The Dice Man (13 page)

'Where?'

'In the middle of the ocean.'

'How big is he?'

'One mile tall and as fat and muscley as Daddy.'

'Don't ships bump his head?'

'Sometimes. Then he makes hurricanes. That's what's called an "angry sea".'

'Daddy, why don't you play with us more?'

It was like dropping a heavy sea anchor into my stomach. The phrase 'I'm too busy' came into my mind and I flushed with shame. 'I'd like to but-' entered and the flush got deeper.
'I don't know,' I said and huffed down to the surf and bulldozed my way in. By floating on my back just beyond the breakers all I could see was the sky, rising and falling.

Both the dice and my own desires permitted me to be with the children more in August and September. The dice once dictated that I take them to a Coney Island Amusement Park for a day, and I look back on that afternoon as one of the two or three absolute islands of joy in my life.

I brought toys home to them spontaneously a couple of times and their gratitude at this unexplained, unprecedented gift of the god was almost enough to make me give up psychiatry and the dice and devote myself to fulltime fatherhood. The third time I tried it, Larry's crane wouldn't work and the children fought solidly for three days over the other one. I considered vacationing in Alaska, the Sahara, the Amazon, anywhere, but alone.

The dice made me a very unreliable disciplinarian. They willed that in the first two weeks in September I should never yell, scold or punish the children for anything. Never had the house been so quiet and peaceful for so long. In the last week of September (school had begun) the dice ordered that I be an absolute dictator regarding homework, table manners, noise, neatness and respect. Fifteen hard spanks were to be administered for all transgressions. By the sixth day of my trying to enforce my standards Lil, the maid and the children locked themselves in the playroom and refused to let me enter. When Lil chastised me for my sudden week-long spasm of tyranny I explained that I'd been overwhelmed by a speech by Spiro Agnew on the evils of permissiveness.

Events like these strained, to say the least, my relations with Lil. One does not live seven years with a person an intelligent, sensitive person who (periodically) shows you great affection - without forming certain emotional ties. You do not father two handsome children by her without strengthening that bond.

Lil and I had met and mated when we were both twenty-five. We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. We soon discovered that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being married which being single can't cure. Or so, for a while, it seemed to us.

I was in medical school earning nothing, and Lil, the spoiled daughter of Peter Daupmann, successful real estate man, went to work to support me. Lil, sole support of Lucius Rhinehart, M.D. to be, became pregnant. Lucius, practical, firm (except at confining sperm to their quarters), urged abortion. Lil, sensitive, loving, female, urged child. Practical man sulked. Female fed foetus, foetus left female: handsome son Lawrence: happiness, pride, poverty. After two months, spoiled child Lil works again for dedicated, practical, impoverished Luke, M.D. (but under analysis and interning and not practicing). Lil soon develops healthy resentment of work, poverty and dedicated, practical M.D. our bond to each other grows, but the intense pleasurable passion of yesteryear diminishes.

In brief, as the alert reader has concluded long before this, we were typically married. We had happy moments which we could share with no one; we had our insider jokes; we had our warm, sensual, sexual love as we had our mutual concern for (well, Lil anyway), interest in and pride in our children; and we had our two increasingly frustrated, isolated private selves. The aspirations we had for these selves did not find fulfillment in marriage, and all the twisting and writhing on the bed together couldn't erase this fact, although our very dissatisfaction united us.

NOW the dice treated everything and everyone as objects and forced me to do the same. The emotions I was to feel for all things were determined by the dice and not by the intrinsic relationship between me and the person or thing. Love I saw as an irrational, arbitrary binding relationship to another object. It was compulsive. It was an important part of the historical self. It must be destroyed. Lillian must become an object: an object of as little intrinsic effect upon or interest for me as ... Nora Hammerhill (name picked at random from Manhattan phone book). Impossible, you say? Perhaps. But if a human being can be changed, this most basic of relationships must be susceptible to alteration. So I tried.

The dice sometimes refused to cooperate. 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, un-philistine. We swore we'd see a play a week all year. The dice said otherwise.

The dice 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 dice 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. Sexual dice decisions were particularly effective in destroying natural intimacy X" convincing a woman that one awkward sexual position is all 'that will satisfy you when she feels otherwise). Such dice commands obviously involved my being able to manipulate (both psychologically and physically) the woman as well as myself. They once perversely chose that `I not partake of sexual intercourse for one week with any woman,' and thus caused considerable internal conflict; a serious matter of conscience and principle: precisely what was denoted by `sexual intercourse'?

By the end of the first week I was desperate to know: did the dice intend to leave me free to participate in everything except penetration? Or except ejaculation? Deep down inside had the dice intended me to steer clear of all sexual activity? Whatever the die's intentions, on the seventh day I found myself on a couch, dressed conservatively in a Tshirt and two socks, beside Arlene Ecstein, dressed fetchingly in a lovely brassiere dangling around her waist, one stocking rolled up to midshin, two bracelets, one earring and one pair of panties modestly covering her left ankle. As part of her iron-clad code she had not been in a bed with me since D-Day, but her ironclad code had said nothing about cars, floors, chairs or couches, and the various parts of her body were being used against the various parts of mine with unmistakable intentions. Since I had permitted her caresses, indeed abetted them, I realized that I had reached the point when if she said, `Come into me,' and I said, `I don't feel like it,' she'd laugh me onto the rug. The decibel count of her groans indicated that in thirty-five seconds she would request my physical presence in her playroom.

To postpone the seemingly unavoidable act I shifted around and placed my head between her legs and began articulate oral communication. Her response was equally articulate and her message was well-received. However, I knew that Arlene found such communication, while pleasant, a relatively poor substitute for orthodox toe-to-toe talk.

My course of action became clear. My conscience had decided with remarkable facility that the dice had intended only that I abstain from genital intercourse, and although Arlene had once told me that she'd read that semen was fattening and didn't want to try it, it had become a matter of her code or that of the diceman. In another half-minute the diceman's honor was intact, I was sexually satisfied and Arlene was looking up at me wide-eyed and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Although I apologized for what I called my `incontinence' (`Is that what it's called?' she asked), Arlene cuddled up affectionately, apparently proud that she had so overexcited me that my passion had overflowed against my will. I redeclared my passionate Platonic love, stuck my fingers in her, kissed her breasts, her mouth . . . in another few minutes I would have been facing the same dilemma a second time with no escape possible, but remembering, I jumped off the couch and began conscientiously increasing my outer decor.

I was Christ for a day. As a pattern-breaking event, being a loving Jesus certainly qualified, and I was surprised `how humble and loving and compassionate I began to feel. The dice had ordered me to `Be as Jesus' and to be constantly filled with a Christian (pronounced `Chr-eye-steean') love for everybody I met. I voluntarily walked the children to school that morning, holding their little hands and feeling paternal, benevolent and loving.

Larry's asking me `What's wrong, Daddy, why are you coming with us?' didn't faze me in the least. Back in my apartment study I re-read the Sermon on the Mount and most of the gospel of Mark, and when I said good-bye to Lil prior to her leaving on a shopping spree, I blessed her and showed her such tenderness that ,the assumed something was wrong. For a horrible instant I was about to confess my affair with Arlene and beg forgiveness, but instead I decided that that was another man - and another world. When I saw Lil again that evening she confessed that my love had helped her to spend three times more than she usually did.

I had a rendezvous scheduled with Arlene for late that very afternoon, but I knew then I would urge both her and myself to cease our sinning and pray for forgiveness. I tried to be especially compassionate with Frank Osterflood and Linda Reichman, my morning patients, but it didn't seem to have much effect. I got a slight stir out of Mr. Osterflood when I mentioned that perhaps raping little girls was a sin: he exploded that they deserved everything he did to them. When I read to him the Sermon on the Mount he became more and more agitated until I reached a part about if the right eye offend thee pluck it out and if the hand offend thee ... He lunged off the couch across my desk and had me by the throat before I'd even stopped reading. After Jake and Miss Reingold and Jake's patient for that hour had finally succeeded in parting us, Osterflood and I were both rather embarrassed and admitted very shyly that we had been discussing the Sermon on the Mount.

Linda Reichman seemed put off when, after she had stripped to the waist, I suggested that we pray together. When she began kissing my ear I talked to her about the necessity of spiritual love. When she got angry, I begged her forgiveness, but when she unzipped my fly I began reading from the Sermon on the Mount again.

`What the hell's the matter with you today?' she sneered. 'You're even worse than you were last time.'

`I'm trying to show you that there's a spiritual love far more enriching than the most perfect of physical experiences.'

`You really believe that crap?' she asked.

`I believe that all men are lost until they become filled with a great warm love for all men, a spiritual love, the love of Jesus.'

`You really believe that crap?'

`Yes.'

`I want my money back.'

` I almost cried that day when I met Jake for lunch. I so wanted to help him, trapped by that relentless overcharged engine of his, zooming through life missing everything, and especially missing the great love that filled me. He was forking down great gobs of beef stew and lima beans and telling me about a patient of his who had committed suicide by mistake. I was searching for some way to break down the seemingly impenetrable wall of his armored self and finding none. As the meal progressed I became sadder and sadder. I felt tears forming in my eyes. I irritably stopped the sentimentality and searched again for some way to his heart.

`Some way to his heart,' was the very phrase I thought in that day. A certain vocabulary and style go with every personality and every religion; under the influence of being Jesus Christ I found I loved people, and the experience expressed itself in unfamiliar actions and in unfamiliar language.

`Jake,' I finally said. `Do you ever feel great warmth and love toward people?'

He stopped with fork at mouth and gaped at me for a second.

`What's that?' he said: `Do you ever, have you ever felt a great rush of warmth and love toward some person or toward all humanity?'

He stared a moment more, then said: `No. Freud associated such feelings with pantheism and the stage of development of two-year-olds. I'd say the irrational flooding of love was regression.'

`And you've never felt it?'

'Nope. Why?'

But what if such feelings are .. . wonderful. What if they seem better, more desirable than any other state? Would its being a regressive mode of feeling still make it undesirable?'

`Sure. Who's the patient? That Cannon kid you were telling me about?'

'What if I were to tell you that I feel such a surge of love and warmth for everyone?'

This stopped the steam-shovel machine.

`And dally love for you,' I added.

Jake blinked behind his glasses and looked - it's only my interpretation of a facial expression I'd never seen on his face before frightened.

`I'd say you were regressing,' he said nervously. `You're blocked in some line of development and to escape responsibility and to find help you feel this great childish love for everyone.'

He began eating again. `It'll pass.'