Free Fun With Problems by Robert Stone

impulsiveness. But he had gone on drinking and smoking too much dope, traveling too much. Strange thoughts assailed him. In Haiti, it might have been, or Indonesia—somewhere that powerful, perhaps infernal, supernatural beings roamed—he dreamed that an unmanageable spirit had entered into him. Flashbacks? Second adolescence on the way down? One never knew.
    He smoked one Marlboro after another. Turning toward the Shumways' door, he thought, Make an entrance! An inappropriate urge, like so many. He opened the door dramatically to face them. Annie looked alarmed. Eric marched to the table and opened the second bottle of wine.
    "Hey," he said. "Sorry, bad habit."

    "Well," she said, "it reheats."
    Taylor served the stew in silence, a somnambulist waiter. Eric noticed that the cardinal's struggles continued into darkness. He thought that unusual.
    "Veggies, right?" Eric asked them. "Love 'em! Never eat anything with a face. Seriously," he asked them, "I mean, what is meat? A certain consistency to the teeth. A rub for the gums. Like chomp chomp, right? No more to it. Hey, guys," Eric said, "how about some more plonkorino?" He poured some into his fruit glass. "Overpriced? Yes! And yet? Not so bad."
    Taylor had begun to smile unpleasantly. Eric looked at the plate before him. He took a forkful of the vegetable stew and put it in his mouth, as much to silence himself as anything else. He glanced at Annie. She seemed strangely calm.
    "Hey, Eric," Taylor said finally, "why don't you tell us what you're really doing out here." Eric shrugged and kept his eyes on his plate and swallowed. "He's a wanderer," Taylor told his wife.
    A wanderer, Eric thought. That was a good one. "The conference," he said. "At Heron's Neck."
    "You ain't part of that shit, are you?"
    "No." Eric tried to explain. "I came out to see ... what local people had to say."
    "Local people?" Taylor asked. "What do you mean by that?"
    "He doesn't mean anything," Annie said.
    "I got nothing to say," Taylor told him. "Annie's got nothing to say neither."
    "I might, Taylor."
    "I should have been here earlier," Eric explained. "Fog. And I had you guys' address from Lou. And I wanted to maybe meet her friends. So I thought I'd call and say hi. So here I am. Tomorrow..."

    "On your merry way?" Annie Shumway asked. "Up to the Neck and the conference? Hey, this ratatouille turned out really well."
    "Well, no," Eric said.
    She was watching Eric being overcome by the wine. He was ever so slightly like Taylor. Like her dad too, though not quiet and surely not violent. These people shouldn't drink. Like her dad. Scandinavian family on her side. Surely not violent, but you could never tell. She had discovered once that drunks were boring and unpleasant, and she had left Taylor once, before they lived on the island. Then the guy she had gone with had told her: Boy, that asshole—meaning Taylor—was work. He was your job, not a lot more than that. She had thought, Oh, I don't know. Because he, that guy, was also boring and unpleasant, and violent sometimes himself, not as brave as Taylor, and that turned out to count with her, as it did with most women. He was not committed to the world outside himself the way Taylor was.
    She got tired of the guy mocking Taylor; she came to see it as mockery against herself. So love has no pride like the song says, and she had found out how ruthless she could be in a worthy cause, and she had gone back to Taylor, who took her back quite lovingly. They had moved to the island, and she had made people unhappy and she had helped people and she thought helping felt better, as was well known. So that was love for Annie.
    "Veggies pretty good," she told the men. "Very nice, Taylor."

    "The bird life is interesting here too." The word for Taylor's smile, Eric thought, was grim. Unless he had started imagining it, the cardinal was still at the window. "You a bird watcher too?" the grim ferryman asked. "You know," he asked his wife, "you