The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
elbows, ears, nose, teeth and (metaphorically) tongue, but soft and rounded breasts, buttocks and thighs. All agree she is a beautiful woman, with natural wavy blonde hair and statuesque dignity. However, her lovely face has a peculiarly pixyish expression which I’m tempted to describe as mousy except that then you’ll picture her with beady red eyes, and they’re actually beady blue. Also, mouses are rarely five feet ten and willowy, and rarely attack men, as Lil does. Nevertheless, her pretty face, in some perceivers, calls up the image of a mouse, a beautiful mouse to be sure, but a mouse. When during our courtship I remarked upon this phenomenon it cost me four weeks of total sexual abstinence. Suffice it to say, my friends, that this mouse analogy is strictly between you and me.
Although young Evie had scrambled talkatively away to follow her mother toward the kitchen, Larry still lay sprawled next to me on the large king-sized bed. It was his philosophical position that our bed was large enough for the whole family and he deeply resented Lil’s obviously hypocritical argument that Mommy and Daddy were so big that they needed the entire area. His recent strategy was to plop on the bed until every last adult was out of it; only then would he triumphantly leave.
‘Time to get up, Luke,’ he announced with the quiet dignity of a doctor announcing that he’s afraid the leg will have to come off.
‘It’s not eight o’clock yet,’ I said.
‘Un-nn,’ he said, and pointed silently at the clock on the dresser.
I squinted at the clock. ‘It says twenty-five before six,’ I said and rolled away from him. A few seconds later I felt him nudging me in the forehead with his fist.
‘Here are your glasses,’ he said. ‘Now look.’
I looked. ‘You changed the time when I wasn’t looking,’ I said, and rolled over in the opposite direction.
Larry climbed back onto the bed and with no conscious intention, I’m sure, began bouncing and humming. And I, with that irrational surge of fury known to every parent, suddenly shouted ‘Get OUT of here!’
For about thirteen seconds after Larry had raced to the kitchen I lay in my bed with relative content. I could hear Evie’s unending chatter punctuated by Lil’s occasional yelling, and from the Manhattan streets below, the unending chatter of automobile horns. That thirteen-second involvement in sense experience was fine; then I began to think, and my day was shot.
I thought of my two morning patients, of lunch with Doctors Ecstein and Felloni, of the book on sadism I was supposed to be writing, of the children, of Lillian: I felt bored. For some months I had been feeling – from about ten to fifteen seconds after the cessation of polymorphous perversity until falling asleep at night – or falling into another session of polymorphous perversity – that depressed feeling of walking up a down escalator. ‘Whither and why,’ as General Eisenhower once said, ‘have the joys of life all flown away?’ Or, as Burt Lancaster once asked: ‘Why do our fingers to the grain of wood, the cold of steel, the heat of the sun, the flesh of women, become calloused?’
‘BREAKFAST, DADDY!’
‘EGGS, hon.’
I arose, plunged my feet into my size-thirteen slippers, pulled my bathrobe around me like a Roman preparing for the Forum, and went to the breakfast table, with, I supposed, a superficial sunniness, but deeply brooding on Lancaster’s eternal question.
We have a six-room apartment on the slightly upper, slightly East, slightly expensive side, near Central Park, near the blacklands, and near the fashionable upper East Side. Its location is so ambiguous that our friends are still not certain whether to envy us or pity us.
In the small kitchen Lil was standing at the stove aggressively mashing eggs in a frying pan; the two children were sitting in whining obedience on the far side of the table. Larry had been playing with the window shade behind him (we have a lovely view from our kitchen window of a kitchen window with a lovely view of ours), and Evie had been guilty of talking without a break in either time or irrelevance since getting up. Lil, since we don’t believe in corporal punishment, had admonished them verbally. However, Lil’s shrieks are such that were children (or adults) ever given a free choice, I’m sure they would prefer that rather than receive ‘verbal admonitions’ they be whipped with straps containing metal studs.
Obviously Lil does not enjoy the early morning hours, but we found that having a maid at this hour was ‘impractical.’ When, earlier in our marriage, the first full-time live-in maid we hired turned out to be a beautiful, sex-oozing wench of a mulatto whose eyes would have stiffened a Eunuch, Lillian intelligently decided that a daytime, part-time maid would give us more privacy.
As she brought the plates of scrambled eggs and bacon to the table she glanced up at me and asked:
‘What time will you be back from Queensborough today?’
‘Four-thirty or so. Why?’ I said as I lowered my body delicately into a small kitchen chair across from the kids.
‘Arlene wants another private chat this afternoon.’
‘Larry took my spoon!’
‘Give Evie her spoon, Larry,’ I said.
Lil gave Evie back her spoon.
‘I imagine she wants to talk more of the “I have to have a baby” dream,’ she said.
‘Mmmm.’
‘I wish you’d talk to Jake,’ Lil said as she sat down beside me.
‘What can I tell him?’ I said. ‘“Say, Jake, your wife desperately wants a baby: anything I can do to help?”’
‘Are there dinosaurs in Harlem?’ Evie asked.
‘Yes,’ Lil said. ‘You could say precisely that. It’s his conjugal responsibility; Arlene is almost thirty-three years old and has wanted a baby for – Evie, use your spoon.’
‘Jake’s going to Philadelphia today,’ I said.
‘I know; that’s one reason Arlene’s coming up. But the poker is still on for tonight, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Mommy, what’s a virgin?’ Larry asked quietly.
‘A virgin is a young girl,’ she answered.
‘Very young,’ I added.
‘That’s funny,’ he said.
‘What is?’ Lil asked.
‘Barney Goldfield called me a stupid virgin.’
‘Barney was misusing the word,’ Lil said. ‘Why don’t we postpone the poker, Luke? It’s –’
‘Why?’
‘I’d rather see a play.’
‘We’ve seen some lemons.’
‘It’s better than playing poker with them.’
Pause.
‘With lemons?’
‘If you and Tim and Renata were able to talk about something besides psychology and the stock market, it would help.’
‘The psychology of the stock market?’
‘And the stock market! God, I wish you’d open your ears for just once.’
I forked my eggs into my mouth with dignity, and sipped with philosophical detachment my instant coffee. My initiation into the mysteries of Zen Buddhism had taught me many things, but the most important was not to argue with my wife. ‘Go with the flow,’ the great sage Oboko said, and I’d been doing it for five months now. Lil had been getting madder and madder.
After about twenty seconds of silence (relatively speaking: Larry leapt up to put in toast for himself; Evie tried a brief burst of monologue on dinosaurs which was smothered with a stare), I (theoretically the way to avoid arguments is to surrender before the attack has been fully