Fun With Problems Read Online Free Page A

and looked at him as if making sure she was among friends. Matthews did his best. "I was going to tell this as somebody else's story. But it was me."
    "I see."
    "Well," Amy said, "at this really expensive health spa there was a clairvoyant? The clairvoyant picked me. Me, right? He read my thoughts—that was the number."
    His instinct was to stop her. A lawyerly impulse. A human one? He didn't.
    "And the clairvoyant revealed to me, and to everybody in the fancy spa, around the beautiful fire in the evening, the clairvoyant revealed to me that there were two men in my life. And that was right. It was God's truth. I had a husband who was not a very nice man. And I had a lover who, it turned out, was not so absolutely great either. As it turned out."

    Her free hand, the one not holding the drink, began to tremble a little. As much as he wanted to, Matthews did not put out his own hand to steady it.
    "So, when I went home, the spa gave me a record of my session with the clairvoyant. A recording—a tape, a CD, I don't know. And would you believe I forgot all about it? I forgot it utterly. Until—"
    It was Amy's guessing game. She teased, grinning, tears beginning.
    "Until your old man found it," Matthews said.
    She pointed her index finger, bingo, at him.
    "Until he found it. The prick. Excuse me. Until he found it. Whereupon he divorced me."
    "I see."
    "And in fact I began to drink. And in fact I later went to ... the other sort of place you mean." She looked closely at him again. "I might have known you there."
    "Yes, you might," he said, "but actually no."
    "By then, my friend—" She stopped herself. "Ah, we're talking me, aren't we? Not my made-up friend."
    "We're talking first-person."
    "After the divorce, I needed a hospital, not a health spa. Get it?"
    "Yes," he said. "I understand. I've been there."
    "Of course," she said, "you've been there."

    "Twice," Matthews said. "For varying lengths of stay."
    "You and me," Amy said. "It might even have been the same place."
    "That it might."
    Amy stood up and leaned on the arm of her leather sofa.
    "Drinking makes me want to smoke," she said. He looked up at her; leaning, she had cocked a hip in a kind of Attic stance, lifting the hem of the top she wore, turned away from him, searching for all the cigarettes in the world to smoke at once. Turned away but, as it were, presenting.
    He put it all together very quickly, an instinct for the logic of events. The presenting stance, the abasement.
    So he stood silently beside her. How easily he might have kissed her and held her. The impulse was there. He drew his hand back and whacked her, as hard as she might reasonably require.
    The hit stunned her. She put a hand to her bottom, flushing nicely and trembling very slightly with the sting of it. Then they stood in the moment, on the brink of it. Poised between what? Absurdity and death, eros and thanatos, the screech of lust and Cymbeline? What the boys in the jail called "down-low shit."
    But she did not call him vulgar names or question his sanity or turn in anger and astonishment. She said quietly, "I guess I deserved that."
    "I guess you did," Matthews told her. His voice was stern and cold, though he took her by the hand. So they went to bed and there was some down-low shit. Had he not been distracted by his pleasure, Matthews would have congratulated himself on the soundness of his observations and his quick reaction time.

    He was drunk but so inflamed there was no question of his flunking it. He let her guide him to what she liked; experience told him this was best. You let her guide you to what she liked and sometimes what she liked was a drag but often what she liked was delightful, an unsuspected turn, a novelty, warm and silky if not always very clean. So it was with Amy. Absolutely no rougher than she wanted it, he thought. Long-lasting and thorough.
    All of that, but in the morning, when he came back from the bathroom, she was quietly crying. He had forced