randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, specially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passers-by looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a night-club lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny's and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at Nedick's.
Another time the Die ordered me to sensitize myself to every moment, to live each moment fully awake. It seemed a marvelously aesthetic thing to do. I pictured myself as Walter Pater John Ruskin Oscar Wilde all rolled into one. What I first became aware of during Aesthetic Sensitivity Day was that I had the sniffles. I may have had them for months, years even, and never noticed it. In January, thanks to this random command of the Die, I became conscious of a periodic intake of air through my nostrils running through some accumulated mucus which produced a sound normally denoted as a `sniff.'
Were it not for the dice I would have remained an insensitive clod.
I became aware of other previously unrealized sense experiences during that Sensitivity Week. Lying in bed with Lil is the early morning hours I would listen fascinated to the symphony of street noises from below, noises which previously I had named silence - meaning that Larry and Evie were not awake. Admittedly after about two days they became a quite monotonous and second-rate symphony, but for two mornings they - and I - lived again. Another day I went to the Museum of Modern Art and tried desperately to experience aesthetic bliss, decided after half an hour to shoot for simple pleasure and settled at the end of a footsore hour and a half for being content with a low level of pain. My visual sense must have atrophied at some point and even the mighty dice couldn't resurrect it. The next day I was happy the dice killed off Walter Pater.
In general, during that month in clothes I wore what I never wore; in words I swore what I never swore; in- sex I whored what I never whored.
Breaking sexual habits and values was the hardest of all. In rambling down the stairs to merge with Arlene I was not altering my sexual values: I was only fulfilling them. Adultery did break a habit of fidelity, but fidelity was the most trivial of my sexual habit-values. Mary, Mother of Jesus, once suggested that the nature of a person's sexuality defines his whole life, but she knew better than to assume that when one had defined an individual as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual one was done. I at first didn't know better. I assumed in my typical mechanical way that breaking sexual habits meant changing favorite sexual positions, changing women, changing from women to men, from men to boys, changing to total abstention and so on. My polymorphous perverse tendencies were vaguely thrilled by this prospect and I began one night, returning from a party, by trying to penetrate my wife's anus at 2 A.M. in the apartment elevator. Lil, however, not so much indignant or inhibited as uninterested, insisted on getting out of the elevator and going to bed and going to sleep.
Since Arlene and I seemed to have made love in most of the normal conceivable ways, the only way to break habits there, I concluded, was to abstain, or even better, feel guilty about our affair.
When I turned for a new woman I realized that it was my duty according to the mandate to change my taste in women. Therefore my next conquest would have to be old, thin, grey-haired, wear glasses, have big feet and be fond of Doris Day Rock Hudson movies. Although I'm sure many such women exist in New York, I soon realized that they were as difficult to locate and date as the equal number, of women whose figures more or less matched that of Raquel Welch. I would have to lower my standards to old, thin and spiritual and let the other precise trivialities fall as they may.
The image of Miss Reingold leapt to my mind and I shuddered. If I were to break my sexual values I would have to seduce her. When consulted, the die said yes.
Seldom have I felt less respect for the die's judgment. Miss Reingold was undoubtedly the antithesis of all my sexual appetites, the Brigitte Bardot of my netherworld. She wasn't of course old; rather she had the remarkable ability to create at the age of thirty-six the impression she was sixty-three. The idea that she urinated was unthinkable, and I blush even to write about it here. In one thousand two hundred and six days with Ecstein and Rhinehart not once to our knowledge had she used the office bathroom. The only odor she gave off was the pervasive smell of baby powder. I didn't know whether she was flat-chested or not; one doesn't speculate on the measurements of one's mother or grandmother.
Her speech was more chaste than that of a Dickensian heroine; she would read back a report on the sexual activities of a superhuman nymphomaniac as if it were a long, bullish announcement of a corporation's phenomenal growth activities.
At the end she would ask; `Would you like me to change the sentence about Miss Werner's multiple intercourse into parallel structure?'
Nevertheless, not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done, and with morbid fascination I took her out to dinner one evening about three weeks through National Habit-Breaking Month and, as the evening progressed, began to sense, much to my horror, that I might succeed: I went to the men's room after dinner and consulted the die about several possible options, but all it told me to do was smoke to marijuana cigarettes; no cocaine before the tooth-pulling. Squirm as I might, I found myself later that evening sitting beside her on the couch discussing (I swear I didn't introduce the subject) nymphomaniacs. Although I'd begun to note as the hours wore by that she had a pretty smile (when she kept her mouth fully closed), her lowcut black dress on her white body reminded me somehow of a black drape hung on a vertical coffin.
`But do you think nymphomaniacs enjoy their lives?'
I was saying with the spontaneous randomness and blissful indifference which pot smoking and Miss Reingold seemed to produce.
`Oh no,' she said quickly, nudging her spectacles up an eighth of an inch. `They must be very unhappy.'
`Yes, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if the great pleasure they get from being loved by so many men doesn't compensate for their unhappiness.'
'Oh no. Dr. Ecstein told me that according to Rogers, Rogers and Hillsman, eighty-two point five percent receive no pleasure from copulation.'
She was sitting so stiffly on the couch that periodically my pot-polluted vision made me believe I was talking to a dressmaker's dummy.
`Yeah,' I said. `But Rogers nor Rogers nor Hillsman have ever been nymphomaniacs. I doubt they've ever been women.'
I smiled triumphantly. `A theory I'm developing is that nymphomaniacs actually are joy-filled hedonists but lie to psychiatrists that they're frigid in order to seduce the psychiatrists.'
'Oh no;' she said. `Who could ever seduce a psychiatrist?'
For a moment we blinked incredulously at each other, and then she went through a kaleidoscope of colors, ending with
typing-paper white.
`You're right,' I said firmly. `The woman is a patient and our code of ethics prevents our giving in to them, but…'
I trailed off, losing the thread of my argument.
In her small voice, with her two hands wrestling with her handkerchief, she asked `But . . .?'
'But?' I echoed.
`You said your code prevents you from ever giving into them but…'
`Oh yeah. But it's hard. We're continually being excited but with no ethical way of satisfying ourselves.'
'Oh, Dr. Rhinehart, you're married.'
`Married? Oh Yes. That's true. I'd forgotten.'
I looked at her, my face a tragic mask. `But my wife practices yoga and consequently can only engage in sexual
congress with a guru.'
She stared back at me.
`Are you certain?' she asked.
`I can't even do a modified headstand. I have come to doubt that I am a man.'
`Oh no, Dr. Rhinehart.'
`To make matters worse, it has always depressed me that you never seem to be sexually attracted to me.'
Miss Reingold's face went through its psychedelic color show and again ended in typing-paper white. Then she
