Fun With Problems Read Online Free PDF

day, the first hour after dawn. Pure as creation, he thought. She took his hand. He kept hearing the
other woman's voice, the one whose skin was no longer so smooth, though it had been, twenty-five years before.
You wanted to go. Be gone.

    Helping her climb into the gear, her back to him, he raised the vial to his lips and took in as many of the tablets as he could. When her tank was in place, they each took a swallow of fresh water. She held his hand while the dive-master explained the currents. The morning sun found diamonds in the dun, quartz-veined rock around the bay.
    It was a wall dive, and the wall was sublime. Elkhorn and rose coral. There were clouds of damselfish, angels and tang. The brilliant sunshine dappled it all and descended in great columns of light to the blue-gray deep.
    He followed one and moved into the uncolored world of fifteen fathoms. The weight of the air took him down the darkening wall. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his tank. It sank with him in a dream, a gala of bubbles. Beyond pain and shadow, her fair, desired, long-limbed form diminished against the sky.

Charm City
    A T A RECITAL one autumn evening Frank Bower heard Mahler's
Song of the Earth,
performed by four young singers. The part that moved him most was the faux Chinese poetry that ended in the poet's rapture. Bower's enjoyment was shadowed by anxiety and some distant unremembered grief. He was transfixed by the singer, a young Korean woman who performed with closed eyes in the posture of a supplicant. "
Abschied,
" she sang. Rapture in spite of all. The music caused him some emotional confusion.

    At the close of the movement the singer held her pose as though she herself did not recognize that the song was over. Bower's gaze settled on a tall woman in a leather coat who appeared to be looking straight at him. Whatever it was she saw so preoccupied her that she did not trouble to applaud after the last movement. He thought she must be a friend of his wife's whom he might have met once and forgotten.
When he left the auditorium Bower wandered into the museum's restaurant, a pleasingly simple room all lines and light, done in the futuristic severity of twenty years before. It had one glass wall transparent to the autumnal garden. Outside there were ivy and pines and leaves on the barren earth. It was growing dark but he could make out the shape of a metal structure and hear the sound of falling water. Bower was a technical writer for a software systems company in Towson who had briefly taught classics at Hopkins. He was naturally discontented with his work as with other things.

    At the cafeteria counter he bought a mini-bottle of cabernet along with cheese and slices of apple. He took a table by the window and sat until it cast him his own reflection. He loved music. Mahler's bittersweet notes echoed in his mind's ear, taking their own direction, producing unvoiced melodies.
Abschied.
It was a Thursday night and the museum was open until eight.
    Finally the wine made him hungry. He put his glasses and jacket on and prepared to go. About to rise, he realized there was a woman standing over his table. She was handsome, long-faced. The phrase "terrible gray eyes," read somewhere, occurred to him. She was forty-five or so, tall and well built. She wore a leather jacket fragrant with the rich piquant smell of hide. It was the woman he had locked eyes with in the auditorium.
    "What would you say," the woman asked, "if I proposed to buy you a drink?"
    He stared. Surely he must know her. She was laughing at his astonishment.
    "Don't strange women often offer to buy you drinks?" She set down the tray she was holding and put wine and another glass before him.

    "That's very kind of you," Bower said. "How can I say no?"
    "I hope you won't. May I sit down?"
    He rose from his chair to invite her. When she was seated across from him, he waited for her to speak. She looked comfortable there, sipping her own wine.
    "But we know each other,"