The Dice Man (9 page)

Thai 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 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 Budding, 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, 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.' She was off again with a full whiskey and two pieces of chewed 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 yon,' 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-upped 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 into 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.'

`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.'

During the first month the dice had rather small effect on my life. 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 Critic's 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, 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 woman 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.