Fun With Problems Read Online Free

around the place. There was one other occupied table. Two youngish faculty couples were finishing their chocolate cake. "I don't know, maybe it's just a superstition."
    "I bet it is. What play are you doing?"

    "
Cymbeline.
It's Shakespeare."
    "I'm not very familiar with it."
    "No, it's not often performed. It's kind of ridiculous on the level of plot. But it has its moments."
    "Why don't you join me," Matthews said. "Have a drink. And we'll have something to eat."
    "Do I have to?" she asked.
    Afterward, he would have to ask himself why he had pressed her so hard. As though it were the senior prom and she were a high school virgin he wanted to addle with fruit wine. Asking him that way, she had seemed so gravely passive, supine, absurd. Asking for it. She would drink if he made her. So he did.
    "Definitely."
    "And what shall I drink?"
    "What do you like?"
    "I like margaritas," she said.
    So they ordered her Teutonic margaritas, of which she consumed quite a few, straight up with salt, and a weight fell, finally, from her pretty shoulders. She told him about
Cymbeline,
which, on the level of plot,
did
sound ridiculous. They laughed about that. But when she professed to discover the other levels, they grew properly serious. She had plainly thought a lot about it, and about her character, named Imogen, an apparently ridiculous figure.
    "And what's strange," she said, "is to come from rehearsal, to come from Shakespeare to the life of all these young community males in the jail."
    For a moment, he did not know what she was talking about. "Don't say things like 'young community males,'" he told her. "Don't use jargon."

    She got huffy, blushed, and withdrew for a while. Ironic, because it was one thing said to her in friendship.

    She lived in Hampton's old downtown, in what had been an office building but was now living space for a variety of the place's ambiguously connected people. "Nontraditional households" was how she would have put it.
    "There's nothing to drink," she told him. "I don't keep it."
    So they made a detour to the package store in the square to get Scotch, tequila and cheap margarita mix.
    Her apartment had high ceilings and many windows adorned with plants. He thought that in the daytime it must have lots of light. On one wall there were theater posters and a few photographs of Amy in costume. He inspected them while, staggering ever so slightly, she went to change clothes.
    In the kitchen, he worked loose her ice trays and made sloppy, overboozy drinks. She came back in gray-green tights with a sort of short, hooded burnous a shade lighter. Her glasses had lightly tinted lenses; she had let her hair down. They sat one cushion apart on an outsized brown leather sofa that looked as though it had come from some dean's office at the local college.
    Settled on the sofa, she did a little snug wiggle.
    "Oh, I like leather." She leaned her head back happily, then turned to him. "But it makes you sweat."
    That should have been the moment, but he was distracted
by drink. He got anecdotal, told some favorite jailhouse horror stories at which they could laugh comradely progressive laughter. Not too many. The subject was too depressing, and he did not want to spoil things. Amy began to tell stories about some other place, a place she did not identify. A hospital? He paid closer attention.

    "So there was a woman at this place where I was."
    "What place?"
    "A woman at this place," Amy went on, "but it wasn't a woman at this place."
    "No?"
    "No," Amy said. "It was me. It was"—she corrected herself with a humorous theatrical flourish. "It was I. It was a spa, right? A really expensive health spa. Ever been to one?" she asked him.
    "Yes. Once."
    She laughed at him, in the bag, unstoppable.
    "I'm not talking about a drunk farm. Although I've been to those too, I have to tell you."
    "I have to tell you," he said, "I have too."
    "But this," Amy said, "the setting of our story, was a very fancy desert health spa." She stopped