`EVERYthing,' I boomed irritably. `Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire.'
`We've tried.'
`We've tried and still we desire.'
`We still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion we can be without illusions.'
`Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved. Become as weeds that grow and die unnoticed in
the fields. Surrender to the wind.'
Lillian suddenly stood up and walked to the liquor cabinet.
`I've heard it all before,' she said, `and the wind turns out to be a lot of hot air.'
`I thought you were drunk.'
'The sight of you preaching is enough to sober-anyone.' Arlene, still on her knees, said strangely, blinking through her
thick glasses, `But I'm still not saved. I want to be saved.'
'You heard him, give up.'
'That's salvation?'
'That's all he offers. Can Jake do better?'
'No, but I can get a family discount with Jake.'
And they laughed.
`Are you two really drunk?' I asked.
'I am, but Lil says she wants all her faculties intact to stay one up on you. Jake's not home so I've giving my faculty a
vacation.'
`Luke never loses any of his faculties: they've all got tenure,' Lil said. `That's why they're all senile.'
Lil smiled a first bitter and then pleased-with-herself smile and raised a fresh martini in mock toast to my senile
faculties. With slow dignity I moved off to my study. There are moments even a pipe can't dignify.
Chapter Seven
The poker that evening was a disaster. Lillian and Arlene were exaggeratedly gay at first (their bottle of gin nearly empty) and, after a series of reckless raises, exaggeratedly broke thereafter. Lil then proceeded to raise even more recklessly (with my money), while Arlene subsided into a sensually blissful indifference. Dr. Mann's luck was deadening. In his totally bored, seemingly uninterested way, he proceeded to raise dramatically, win, bluff people out, win, or fold early and miss out on only small pots. He was an intelligent player, but when the cards went his way his blandness made him seem superhuman. That this blubbery god was crumbling potato chips all over the table was a further source of personal gloom, Lil seemed happy that it was Dr. Mann winning big and not I, but Dr. Felloni, by the vigor with which she nodded her head after losing a pot to him, also seemed vastly irritated.
At about eleven Arlene asked to be dealt out, and, announcing drowsily that losing at poker made her feel sexy and sleepy, left for her apartment downstairs. Lil drank and battled on, won two huge pots at a seven-card- stud game with dice that she liked to play, became gay again, teased me affectionately, apologized for being irritable, teased Dr. Mann for winning so much, then ran from the table to vomit in the bathtub.
She returned after a few minutes uninterested in playing poker. Announcing that losing made her feel a frigid insomniac, she retired to bed.
We three doctors played on for another half-hour or so, discussing Dr. Ecstein's latest book, which I criticized brilliantly, and gradually losing interest in poker. Near midnight Dr. Felloni said it was time for her to leave, but instead of getting a ride cross-town with her, Dr. Mann said he'd stay a little longer and take a taxi home. After she'd left, we played four final hands of stud poker and with joy I won three of them.
When we'd finished, he lifted himself out of the straight-backed chair and deposited himself in the overstuffed one near the long bookcase. I heard the toilet flush down the hall and wondered if Lil had been sick again. Dr. Mann drew out his pipe, stuffed and lighted it with all the speed of a slow-motion machine being photographed is slow motion, sucked in eternally at the pipe as he lit it and then, finally, boom, let loose a medium-megaton nuclear explosion up toward the ceiling, obscuring the books on the shelves beside him and generally astounding me with its magnitude.
`How's your book coming, Luke?' he asked. He had a deep, gruff, old man's voice.
`Not coming at all,' I said from my seat at the poker table.
`Mmmmm.'
`I don't think I'm on to much of value…'
'Un … Un. Huh.'
`When I began it, I thought the transition from sadistic to masochistic might lead to something important.'
I ran my finger over the soft green velvet of the poker table.
`It leads from sadism to masochism.' I smiled.
Puffing lightly and looking up at the picture of Freud hung on the wall opposite him, he asked `How many cases have you analyzed and written up in detail?'
`Three.'
`The same three?'
'The same three. I tell you, Tim, all I'm doing is un-interpreted case histories. The libraries are retching with them.'
'Nnnn.'
I looked at him, he continued to look at Freud, and from the street below a police siren whined upward from Madison
Avenue.
`Why don't you finish the book anyway?' he asked mildly. `As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is
meaningless.'
'I am going with the flow. My flow with that book has totally stopped. I don't feel like pumping it up again.'
`Nnnn.'
I became aware that I was grinding a die into the green velvet. I tried to relax.
`By the way, Tim, I had my first interview with that boy you had sent to QSH for me. I found him-'
`I don't care about your patient at QSH, Luke, unless it's going to get into print.'
He still didn't look at me, and the abruptness of the remark stunned me.
`If you're not writing, you're not thinking,' he went on, `and if you're not thinking you're dead.'
I used to feel that way.'
`Yes you did. Then you discovered Zen.'
`Yes I did.'
`And now you find writing a bore.'
`Yes.'
`And thinking?'
`And thinking too,' I said.
`Maybe there's something wrong with Zen,' he said.
`Maybe there's something wrong with thinking.'
`It's been fashionable among thinkers lately to say so, but saying, 'I strongly think that thinking is nonsense,' that
stems rather absurd to me.'
`It is absurd; so is psychoanalysis.'
He looked over at me; the crinkles around his left eye twitched.
