphill from the Tenderloin and by then she was scoring regularly in the Mission. After numerous misadventures, ripoffs, and a near rape she had learned how to comport herself around the market.

She had the added protection of being a reliable customer. Lucy was not yet penniless. Her television work was still in syndication and her residuals from SAG continued.


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  4. But she was spending her money fast. It's as if Stone had grown weary of his half-century-long immersion with those at the edges of society, as if the burden of his own imagination had become too great. Stone's new book, "Fun With Problems," may not represent a complete return to form, but it's far more satisfying than "Bay of Souls" or "Prime Green. As with his story collection "Bear and His Daughter," some of the material here gives the impression of a writer not quite at ease with the form in which he's working; Stone is no miniaturist, after all.

    But if this mars such efforts as "Charm City," with its contrived pickup-turned-crime-drama double narrative, or "From the Lowlands," which suffers from an unnatural compression "What happened then," Stone writes, encapsulating several years in a fraction of a paragraph, "was Barbara the beautiful. Dongo died -- had to happen. Leroy's marriage was brief.

    This is a particular Stone fascination, and throughout "Fun With Problems," he presents a series of apparently mundane circumstances that, with little warning, bare their teeth. In the title story, a public defender, aging, lonely, only provisionally on the wagon, seduces a younger woman, also fighting to stay sober, and draws her back to drink.

    A similar dynamic motivates "The Archer," in which a professor-painter named Duffy gets a visiting artist gig at a university on the Gulf of Mexico, only to throw it away when he creates a drunken scene during a dinner with his host professor. Anyone who's ever done the college circuit can understand Duffy's impulse: Here, however, Stone pushes into unanticipated territory, offering a whisper of redemption, temporary and soiled though it may be. Sitting on the beach, sketching while he waits to leave town, Duffy gets a glimpse of his place in the world.

    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.


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