Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

Since Arlene and I seemed to have made love in most of the normal conceivable ways, the only way to break habits there, I concluded, was to abstain, or even better, feel guilty about our affair.

When I turned for a new woman I realized that it was my duty according to the mandate to change my taste in women. Therefore my next conquest would have to be old, thin, grey-haired, wear glasses, have big feet and be fond of Doris Day Rock Hudson movies. Although I'm sure many such women exist in New York, I soon realized that they were as difficult to locate and date as the equal number, of women whose figures more or less matched that of Raquel Welch. I would have to lower my standards to old, thin and spiritual and let the other precise trivialities fall as they may.

The image of Miss Reingold leapt to my mind and I shuddered. If I were to break my sexual values I would have to seduce her. When consulted, the die said yes.

Seldom have I felt less respect for the die's judgment. Miss Reingold was undoubtedly the antithesis of all my sexual appetites, the Brigitte Bardot of my netherworld. She wasn't of course old; rather she had the remarkable ability to create at the age of thirty-six the impression she was sixty-three. The idea that she urinated was unthinkable, and I blush even to write about it here. In one thousand two hundred and six days with Ecstein and Rhinehart not once to our knowledge had she used the office bathroom. The only odor she gave off was the pervasive smell of baby powder. I didn't know whether she was flat-chested or not; one doesn't speculate on the measurements of one's mother or grandmother.

Her speech was more chaste than that of a Dickensian heroine; she would read back a report on the sexual activities of a superhuman nymphomaniac as if it were a long, bullish announcement of a corporation's phenomenal growth activities.

At the end she would ask; `Would you like me to change the sentence about Miss Werner's multiple intercourse into parallel structure?'

Nevertheless, not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done, and with morbid fascination I took her out to dinner one evening about three weeks through National Habit-Breaking Month and, as the evening progressed, began to sense, much to my horror, that I might succeed: I went to the men's room after dinner and consulted the die about several possible options, but all it told me to do was smoke to marijuana cigarettes; no cocaine before the tooth-pulling. Squirm as I might, I found myself later that evening sitting beside her on the couch discussing (I swear I didn't introduce the subject) nymphomaniacs. Although I'd begun to note as the hours wore by that she had a pretty smile (when she kept her mouth fully closed), her lowcut black dress on her white body reminded me somehow of a black drape hung on a vertical coffin.

`But do you think nymphomaniacs enjoy their lives?'

I was saying with the spontaneous randomness and blissful indifference which pot smoking and Miss Reingold seemed to produce.

`Oh no,' she said quickly, nudging her spectacles up an eighth of an inch. `They must be very unhappy.'

`Yes, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if the great pleasure they get from being loved by so many men doesn't compensate for their unhappiness.'

'Oh no. Dr. Ecstein told me that according to Rogers, Rogers and Hillsman, eighty-two point five percent receive no pleasure from copulation.'

She was sitting so stiffly on the couch that periodically my pot-polluted vision made me believe I was talking to a dressmaker's dummy.

`Yeah,' I said. `But Rogers nor Rogers nor Hillsman have ever been nymphomaniacs. I doubt they've ever been women.'

I smiled triumphantly. `A theory I'm developing is that nymphomaniacs actually are joy-filled hedonists but lie to psychiatrists that they're frigid in order to seduce the psychiatrists.'

'Oh no;' she said. `Who could ever seduce a psychiatrist?'

For a moment we blinked incredulously at each other, and then she went through a kaleidoscope of colors, ending with

typing-paper white.

`You're right,' I said firmly. `The woman is a patient and our code of ethics prevents our giving in to them, but…'

I trailed off, losing the thread of my argument.

In her small voice, with her two hands wrestling with her handkerchief, she asked `But . . .?'

'But?' I echoed.

`You said your code prevents you from ever giving into them but…'

`Oh yeah. But it's hard. We're continually being excited but with no ethical way of satisfying ourselves.'

'Oh, Dr. Rhinehart, you're married.'

`Married? Oh Yes. That's true. I'd forgotten.'

I looked at her, my face a tragic mask. `But my wife practices yoga and consequently can only engage in sexual

congress with a guru.'

She stared back at me.

`Are you certain?' she asked.

`I can't even do a modified headstand. I have come to doubt that I am a man.'

`Oh no, Dr. Rhinehart.'

`To make matters worse, it has always depressed me that you never seem to be sexually attracted to me.'

Miss Reingold's face went through its psychedelic color show and again ended in typing-paper white. Then she said in

the smallest audible voice I've ever heard `But I am.'

`You . . . you . . .'

`I am sexually attracted to you.'

`Oh.'

I paused, all the forces of the residual me mobilizing my body to run for the door; only religious discipline kept me on

the couch.

`Miss Reingold!' I shouted impulsively. `Will you make me a man?'

I sat erect and leaned toward her.

She stared at me, removed her glasses from her face and placed them on the rug beside the, couch.

`No, no,' she said softly, her eyes focusing vaguely on the couch between us. `I can't'

At first, for the only time in my life not dictated by the die, I was impotent. I had to sit on the bed beside her, nude, in

a modified lotus position, not touching, and for seven or eight minutes meditate with all the powers of a yogi on

Arlene's breasts, Linda Reichman's behind and Lil's innards, until, at last, with the powers properly concentrated, I assumed the cat's cradle position over Miss Reingold's assumed corpse position and lowered myself into samadhi (emptiness).

It is a frightening experience to make love to one's mother, especially one's mother as a corpse, and nowhere near what Freud imagined it. That I looked upon her as a mother image and yet succeeded in assuming the proper positions and fulfilling all the appropriate exercises is a tribute to my budding abilities as a yogi. It was a great step forward in the breaking of psychological barriers, and I trembled all the next day thinking about it. Surprisingly also, I've felt much closer to Miss Reingold ever since.

Chapter Twenty-five

But not that close.

Chapter Twenty-six

My friends, it's time for confession. Amusing as I or you may have found some of the events of my early dice-life, I must admit that being the dice man was sometimes hard work. Depressing, lonely and hard. The fact is, I didn't want to go bowling. Or to break up with Arlene for a month. Or play an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers. Or seduce Miss Reingold. Or have sexual intercourse in one sexual position when Lil wanted it in another. Fulfilling these missions of fate was a chore. Fulfilling many others was a chore. Sometimes when the dice sent me rolling randomly to a bowling alley or vetoed my playing Romeo, I felt like the slave you take me to be, yoked to an unsympathetic and unintelligent master, one whose whims were getting increasingly on my nerves. The resistance of my residual self to certain dice decisions never ceased and always dragged at my desire to become the Random Man. I was attempting to permit that one desire, the desire to kill my old self and to learn something new about the nature of man, to dominate the vast majority of the rest of my desires. It was an ascetic, religious struggle.