Except for the silent restoration of our clothing, the session was over.
Chapter Fourteen
During these first months of diceliving I never consciously decided to let the dice take over my whole life or to aim at becoming an organism whose every act was determined by the dice. The thought would have frightened me then. I tended to restrict, my options so that Lil and my colleagues wouldn't begin to suspect that I was into anything slightly unorthodox. I kept my shimmering green cubes hidden carefully 'from everyone, consulting them surreptitiously when necessary. But I found myself adapting quickly to following the die's sporadic whims. I might resent a particular command, but like a well-oiled automaton I went and did the job.
The dice sent me to bars scattered throughout the city to sit, sip, listen, chat. They picked out strangers to whom I was sent to talk. They chose roles that I played with these strangers. I would be a veteran outfielder with the Detroit Tigers in town for a Yankee series (Bronx bar), English reporter with the Guardian (the Barbizon Plaza), playwright homosexual, alcoholic college professor, escaped criminal and so on. The dice determined that I try to seduce stranger chosen at random from the phone book of Brooklyn (actually Mrs. Anna Maria Sploglio was the lucky lady and she totally repulsed me. Thank God); that I try to borrow ten dollars from stranger `X' (another failure); that I give twenty dollars to stranger `Y' (he threatened to call the police, then took the money and ran, not walked, away). In bars, restaurants, theaters, taxis, stores - whenever out of sight of those who knew me - I was soon never myself, my old `normal self.'
I went bowling. I signed up at Vic Tanny's to muscle my middle. I went to concerts, baseball games, sit-ins, open parties; anything and everything that I had never done, I now created as options, and the dice threw me from one to the other - and rarely the same man from day to day.
New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.
I also created problems.
Although I tried to act so I would always give Lil a `rational' explanation for my eccentricities, I let the dice increasingly determine what kind of a father and husband I would be, especially during the three weeks Lil, Larry, Evie and I (for three-day weekends) spent in our rented farmhouse on eastern Long Island.
Now historically, my friends, I had been a withdrawn, somewhat absentee father. My contacts with my two children had consisted primarily of: (a) yelling at them to stop yelling when I was on the telephone in the living room; (b) yelling at them to go play someplace else when I wanted to make love to Lil during the day; (c) yelling at them to obey their Mommy when they were most blatantly disobeying their Mommy; (d) yelling at Larry for being stupid when trying to do math homework.
There were times when I would not yell at them, it is true. Whenever I was daydreaming about something (`Rhinehart Discovers Missing Link in Freudian Theory!' 'Sophia Loren to Divorce Ponti for NY Psychiatrist,' `Incredible Stock Market Coup by M.D. Amateur'), or thinking about something (how to discover missing link, win Miss Loren, make a coup) I would talk calmly to the children about whatever it was they felt like talking about (`That's a beautiful painting, Larry, especially the chimney.' Lil `That's a ballistic missile.'), and even, upon occasion, play with them. (`Bam bam, I got you Daddy.' I collapse to the floor. `Oh, Daddy, you're only wounded.')
I liked my kids but primarily as potential Jungs, Adlers and Anna Freuds to my Sigmund. I was much too wrapped up in being a great psychiatrist to compete in the game of being a father. My paternal behavior manifested flaws.
Among the alternatives which I gave the dice to consider were some which expressed the fond father buried deep within, and others which gave full rein to the not so benevolent despot: On the one hand the dice twice determined that I pay extra attention to my children, that I spend a minimum of five hours a day with them for each of three days. (Such devotional! Such sacrifice) Mothers of the world, what would you give to spend only five hours a day with your children?)
In September one day, after breakfast in the big old kitchen with white cupboards and built-in sunshine in the big old farmhouse on the big plot surrounded by big trees and bright, flowing fields of poison ivy, I asked the children what they wanted to do that day.
Larry eyed me from his seat by the toaster. He had short red pants, white (in places) T-shirt, bare feet, built-in scratches and scabs on both chubby legs and bleached yellow hair hiding most of his suspicious frown.
'Play,' he answered.
'Play what?'
'I already took out the garbage yesterday.'
'I'd like to play with you today. What do you plan to do?'
From her seat Evie looked at Larry wondering what they were going to do.
'You want to play with us?'
'Yes.'
'You won't hog the dump truck?'
'No. I'll let you be the complete boss.'
'You will?'
'Yep.'
'Hooray, let's go play in the sand.'
The sand was actually the farmer's plowed field, which rectangled the farmhouse on three and a half sides. There,
winding in an intricate maze among the green explosions of cabbage, was a road system to put Robert Moses to
shame. For an hour I traveled in a 1963 pickup truck (Tonka, 00 h.p., .002 c.c. engine, needed new paint job) over
these roads. There was frequent criticism that I wrecked too many secondary roads while maneuvering my bulk down
tertiary roads, and that tunnels that had been standing for years through cyclones and hurricanes (three and a half days
through one brief shower) had collapsed under the weight of my one errant elbow. Otherwise the children enjoyed my
presence, and I enjoyed the earth and them. Children are really quite nice once you get to know them.
They're more than nice.
'Daddy,' Larry said to me later that day when we were lying in the sand watching the surf of the Atlantic come rolling
on to Westhampton Beach, 'why does the ocean make waves?'
I considered my knowledge of oceans, tides and such, and decided on `Wind.'
`But sometimes the wind doesn't blow, but the ocean always makes waves.'
`It's the god of the sea breathing.'
This time he considered.
`Breathing what?' he asked.
'Breathing water. In and out, in and out.'
'Where?'
'In the middle of the ocean.'
'How big is he?'
'One mile tall and as fat and muscley as Daddy.'
'Don't ships bump his head?'
'Sometimes. Then he makes hurricanes. That's what's called an "angry sea".'
'Daddy, why don't you play with us more?'