The day of his marriage was apparently the last time Jake had bothered to give a thought to the pursuit of women. He seemed to have acquired Arlene in the same spirit with which in later life he acquired a lifetime supply of aspirin, and, a little after that, a lifetime supply of laxatives. Moreover, just as the aspirin and laxative were guaranteed not to produce any annoying side effects, so too he saw to it that periodic use of Arlene would be free of such effects also. There was an ill-intended rumor that he had Arlene take the pill and use an inter-uterine device, a diaphragm and a douche, while he used a contraceptive, always used her anus anyway and then always practiced coitus interruptus. Whatever his methods, they had worked. They were childless, Jake was satisfied and Arlene was bored and longed to have a baby.
So my first option was clear: no more affair. Feeling rebellious I wrote as number two option, “I’ll do whatever Arlene says we ought to do” (rather courageous in those days). Number three, I would attempt to reseduce Arlene as soon as possible. Too vague. I’d try to reseduce her, hummm, obviously Saturday evening. (The Ecsteins were having a cocktail party.)
Number four, I—I seemed to have exhausted the three obvious courses of action—no wait, number four, I would say to her whenever I could get her alone that although I loved her beyond words, I felt that we should keep our love Platonic for the sake of the children. Number five, I would play it by ear and let my impulses dictate my behavior (another chicken’s squawk). Number six, I would go to her apartment Tuesday afternoon (the next time I knew her to be alone) and more realistically rape her (i.e. no effort at softness or seduction).
I looked at the options, smiled happily and flipped a die: four: Platonic love. Platonic love? How did that get in there? I was momentarily appalled. I decided that it was understood by number four that I might be dissuaded from Platonism by Arlene.
That Saturday evening Arlene greeted me at the door wearing a lovely blue cocktail dress I’d never seen before (neither had Jake), with a glass of Scotch and with a wide-eyed stare: representing awe, fright or blindness from being without her glasses. After handing me the Scotch (Lil was upstairs still dressing), Arlene fled to the other side of the room. I drifted over to a small group of psychiatrists led by Jake and listened to a consecutive series of monologues on methods of avoiding income taxes.
Depressed, I drifted after Arlene, poetry poised like cookie crumbs on my lips. She was yo-yoing from the kitchen-bar to her guests, smiling bigly and blankly, and then rushing away in someone’s midsentence on the presumed pretense of getting someone a drink. I’d never seen her so manic. When I finally followed her into the kitchen one time she was staring at a picture of the Empire State Building, or rather at the calendar beneath it with all the banking holidays squared in orange.
She turned and looked at me with the same wide-eyed awe, fear or blindness and asked in a frighteningly loud, nervous voice:
“What if I’m pregnant?”
“Shhhh,” I replied.
“If I’m pregnant, Jake will never forgive me.”
“But I thought you took the pill every morning.”
“Jake tells me to but for the last two years, I’ve substituted little vitamin C tablets in my calendar clock.”
“Oh my God, when, er, when … Do you think you’re pregnant?”
“Jake’ll know I cheated on him and didn’t take the pill.”
“But he’ll think he’s the father?”
“Of course, who else could be?”
“Well … uh …”
“But you know how he detests the thought of having children.”
“Yes I do. Arlene …”
“Excuse me, I’ve got to serve drinks.”
She ran out with two martinis and returned with an empty highball glass.
“Don’t you dare to touch me again,” she said as she began preparing another drink.
“Ah Arlene, how can you say that? My love is like …”
“This Tuesday, Jake is going to spend all day at the Library annex working on his new book. If you dare try anything like last night I’ll phone the police.”
“Arlene …”
“I’ve checked their number and I plan to always keep the phone near me.”
“Arlene, the feelings I have for you are …”
“Although I told Lil yesterday that I’m going to Westchester to see my Aunt Miriam.”
“If you only knew how …”
She was off again with a full whiskey and two pieces of cheesed celery, and before she returned again Lil had arrived and I was trapped in an infinite analysis with a man named Sidney Opt of the effect of the Beatles on American culture. It was the closest I came to poetry that night. I didn’t even talk to Arlene again until, well, that Tuesday afternoon.
“Arlene,” I said, trying to rope in a scream as she pressed the door convincingly against my foot, “you must let me in.”
“No,” she said.
“If you don’t let me in I won’t tell you what I plan to do.”
“Plan to do?”
“You’ll never know what I’m going to say.”
There was a long pause and then the door eased open and I limped into her apartment. She retreated decisively to the telephone and, standing stiffly with the receiver in her hand with one finger inserted into presumably the first digit, she said:
“Don’t come any nearer.”
“I won’t, I won’t. But you really should hang up the phone.”
“Absolutely not.”
“If you keep it off the hook too long they’ll disconnect the phone.” Hesitantly she replaced the receiver and sat at one end of the couch (next to the telephone); I seated myself at the other end.
After looking at me blankly for a few minutes (I was preparing my declaration of Platonic love), she suddenly began crying into her hands.
“I can’t stop you,” she moaned.
“I’m not trying to do anything!”
“I can’t stop you, I know I can’t, I’m weak.”
“But I won’t touch you.”
“You’re too strong, too forceful …”
“I won’t touch you.”
She looked up.
“You won’t?”
“Arlene, I love you …”
“I knew it! Oh and I’m so weak.”
“I love you in a way beyond words.”
“You evil man.”
“But I have decided [I had become tight-lipped with annoyance at her] that our love must always be Platonic.”
She looked at me with narrowed, resentful eyes: I suppose that it was her equivalent of Jake’s penetrating squint, but it made her look as if she were trying to read subtitles on an old Italian movie.
“Plutonic?” she asked.
“Yes, it must always be Platonic.”
“Plutonic.” She meditated. “Pluto was the God of the Underworld.”
“No, wait a minute, not Pluto, Play …”
“You sick, filthy man.”
“Arlene, stop it.” I stood up and walked over in front of her. She picked up the phone and put it to her ear. “I want to love you with a love that is beyond words and beyond the mere touch of bodies. With a love of the spirit.”
“But what’ll we do?”
“We’ll see each other as we have in the past, but now knowing we were meant to be lovers but that fate seventeen years ago made a mistake and gave you to Jake.”
“But what’ll we do?” She held the phone to her ear.
“And for the sake of the children we must remain faithful to our spouses and never again give in to our passion.”
“I know, but what will we do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Er … nothing … unusual.”
“Won’t we see each other?”
“Yes.”
“At least say we love each other?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“At least reassure me that you haven’t forgotten?”
> “Perhaps.”
“Don’t you like to touch me?”
“Ah Arlene yes yes I do but for the sake of the children …”
“What children?”
“My children.”
“Oh.”
She was sitting on the couch, one arm in her lap and the other holding the telephone to her right ear. Her low-cut blue cocktail dress which for some reason she was wearing again was making me feel less and less Platonic.
“But …” she seemed trying to find the right words. “How … how would your … raping me hurt your children?”
“Because—how would my raping you hurt my children?”
“Yes.”
“It would … were I to touch the magic of your body again I might well never be able to return to my family. I might have to drag you off with me to start a new life.”
“Oh.” Wide-eyed, she stared at me.
“You’re so strange,” she added.
“Love has made me strange.”
“You really love me?”
“I have loved you … I have loved you since … since I realized how much there was hiding beneath the surface of your outward appearance, how much depth and fullness there is to your soul.”
“I just don’t understand it.”
She put the phone down on the arm of the couch and raised her hands again to her face, but she didn’t cry.
“Arlene, I must go now. We must never speak of our love again.”
She looked up at me through her glasses with a new expression—one of fatigue or sadness, I couldn’t tell.
“Seventeen years.”
I moved hesitantly away from the couch. She continued to stare at the spot I had vacated.
“Seventeen years.”
“I thank you for letting me speak to you.”
She rose now and took off her glasses and put them next to the telephone. She came to me and put a trembling hand on the side of my arm.
“You must stay,” she said.
“No, I must leave.”
“I’ll never let you leave your children.”
“I would be too strong. Nothing could stop me.”
She hesitated, her eyes searching my face.
“You’re so strange.”
“Arlene, if only …”
“Stay.”
“Stay?”
“Please.”
“What for?”
She pulled my head down to hers and gave me her lips and mouth in a kiss.
“I won’t be able to control myself,” I said.
“You must try,” she said dreamily. “I have sworn never to go to bed with you again.”
“You what?”
“I have sworn on my husband’s honor never to get into bed with you again.”
“I’ll have to rape you.”
She looked up at me sadly.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
11
During the first month the dice had rather small effect on me, and I certainly never considered letting them take over my whole life. The thought would have frightened me them. I tended to restrict my options so that Lil and my colleagues wouldn’t begin to suspect I was into anything slightly unorthodox. I kept my shimmering green cubes hidden carefully from everyone, consulting them surreptitiously when necessary.
I used them to choose ways to spend my free time, and to choose alternatives when the normal “I” didn’t particularly care. They decided that Lil and I would see the Edward Albee play rather than the Critics Award play, that I read work x selected randomly from a huge collection; that I would cease writing my book and begin an article on “Why Psychoanalysis Usually Fails,” that I would buy General Envelopment Corporation rather than Wonderfilled Industries or Dynamicgo Company; that I would not go to a convention in Chicago; that I would make love to my wife in Kama-Sutra position number 23, number 52, and number 8, etc.; that I see Arlene, that I don’t see Arlene, etc.; that I see her in place X rather than place Y and so on.
In short the dice decided things which really didn’t matter. Most of my options tended to be from among the great middle way of my tastes and personality. I learned to like to play with the probabilities I gave the various options I would create. In letting the dice choose among possible women I might pursue for a night, for example, I might give Lil one chance in six, some new women chosen at random two chances in six, and Arlene three chances in six. If I played with two dice the subtleties in probability were much greater. Two principles I always took care to follow. First: never include an option I might be unwilling to fulfill; second: always begin to fulfill the option without thought and without quibble. The secret of the successful dicelife is to be a puppet on the strings of the die.
About a month after sinking into Arlene I began letting the dice send me to bars scattered throughout the city to sit, sip, listen, chat. They picked out strangers to whom I was sent to talk and chose roles that I played with these strangers. I would be a veteran outfielder with the Detroit Tigers in town for a Yankee series (Bronx bar), English reporter with the Guardian (the Barbizon Plaza), playwright homosexual, alcoholic professor, escaped criminal and so on. In bars, restaurants, theaters, taxis, stores—whenever out of sight of those who knew me—I was soon never myself, my old, “normal self.” I went bowling. I signed up at Vic Tanny’s to muscle my middle. I went to concerts, baseball games, sit-ins, open parties; anything and everything that I had never done, I now created as options, and the dice threw me from one to the other—and rarely the same man from day to day.
Although I tried to act so I could always give Lil a “rational” explanation for my eccentricities, the dice sometimes made it difficult. They commanded me to show her concern and generosity. They bought her the first piece of jewelry I’d given her in six years. She accused me of infidelity. Reassured, she was very pleased. The dice sent us to three dramas on three consecutive nights (I had averaged three plays a year, two of which were inevitably musicals with record short runs); we both felt cultured, avant-garde, unphilistine. We swore we’d see a play a week all year. The dice said otherwise.
The die one week requested that I give in to her every whim. Although she twice called me spineless and at the end of the week seemed disgusted with my lack of authority, I found myself listening and responding to her at times where normally I wouldn’t have known she existed, and at times I touched her with my thoughtfulness.
Lil even enjoyed the dice’s sudden passion for awkward sexual positions, although when the die ordered me to penetrate her from thirteen distinctly different positions before reaching my climax, she became quite angry as I was trying to maneuver her into position eleven. When she wondered why I was getting so many strange whims these days, I suggested that perhaps I was pregnant. But the medium is the message, and the dice decisions, no matter how pleasant they might sometimes be to Lil or Arlene or others, acted to separate me from people, even when I was physically rather close.
The next interesting development occurred when the dice began diddling with my patients: it was a decisive step. I began creating as options that I comment aggressively to a patient as my insights arose; that I restudy some other standard analytic theory and method and adopt it for a specified number of hours with a patient; that I preach to my patients.
Eventually I began also to include as an option that I give my patients assigned psychological exercises much as a coach gives his athletes physical exercises: shy girl assigned to date make-out artist; aggressive bully assigned to pick a fight with ninety-eight-pound weakling and purposely lose; studious grind assigned to see five movies, go to two dances and play bridge a minimum of five hours a day all week. Of course, most meaningful assignments involved a breach of the psychiatrist’s code of ethics. In telling my patients what to do, I was becoming legally responsible for any ill consequences which might result. Since everything a typical neurotic does eventually has ill consequences, my giving them assignments meant trouble. It meant, in fact, the probable end of my career,
a thought which for some reason I found exhilarating. I was like a professional quarterback deciding to let chance determine what play I would call and where I would throw the ball. I was ceasing to be a professional psychiatrist, the very jockstrap of my basic self; I was becoming belly to belly with whim.
In the first few days the dice usually had me express freely my own feelings toward my patients—to break, in effect, the cardinal rule of all psychotherapy: do not judge. I began overtly condemning every shabby little weakness I could find in my sniveling, cringing patients. Great gob of God, that was fun. If you remember that for four years I had been acting like a saint, understanding, forgiving and accepting all sorts of human folly, cruelty and nonsense: that I had been thus repressing every normal reactive impulse, you can imagine the joy with which I responded to the dice letting me call my patients sadists, idiots, bastards, sluts, cowards and latent cretins. Joy. I had found another island of joy.
My patients and colleagues didn’t seem to appreciate my new roles. From this date my reputation began to decline and my notoriety to rise. My college professor of English at Yale, Orville Boggles, was the first troublemaker.
A big, toothy man with tiny dull eyes, he had been coming to me off and on for six months to overcome a writing block. He hadn’t been able to do more than sign his name for three years, and in order to maintain his academic reputation as a scholar he had been reduced to digging out term papers he had written as a sophomore at Michigan State, making small revisions and getting the articles published in quarterlies. Since no one read them past the second paragraph anyway, he hadn’t been caught; in fact, on the basis of his impressive list of publications he had received tenure the year before he came to me.
I had been unenthusiastically working on his ambivalent feelings toward his father, his latent homosexuality and his false image of himself, when under the impetus of the dictates of the dice I suddenly found myself one day exploding.
“Boggles,” I said after he arrived one morning (I had always previously addressed him as Professor Boggles), “Boggles,” I said, “what say we cut the shit, and get down to basics? Why don’t you consciously and publicly decide to quit writing?”
Professor Boggles, who had just lain down and hadn’t yet said a word, quivered like a huge sunflower leaf at the first breath of a storm.
Dice Man Page 7