Like a frightened kitten she hunched down away from me with her hands tugging her robe at the throat. Then she
straightened.
'All right,' she said, and with a look which I can only describe as righteous indignation, began to move past me down
the hall toward the bedroom, adding, `But you leave Jake's bathrobe alone.'
The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination,
passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene's. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounting her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.
`Why did you do it, Luke?'
`I had to, Arlene, I was driven to it.'
`Jake won't like it.'
`Ah. . . Jake?'
`I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.'
`But . . . this . . . have you been . . . raped before?'
'No. Not since getting married. Jake's the only one and he never rapes me.'
`Are you sure you have to tell him?'
`Oh yes. He'd want to know.'
`But won't he be tremendously upset?'
'Jake? No. He'll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we'd committed sodomy that would be even more
interesting.'
'Arlene, stop being bitter.'
`I'm not bitter. Jake's a scientist.'
`Well, maybe you're right but-'
`Of course, there was that once…'
`What once?'
`That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull
with a bottle of . . . bottle of . . . was it Cognac?'
`Split his skull?'
`Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy
`I'm remembering - so look, Arlene, don't be silly, don't tell Jake about tonight.'
She considered this.
`But if I don't tell him, it will imply I've done something wrong.'
`No. I've done something wrong, Arlene. And I don't want to lose Jake's friendship and trust just because I've raped
you.'
`I understand.'
`He'd be hurt.'
`Yes he would. He wouldn't be objective. If he'd been drinking.'
`Yes he would.'
`I won't tell him.'
We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other
incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.
For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly `Luke, baby, you're just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He's cured. I did it. I'm famous.'
Chapter Nine
Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at
whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods - the die - rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die's being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape was obviously dictated by fate. Not guilty.
Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional-man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located spittoon in front of my jury.
But on the whole it seemed a pretty weak defense, and I began vaguely hunting for a new one when I became ablaze at the thought: I am right: I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die! Excited and proud, I stood for a moment on my own personal Rubicon. And then I stepped across. I established in my mind at that moment and for all time, the never-to-be-questioned principle that what the die dictates, I will perform.
The next moment was anticlimactic. I picked up the die and announced: `If it's a one, three or five, I'll to go bed; if its a two I'll go downstairs and ask Jake if I can try to rape Arlene again; if it's a four or a six I'll stay up and think about this some more.'
I shook the die violently in the cup of my two hands and flipped it, out onto the poker table, it rolled to a stop: five. Astonished and a bit let down, I went to bed. It was a lesson I was to learn many times in subsequent casts; the dive can show almost as poor judgment as a human.
Chapter Ten
By training I have learned to look for the casual insignificance of every overt cause. In the morning, after a caressless, buttockless period before breakfast, lukewarm coffee, and Lil's hungover imprecations, I wander into the living room to recreate the scene of the crime. Pacing back and forth I tried to demonstrate to myself that I would have gone down to Arlene whether the die had been a one, a four, or a box of matches. I remained unconvinced. I knew in my big hard-pumping heart that only the die could have pushed me down those stairs and into Arlene's entranceway.