`My hypothesis is-'
`No more, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.
`Pardon?'
`No more. You've just about convinced everyone, but Jake that you're splitting apart. He alone has faith'
`My hypothesis is-'
'No more. Your friends have protected you all they're going to. Either back into the old Luke Rhinehart or you're finished as a psychiatrist' Dr. Cobblestone arose solemnly.
`And if you wish to bring up your idea for some sort of new center to help our patients you must have it placed on the agenda before our meeting.'
`I understand,' said Dr. Rhinehart, also standing.
`No, more, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.
Dr. Rhinehart understood.
Chapter Thirty-six
I should have known when Lil sat me down on the armchair opposite her without even touching her champagne that there was trouble. As part of a one-in-six die decision I had been courting her anew with all the unselfish and romantic love I could imagine, and we'd been having a marvelous week. I'd climaxed four days of traditional courting (two plays, a concert, an evening of love on hashish) by suggesting that we end Love Lil Week by taking a three-day skiing holiday at a Canadian ski resort. I had bought her flowers at the airport and champagne for our first night. It had begun snowing thickly after we arrived and although the next day we both skied like untrained walruses, we soon made an art out of tumbling. The snow fell lightly and wetly in the afternoon and we removed our skis and made snowballs and wrestled and rolled and munched the snow more or less like a couple of aged dogs reliving their puppyhood, I a Saint Bernard and she a collie. She was pretty and bright-eyed and girlishly athletic, and I was handsome and affectionate and boyishly uncoordinated, and we enjoyed playing together again. We danced before a roaring fire and drank more champagne and played brilliant bridge against a couple from Boston and made sweet love under a foot-high mountain of blankets and slept the sleep of the just.
We did the same the next day and the next, and on our last evening, a little high on champagne and marijuana, we spent half an hour holding hands in front of the fire and another ten minutes sitting on our bed with the lights off staring out our window at the moonlight lighting in pale blue the slopes of snow which stretched away from the hotel. I'd opened yet another bottle of champagne and felt warm and complete and serene. The touch of Lil's hand seemed holy. But then Lil asked me to sit opposite her in the armchair and shook her head when I tried to hand her a glass of champagne, and I knew there was trouble.
After turning on the bedside lamp. I looked up at her and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She reached forward and took one of my hands and drew it to her face. Her lips touched my fingers delicately and she looked into my eyes. She smiled, slightly, lovingly, but with a tear running down one side of her face.
`Luke,' she said, and she paused for several seconds looking into my eyes. `What have you been acting so strangely for
so long now?'
'Ah Lil,' I began, `I'd like to tell you . . .' and I stopped.
`I know you aren't really unbalanced,' she went on. `It's some . . theory you're working on, isn't it?'
The warmth I'd been feeling froze, the lover solidified to stone. Sitting mute, hand being held, was a wary dice man.
`Please tell me,' she said. She was wetting her lips and squeezing my hand.
`Luke, we're together again. I feel so whole, so full of love for you, yet . . . I know that tomorrow, the next day, you
may change again. Everything that has made these last few days so sweet will disappear. And I don't know why: And I
won't know why.'
Maybe Lil could become the Dice Woman. It sounded like the name of a villainess on the Batman show but it offered me at the moment the only rationalization I could find for betraying the secret of my life and permitting me to hold Lil's happiness and love. I wavered. The band downstairs was playing a waltz. It wasn't too modern a ski resort..
`I…' I started. The dice man still fought.
`Tell me,' she said.
`I've been experimenting, Lil,' I began for a third time, `with practicing eccentric behavior, unusual roles, attitudes,
emotions - in order to discover the variety of human nature.'
I paused: wide-eyed she waited for what I was going to say. Narrow-eyed, so did I. I reached to my side and turned off the light again. Our faces, separated by only three feet, were still quite visible in the moonlight. `I didn't want to tell you until . . . I had learned whether the experiment had value: you might have rejected me, fought
the experiment, ended our love.'
`Oh no I wouldn't.'
`I knew a moment would come when I could tell you everything. Last week I decided to end the experiment for a
while so we could be together again.'
Her grip on my hand was frightening.
`I would have gone along,' she said. `I would have, sweetheart. Those asses think you're losing your mind. I would
have laughed at them if I knew. [Pause] Why? You should have told me.'
`I know that now. I knew that as soon as I freed myself 'from the experiment: I should have done it all with you. 'But..
Still staring, her eyes glittering in the moonlight, she seemed nervous, uncertain, curious. `What were the kind … kinds
of experiments?'
I was so pale and stonelike in the moonlight I imagine I looked like an abandoned statue.
`Oh, going to places I'd never seen before, pretending to be someone different from myself to see people's reactions.
Experimenting with food, fasting, drugs, even getting drunk that time was a conscious experiment.'
`Really?'
And she smiled, tears wetting her cheeks and chin, like a child in the rain.
`It proved that when I'm drunk I act like other people that are drunk.'
`Oh Luke, why didn't you tell me?'
'The mad scientist in me insisted that if I revealed to you that I was experimenting, your reaction would be
experimentally useless and a wealth of evidence would be missing.'
`And . . . and the experiment is . . . over?'