The Dice Man (22 page)

Dr. Felloni's dean-of-women dignity and my own rugged, professional look had convinced our subjects that we were the epitome of respectability. They had become more accustomed than the average person to discussing all sorts of outrageous sexuality with strange, non-condemning adults. All of this might ready them, so my thinking went, for any outrageous instructions we might give them.

`Now this afternoon, Mr. F., in the next room is a shy but promiscuous young woman your own age. She has been paid to make love to you. Be a gentleman with her, but insist that she fuck good. At the conclusion of your experience fill out the questionnaire in this sealed envelope. Be as honest as possible with your answers; they will be completely anonymous.'

`Miss F., in the next room is a shy young man your own age named F. Like yourself he is a virgin. He has been told that you are a prostitute hired to teach him the art of love. For this experiment we wish to see how well you can play this role by interacting with him sexually to permit us to collect as much data as possible. If you overcome your inhibitions about nudity and intimate sexual contact with a man you will receive a bonus of one hundred dollars. If you permit him to have sexual intercourse you will receive a bonus of two hundred dollars. For other possible bonuses read pages five and six of the enclosed instruction sheet and questionnaire. You need not fear pregnancy, since the other subject has been medically certified as sterile.'

`Tomorrow afternoon, Mr. J., you are to go to the address printed on this card. You will meet there a man who has been told you are a fellow homosexual. He will attempt to seduce you. You are to encourage him as much as possible, while noting your own feelings and reactions. If he achieves an orgasm you will receive a bonus of one hundred dollars for producing such significant data. If you also achieve orgasm you will receive an additional two-hundreddollar bonus. We are interested in studying the social and sexual intercourse between normal men like yourself and homosexual men.. Within the enclosed...'

Instructions like these came parading through my mind. I might have to hire prostitutes and homosexuals, but in some cases I might have subjects playing both roles. (Two heterosexual men banging away at each other collecting data.) I began to believe that human beings are capable of anything. Our other-directed modern men are so accustomed to looking to the immediate social environment for approval or disapproval that, given the correct experimental leader, tone and situation, I should be able to get the subjects to alter their customary sexual roles.

It seemed a worthy project, worthy of the Marquis de Sade. Consciously, I wanted to confirm my theory of the malleability of man, but I seemed to be taking a rather fiendish non-rational delight in the prospect.

Hectic, hectic, hectic. The life of an experimenter is not easy. To set up mazes, find rats to run them, measure the results and to tabulate everything is hard. To set up sexual encounters, find people to run them, measure the results and believe everything is harder.

Nevertheless, in the next few weeks I completed the complicated task of setting up what was officially named the Rhinehart-Felloni Investigation of Amorality Tolerance, but which has become generally known among New York psychiatrists as `Fuck Without Fear for Fun and Profit,' and in the New York Daily News as `The Columbia Copulation Caper.'

I had some trouble convincing Dr. Felloni of the correctness of our joint venture, but I took her to lunch one day and just kept talking about `test of the stability of behavioral patterns and attitudes under experimental conditions' and `the Leiberwitz-Loom criteria for defining a homosexual,' and `heterosexuality as defined operationally by the maintenance of an erection in the presence of a woman for five or more minutes' and, as my clincher, `the complete quantification of all results.'

She finally agreed and laid great professional stress on the necessity of anonymity for all subjects.

The first two weeks of the experiment were incredibly confusing. Too many of our hired personnel - prostitutes male and female - were failing to show up or, more usually, failing to follow instructions. Women hired to play hard-to-get would bring along a friend and give our subject an orgy. Another woman hired to exhaust a Don Juan type sexually, fell asleep after fifteen minutes and couldn't be roused even by a gentle beating with a belt.

Many of our subjects, after seeming to agree to the experiment, disappeared. I was desperate for subjects, `lab assistants' (our `help' was so designated in our budget and foundation report) and data. I found myself tempted to hire my wife, Arlene, Miss Reingold even, to meet the various appointments. Dr. Felloni reported that she was having the same problem with the group of subjects she was dealing with. The confusion was further compounded by our having to use the same two apartments for all our `experimental sessions.'

I sent Arlene out to play the role of a lonely, prudish, love sick housewife for a sexually hard-up and inhibited college student who had been instructed to play the role of a Henry Miller; she came back exhilarated. She announced that the evening had been a total success, although she admitted that nothing much had happened for the first two hours and that she may not have stuck completely to her assigned role when she walked into the living room nude after taking a shower. She volunteered to assist in any way she could if needed further for the experiment and even agreed not to tell Jake.

Finally I decided that the old coach himself had to get off the bench and into the game. Someone had to get in there who could plug up the holes when they needed to be plugged or burst up the middle of a score. A hush fell over the crowd when I trotted onto the field.

Miss T. was required by the instructions to: `Spend the evening at the apartment of Mr. O., age thirty-five. Man will have paid one hundred dollars to spend the evening with you. Mr. O. is a lonely college professor whose wife died a year ago. He knows nothing about this experiment and believes a friend has provided him with a young, inexperienced call girl. You are to try to give yourself to him as completely as possible. Examine closely your own attitudes and emotions and fill out the questions contained in the enclosed envelope.'

According to her answers on our attitude questionnaires, Miss T. was nineteen years old, had never had sexual intercourse, had `necked heavily' with only two boys, had kissed `less than ten' boys and had never had any conscious lesbian inclinations or experiences. She believed that premarital sexual intercourse was wrong because `God punished it finitely,' it was `psychologically unhealthy' and there was `danger of pregnancy.'

She affirmed that as a positive attribute it procreated the race. According to her she had never masturbated because `God punished it finitely.'

She was vaguely intolerant of all sexual deviations from the heterosexual norm, extremely conventional in most other attitudes and indicated no close relationships with anyone except her mother, to whom she seemed quite close. She reported that she was a believing Catholic and hoped to be a social worker for emotionally disturbed children.

It seemed to me unlikely that Miss T. would even show up. Of the seven other subjects to whom I had given similar instructions (to meet each other or hired help), three had never appeared; and two of the desertees were quiet types like Miss T. The assigned time, was `around eight o'clock.'

I, in a generous act of self-employment arrived at seven-thirty, and, after fixing myself a small drink, was settling down for a long wait when the bell rang. At the door I found a young woman who announced that she was `Terry Tracy.'

It was five of eight.

Terry Tracy looked up at me brightly like a teenager arriving for a baby-sitting assignment. She was short and pert, with wane brown eyes, soft brown hair and a nervous grace which reminded me of Natalie Wood. She was wearing a skirt and loose turtleneck sweater and carrying her homework crooked in her left arm (it turned out to be her sealed manila folder with the questionnaire.) I awkwardly invited her in, feeling like a decrepit and obscenely lecherous old man.

`Can I fix you a drink?' I asked. It occurred to me that this girl might have misunderstood the instructions.

`Yes, please,' she said and, walking into the middle of the room, looked around at the absolutely conventional modern couch, chairs, bureau, bookcase and rugs as if they had been imported from the moon.

`My name is Robert O'Connor. I'm a professor of history at Long Island University.'

`I'm Terry Tracy,' she said brightly, looking at me for all the world as though I were an interesting uncle about to beguile her with sea yarns.

1 tried to meditate with pseudo-serenity upon my drink but felt ridiculous. `Seen any good movies lately?' I asked.

`Oh no. I don't go to movies very much.'

`They're very expensive these days.'

`Oh yes. And a lot of them are ... well . . . not very worthwhile.'

`That's true.'

She looked over at the fireplace. I looked at the fireplace. It had a little wood-burning grate that looked as though it hadn't been used since the apartment had been built ninety years ago.

`Would you like to have a fire?' I asked.

`Oh no. It's warm enough, thank you.'

I sipped at my drink and licked the sweat off part of the outside of the cold glass. It occurred to me that this might be the most sensuous thing I would do all evening.

`Come over and sit by me, why don't you.'

A hippopotamus eating a daisy.

`I'm very comfortable here, thank you.'

After looking nervously at the fireplace for a few moments she added `All right' Balancing her drink carefully like a child with her first cup of milk, she came over and seated herself about a foot from me on the couch. She modestly tugged down once on her miniskirt, which remained, however, a few feet above her knees. She seemed incredibly small. At six four I was used to looking down at people, but looking down at Terry Tracy to my left all I could see was her curly brown hair and her two seemingly nude legs.

`Hey,' I said.

She looked up-with a smile, but a certain vagueness seemed to have crept into her eyes, as if her yarn-spinning uncle had just used the word bordello.

`May I kiss you?' I asked. At a hundred bucks a toss it didn't seem too much to ask.

Her eyes went vaguer and she said, `Oh yes.'

I pulled her little body to me and leaned down to meet her lips. Without premeditation I found myself kissing only with my lips upon her lips. Her mouth was small, her lips dry. After a few seconds I straightened up.

`You're awfully pretty,' I said.

`Thank you.'

`Your lips are very nice'

`Yours are too,' she said.

`Now you kiss me.' She looked up and waited for me to lower my head, but I remained upright and even leaned back against the couch while still looking down at her, sexily.

After a moment's uncertainty, she placed her drink on the coffee table and got up on her knees. Putting her hands on my neck she slowly leaned towards me. My arms circled her, one hand closed hard around a buttock and I pressed my mouth and tongue against hers. For ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds I kept my tongue in her mouth and moved my hands over her back, buttocks and thighs. Her body was small but firm, her little behind round and rubbery through the woolen skirt. Finally I pulled back and looked at her.

She smiled the smile of a straight-A student.

`That was awfully nice,' I said.

`Oh yes. It was good,' she replied.

`Put your tongue in my mouth,' I said, and as I slid sideways to a horizontal position on the couch, I pulled he her over on top of me. She was remarkably light and her tongue came out of her small mouth in little tentative darts like a snake trying to frighten someone. I bought both my hands up under her skirt and panties and exploring between her legs, got lost. That is, of the two caves traditionally located in the underbrush, I was able to locate only one, and that, in the immortal words of Robert Frost, The one less traveled by.'

Had she been sewn up? I discovered and caressed a slippery crack, but it led not to the warm-cushioned opening of a Lil or Arlene but to a dead-end: a virgin with a vengeance. She pulled up a few inches away from me.

`Please don't touch me there,' she said.

`I beg your pardon,' I said and delicately withdrew my hands and smoothed down her skirt.

She hesitated, a moment and then brought her little mouth down warmly on mine, her hands framing my face. Her abdomen pressing down on my extended penis began to create climactic feelings so I broke our kiss and rolled us both into sitting positions again. She looked up at me brightly, as if pleased by having brought home a good report card. Of course it may have been the brightness of sexual excitement: certainly my gooey fingers didn't indicate scholarly interests. Looking at her a bit drunkenly I asked in a husky voice; `Shall we go to the bedroom?'

`Oh no,' she said, `I have to finish my drink.'

Further straightening her skirt, she reached forward and took a healthier swig from her gin and tonic. I rediscovered my glass on the floor at my feet and finished it off.

`Are you a professor?' she asked.

`Yes I am.'

`What of?'

'Of history.'

'Oh yes, you told me. That must be interesting. What history do you like best?'

`I'm a specialist in papal bulls of the Renaissance. Look, can't I get you another drink?'

`Oh really? I loved reading about Cesare Borgia and the Popes. I'd love another drink. Were the Popes really as bad as the books say?'

I walked liquor-ward a trifle aggressively but said over my shoulder: `It all depends on what you mean by bad.'

`I mean have children and all.'

`Alexander I had several children as did Pope John IX, but before they became popes.'

The Church is much purer today.'

I poured her a huge gin, added a trickle of tonic, gave myself a bathtub-glassful of Scotch and marched back toward the couch.

`How much college have you finished?' I asked.