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Chapter Eight

After closing the door I walked mechanically back into the living room. At the window I stared at the few lights and at the empty early-morning streets below. Dr Mann emerged from the building and moved off toward Madison Avenue; he looked, from three floors up, like a stuffed dwarf. I had an urge to pick up the easy chair he had been sitting in and throw it through the glass window after him. Distorted images swirled through my mind: Jake’s book lying darkly on the white tablecloth at lunch; the boy Eric’s black eyes staring at me warmly; Lil and Arlene wriggling toward me; blank pieces of paper on my desk; Dr Mann’s clouds of smoke mushrooming toward the ceiling; and Arlene as she had left the room a few hours earlier; an open, sensuous yawn. For some reason I felt like starting at one end of the room and running full speed to the other end and smashing right through the portrait of Freud which hung there.

Instead I turned from the window and walked back and forth until I was looking up at the portrait. Freud stared down at me dignified, serious, productive, rational and stable: he was every thing which a reasonable man might strive to be. I reached up and, grasping the portrait carefully, turned it around so that the face was toward the wall. I stared with rising satisfaction at the brown cardboard backing and then, with a sigh, returned to the poker table and put away the cards, chips and chairs. One of the two dice was missing but when I glanced at the floor it was not to be found. Turning to go to bed, I saw on the small table next to the chair Dr Mann had been lecturing me from, a card – the queen of spades – angled as if propped up against something. I went over and stared down at the card and knew that beneath it was the die.

I stood that way for a full minute feeling a rising, incomprehensible rage: something of what Osterflood must feel, of what Lil must have been feeling during the afternoon, but directed at nothing, thoughtless, aimless rage. I vaguely remember an electric clock humming on the mantelpiece. Then a fog-horn blast groaned into the room from the Eastriver and terror tore the arteries out of my heart and tied them in knots in my belly: if that die has a one face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs and rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene,’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror was boiled away by a pleasant excitement and my mouth swelled into a gargantuan grin: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the die?

I picked up the queen of spades and saw staring at me a cyclopean eye: a one.

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 ‘Luuuu-UUke,’ 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.’

Chapter Nine

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 go to bed; if it’s 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 dice can show almost as poor judgment as a human.

Chapter Ten

By training I have learned to look for the casual insignificance of every overt cause. In the morning, after a careless, buttockless period before breakfast, lukewarm coffee and Lil’s hungover imprecations, I wandered 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 hard-pumping 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 cheese 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 man. 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 part, an idiosyncrasy.

My mind exploded with possibilities. The boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saying 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.

Chapter Eleven

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.

That evening and the next day I seemed to avoid the dice. The result was that two nights after my great D-Day I lay in bed brooding about what to do with Arlene. I wanted, no doubt about it, to press her to my bosom once again, but the dangers, complications and comedy seemed almost too much to pay. I tossed and turned in indecision, anxiety and lust until Lil ordered me to take a sedative or sleep in the bathtub.

I rolled out of bed and retreated to my study. I was halfway through a complicated imaginary conversation with Jake in which I was explaining with great clarity what I was doing under his bed and pointing out the legal complications involved in homicide, when I realized with a rush of relief that I’d simply let the dice decide. Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair.

I took out a pen and wrote out the numbers one to six. The first option to occur to my essentially conservative nature was to chuck the whole thing: I’d ignore my brief affair and treat Arlene as if nothing had happened. After all, the sporadic screwing of another man’s wife might provide complications. When the woman is the wife of your Best Friend, nearest Neighbor, and closest Business Associate, the intrigue and betrayal are so complete that the end hardly seemed worth the effort. Arlene’s end wasn’t so different from Lil’s that it justified painful hours of scheming as to how one might enter it in dice-dictated ways and painful hours of brooding about whether one should brood about having entered it. Nor were the convolutions of her soul likely to offer any more originality than those of her body.

Arlene and Jake had married seventeen years before when they were both juniors in high school. Jake had been a highly precocious teenager and after seducing Arlene one summer, he found himself sexually inconvenienced in the fall when they were separated by his being away at Tapper’s Boarding School for Brilliant Boys. Masturbation drove him to a fury of frustration since no daydream or self-caress remotely approached Arlene’s round breasts cupped in his hands or filling his mouth. At Christmas he announced to his parents that he must either return to the public high school, commit suicide or marry Arlene. His parents brooded briefly between the last two of these options and then reluctantly permitted marriage.

Arlene was quite happy to leave school and miss her algebra and chemistry finals; they were married over the Easter holiday and she began working to help support Jake through his schools. Arlene’s education had thus come from life, and since her life had been spent clerking at Gimbel’s, girl-Fridaying at Bache and Company, typing at Woolworth’s and controlling a switchboard at the Fashion Institute of Technology, her education was a limited one. In the seven years since she’d stopped working, she had devoted herself to philanthropic causes of which no one had ever heard (The Penny Parade for Puppies, Dough for Diabetes, Help Afghanistanian Sheepherders!), and reading lurid fiction and advanced psychoanalytic journals. It’s not clear to what degree she understood any of her activities.

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 re-seduce Arlene as soon as possible. Too vague. I’d try to re-seduce 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 frightening 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 West chester to see my Aunt Miriam.’

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.

‘Platonic?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it must always be Platonic.’

‘Platonic.’ She meditated.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘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 may stay,’ she said.

‘No, I must leave.’

‘I’ll never let you leave your children.’