The Dice Man (28 page)

We did the same the next day and the next, and on our last evening, a little high on champagne and marijuana, we spent half an hour holding hands in front of the fire and another ten minutes sitting on our bed with the lights off staring out our window at the moonlight lighting in pale blue the slopes of snow which stretched away from the hotel. I'd opened yet another bottle of champagne and felt warm and complete and serene. The touch of Lil's hand seemed holy. But then Lil asked me to sit opposite her in the armchair and shook her head when I tried to hand her a glass of champagne, and I knew there was trouble.

After turning on the bedside lamp. I looked up at her and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She reached forward and took one of my hands and drew it to her face. Her lips touched my fingers delicately and she looked into my eyes. She smiled, slightly, lovingly, but with a tear running down one side of her face.
`Luke,' she said, and she paused for several seconds looking into my eyes. `What have you been acting so strangely for so long now?'

'Ah Lil,' I began, `I'd like to tell you . . .' and I stopped.

`I know you aren't really unbalanced,' she went on. `It's some . . theory you're working on, isn't it?'

The warmth I'd been feeling froze, the lover solidified to stone. Sitting mute, hand being held, was a wary dice man.

`Please tell me,' she said. She was wetting her lips and squeezing my hand.

`Luke, we're together again. I feel so whole, so full of love for you, yet . . . I know that tomorrow, the next day, you may change again. Everything that has made these last few days so sweet will disappear. And I don't know why: And I won't know why.'

Maybe Lil could become the Dice Woman. It sounded like the name of a villainess on the Batman show but it offered me at the moment the only rationalization I could find for betraying the secret of my life and permitting me to hold Lil's happiness and love. I wavered. The band downstairs was playing a waltz. It wasn't too modern a ski resort..

`I...' I started. The dice man still fought.

`Tell me,' she said.

`I've been experimenting, Lil,' I began for a third time, `with practicing eccentric behavior, unusual roles, attitudes, emotions - in order to discover the variety of human nature.'

I paused: wide-eyed she waited for what I was going to say. Narrow-eyed, so did I. I reached to my side and turned off the light again. Our faces, separated by only three feet, were still quite visible in the moonlight.

`I didn't want to tell you until . . . I had learned whether the experiment had value: you might have rejected me, fought the experiment, ended our love.'

`Oh no I wouldn't.'

`I knew a moment would come when I could tell you everything. Last week I decided to end the experiment for a while so we could be together again.'

Her grip on my hand was frightening.

`I would have gone along,' she said. `I would have, sweetheart. Those asses think you're losing your mind. I would have laughed at them if I knew. [Pause] Why? You should have told me.'

`I know that now. I knew that as soon as I freed myself 'from the experiment: I should have done it all with you. 'But.. Still staring, her eyes glittering in the moonlight, she seemed nervous, uncertain, curious. `What were the kind ... kinds of experiments?'

I was so pale and stonelike in the moonlight I imagine I looked like an abandoned statue.

`Oh, going to places I'd never seen before, pretending to be someone different from myself to see people's reactions. Experimenting with food, fasting, drugs, even getting drunk that time was a conscious experiment.'

`Really?' And she smiled, tears wetting her cheeks and chin, like a child in the rain.

`It proved that when I'm drunk I act like other people that are drunk.'

`Oh Luke, why didn't you tell me?'

'The mad scientist in me insisted that if I revealed to you that I was experimenting, your reaction would be experimentally useless and a wealth of evidence would be missing.'

`And . . . and the experiment is . . . over?'

'No,' I answered. `No, Lil, it isn't. But now we'll begin . . . experimenting together, and the loneliness we've both felt will end.'

`But...'

`What is it, honey?'

'Will our life like the last few days end too?'

A roar of laughter came from the assembled guests downstairs. `Sounds like they're having a good time,' I said.

`Will this end?' she asked again softly.

`Of course it will, honey,' I said, trying to dare look at her. `It would end whether I returned to experimenting or not, you know that. The good things we've felt these last few days have come because they follow such hell. One doesn't have to be a scientist to know that bliss doesn't last.'

She came forward heavily into my arms, sobbing.

`I want it to last. I want it to last,' she said.

I stroked her, kissed her, mumbled sweet nothings, felt numbly that I was handling the situation horribly, felt terrible. A part of me imagined drawing Lit into even more radical dice deals than I could manage alone; perhaps I'd even change her. Another part of me felt utterly abandoned by everyone.

She down-shifted from sobs to sniffles, then left me to trot to the bathroom. When she returned to her same spot on the bed with her face and hair tidied up, I was surprised to see that she was looking at me coldly.

`Have you kept a written record of these experiments?' she asked.

`Of some. And I've written brief essays of analysis of various hypotheses I've been testing.'

`Have you experimented with me?'

`Of course I have, honey. Since it's me I experiment with, and me lives with you, you've been affected by many of the experiments.'

`I mean have you directly experimented. .. tried to get me to do things?'

`I . .. no, no, I haven't' `Have you experimented with sex? With other women?'

Bingo! I hesitated. My male friends, attention. There are some questions which demand any answer except hesitation. `Do you love me?' for example, is not a question; it is intended as a stimulus in the stimulus-response sequence `Do-you-love-me?-Ohmy precious yes.'

`Did you sleep with her?' demands a yes-or-no answer immediately: hedging implies guilt. `Have you experimented with other women?' demanded an immediate answer of `Yes, of course, honey, and it's made me closer to you than ever.'

This would bring tears, slaps, revilings, withdrawal and eventually, curiosity and reconciliation. Hesitation on 'the other hand . . .

Hesitation brought Lil leaping to her feet.

`You Goddamn bastard,' she said.

`Don't touch me: `You don't even know what the experiments were.'

`I know your mind. I know . . . oh my God . . . I know ... Arlene! You and Arlene!' She was rigid and trembling.

`Honey, honey, honey, you're blowing up about nothing. My experiments didn't include infidelity `I'll bet they didn't. I'm no fool. I'm no fool,' she shouted and, sobbing, crumpled on to the couch.

`Oh. I'm such a fool,' she moaned, `such a fool.'

I went over and tried to comfort her. She ignored me. After another minute's crying she got up and went into the bathroom. When I followed about two minutes later the door was hooked closed.

Now remember, my friends, I was still supposed to be playing the lover. For seven days I had been the lover, at one with the role; now I was only artificially trying to go through the proper motions and emotions. The love was dead, but the lover was commanded to live on.

I knocked and called and finally received a `Go away'; unoriginal but, I fear, sincere. My impulse was to do just that, but my mind warned me that real lovers never leave their beloved in such cases except to blow out their brains or to get drunk. Considering the alternatives I threw my shoulder against the door twice and broke in.

Lil was sitting on the edge of the tub with a pair of scissors in her hand; she looked up at me dully when I stumbled in. A quick scrutiny indicated she had not slashed anything.

`What are you doing?' I asked.

`I thought I'd mend your pants, if you don't mind.'

Beside her, prosaically enough, was, in fact, some thread and the pants I'd ripped down the backside on the slopes that afternoon.

`Mend my pants?'

`You have your experiments and I have ... [she almost started crying again] my art projects. Pants and .. . I'm being pathetic and maudlin.'

She placed the pants on the rim of the tub and turned on the water in the sink and began scrubbing her face. When she'd finished, she brushed her teeth. I stood in the doorway, trying to marshal my creative faculties to tell a talc tale.

'Lil, an hour ago we had something which we can and will have again. But you've got to know all about my experiments or-'

She looked up at me foaming at the mouth, toothbrush in hand.

'I'll listen to it all, Luke, to every scientific word but not now. Just not now.'

`You may not want to listen, but I must tell you. This hour is too important, our love is too-'

'Crap!'

`Important to let a night go by with this rock between us.'

`I'm going to bed,' she said as she left the bathroom and began to undress.

`Then go, but listen.'

She threw off her clothes on to her dresser, got into a nightgown and went to bed. She pulled the covers up so that only the top of her head was showing and turned her back to me. I began lumbering back and forth at the foot of the bed. I was trying to prepare a speech. I wanted to document my series of harmless; faithful-husband experiments but was floundering in the sea of harmful, faithless-husband facts. I didn't know what to do.

I knew door-slamming only postponed the ultimate confrontation and further soothing necessitated my saying something, an act I wished to avoid for a decade or two. Moreover, modest spiritual caresses would leave her free to continue thinking, and thinking, when you are guilty of something (and what man dare cast the first stone?), is dangerous sad must be stopped. Such soothing would also encourage her to consider herself the guiltless sad abused party, a truth best left unconsidered.

I paced like a starving rat back and forth at the foot of the bed, staring at the food I wanted (Lil) and at the electric grid which would make the eating painful (Lil). Irritably I threw back the covers. Her nightgown was twisted tightly around her and pulled almost to the knees. My blood, seeing that delicious, plump, helpless rear, sent representatives racing with the news to the capillaries of my penis.

I retrieved the scissors from the floor and with stealth and delicacy snipped the heavier material at the neck of her nightgown and with a swift yank tore it from top to bottom. Lil twisted upwards screaming and clawing.

The further details, while perhaps of anthropological value, would read something like the dry documentation of some invasion of a Japanese Pacific island during the Second World War: circling movements; advance of right thigh to position `V'; repulse of fingernail attack on left flank; main artillery piece to attack position; main artillery piece forced to withdraw when caught in classic pincers movement by two enemy ranks, etc.

Forced carnal knowledge, whatever else it may be, is good physical exercise and represents meaningful variation on normal marital relations. As pleasure, however, it has its Limitations. For myself, I was so distracted that night by scratches, bites and screams, and by wondering whether one could be arrested for violating one's wife (was pinching a felony or a misdemeanor?), that I must warn male readers that although desirable as tactic, as pleasure might better employ a quiet night alone with pornography.

The next morning my ears, neck, shoulders and back looked as if I'd spent the night wrestling with thirty-three kittens in a briar patch crisscrossed with barbed wire during a hailstorm. I was bloody and Lil was unbowed. But though she was cold and distant, she listened to my long, scientific report during the bus ride and plane flight back to New York and although she seemed unimpressed with my claims of innocence with Arlene, a part of her believed the rest. I told her nothing about my use of the dice, keeping it all a matter of some vague, temporary psychological testing having to do with responses to eccentric patterns. How much of her believed me isn't clear, but her majority self announced unequivocally that if I did not cease my experiments - whatever they might be - and cease them forthwith, she and the children would leave me forever.
`No, more, Luke,' she said as I left for work the first day back in Manhattan. `No more. From now on you're normal, eccentric, boring Dr. Rhinehart, or I'm done.'

`Yes, dear,' I said (the die had fallen a two), and left.

Dr. Rhinehart should have known when Mrs. Ecstein summoned him to her living room couch that Wednesday that there was trouble. They hadn't met in her apartment since she had begun therapy with him. After letting him in she seated herself sedately on the couch, folded her hands and looked the floor. Her mannish gray suit, her glasses and her hair tied back severely in a bun, made her look strikingly like a door-to-door purveyor of Baptist religious tracts.

`I'm going to have a baby,' she said quietly.

Dr. Rhinehart sat down at the opposite end of the couch, leaned back and mechanically crossed his legs. He looked blankly at the wall opposite him, on which hung an ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria.

`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said.

'This is now the second straight month I've missed my period.'

'I'm happy.'

`I asked the Die what I should name it and gave it thirty-six options and the Die named it Edgar.'

`Edgar.'

`Edgar Ecstein.'

They sat there quietly not looking at each other.

`I gave ten chances to Lucius but the dice chose Edgar.'

'Ahh.'

Silence.

`What if it's a girl?'

Dr. Rhinehart asked after a while.

`Edgarina: `Edgarina Ecstein.'

Silence.

`Are you happy about it, Arlene?'

`Yes.'

Silence.

`It hasn't been decided yet who the father is,' Mrs. Ecstein said. `You don't know who the father is?' asked Dr. Rhinehart, sitting up.