His wife flinched and averted her eyes, but Pastor Cannon hesitated only a second and then nodded his head.
“Absolutely right. Teach the boy the realities of life. Now, about his clothing—”
“Pastor Cannon,” I said sharply. “This is no Sunday school. This is a mental hospital. Men are sent here when they refuse to play our normal games of reality. Your son has been sucked up by the wards; you’ll never see him the same again, for better or worse. Don’t talk so blithely about rooms and clothes; your son is gone.”
His eyes changed from momentary fright into a cold glare, and his arm fell from around his wife.
“I never had a son,” he said.
And they left.
6
When I got home, Lillian and Arlene Ecstein were collapsed side by side on the couch in their slacks and both were laughing as if they’d just finished splitting a bottle of gin. Arlene, by the way, always seems permanently eclipsed by the brilliant pinwheeling light of her husband. A little short from my six-foot-four point of view, she usually looked prim and prudish with thick horn-rimmed glasses like Jake’s and undistinguished black hair tied back in a bun. Although there were unconfirmed rumors that on her otherwise slender body she owned two marvelously full breasts, the baggy sweaters, men’s shirts, loose blouses and oversized smocks she always wore resulted in no one’s noticing her breasts until they’d known her for several months—by which time they’d forgotten all about her.
In her own sweet, simpleminded way I think she may once have given me a housewifely come-on, but being married, a dignified professional man, a loyal friend and having already forgotten all about her, I had resisted. (As I recall she spent one whole evening asking me to take pieces of lint off her smock; I spent the evening taking pieces of lint off her smock.) On the other hand, vaguely, late at night, after a hard day at the mental hospital, or when Lil and the children all had the flu or diarrhea or measles, I would feel regret at being married, a dignified professional man and a loyal friend. Twice I had daydreamed of somehow engulfing one entire Arlene breast in my mouth. It was clear that were fate ever to give me a reasonable opportunity—e.g. she were to climb naked into bed with me—I would yield; we would have one fine quick fire of first fornication and then settle into some dull routine of copulation on the q.t. But as long as the initiative was left to me I would never do anything about it. The two-thirds married professional man friend would always dominate the bored animal. And, as you, my friend, know, the combination would be miserable.
“We’ve just been splitting a bottle of gin,” Lil said, managing to sprawl and smile and giggle and glare all at once.
“It was that or dope and we couldn’t find any dope,” Arlene added. “Jake doesn’t believe in LSD and Lil couldn’t find yours.”
“That’s strange,” I said, taking off my raincoat. “Lil knows I always keep it in the boy’s toy cabinet.”
“I was wondering why Larry went off to school without a fuss this morning,” Lil said, and, having said something amusing, she stopped laughing.
“Well, what’s the occasion? Is one of you getting divorced or having an abortion?” I asked, fixing myself a martini from the still two-thirds full bottle of gin.
“Don’t be silly,” Lil said. “We’d never dream of such high points. Our lives ooze. Not ooze excitement or sex appeal, just ooze.”
“Like vaginal jelly from a tube,” Arlene added.
They sat slumped on the couch looking grief-stricken for half a minute and then Lil perked up.
“We might form a Psychiatrists’ Wives Invitational Club, Arlene,” she said. “And not invite Luke and Jake.”
“I would hope not,” I said and pulled a desk chair around and, straddling it theatrically, drink in hand, faced the females with fatigue.
“We could be charter members of P.W.I.C.,” Lil went on, scowling. “I can’t quite figure out what good it will do us.” Then she giggled. “Perhaps, though, our P.W.I.C. will grow bigger than yours,” and both women, after staring at me pleasantly for a few seconds, began giggling stupidly.
“We could have our first social project by changing husbands for a week,” said Arlene.
“Neither of us would notice any difference,” Lil said.
“That’s not true. Jake brushes his teeth in a very original way, and I bet Luke has abilities I don’t know about.”
“Believe me,” Lil said, “he doesn’t.”
“Sssss,” said Arlene. “You shouldn’t show public contempt for your husband. It will bruise his ego.”
“Thank you, Arlene,” I said.
“Luke’s an in-tell-i-gent man,” she managed to get out. “I’m not even a liberal arts woman, and he’s studied … he’s studied …”
“Urine and stools,” completed Lil, and they laughed.
Why is it that I can lead my life of quiet desperation with complete poise, dignity and grace, while most women I know insist on leading lives of quiet desperation which are noisy. I was giving the question serious thought when I noticed Lil and Arlene crawling toward me on their knees, their hands clasped in supplication.
“Save us, O Master of the Stools, we’re bored.”
“Give us the word!”
It was good to be back in the quiet of home and fireside after a trying day with the mentally disturbed.
“O Master, help us, our lives are yours.”
The effect of two crawling, begging, drunken women wiggling their way toward me was that I got an erection, not professionally or maritally the most helpful response, but sincere. Somehow I felt that more was expected of a sage.
“Rise, my children,” I said gently and I myself now stood up before them.
“O Master, speak!” Arlene said, on her knees.
“You wish to be saved? To be reborn?”
“Oh, yes!”
“You wish a new life?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Have you tried the new ALL with Borax?”
They collapsed forward in groans and giggles, but straightened quickly with a “We have, we have, but still no satori” (from Lil), and “Even Mr. Clean” (from Arlene).
“You must cease caring,” I said. “You must surrender everything. EVERYTHING.”
“Oh, Master, here, in front of your wife!” and they both giggled and fluttered like sparrows in heat.
“EVERYthing,” I boomed irritably. “Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire.”
“We’ve tried.”
“We’ve tried and still we desire.”
“We still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion we can be without illusions.”
“Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved. Become as weeds that grow and die unnoticed in the fields. Surrender to the wind.”
Lillian suddenly stood up and walked to the liquor cabinet.
“I’ve heard it all before,” she said, “and the wind turns out to be a lot of hot air.”
“I thought you were drunk.”
“The sight of you preaching is enough to sober anyone.”
Arlene, still on her knees, said strangely, blinking through her thick glasses, “But I’m still not saved. I want to be saved.”
“You heard him, give up.”
“That’s salvation?”
“That’s all he offers. Can Jake do better?”
“No, but I can get a family discount with Jake.”
And they laughed.
“Are you two really drunk?” I asked.
“I am, but Lil says she wants all her faculties intact to stay one up on you. Jake’s not home so I’m giving my faculty a vacation.”
“Luke never loses any of his faculties: they’ve all got tenure,” Lil said. “That’s why they’re all senile.” Lil smiled a first bitter and then pleased-with-herself smile and raised a fresh martini in mock toast to my senile faculties. With slow dignity I moved off to my study. There are moments even a pipe can’t dignify.
&nbs
p; 7
The poker that evening was a disaster. Lil and Arlene were exaggeratedly gay at first (their bottle of gin nearly empty) and, after a series of reckless raises, exaggeratedly broke thereafter. Lil then proceeded to raise even more recklessly, while Arlene subsided into a sensually blissful indifference. Dr. Mann’s luck was deadening. In his totally bored, seemingly uninterested way, he proceeded to raise dramatically, win, bluff people out, win, or fold early and miss out on only small pots. He was an intelligent player, but when the cards went his way his blandness made him seem superhuman. That this blubbery god was crumbling potato chips all over the table was a further source of personal gloom. Lil seemed happy that it was Dr. Mann winning big and not I, but Dr. Felloni, by the vigor with which she nodded her head after losing a pot to him, also seemed vastly irritated.
At about eleven Arlene asked to be dealt out, and, announcing drowsily that losing at poker made her feel sexy and sleepy, left for her apartment downstairs. Lil drank and battled on, won two huge pots at a seven-card-stud game with dice that she liked to play, became gay again, teased me affectionately, apologized for being irritable, teased Dr. Mann for winning so much, then ran from the table to vomit in the bathtub. She returned after a few minutes uninterested in playing poker. Announcing that losing made her feel a frigid insomniac, she retired to bed.
We three doctors played on for another half hour or so, discussing Dr. Ecstein’s latest book, which I criticized brilliantly, and gradually losing interest in poker. Near midnight Dr. Felloni said it was time for her to leave, but instead of getting a ride crosstown with her, Dr. Mann said he’d stay a little longer and take a taxi home. After she’d left, we played four final hands of stud poker and with joy I won three of them.
When we’d finished, he lifted himself out of the straight-backed chair and deposited himself in the overstuffed one near the long bookcase. I heard the toilet flush down the hall and wondered if Lil had been sick again. Dr. Mann drew out his pipe, stuffed and lighted it with all the speed of a slow-motion machine being photographed in slow motion, sucked in eternally at the pipe as he lit it and then, finally, boom, let loose a medium-megaton nuclear explosion up toward the ceiling, obscuring the books on the shelves beside him and generally astounding me with its magnitude.
“How’s your book coming, Luke?” he asked. He had a deep, gruff, old man’s voice.
“Not coming at all,” I said from my seat at the poker table.
“Nnnmmmm.”
“I don’t think I’m on to much of value …”
“Un … Un. Huh.”
“When I began it, I thought the transition from sadistic to masochistic might lead to something important.” I ran my finger over the soft green velvet of the poker table. “It leads from sadism to masochism.” I smiled.
Puffing lightly and looking up at the picture of Freud hung on the wall opposite him, he asked:
“How many cases have you analyzed and written up in detail?”
“Three.”
“The same three?”
“The same three. I tell you, Tim, all I’m doing is uninterpreted case histories. The libraries are retching with them.”
“Nnnn.”
I looked at him, he continued to look at Freud, and from the street below a police siren whined upward from Madison Avenue.
“By the way, I had my first interview with that boy you had sent to QSH for me. I found him—”
“I don’t care about your patient at QSH, Luke, unless it’s going to get into print.”
He still didn’t look at me, and the abruptness of the remark stunned me.
“If you’re not writing, you’re not thinking,” he went on, “and if you’re not thinking you’re dead.”
“I used to feel that way.”
“Yes you did. Then you discovered Zen.”
“Yes I did.”
“And now you find writing a bore.”
“Yes.”
“And thinking?”
“And thinking too,” I said.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with Zen,” he said.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking,” I answered and laughed.
“For Christ’s sake, Luke, don’t laugh,” he said loudly. “You’re wasting your life these days, throwing it away.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“No, we’re not. Jake isn’t. I’m not. Good men in every profession aren’t. You weren’t, until a year ago.”
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child—”
“Luke, Luke, listen to me.” He was an agitated old man.
“Well—?”
“Come back to analysis with me.”
I rubbed a green die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered:
“No.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he said sharply.
Without premeditation I surged up from my chair like a defensive tackle at the sight of a shot at the quarterback. I strode across the room in front of Dr. Mann to the big window looking along the street toward Central Park.
“I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m sorry but that’s about it. I’m sick of lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles—”
“These are symptoms, not analysis.”
“To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I’d finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now … they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.”
“You sound like a disillusioned sophomore.”
“The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs. The same old new philosophies. And the thing I’d really pinned my ego to, psychoanalysis, doesn’t seem to be a bit relevant to the problem.”
“It’s totally relevant.”
“Because analysis, were it really on the right track, should be able to change me, to change anything and anybody, to eliminate all undesired neurotic symptoms, and to do it much more quickly than the two years necessary to produce most measurable changes in people.”
“You’re dreaming, Luke. In both theory and practice it can’t be done.”
“Then maybe the theory and practice are wrong.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“There must be more to man than you and me.”
“For God’s sake!” Dr. Mann tapped his pipe vigorously against a bronze ashtray and glared up at me irritably. “You’re dreaming. There are no Utopias. There can be no perfect men. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man’s personal proverb about himself is: ‘Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.’ The whole tendency is … the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don’t change corpses. Corpses aren’t bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.”
“I agree,” I answered. “Psychoanalysis rarely breaks this solidifying flow of personality; it has nothing new to offer man.”
Dr. Mann harumphed or snorted or something and I moved away from the window to look up at Freud. Freud stared down seriously; he didn’t look pleased.
“There must be some other … other secret [blasphemy!] some other … magic potion which would permit certain men to radically alter their lives,” I went on.
&
nbsp; “Try astrology, the I Ching, LSD.”
“You think accepting the self-defeating limitations of the corpse is mental health?” I said.
“Mmmmm.”
I stood facing him and felt a strange rush of rage surge through me. I wanted to crush Dr. Mann with a ten-ton block of concrete. I spat out my next words:
“We must be wrong. All psychotherapy is a tedious disaster. We must be making some fundamental, rock-bottom error that poisons all our thinking. Years from now men will look upon our therapeutic theories and our techniques as we do upon nineteenth-century bloodletting.”
“You’re sick, Luke,” he said quietly.
“You and Jake are among the best and as humans you’re both nothing.” He was sitting erect in his chair.
“You’re sick,” he said. “Half the time you seem like a giggly schoolboy and the other half like a pompous ass.”
“I’m a therapist and it’s clear I, as a human, am a disaster. Physician heal thyself.”
“You’ve lost faith in the most important profession in the world because of an idealized expectation which even Zen says is unrealistic. You’ve gotten bored with the day-to-day miracles of making people slightly better. I don’t see where letting them get slightly worse is much to be proud of.”
“I’m not proud of—”
“Yes you are. You’re a classic case of Horney’s: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves but with what he dreams of achieving.”
“I am.” I stated it flatly; it happened to be true. “But you, Tim, are a classic case of the normal human being, and I’m not impressed.”
He stared at me, his face flushed, and then abruptly, like a big balloon bouncing, arose from his chair with a grunt.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said and chugged toward the door.
“There must be a method to change men more radically than we’ve discovered—”
“Let me know when you find it,” he said.
He stopped at the door and we looked at each other, two alien worlds. His face showed bitter contempt.
“I will,” I said.
“When you find it, just give me a ring. Oxford 4-0300.”
Dice Man Page 5