Fun With Problems Read Free Page A

underage. I got him out on habeas corpus. Now he thinks I'm a miracle worker."
    "Good luck," she said.
    They parted ways in the gathering sleet. Matthews took the river sidewalk with his shoulder to the force of the storm off the river. He followed the embankment to the edge of the downtown mill buildings. Then he suddenly turned back and went in the direction that Amy had gone. When she heard him coming up behind her, she stopped and moved back from the sidewalk.
    "What did you mean," Matthews asked, "he doesn't belong in there?"
    She laughed. "What did I mean? I meant he was crazy. He should be in a hospital."
    "Right."
    "Did you think I was taking his side? That I thought he was a nice guy?"
    "I wasn't sure. You're a social worker."
    She shook her head.
    He looked up and down the street and she watched. He thought she was about to ask him if he was looking for something.
    "So, Amy," he said, "would you like a drink?"

    She laughed in a strangely embarrassed way. The quality of her embarrassment was somehow familiar to him.
    "I don't drink," she said gaily. As though the statement did not necessarily foreclose sociability.
    "Well," he said, "have an
Apfel-schorle!
"
    "I don't know what that is."
    "You've fallen into the right hands," Matthews said. The young psychologist stopped in her tracks. She shielded the lenses of her glasses from the icy rain with one hand and pulled her plaid scarf over her bright hair. Little hailstones clung to the russet strands like coral clusters, not melting.
    "Wait a minute," she said. "I haven't fallen into your hands."
    "No," Matthews said. "Of course not." He was wondering whether she thought him too old for her. She did not seem much over thirty-five.
    "Oh," she said. There was another slightly embarrassed laugh. Like the first, it made him hopeful.
    "I'm not surprised you're a psychologist, Amy."
    "Really?" she asked, as they hurried out of the weather. "Why?"
    He had only been mocking her. Matthews's life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.

    They went to the restaurant where, sober, Matthews had discovered
Apfel-schorle,
mixed apple juice and soda. The place was run by a German hippie who cooked and his
American graduate-student wife. Its ambience was not at all gemütlich, but gray-black Euro-slick. The waitress was a stylish, somber German exchange student.

    "Funny," Amy said when they had ordered a
schorle
for her and a Scotch for Matthews, "that they'd still serve such a summer drink in the winter."
    Matthews agreed that it was funny.
    "Aren't you hungry?" he asked her.
    She cast the question off with her peculiar gaiety. Matthews tried to inspect her further without being spotted. Her red hair seemed natural: she had the right watery-blue eyes and freckled skin. In her strong lean face, the long-lashed, achromatic eyes looked wonderfully dramatic. Effects combined to make her seem sensitive, innocent and touchingly plain. Vulnerable.
    Across the table, he indulged in some brief speculation about her character and inner life. Her facing down fatuous Sister Sophia was admirable in a way, but it was also self-righteous and overwrought. Pretty ruthless, really, calling the poor woman a snitch. And Amy herself seemed not much smarter than the nun, all fiery bread and roses, the blushing champion of free thought with her fucking wall of separation.
    In fact, at that moment Matthews did not want to care what Amy was like. His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught him detachment. The trick was to carry on indifferent to his own feelings and without pity for things like Amy's ditsy vagueness or the neediness she was beginning to display.
    "Sure you won't have something stronger?"

    She shook her head. Now, he observed, she was all reticence and demurrals—no drink, no dinner, no