#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone
Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He
used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled
into an existence of complacency and greyness.
“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped
caring what he said, or to whom.”
“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and
perversely satisfying in Hampton.”
While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a
social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a
recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her
shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is
successful, she drinks, and they hook up.
“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 his
detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity
for things."
Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that
middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others
unhappy as well.
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