The Dice Man (2 page)

In the midst of my cynicism I would occasionally daydream of the future. My hopes? To excel in all that I had been doing in the past: to write widely acclaimed articles and books; to raise my children so they might avoid the mistakes I had made; to meet some Technicolor woman with whom I would become soul-mate for life. Unfortunately, the thought that these dreams might all be fulfilled plunged me into despair.

I was caught in a bind. On the one hand I was bored and dissatisfied with my life and myself as they had been for the past decade; on the other, no conceivable change seemed preferable. I was too old to believe that lounging on the shores of Tahiti, becoming a wealthy television personality, being buddy buddy with Erich Fromm, Teddy Kennedy or Bob Dylan, or entertaining Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch in the same bed for a month or so would change anything. No matter how I twisted or turned there seemed to be an anchor in my chest which held me fast, the long line leaning out against the slant of sea taut and trim, as if it were cleated fast into the rock of the earth's vast core. It held me locked, and when a storm of boredom and bitterness blew in I would plunge and- leap against the line's roughclutching knot to be away, to fly before the wind, but the knot grew tight, the anchor, only dug the deeper in my chest; I stayed. The burden of my self seemed inevitable and eternal.

My colleagues, and even myself, mumbling coyly by our couches, all asserted that my problem was absolutely normal I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. The assumption is that a limited and bored self is the unavoidable, all-embracing norm. And I was beginning to agree until, after a few months of wallowing in depression (I furtively had purchased a .38 revolver and nine cartridges), I came washing up on the shore of Zen.

For fifteen years I had been leading a rather ambitious, driving, driven sort of life; anyone who opts for medical school and psychiatry has to have a pretty healthy neurosis burning inside him to keep the motor going. My own analysis by Dr. Timothy Mann had made me understand why my motor was racing away but hadn't slowed it. I now cruised consistently at sixty miles per hour rather than oscillating erratically between fifteen and ninety-five, but if anything blocked my rapid progress along the speedway I became at irritable as a cabby waiting for a parade to pass. When Karen Homey led me to discover D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and Zen, the world of the rat race, which I had assumed to be normal and healthy for an ambitious young man, seemed suddenly like the world of a rat race.

I was stunned and converted - as only the utterly bored can be. Seeing drive, greed and intellectual aspiration as meaningless and sick in my colleagues, I was able to make the unusual generalization to myself; I too had the same symptoms of grasping after illusions. The secret, I seemed to learn, was in not caring, in accepting limitations, conflicts and ambiguities of life with joy and satisfaction, in effortless drifting with the flow of impulse. So life was meaningless? Who cares? So my ambitions are trivial? Pursue them anyway. Life seems boring? Yawn.

I followed impulse. I drifted. I didn't care.

Unfortunately, life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninteresting. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much. It was along about this stage of my somewhat sordid road to truth that I discovered the Dice Man.

My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repetitious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable - the life of a typical successful married man. My new life began on a hot day in the middle of August, 1968. I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four or five minutes we both rolled over and she began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.

`Nnnn, morning, sweetheart,' one of us would eventually say, `Nnnn,' would say the other.

From that point on the day's dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body's most sensitive surfaces the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil's hands gliding over him. Or his own wife's either for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone every effectively stroked his penis.

Lil and I were slowly advancing to the stage where play is replaced by passion when two, three, four thumps resounded from the hall, our bedroom door opened and sixty pounds of boy-energy exploded onto our bed in a graceless flop.

`Time to wake up!' he shouted. Lil had instinctively turned away from me at the sound of the thumps and, although she arched her lovely behind against me and squirmed intelligently, I knew from long experience that the game was over. I had tried to convince her that in an ideal society parents would make love in front of their children as naturally as they would eat or talk, that ideally the children would caress, fondle and make love to the parent, or both parents but Lillian felt different. She liked to make love under sheets, alone with her partner, uninterrupted. I pointed out that this showed unconscious shame and she agreed and went on hiding our caresses from the kids. Our girl, a forty-five pound variety, was by this time announcing in slightly fonder tones than her older brother: `Cock-a-doodle-do! Time to get up.'

Generally, we were up. Occasionally, when I don't have a nine o'clock patient, we encourage him to fix himself and his sister some breakfast. This he is happy to do, but the curiosity aroused by the sound of shattering glassware or the lack of sound of anything from the kitchen makes our extra minutes in bed unrewarding: it is difficult to enjoy sensual bliss while certain that the kitchen is on fire. This particular morning Lil arose right away, modestly keeping her front parts turned away-from the children, slipped on a flimsy nightgown that may have left them in ignorance, but left nothing to my imagination, and slouched sleepily off to prepare breakfast.

Lil, I should note here, is a tall, essentially slender woman with sharp and pointed elbows, ears, nose, teeth and (metaphorically) tongue, but soft and rounded breasts, buttocks and thighs. All agree she is a beautiful woman, with natural wavy blonde hair and statuesque dignity. However, her lovely face has a peculiarly pixyish expression which I'm tempted to describe as mousy except that then you'll picture her with beady red eyes, and they're actually beady blue. Also, mouses are rarely five feet ten and willowy, and rarely attack men, as Lil does. Nevertheless, her pretty face, in some perceivers, calls up the image of a mouse, a beautiful mouse to be sure, but a mouse. When during our courtship I remarked upon this phenomenon it cost me four weeks of total sexual abstinence. Suffice it to say, my friends, that this mouse analogy is strictly between you and me.

Although young Evie had scrambled talkatively away to follow her mother toward the kitchen, Larry still lay sprawled next to me on the large-king-sized bed. It was his philosophical position that our bed was large enough for the whole family and he deeply resented Lil's obviously hypocritical argument that Mommy and Daddy were so big that they needed the entire area. His recent strategy was to plop on the bed until every last adult was out of it; only then would he triumphantly leave.

'Time to get up, Luke,' he announced with the quiet dignity of a doctor announcing that he's afraid the leg will have to come off.

`It's not eight o'clock yet,' I said.

`Un-nn,' he said, and pointed silently at the clock on the dresser.

I squinted at the clock. `It says twenty-five before six,' I said and rolled away from him. A few seconds later I felt him nudging me in the forehead with his fist.'

`Here are your glasses,' he said. `Now look.'

I looked. `You changed the time when I wasn't looking,' I said, and rolled over in the opposite direction.

Larry climbed back onto the bed and with no conscious intention, I'm sure, began bouncing and humming.

And I, with that irrational surge of fury known to every parent, suddenly shouted `Get OUT of here!' For about thirteen seconds after Larry had raced to the kitchen I lay in my bed with relative content. I could hear Evie's unending chatter punctuated by Lil's occasional yelling, and from the Manhattan streets below, the unending chatter of automobile horns. That thirteen-second involvement in sense experience was fine; then I began to think, and my day was shot.

I thought of my two morning patients, of lunch with Doctors Ecstein and Felloni, of the book on sadism I was supposed to be writing, of the children, of Lillian: I felt bored. For some months I had been feeling - from about ten to fifteen seconds after the cessation of polymorphous perversity until falling asleep at night - or falling into another session of polymorphous perversity - that depressed feeling of walking up a down escalator. `Whither and why, as General Eisenhower once said, `have the joys of life all flown away?'

Or, as Burt Lancaster once asked: `Why do our fingers to the grain of wood, the cold of steel, the heat of the sun, the flesh of women, become calloused?'

`BREAKFAST DADDY!'

'EGGS, hon.'

I arose, plunged my feet into my size-thirteen slippers, pulled my bathrobe around me like a Roman preparing for the Forum, and went to the breakfast table, with, I supposed, a superficial sunniness, but deeply brooding on Lancaster's eternal question.

We have a six-room apartment on the slightly upper, slightly East, slightly expensive side, near Central Park, near the blacklands, and near the fashionable upper East Side. Its location is so ambiguous that our friends are still not certain whether to envy us or pity us.

In the small kitchen Lil was standing at the stove aggressively mashing eggs in a frying pan; the two children were sitting in whining obedience on the far side of the table. Larry had been playing with the window shade behind him (we have a lovely view from our kitchen window of a kitchen window with a lovely view of ours), and Evie had been guilty of talking without a break in either time or irrelevance since getting up. Lil, since we don't believe in corporal punishment, had admonished them verbally. However, Lil's shrieks are such that were children (or adults) ever given a free choice, I'm sure they would prefer that rather than receive `verbal admonitions' they be whipped with straps containing metal studs.

Obviously Lil does not enjoy the early morning hours, but we found that having a maid at this hour was `impractical.'

When, earlier in our marriage, the first full-time live-in maid we hired turned out to be a beautiful, sex-oozing wench of a mulatto whose eyes would have stiffened a Eunuch, Lillian intelligently decided that a daytime, part-time maid would give us more privacy.

As she brought the plates of scrambled eggs and bacon to the table she glanced up at me and asked `What time will you be back from Queensborough today?'

`Four-thirty or so. Why?' I said as I lowered my body delicately into a small kitchen chair across from the kids.

'Arlene wants another private chat this afternoon.'

`Larry took my spoon!'

`Give Evie her spoon, Larry,' I said.

Lil gave Evie back her spoon.

`I imagine she wants to talk more of the "I have to have a baby" dream,' she said.

`I wish you'd talk to Jake,' Lil said as she sat down beside me.

`What can I tell him?'

I said. `Say Jake, your wife desperately wants a baby: anything I can do to help?"

`Are there dinosaurs in Harlem?' Evie asked. `Yes,' Lil said. `You could say precisely that. It's his conjugal responsibility; Arlene is almost thirty-three years old and has wanted a baby for - Evie, use your spoon.'

`Jake's going to Philadelphia today,' I said.

`I know; that's one reason Arlene's coming up. But the poker is still on for tonight, isn't it?'

`Mmm.'

'Mommy, what's a virgin?' Larry asked quietly.

`A virgin is a young girl,' she answered.

'Very young,' I added.

'That's funny,' he said.

`What is?' Lil asked.

`Barney Goldfield called me a stupid Virgin.'

'Barney was misusing the word,' Lil said. `Why don't we postpone the poker, Luke. It's-'

'Why?'

`I'd rather see a play.'

`We've seen some lemons.'

'It's better than playing poker with them.'

Pause.

`With lemons?'

`If you and Tim and Renata were able to talk about something besides psychology and the stock market, it would help.'

`The psychology of the stock market?'

`And the stock market! God, I wish you'd open your ears for just once.'

I forked my eggs into my mouth with dignity, and sipped with philosophical detachment my instant coffee. My initiation into the mysteries of Zen Buddhism had taught me many things, but the most important was not to argue with my wife. `Go with the flow,' the great sage Oboko said, and I'd been doing it for five months now. Lil had been getting madder and madder.

After about twenty seconds of silence (relatively speaking: Larry leapt up to put in toast for himself; Evie tried a brief burst of monologue on dinosaurs which was smothered with a stare), I (theoretically the way to avoid arguments is to surrender before the attack has been fully launched) said quietly I'm sorry, Lil.'

`You and your damn Zen. I'm trying to tell you something. I don't like the forms of entertainment we have. Why can't we ever do something new or different, or, revolution of revolutions, something I want.'

`We do, honey, we do. The last three plays' I had to drag you. You're so-'