Читать книгу The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 17

After closing the door I walked mechanically back into the living room. At the window I stared at the few lights and at the empty early-morning streets below. Dr Mann emerged from the building and moved off toward Madison Avenue; he looked, from three floors up, like a stuffed dwarf. I had an urge to pick up the easy chair he had been sitting in and throw it through the glass window after him. Distorted images swirled through my mind: Jake’s book lying darkly on the white tablecloth at lunch; the boy Eric’s black eyes staring at me warmly; Lil and Arlene wriggling toward me; blank pieces of paper on my desk; Dr Mann’s clouds of smoke mushrooming toward the ceiling; and Arlene as she had left the room a few hours earlier; an open, sensuous yawn. For some reason I felt like starting at one end of the room and running full speed to the other end and smashing right through the portrait of Freud which hung there.

Instead I turned from the window and walked back and forth until I was looking up at the portrait. Freud stared down at me dignified, serious, productive, rational and stable: he was every thing which a reasonable man might strive to be. I reached up and, grasping the portrait carefully, turned it around so that the face was toward the wall. I stared with rising satisfaction at the brown cardboard backing and then, with a sigh, returned to the poker table and put away the cards, chips and chairs. One of the two dice was missing but when I glanced at the floor it was not to be found. Turning to go to bed, I saw on the small table next to the chair Dr Mann had been lecturing me from, a card – the queen of spades – angled as if propped up against something. I went over and stared down at the card and knew that beneath it was the die.

I stood that way for a full minute feeling a rising, incomprehensible rage: something of what Osterflood must feel, of what Lil must have been feeling during the afternoon, but directed at nothing, thoughtless, aimless rage. I vaguely remember an electric clock humming on the mantelpiece. Then a fog-horn blast groaned into the room from the Eastriver and terror tore the arteries out of my heart and tied them in knots in my belly: if that die has a one face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs and rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene,’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror was boiled away by a pleasant excitement and my mouth swelled into a gargantuan grin: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the die?

I picked up the queen of spades and saw staring at me a cyclopean eye: a one.

I was shocked into immobility for perhaps five seconds, but finally made an abrupt, soldierly about-face and marched to our apartment door, opened it and took one pace outside, wheeled, and marched with mechanical precision and joyous excitement back into the apartment, down the hall to our bedroom, opened the door a crack and announced loudly: ‘I’m going for a walk, Lil.’ Turning, I marched out of the apartment a second time.

As I walked woodenly down the two flights of stairs I noticed rust spots on the railing and an abandoned advertising circular crumpled into a corner. ‘Think Big,’ it urged. On the Ecstein floor I wheeled like a puppet, marched to the door of their apartment and rang. My next clear thought swept with dignified panic through my mind: ‘Does Arlene really take the pill?’ A smile colored my consciousness at the thought of Jack the Ripper, on his way to rape and strangle another woman, and worrying whether she was protected or not.

After twenty seconds I rang again.

A second smile (my face remained wooden) flowed through at the thought of someone else’s already having discovered the die and thus now busily banging away at Arlene on the floor just on the other side of the door.

The door unlatched and opened a crack.

‘Jake?’ a voice said sleepily.

‘It’s me, Arlene,’ I said.

‘What do you want?’ The door stayed open only a crack.

‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just a minute.’

She unlatched and opened the door. She was wearing an unattractive cotton bathrobe, possibly even Jake’s, her black hair was straggling down her forehead, cold cream whitened her face, and she was squinting at me without her glasses like a blind beggar woman in a melodrama of the life of Christ.

Closing the door behind me I turned toward her and waited, wondering passively what I was going to do next.

‘What did you say you wanted?’ she asked; she was groggy with sleep.

‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I replied and advanced toward her, she continuing to stand there with a widening and perhaps wakening look of curiosity. Feeling for the first time a faint hint of sexual desire, I put my arms around her, lowered my head and planted my mouth on her neck.

Almost immediately I felt her hands pushing hard against my chest and soon a long-drawn-out ‘Luuuu-UUke,’ part terror, part question, part giggle. After a good solid wet arousing kissing of her upper dorsal region I released her. She stepped back a step and straightened her ugly bathrobe. We stared at each other, in our differently hypnotized states, like two drunks confronting each other, knowing they are expected to dance.

‘Come,’ I found myself saying after our mutual moment of awe, and I put my left arm around her waist and began drawing her toward the bedroom.

‘Let go of me,’ she said sharply and pushed my arm away.

With the mechanical swiftness of a superbly driven puppet my right hand slammed across her face. She was terror-stricken. So was I. A second time we faced each other, her face now showing a blotch of red on the left side. I mechanically wiped some cold cream off my fingers onto my trousers, then I reached out and took hold of the front of her robe and pulled her to me.

‘Come,’ I said again.

‘Get your hands off Jake’s bathrobe,’ she hissed uncertainly.

I released her and said: ‘I want to rape you, Arlene. Now, this moment. Let’s go.’

Like a frightened kitten she hunched down away from me with her hands tugging her robe at the throat. Then she straightened.

‘All right,’ she said, and with a look which I can only describe as righteous indignation, began to move past me down the hall toward the bedroom, adding, ‘But you leave Jake’s bathrobe alone.’

The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination, passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene’s. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounting her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.

‘Why did you do it, Luke?’

‘I had to, Arlene, I was driven to it.’

‘Jake won’t like it.’

‘Ah … Jake?’

‘I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.’

‘But … this … have you been … raped before?’

‘No. Not since getting married. Jake’s the only one and he never rapes me.’

‘Are you sure you have to tell him?’

‘Oh yes. He’d want to know.’

‘But won’t he be tremendously upset?’

‘Jake? No. He’ll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we’d committed sodomy that would be even more interesting.’

‘Arlene, stop being bitter.’

‘I’m not bitter. Jake’s a scientist.’

‘Well, maybe you’re right but –’

‘Of course, there was that once …’

‘What once?’

‘That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull with a bottle of … bottle of … was it Cognac?’

‘Split his skull?’

‘Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy –’

‘I’m remembering – so look, Arlene, don’t be silly, don’t tell Jake about tonight.’

She considered this.

‘But if I don’t tell him, it will imply I’ve done something wrong.’

‘No. I’ve done something wrong, Arlene. And I don’t want to lose Jake’s friendship and trust just because I’ve raped you.’

‘I understand.’

‘He’d be hurt.’

‘Yes, he would. He wouldn’t be objective. If he’d been drinking …’

‘Yes, he would …’

‘I won’t tell him.’

We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.

For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly:

’Luke, baby, you’re just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He’s cured. I did it. I’m famous.’