The Dice Man Read Free

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