`What happened to the picture of Freud?' asked Lil, who had come in from the kitchen after turning the kids over to the maid.
Seeing that Freud's portrait was still facing the wall, I said `I don't know. I assumed you did that last night as you went to bed. A symbolic rejection of me and my colleagues.'
Lil, her messed blonde hair, reddish eyes and uncertain frown making her look unusually like a mouse approaching chase in a trap, looked at me suspiciously.
`I did it?' she asked, her mind stumbling over the events of last night.
`Sure. Don't you remember? You said something like "Now, Freud can look into the bowels of the house," and staggered off to the john.'
`I did not,' she said. `I strode with great dignity.'
`You're right. You strode with great dignity in a variety of directions.'
'But essentially I moved east'
'True.'
`East and johnward.'
We laughed and I asked her to bring another cup of coffee and a doughnut to my study. Evie and Larry momentarily escaped from the clutches of the maid and swooped through the living room like two desperadoes shooting up a town and disappeared back toward the kitchen. I retreated to my home within my home: my old oaken desk in the study.
For a while I sat there throwing the two green dice across its scarred face and wondering what the events of the night before meant for me. My legs and loins felt heavy, my mind light, Last night I had done something I had vaguely felt like doing for two or three years. Having done it I was changed, not greatly, but changed. My life for a few weeks would be a little more complex, a little more exciting. Searching for a free hour to play with Arlene would while away time that in the recent past had been-spent not being able to work on my book, not being able to concentrate on my cases and daydreaming about stock market coups. The time might not be better spent, but I would be better entertained. Thanks to the die.
What else might the dice dictate? Well, that I stop writing silly psychoanalytic articles; that I sell all my stock, or buy all I could afford; that I make love to Arlene in our double bed while my wife slept on the other side; that I take a trip to San Francisco, Hawaii, Peking; that I bluff every time when playing poker; that I give up my home, my friends, my profession. After giving up my psychiatric practice I might become a college professor. .. a stockbroker . .. a real estate salesman .. Zen master … used-car salesman … travel agent … elevator fan. My choice of profession seemed suddenly infinite. That I didn't want to be a used-car salesman, didn't respect the profession, seemed almost a limitation on my pall, as idiosyncrasy.
My mind exploded with possibilities. The, boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saving after each random decision.
`The die is cast,' and sloshing stoically across some new, ever wider Rubicon. If one life was dead and boring, so what? Long live a new life! But what new life? During the last months nothing had seemed worth doing. Had the die changed that? What specifically did I want to do? Well, nothing specific. But in general? All power to the dice! Good enough, but what might they decide? Everything.
Everything? Everything.
Chapter Eleven
Everything didn't turn out to be too much at first.
That afternoon the dice scorned all sorts of exciting options and steered me instead to the corner drugstore to choose reading matter at random. Admittedly, browsing through the four magazines chosen - Agonizing Confessions; Your Pro-Football Handbook; Fuck-it and Health and You - was more interesting than my usual psychoanalytic fare, but I vaguely regretted not having been sent by the dice on a more important or absurd mission.
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.'