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 nothing. Yet, on a certain level, he thought, she acted like someone who wanted to play.
"I liked your standing up to Sister Sophia," Matthews told her when he had his second drink in hand.
She did not seem entirely pleased by his compliment. For a few seconds, she only looked at him without speaking.
"I felt kind of sorry afterward. I shouldn't have called her a snitch."
"I wouldn't worry about it. She's a bully." He watched her fidget unhappily on her big wooden chair. To make any progress it would be necessary to cheer her up. Win her over. "And she really is a snitch."
"Oh, God," said Amy. "That makes it worse."
"Yes, it does," Matthews said. He laughed at her in spite of himself. "Sorry."
"So," she said, "I was being stupid."
"No, no. I admired what you did." He felt a little ashamed of the contrived flattery. He had underestimated her.
"I was being pompous pious."
"You were fine," he said. "I don't think you did anything inappropriate."
"Inappropriate" had become such a useful word, he thought, so redolent of the spirit of the times. Everyone had dumb, disastrous moments and behaved inappropriately. Inappropriate anger led to attacks of bad judgment. Misplaced idealism was also inappropriate. And almost everyone had a little no matter how clean they were.
"Really?" she asked.
"Really," he told her. "Have a drink." Somehow the suggestion turned her around this time. Her state of agitated regret seemed to visibly depart. The look he saw in her pale eyes was suddenly challenging and flirtatious.
"No, I don't think so," she said firmly. The firmness had a pretended note.
The mournful fráulein desired them to stop fiddle-fucking, order dinner or go away. Matthews set her pouting with another drinks order. Apfel-schorle for the little lady, another Scotch for himself. Amy went to the Ladies.
When the drinks came, Matthews was reminded of the celebrations at a wedding he had attended the previous weekend. Someone had proposed the toast "l'chaim" — "to life." There and then Matthews had decided it was a toast he would never, ever, willingly drink again. Not, of course, that he would make a scene about it. Returned, Amy thoughtfully considered her glass of juice.
"I've quit drinking for a while," she announced. Matthews thought she might be getting admirable again. In fact, he realized, she was offering him a wedge. How much might he pry?
"I think you should make an exception this evening. Really," he said. "You've been fighting the good fight." The words were ill chosen, he knew that. It was hard to stop making fun of her. The devil drove him. He labored to recoup. "I mean, you want to forget all that, right?"
"Well," she said, in the manner of one about to explain thoroughly, "see, I've been doing a play."
"A play?"
Amy told him about her second career. "I went to New York for a year," she said. "I did some off-off-Broadway. I almost got Shakespeare in the Park."
"No kidding?"
"No kidding. It would have been fun."
"Shakespeare in the Park? Sounds like fun."
"But it was almost, right? No cigar."
A different Amy. Animation. Still, though, tinged with regret. "Anyway," Amy said, "I did some great stuff. Odets. Do you know Clifford Odets?"
"Sure. Waiting for Lefty."
"We didn't do that. We did two minor short plays. And we did a dramatic reading of John Brown's Body"
"Really? Who were you?"
"Don't tease me," she said. "Don't tease me about my year in New York."
"I wouldn't," Matthews said, because he had not been. "I think it's great."
"Well, not so great," she said, "because it's over and I have to make a living. And clinical psych is what I do."
"You do it very effectively."
"Yeah, sure," she said. It turned out she was not drinking because she thought alcohol interfered with remembering her lines. "I blank. I go up. You know, forget the cue and the line."
"I see."
"Drinking gives you these glitches," she said. For a moment, she put the tip of her tongue to her upper lip and looked 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.