`You have your experiments and I have … [she almost started crying again] my art projects. Pants and .. . I'm being
pathetic and maudlin.'
She placed the pants on the rim of the tub and turned on the water in the sink and began scrubbing her face. When
she'd finished, she brushed her teeth. I stood in the doorway, trying to marshal my creative faculties to tell a talc tale.
'Lil, an hour ago we had something which we can and will have again. But you've got to know all about my
experiments or-'
She looked up at me foaming at the mouth, toothbrush in hand.
'I'll listen to it all, Luke, to every scientific word but not now. Just not now.'
`You may not want to listen, but I must tell you. This hour is too important, our love is too-'
'Crap!'
`Important to let a night go by with this rock between us.'
`I'm going to bed,' she said as she left the bathroom and began to undress.
`Then go, but listen.'
She threw off her clothes on to her dresser, got into a nightgown and went to bed. She pulled the covers up so that only the top of her head was showing and turned her back to me. I began lumbering back and forth at the foot of the bed. I was trying to prepare a speech. I wanted to document my series of harmless; faithful-husband experiments but was floundering in the sea of harmful, faithless-husband facts. I didn't know what to do.
I knew door-slamming only postponed the ultimate confrontation and further soothing necessitated my saying something, an act I wished to avoid for a decade or two. Moreover, modest spiritual caresses would leave her free to continue thinking, and thinking, when you are guilty of something (and what man dare cast the first stone?), is dangerous sad must be stopped. Such soothing would also encourage her to consider herself the guiltless sad abused party, a truth best left unconsidered.
I paced like a starving rat back and forth at the foot of the bed, staring at the food I wanted (Lil) and at the electric grid which would make the eating painful (Lil). Irritably I threw back the covers. Her nightgown was twisted tightly around her and pulled almost to the knees. My blood, seeing that delicious, plump, helpless rear, sent representatives racing with the news to the capillaries of my penis.
I retrieved the scissors from the floor and with stealth and delicacy snipped the heavier material at the neck of her nightgown and with a swift yank tore it from top to bottom. Lil twisted upwards screaming and clawing.
The further details, while perhaps of anthropological value, would read something like the dry documentation of some invasion of a Japanese Pacific island during the Second World War: circling movements; advance of right thigh to position `V'; repulse of fingernail attack on left flank; main artillery piece to attack position; main artillery piece forced to withdraw when caught in classic pincers movement by two enemy ranks, etc.
Forced carnal knowledge, whatever else it may be, is good physical exercise and represents meaningful variation on normal marital relations. As pleasure, however, it has its Limitations. For myself, I was so distracted that night by scratches, bites and screams, and by wondering whether one could be arrested for violating one's wife (was pinching a felony or a misdemeanor?), that I must warn male readers that although desirable as tactic, as pleasure might better employ a quiet night alone with pornography.
The next morning my ears, neck, shoulders and back looked as if I'd spent the night wrestling with thirty-three kittens in a briar patch crisscrossed with barbed wire during a hailstorm. I was bloody and Lil was unbowed. But though she was cold and distant, she listened to my long, scientific report during the bus ride and plane flight back to New York and although she seemed unimpressed with my claims of innocence with Arlene, a part of her believed the rest. I told her nothing about my use of the dice, keeping it all a matter of some vague, temporary psychological testing having to do with responses to eccentric patterns. How much of her believed me isn't clear, but her majority self announced unequivocally that if I did not cease my experiments - whatever they might be - and cease them forthwith, she and the children would leave me forever.
`No, more, Luke,' she said as I left for work the first day back in Manhattan. `No more. From now on you're normal,
eccentric, boring Dr. Rhinehart, or I'm done.'
`Yes, dear,' I said (the die had fallen a two), and left.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Dr. Rhinehart should have known when Mrs. Ecstein summoned him to her living room couch that Wednesday that
there was trouble. They hadn't met in her apartment since she had begun therapy with him. After letting him in she
seated herself sedately on the couch, folded her hands and looked the floor. Her mannish gray suit, her glasses and her
hair tied back severely in a bun, made her look strikingly like a door-to-door purveyor of Baptist religious tracts.
`I'm going to have a baby,' she said quietly.
Dr. Rhinehart sat down at the opposite end of the couch, leaned back and mechanically crossed his legs. He looked
blankly at the wall opposite him, on which hung an ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria.
`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said.
'This is now the second straight month I've missed my period.'
'I'm happy.'
`I asked the Die what I should name it and gave it thirty-six options and the Die named it Edgar.'
`Edgar.'
`Edgar Ecstein.'
They sat there quietly not looking at each other.
`I gave ten chances to Lucius but the dice chose Edgar.'
'Ahh.'
Silence.
`What if it's a girl?'
Dr. Rhinehart asked after a while.
`Edgarina: `Edgarina Ecstein.'
Silence.
`Are you happy about it, Arlene?'
`Yes.'
Silence.
`It hasn't been decided yet who the father is,' Mrs. Ecstein said.