The Dice Man (8 page)

I was shocked into immobility for perhaps five seconds, but finally made an abrupt, soldierly about-face and marched to our apartment door, opened it and took one pace outside, wheeled, and marched with mechanical precision and joyous excitement back into the apartment, down the hall to our bedroom, opened the door a crack and announced loudly: `I'm going for a walk, Lil.'

Turning, I marched out of the apartment a second time.

As I walked woodenly down the two flights of stairs I noticed rust spots on the railing and an abandoned advertising circular crumpled into a corner. `Think Big,' it urged. On the Ecstein floor I wheeled like a puppet, marched to the door of their apartment and rang. My next clear thought swept with dignified panic through my mind: `Does Arlene really take the pill?'

A smile colored my consciousness at the thought of Jack the Ripper, on his way to rape and strangle another woman, and worrying whether she was protected or not.

After twenty seconds I rang again.

A second smile (my face remained wooden) flowed through at the thought of someone else's already having discovered the' die and thus now busily banging away at Arlene on the floor just on the other side of the door.

The door unlatched and opened a crack.

`Jake?' a voice said sleepily.

`It's me, Arlene,' I said.

`What do you want?'

The door stayed open only a crack.

`I've come downstairs to rape you,' I said.

`Oh,' she said, `just a minute.'

She unlatched and opened the door. She was wearing an unattractive cotton bathrobe, possibly even Jake's, her black hair was straggling down her forehead, cold cream whitened her face, and she was squinting at me without her glasses like a blind beggar woman in a melodrama of the life of Christ.

Closing, the door behind me I turned toward her and waited, wondering passively what I was going to do next.

`What did you say you wanted?' she asked; she was groggy with sleep.

`I've come downstairs to rape you,' I replied and advanced toward her, she continuing to stand there with a widening and perhaps wakening look of curiosity. Feeling for the first time a faint hint of sexual desire, I put my arms around her, lowered my head and planted my mouth on her neck.

Almost immediately I felt her hands pushing hard against my chest and soon a long-drawn-out `LuuuuUUke,' part terror, part question, part giggle. After a good solid wet arousing kissing of her upper dorsal region I released her. She stepped back a step and straightened her ugly bathrobe. We stared at each other, in our differently hypnotized states, like two drunks confronting each other, knowing they are expected to dance.

`Come,' I found myself saying after our mutual moment of awe, and I put my left arm around her waist and began drawing her toward the bedroom.

`Let go of me,' she said sharply and pushed my arm away.

With the mechanical swiftness of a superbly driven puppet my right hand slammed across her face. She was terror stricken. So was I. A second time we faced each other, her face now showing a blotch of red on the left side. I mechanically wiped some cold cream off my fingers onto my trousers, then I reached out and took hold of the front of her robe and pulled her to me.

`Come,' I said again.

`Get your hands off Jake's bathrobe,' she hissed uncertainly.

I released her and said: `I want to rape you, Arlene. Now, this moment. Let's go.'

Like a frightened kitten she hunched down away from me with her hands tugging her robe at the throat. Then she straightened.

'All right,' she said, and with a look which I can only describe as righteous indignation, began to move past me down the hall toward the bedroom, adding, `But you leave Jake's bathrobe alone.'

The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination, passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene's. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounting her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.

`Why did you do it, Luke?'

`I had to, Arlene, I was driven to it.'

`Jake won't like it.'

`Ah. . . Jake?'

`I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.'

`But . . . this . . . have you been . . . raped before?'

'No. Not since getting married. Jake's the only one and he never rapes me.'

`Are you sure you have to tell him?'

`Oh yes. He'd want to know.' `But won't he be tremendously upset?'

'Jake? No. He'll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we'd committed sodomy that would be even more interesting.'

'Arlene, stop being bitter.'

`I'm not bitter. Jake's a scientist.'

`Well, maybe you're right but-'

`Of course, there was that once...'

`What once?'

`That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull with a bottle of . . . bottle of . . . was it Cognac?'

`Split his skull?'

`Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy `I'm remembering - so look, Arlene, don't be silly, don't tell Jake about tonight.'

She considered this.

`But if I don't tell him, it will imply I've done something wrong.'

`No. I've done something wrong, Arlene. And I don't want to lose Jake's friendship and trust just because I've raped you.'

`I understand.'

`He'd be hurt.'

`Yes he would. He wouldn't be objective. If he'd been drinking.'

`Yes he would.'

`I won't tell him.'

We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.

For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly `Luke, baby, you're just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He's cured. I did it. I'm famous.'

Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods - the die - rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die's being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape was obviously dictated by fate. Not guilty.

Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional-man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located spittoon in front of my jury.

But on the whole it seemed a pretty weak defense, and I began vaguely hunting for a new one when I became ablaze at the thought: I am right: I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die! Excited and proud, I stood for a moment on my own personal Rubicon. And then I stepped across. I established in my mind at that moment and for all time, the never-to-be-questioned principle that what the die dictates, I will perform.

The next moment was anticlimactic. I picked up the die and announced: `If it's a one, three or five, I'll to go bed; if its a two I'll go downstairs and ask Jake if I can try to rape Arlene again; if it's a four or a six I'll stay up and think about this some more.'

I shook the die violently in the cup of my two hands and flipped it, out onto the poker table, it rolled to a stop: five. Astonished and a bit let down, I went to bed. It was a lesson I was to learn many times in subsequent casts; the dive can show almost as poor judgment as a human.

By training I have learned to look for the casual insignificance of every overt cause. In the morning, after a caressless, buttockless period before breakfast, lukewarm coffee, and Lil's hungover imprecations, I wander into the living room to recreate the scene of the crime. Pacing back and forth I tried to demonstrate to myself that I would have gone down to Arlene whether the die had been a one, a four, or a box of matches. I remained unconvinced. I knew in my big hardpumping heart that only the die could have pushed me down those stairs and into Arlene's entranceway.

I tried then to prove that I had seen the die that was on the side table before it had been covered with a card or at any rate before I made my solemn vow to commit holy rape if it turned out to have a one face up. I tried to determine who had left the card and die there and guessed it must have been Lil during her headlong flight to the bathroom. It seemed thus that I couldn't have known that it was a one. Had I seen from the angle of my chair the sides of the die and thus unconsciously known that the die must have turned upward either a one or a six? I walked over to the little table and tumbled a die onto it and, without looking at what came face up, covered the die with the queen of spades more or less as it had been covered the night before. I went back and sat at the poker table. From there, staring through my glasses, squinting, straining, trying with superhuman effort, I managed to make out the table and the slightly humped playing card. If there was a die under the card it was unpublished news as far as my eyes were concerned. For me to have seen the die from my chair at the poker table I would have had to have an unconscious with telescopic sight. The case was clear: I couldn't possibly have known what was under the queen of spades; my rape was determined by fate.

`What happened to the picture of Freud?' asked Lil, who had come in from the kitchen after turning the kids over to the maid.

Seeing that Freud's portrait was still facing the wall, I said `I don't know. I assumed you did that last night as you went to bed. A symbolic rejection of me and my colleagues.'

Lil, her messed blonde hair, reddish eyes and uncertain frown making her look unusually like a mouse approaching chase in a trap, looked at me suspiciously.

`I did it?' she asked, her mind stumbling over the events of last night. `Sure. Don't you remember? You said something like "Now, Freud can look into the bowels of the house," and staggered off to the john.'

`I did not,' she said. `I strode with great dignity.'

`You're right. You strode with great dignity in a variety of directions.'

'But essentially I moved east'

'True.'

`East and johnward.'

We laughed and I asked her to bring another cup of coffee and a doughnut to my study. Evie and Larry momentarily escaped from the clutches of the maid and swooped through the living room like two desperadoes shooting up a town and disappeared back toward the kitchen. I retreated to my home within my home: my old oaken desk in the study.

For a while I sat there throwing the two green dice across its scarred face and wondering what the events of the night before meant for me. My legs and loins felt heavy, my mind light, Last night I had done something I had vaguely felt like doing for two or three years. Having done it I was changed, not greatly, but changed. My life for a few weeks would be a little more complex, a little more exciting. Searching for a free hour to play with Arlene would while away time that in the recent past had been-spent not being able to work on my book, not being able to concentrate on my cases and daydreaming about stock market coups. The time might not be better spent, but I would be better entertained. Thanks to the die.

What else might the dice dictate? Well, that I stop writing silly psychoanalytic articles; that I sell all my stock, or buy all I could afford; that I make love to Arlene in our double bed while my wife slept on the other side; that I take a trip to San Francisco, Hawaii, Peking; that I bluff every time when playing poker; that I give up my home, my friends, my profession. After giving up my psychiatric practice I might become a college professor. .. a stockbroker . .. a real estate salesman .. Zen master ... used-car salesman ... travel agent ... elevator fan. My choice of profession seemed suddenly infinite. That I didn't want to be a used-car salesman, didn't respect the profession, seemed almost a limitation on my pall, as idiosyncrasy.

My mind exploded with possibilities. The, boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saving after each random decision.

`The die is cast,' and sloshing stoically across some new, ever wider Rubicon. If one life was dead and boring, so what? Long live a new life! But what new life? During the last months nothing had seemed worth doing. Had the die changed that? What specifically did I want to do? Well, nothing specific. But in general? All power to the dice! Good enough, but what might they decide? Everything.

Everything? Everything.

Everything didn't turn out to be too much at first.

That afternoon the dice scorned all sorts of exciting options and steered me instead to the corner drugstore to choose reading matter at random. Admittedly, browsing through the four magazines chosen - Agonizing Confessions; Your Pro-Football Handbook; Fuck-it and Health and You - was more interesting than my usual psychoanalytic fare, but I vaguely regretted not having been sent by the dice on a more important or absurd mission.