Luke Rhinehart - The Dice Man

‘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 launched) said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Lil.’

‘You and your damn Zen. I’m trying to tell you something. I don’t like the forms of entertainment we have. Why can’t we ever do something new or different, or, revolution of revolutions, something I want.’

‘We do, honey, we do. The last three plays –’

‘I had to drag you. You’re so –’

‘Honey, the children.’

The children in fact looked about as affected by our arguments as elephants by two squabbling mosquitoes, but the ploy always worked to silence Lil.

After we’d all finished breakfast she led the children into their room to get dressed while I went to wash and shave. Holding the lathered brush stiffly in my raised right hand like an Indian saying ‘How!’, I stared glumly into the mirror. I always hated to shave a two-day growth of beard; with the dark shadows around my mouth I looked – potentially at least – like Don Giovanni, Faust, Mephistopheles, Charlton Heston, or Jesus. After shaving I knew I would look like a successful, boyishly handsome public relations man. Because I was a bourgeois psychiatrist and had to wear glasses to see myself in the mirror I had resisted the impulse to grow a beard. I let my sideburns grow, though, and it made me look a little less like a successful public relations man and a little more like an unsuccessful, out-of-work actor.

After I’d begun shaving and was concentrating particularly well on three small hairs at the tip of my chin Lil came, still wearing her modest, obscene nightgown, and leaned against the doorway.

‘I’d divorce you if it wouldn’t mean I’d be stuck with the kids,’ she said, in a tone half-ironic and half-serious.

‘Nnn.’

‘If you had them, they’d all turn into clownish Buddha-blobs.’

‘Unnnn.’

‘What I don’t understand is that you’re a psychiatrist, a supposedly good one, and you have no more insight into me or into yourself than the elevator man.’

‘Ah, honey –’

‘You don’t! You think loving me up, apologizing before and after every argument, buying me paints, leotards, guitars, records and new book clubs must make me happy. It’s driving me crazy.’

‘What can I do?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the analyst. You should know. I’m bored. I’m Emma Bovary in everything except that I have no romantic hopes.’

‘That makes me a clod doctor, you know.’

‘I know. I’m glad you noticed. It’s no fun attacking unless you catch my allusions. Usually you know about as much about literature as the elevator man.’

‘Say, just what is it between you and this elevator man?’

‘I’ve given up my yoga exercises –’

‘How come?’

‘They just make me tense.’

‘That’s strange, they’re supposed –’

‘I know ! But they make me tense – I can’t help it.’

I’d finished shaving, taken off my glasses, and was grooming my hair with what I fear may have been greasy kid stuff; Lil moved into the bathroom and sat on the wooden laundry basket. Crouching now quite a bit in order to see the top of my hair in the mirror, I noticed that my knee muscles were already aching. Moreover, without my glasses I looked old today, and in a blurred sort of way, badly dissipated. Since I didn’t smoke or drink much, I wondered vaguely if excessive early morning petting were debilitating.

‘Maybe I should become a hippie,’ Lil went on absently.

‘That’s what a few of our patients try. They don’t seem overly pleased with the result.’

‘Or drugs.’

‘Ah Lil, sweet precious –’

‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Ah-’

‘No!’

Lil was backed up against the tub and shower curtain as if threatened by a stranger in a cheap melodrama, and I, slightly appalled by her apparent fear, backed meekly away.

‘I’ve got a patient in half an hour, hon, I’ve got to go.’

‘I’ll try infidelity!’ Lil shouted after me, ‘Emma Bovary did it.’

I turned back again. She was standing with her arms folded over her chest, her two elbows pointing out sharply from her long slender body, and with a bleak, mousy, helpless look on her face; at the moment she seemed like a kind of female Don Quixote after having just been tossed in a blanket. I went to her, and took her in my arms.

‘Poor little rich girl. Who would you have for adultery? The elevator man? [She sobbed.] Anyone else? Sixty-three-year-old Dr Mann, and flashy, debonair Jake Ecstein [she detested Jake and he never noticed her]. Come on, come on. We’ll go out to the farmhouse soon; it’ll be the break you need. Now …’

Her head was still nestled into my chest, but her breathing was regular. She’d had just the one sob.

‘Now … chin up … bust out … tummy in …’ I said. ‘Buttocks firm … and you’re ready to face life again. You can have an exciting morning: talking with Evie, discussing avant-garde art with Ma Kettle [our maid], reading Time , listening to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony : racy, thought-provoking experiences all.’

‘You … [she scratched her nose against my chest]… should mention that I could do coloring with Larry when he gets home from school.’