The Dice Man (43 page)

`Confusion is only a symptom of repression,' Marya said, smiling. `You know there are unpleasant aspects to your true feelings which you're ashamed of. But if you'd just share them with us, they'd no longer bug you.'

`Lie about them,' Linda said, stretching her lovely legs into the middle of the room. `Exaggerate. Fantasize. Make up some junk that you think will entertain us.'

`Why do you want the spotlight?' Marya, smiling and tense, asked Linda.

`I enjoy lying,' Linda answered. `And if I can't talk, I can't lie.'

'Ah come on,' said the magazine editor. `What's so much about lying?'

'What's so much fun about pretending to be honest?' she replied.

'We're not aware that we're pretending, Linda,' Scott said.

`Maybe that's why you're all tense,' Linda countered.

Since Linda was more relaxed at this point than either Marya or Scott, it was one-upmanship parfait, and several people smiled.

`Lies are a way of covering up,' Marya said.

`Being honest and truthful the way we do here is like cheap striptease, a lot of motion to reveal that there are boobs and pricks and asses in the world, something we all knew in the first place.'

`Aren't boobs and pricks beautiful, Linda?' asked Marya in her softest and most sincere voice.

`Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on which illusion I feel like supporting.'

`Our genitalia are always beautiful,' Marya said.

`You obviously haven't looked lately,' Linda answered, yawning.

`I doubt you've ever really faced your sexual shame and guilt,' Marya said.

`I have and they bore me,' replied Linda, smothering another yawn.

`Boredom is-'

`Are your breasts and cunt beautiful?'

Linda asked Marya abruptly.

`Yes, and so are yours.'

'Then show us your beautiful genitalia.'

No one was particularly bored now. Marya sat with her back to the fire and a fixed smile on her face, staring vaguely at Linda. Scott cleared his throat noisily and leaned forward to the rescue.

`This isn't a beauty contest, Linda,' he said. `You're obviously trying -'

`Marya has a beautiful cunt. She's not ashamed of it. We're not supposed to be ashamed of it. Let's see it.'

'I don't think this is an appropriate occasion,' Marya said. She wasn't smiling.

`A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' Linda replied. `Don't deny us.'

`I partly feel that my role as leader-'

`Partly!' Linda said, waking up. `Partly? You mean in fact that feelings and truth can be broken into parts?'

Linda began taking off her blouse.

`I don't wish to cause embarrassment to anyone here,' Marya said. `Our purpose is to get at real attitudes, real feelings, to . . . ah, to explore . . . ah . . ' But no one was paying much attention, since Linda, with serene, concentration, had now removed her bra and her skirt and her panties and was sitting nude, legs apart, with her back to the wall. When she finished she had to smother another yawn. The firelight made a decidedly splendid effect on her white skin. For a while there was silence.

'Are you embarrassed, Linda?' Marya asked quietly, her face again frozen in a smile.

`Linda sat silently with her back to the wall, looking at the rug between her legs. Tears began to form in her eyes. She suddenly drew up her knees, put her face into her hands and sobbed.

`Oh yes, yes,' she said. `I'm ashamed I'm ashamed!' She was crying.

No one spoke or moved.

`You needn't feel that way,' Marya said, getting on her knees and beginning to crawl toward Linda.

`My body is ugly ugly ugly,' Linda sobbed. `I can't stand it.'

`I don't think it's ugly,' said Mr. Hopper, pushing his peanuts away from him off to the side.

`It's not ugly, Linda,' Marya said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

`It is. It is. I'm a slut.'

`Don't be silly. You can't really feel that.'

`I can't?'

Linda asked, raising her head with a startled expression.

`Your body is beautiful,' Marya added.

`Yeah, I agree,' said Linda, abruptly sitting back and stretching out her legs again. `Good round teats, good firm ass, juicy cunt. Nothing to complain about. Anyone want a feel?'

Everyone was caught leaning forward sympathetically with his mouth open and eyes bulging and nothing to say. `If it's beautiful, touch it, Marya,' Linda added.

`I'll volunteer,' Mr. Hopper said.

`Not yet, Hank,' Linda said, smiling affectionately at him. 'Marya's got a thing about beautiful genitalia.'

We all looked at Marya, who hesitated, and, then, with tightlipped determination, put her hands delicately on Linda's shoulders, then her breasts. Her face relaxed a bit and she slid her bands down to the tummy and across the pubic hair and onto the thighs.

`You're lovely, Linda,' she said, sitting back on her heels and smiling a relaxed, almost triumphant smile.

`Would you like to suck me off?' Linda asked.

`No ... no thank you,' Marya answered, flushing.

`Your love of beauty and all.'

`Is it my turn?' asked Mr. Hopper.

`What are you trying to prove?'

Scott snapped out at Linda. Linda looked over at him and patted Marya on her bare knee.

`Nothing,' she said to Scott. `I just feel like acting the way I'm acting.'

`You admit you're just acting?' he asked.

`Of course,' she answered. Then she sat up and directed her sincere blue eyes at Mr. Hopper. `I'm afraid a part of you is embarrassed by all this, right Hank?'

`Yes,' he said, and he smiled nervously.

`But part of you is enjoying it.'

He laughed.

`Part of you thinks I'm a nervy bitch.'

He hesitated and then nodded.

`And part of you thinks I'm the most honest one here.'

`You're damn right,' he answered abruptly.

`Which one is the real you?'

He frowned and seemed to be concentrating on self-analysis. `I guess the real me is the one-'

`Oh shit, Hank. You're not being honest.'

`I'm not? I didn't even tell you which one'

`But is one any more real than the next?' `You sophist whore!' I blurted out.

`What's with you, Big Daddy?' Linda asked.

`You're a sick sophist hypocritical Communist nihilist slut.'

'You're a big handsome brainless nobody.'

`Just because you're pretty, you seduce poor Hopper into liking you. But the real Hopper knows you for what you are a cheap, neurotic two-bit sophist anti-American divorcee.'

`Now just a minute' Scott interrupted, leaning toward me.

`But I know her type, Scott,' I went on. `Stage struck since she first grew pubic hair, subverting her way into good men's pants with cheap, five-and-dime-store sophist sex techniques, and ruining the lives of one hundred percent American men. We all know her: nothing but a diseased anarchist hippie uptight sophist bitch.'

Linda's mouth twisted grotesquely, tears formed again in her eyes and she finally burst into tears, rolling onto her stomach and flexing her buttock muscles impressively in grief. She sobbed and sobbed.

`Oh I know, I know,' she said finally between gasps. `I am a slut, I am. You've seen the real me. Take my body and do what you will.'

`Jesus, the dame is nuts,' said the burly tax lawyer.

`Should we comfort her?' asked Mr. Hopper.

`Stop pretending!' snapped Scott. `We know you don't really feel guilty.'

But Linda, still crying, was getting back into her clothes. When dressed again, she curled up in a corner in the fetal position. The room was very quiet.

`I know that type,' I said confidently. `A hot, slimy, ball breaking one-time sophist feminist lay, but nervous as a vibrator.'

'But which is the real Linda?' Mr. Hopper said dreamily to no one in particular.

`Who cares?' I sneered.

`Who cares?' echoed Linda, sitting up again and yawning. Then she leaned toward Mr. Hopper.

`What are your true feelings now, Hank?' she asked him.

For a moment the question caught him off guard; then he smiled.

`Happy confusion,' he said loudly.

`And how do you feel now, Linda?' asked Marya, but the question was met by six or seven groans from group members seated around the room.

Linda flipped a pair of green dice out onto the middle of the rug and, after looking mischievously at each of us in turn, asked quietly `Anyone want to play some games?'
Linda was marvelous. What people needed in these groups was someone to let himself go so completely that inhibitions were knocked away. Linda could strip, simulate all kinds of love, could rage, cry, could argue convincingly, all in such rapid succession that she soon made everyone experience existence inside the group as a game; nothing seemed to matter. After we'd gotten most of the members of an encounter group to splinter off the original leader and meet only with us (as happened on Fire Island that weekend), they came to see that with us truth and honesty were irrelevant; we approved good acting and bad, role playing and out-of-role playing, baddie roles and goodie roles, truth and lies.

When one individual would try to pretend to be his `real' self and call the others back to `reality,' we would try to encourage our dice players to ignore him and go right on playing their dice-dictated roles. When someone else, as the result of playing out some role dammed up inside him for years, broke down and cried, the group would at first rally round the bawler to reassure him, as they'd gotten used to doing in traditional encounter groups. We tried to show them that this was the worst thing they could do; the crier should be ignored or be responded to solely within the roles that were already being played.

We wanted them to come to realize that neither `immorality' nor `emotional breakdowns' earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group dice play they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one - least of all us, the leaders - is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves - as the dice dictate. In those cases when the other group members respond conventionally to someone's breakdown, our work is undone: the sufferer feels frightened and ashamed. He believes that the `real world' and its conventional attitudes exist even in group dice play.

And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him. His `reality,' his `reason,' his 'society': these are what must be destroyed.

All that fall Linda and I did our very best.

In addition to our work with various groups, Linda went to work on H. J. Wipple, a philanthropist whom I'd gotten interested in building a Dice Center for us in Southern California, and construction soon speeded up considerably. Work even began in renovating a boys' camp in the Catskills for a second Center. The world was getting ready for dicepeople.

Naturally Dr. Rhinehart felt a little guilty about leaving his wife and children without the slightest hint of when he'd return, but he consulted the Die, which advised him to forget about it. Then four months after he'd left home, a random Whim chose one of his random whims and ordered him to return to his apartment and try to seduce his wife.

Mrs. Rhinehart greeted him at two o'clock in the afternoon in a stylish new pants suit he'd never seen before and a cocktail in her hand.

`I've got a visitor now, Luke,' she said quietly. `If you want to see me come back about four.'

It was not precisely the greeting Dr. Rhinehart had expected after four months of mysterious disappearance, and while he was rallying his mental faculties for a suitable riposte he discovered the door had gently been closed in his face.

Two hours later he tried again.

`Oh, it's you,' said Mrs. Rhinehart as she might have greeted a plumber just back with a fresh tool. `Come on in.'

`Thank you,' said Dr. Rhinehart with dignity.

His wife walked ahead of him into the living room and offered him a seat, herself leaning against a new desk covered with papers and books. Dr. Rhinehart stood dramatically in the middle of the room and looked intently at his wife.

`Where you been?' she asked, with a tone of bored interest discouragingly close to what she might have used asking her son Larry the same question after he'd been out of the house for twenty minutes.

`The dice told me to leave you, Lil, and . . . well, I left.'

`Yes. I figured as much. What are you doing these days?'

Speechless for a few seconds, Dr. Rhinehart nevertheless managed to look intently at his wife.

`I'm doing a lot of work these days with group dice therapy.'

'How nice,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. She moved away from the desk over in front of a new painting Dr. Rhinehart had never seen before and glanced at some mail which was lying on a table beneath the painting. Then she turned back to him.

`Part of me has missed you, Luke.' She smiled warmly at him. `And part of me hasn't.'

`Yeah, me too.'

`Part of me was mad mad mad,' she went on, frowning. `And part of me, she smiled again, `was glad glad glad.'

`Really?'

`Yes. Fred Boyd helped me let go of the mad mad mad business and that's just left me with . . . the other.'

`How'd Fred do it?'

`After I'd cried and complained and raged for an hour or so two days after you'd left, he said to me: "You ought to consider suicide, Lil."

'Lil paused to smile at the memory. 'That sort of caught my attention so to speak, and he went on to say: "Shake the dice also to see whether you should try to kill Luke."

'Good friend, old Fred,' Dr. Rhinehart interjected, and began pacing nervously back and forth in front of his wife.

`Another option he suggested was that I divorce you and try to marry him.'

`One of my real pals.'

`Or also, that I not divorce you but begin sleeping with him.'

`Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his best friend's wife `He than gave me a sincere impassioned lecture on how I had let my compulsive tie to you limit me in every way, let it starve all the creative and imaginative selves that would otherwise live.'