I didn’t care.
Unfortunately, life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninteresting. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much. It was along about this stage of my somewhat sordid road to truth that I discovered the Dice Man.
Chapter Two
My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repetitious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable – the life of a typical successful married man. My new life began on a hot day in the middle of August, 1968.
I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four or five minutes we both rolled over and she began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.
‘Nnn morning, sweetheart,’ one of us would eventually say.
‘Nnnn,’ would say the other.
From that point on the day’s dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body’s most sensitive surfaces, the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil’s hands gliding over him. Or his own wife’s either for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone ever effectively stroked his penis.
Lil and I were slowly advancing to the stage where play is replaced by passion when two, three, four thumps resounded from the hall, our bedroom door opened and sixty pounds of boy-energy exploded onto our bed in a graceless flop.
‘Time to wake up!’ he shouted.
Lil had instinctively turned away from me at the sound of the thumps and, although she arched her lovely behind against me and squirmed intelligently, I knew from long experience that the game was over. I had tried to convince her that in an ideal society parents would make love in front of their children as naturally as they would eat or talk, that ideally the children would caress, fondle and make love to the parent, or both parents, but Lillian felt different. She liked to make love under sheets, alone with her partner, uninterrupted. I pointed out that this showed unconscious shame and she agreed and went on hiding our caresses from the kids. Our girl, a forty-five-pound variety, was by this time announcing in slightly louder tones than her older brother:
‘Cock-a-doodle-do! Time to get up.’
Generally, we were up. Occasionally, when I don’t have a nine o’clock patient, we encourage Larry to fix himself and his sister some breakfast. This he is happy to do, but the curiosity aroused by the sound of shattering glassware or the lack of sound of anything from the kitchen makes our extra minutes in bed unrewarding: it is difficult to enjoy sensual bliss while certain that the kitchen is on fire. This particular morning Lil arose right away, modestly keeping her front parts turned away from the children, slipped on a flimsy nightgown that may have left them in ignorance, but left nothing to my imagination, and slouched sleepily off to prepare breakfast.
Lil, I should note here, is a tall, essentially slender woman with sharp and pointed elbows, ears, nose, teeth and (metaphorically) tongue, but soft and rounded breasts, buttocks and thighs. All agree she is a beautiful woman, with natural wavy blonde hair and statuesque dignity. However, her lovely face has a peculiarly pixyish expression which I’m tempted to describe as mousy except that then you’ll picture her with beady red eyes, and they’re actually beady blue. Also, mouses are rarely five feet ten and willowy, and rarely attack men, as Lil does. Nevertheless, her pretty face, in some perceivers, calls up the image of a mouse, a beautiful mouse to be sure, but a mouse. When during our courtship I remarked upon this phenomenon it cost me four weeks of total sexual abstinence. Suffice it to say, my friends, that this mouse analogy is strictly between you and me.
Although young Evie had scrambled talkatively away to follow her mother toward the kitchen, Larry still lay sprawled next to me on the large king-sized bed. It was his philosophical position that our bed was large enough for the whole family and he deeply resented Lil’s obviously hypocritical argument that Mommy and Daddy were so big that they needed the entire area. His recent strategy was to plop on the bed until every last adult was out of it; only then would he triumphantly leave.
‘Time to get up, Luke,’ he announced with the quiet dignity of a doctor announcing that he’s afraid the leg will have to come off.
‘It’s not eight o’clock yet,’ I said.
‘Un-nn,’ he said, and pointed silently at the clock on the dresser.
I squinted at the clock. ‘It says twenty-five before six,’ I said and rolled away from him. A few seconds later I felt him nudging me in the forehead with his fist.
‘Here are your glasses,’ he said. ‘Now look.’
I looked. ‘You changed the time when I wasn’t looking,’ I said, and rolled over in the opposite direction.
Larry climbed back onto the bed and with no conscious intention, I’m sure, began bouncing and humming. And I, with that irrational surge of fury known to every parent, suddenly shouted ‘Get OUT of here!’
For about thirteen seconds after Larry had raced to the kitchen I lay in my bed with relative content. I could hear Evie’s unending chatter punctuated by Lil’s occasional yelling, and from the Manhattan streets below, the unending chatter of automobile horns. That thirteen-second involvement in sense experience was fine; then I began to think, and my day was shot.
I thought of my two morning patients, of lunch with Doctors Ecstein and Felloni, of the book on sadism I was supposed to be writing, of the children, of Lillian: I felt bored. For some months I had been feeling – from about ten to fifteen seconds after the cessation of polymorphous perversity until falling asleep at night – or falling into another session of polymorphous perversity – that depressed feeling of walking up a down escalator. ‘Whither and why,’ as General Eisenhower once said, ‘have the joys of life all flown away?’ Or, as Burt Lancaster once asked: ‘Why do our fingers to the grain of wood, the cold of steel, the heat of the sun, the flesh of women, become calloused?’
‘BREAKFAST, DADDY!’
‘EGGS, hon.’
I arose, plunged my feet into my size-thirteen slippers, pulled my bathrobe around me like a Roman preparing for the Forum, and went to the breakfast table, with, I supposed, a superficial sunniness, but deeply brooding on Lancaster’s eternal question.
We have a six-room apartment on the slightly upper, slightly East, slightly expensive side, near Central Park, near the blacklands, and near the fashionable upper East Side. Its location is so ambiguous that our friends are still not certain whether to envy us or pity us.
In the small kitchen Lil was standing at the stove aggressively mashing eggs in a frying pan; the two children were sitting in whining obedience on the far side of the table. Larry had been playing with the window shade behind him (we have a lovely view from our kitchen window of a kitchen window with a lovely view of ours), and Evie had been guilty of talking without a break in either time or irrelevance since getting up. Lil, since we don’t believe in corporal punishment,
