The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

arch her back and project her (true or false?) bosom, I felt my loins, for the first time in my analytic history, respond.

      Her smile slowly curled into a sneer.

      ‘It’s better than you were, but that’s not saying much.’

      ‘I thought you wanted to feel my prick.’

      ‘I can’t be bothered.’

      ‘In that case, let’s get back to you. Lie down again and let your mind go.’

      ‘What do you mean, lie down again. You just said you were going to be human. Humans don’t talk to each other with their backs to each other.’

      ‘True. So go ahead, we’ll talk … eyeball to eyeball.’

      She looked at me again and her eyes narrowed slightly and her upper lip twitched twice. She stood up and faced me. The light from my desk picked up a light perspiration on her face, which revealed this time no suggestive smile – although one may have been intended – but rather a tense grimace. She roved slightly toward me, unbuttoning her skirt at the side as she approached.

      ‘I think maybe it would be good for both of us – if we got to know each other physically. Don’t you?’

      She came to the chair and let her skirt fall to the floor. Her half-slip must have gone with it. She had on white silk bikini-panties but no stockings. Sitting down in my lap (the chair tipped back another three inches with an undignified squeak), her eyes half-closed, she looked up into my face and said drowsily, ‘Don’t you?’

      Frankly, the answer was yes. I had a fine erection, my pulse was forty percent, my loins were being activated by all the requisite hormones and my mind, as nature intended it in such cases, was functioning vaguely and without energy. Her lips and tongue came wetly against and into my mouth, her fingers along my neck and into my hair. She was role-playing Brigitte Bardot and I was responding accordingly. After a prolonged, satisfactory kiss, she stood up, and with a set, drowsy, mechanical half-smile removed, item by item, her blouse, bra (she hadn’t needed falsies), bracelet, wristwatch and panties.

      Since I continued to sit with a blissfully unplanned and idiotic expression, she hesitated, and sensed that somewhere about now was my cue to embrace her passionately, carry her to the couch and consummate our union. I decided to miss the cue. After this brief hesitation (her now wet upper lip twitched once), she knelt down beside me and fingered my fly. She undid the belt, a hook and lowered the zipper. Since I didn’t move one millimeter (voluntarily) she had trouble extricating her desired object from my boxer undershorts. When she had succeeded in freeing him from his cage, he stood with dignified stiffness, trembling slightly, like a young scholar about to have a doctoral hood lowered over his head. (The rest of me was cold and immobile as the code of ethics of AAPP encourages us.) She leaned forward to put her mouth over it.

      ‘Did you ever see the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre?’ I asked.

      She stopped, startled, then closing her eyes completely, drew my penis into her mouth.

      She did what intelligent women do in such cases. Although the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her tongue produced predictable feelings of euphoria, I found I was not much mentally excited by what was happening. That mad scientist dice man was looking at everything too hard.

      After what began to seem like an embarrassingly long time (I sat mute, dignified, professional through it all), she rose up and whispered, ‘Take off your clothes and come.’ She moved nicely to the couch and lay down on her stomach with her face to the wall.

      I felt that if I sat immobile any longer she would snap out of it and become angry, get dressed and demand her money back. I had seen her in two roles, sex kitten and intellectual bitch. Was there some sort of third Linda? I walked over (my left hand pants clutching) to the couch and sat down. Linda’s white, nude body looked cold and babyish against the formal brown leather. Her face was turned away but my weight on the side of the couch let her know I had arrived.

      Whatever limitations Linda might have as a human being seemed adequately compensated for by a round and apparently firm posterior. Her instinct – or probably her well-learned habit – of stuffing her buttocks at an obviously aroused man seemed correct. My hand actually arrived within two and one-quarter inches of that flesh before the mad scientist in the London fog got the message through.

      ‘Roll over,’ I said. (Get her best weapon aimed elsewhere.)

      She rolled slowly over, reached up two white arms and pulled my neck down until our mouths met. She began to groan authoritatively. She pressed first her mouth hard against mine and then, somehow getting me to lift my legs up on the couch beside hers, pressed her abdomen hard into mine. She tongued, writhed, groaned and clutched with intelligent abandon. I just lay, wondering not too acutely what to do.

      Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.

      ‘Linda,’ I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) ‘Linda,’ I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dante and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dante back. ‘Linda,’ I said a third time.

      ‘Put it in,’ she said.

      ‘Linda, wait a minute.’

      ‘What’s the matter, put it in.’ She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.

      ‘Linda, I’ve got my period.’

      Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.

      Linda either hadn’t read Freud or didn’t care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.

      She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half-closed her eyes again, groaned and said, ‘Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.’

      Although her hands weren’t pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one-eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.

      ‘Linda, there’s something I’d like you to do, first,’ I said. (What? What? For God’s sake, what?) This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn’t tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.

      ‘What?’ she asked.

      ‘Lie here just as you are without moving, and close your eyes.’

      She looked at me – our bodies were separated by only three or four inches and one of her hands was still pulling me toward the great melting pot – and again she was neither Bardot nor bitch. When she sighed, let go of me and closed her eyes, I eased myself to a seat on the edge of the couch again.

      ‘Try to relax,’ I said.

      Her eyes shot open and her head jerked up like a doll’s.

      ‘What the hell do I want to relax for?’

      ‘Please, for me, do this … one thing. Lie there in your full beauty and let your arms, legs, face, everything relax. Please.’

      ‘What for? You’re not relaxed.’ And she laughed coldly at my denied, deprived, but still unbending middle leg.

      ‘Please, Linda, I want you. I want to make love to you, but first I want to caress you and kiss you and I want you to receive my love without – with complete relaxation. I know it’s impossible, so I’ll suggest a way you might do it. I want you to think of a little girl picking flowers in a field. Can you do that?’

      Bitch