The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

end hardly seemed worth the effort. Arlene's end wasn't so different from Lil's that it justified painful hours of scheming as to how one might enter it in dice-dictated ways and painful hours of brooding about whether one should brood about having entered it. Nor were the convolutions of her soul likely to offer any more originality than those of her body.
    Arlene and Jake had married seventeen years before when they were both juniors in high school. Jake had been a highly Precocious teenager and after seducing Arlene one summer, he found himself sexually inconvenienced in the fall when they were separated by his being away at Tapper's Boarding School for Brilliant Boys. Masturbation drove him to a fury of frustration since no daydream or self-caress remotely approached Arlene's round breasts cupped in his hands or filling his mouth. At Christmas he announced to his parents that he must either return to the public high school, commit suicide or marry Arlene. His parents brooded briefly between the last two of these options and then reluctantly permitted marriage.
    Arlene was quite happy to leave school and miss her algebra and chemistry finals; they were married over the Easter holiday and she began working to help support Jake through his schools. Arlene's education had thus come from life; and since her life had been spent clerking at Gimbel's, girl-Fridaying at Bache and Company, typing at Woolworth's and controlling a switchboard at the Fashion Institute of Technology, her education was a limited one. In the seven years since she'd stopped working, she had devoted herself to philanthropic causes of which no one had ever heard (The Penny Parade for Puppies, Dough for Diabetes, Help Afghanistanian Sheepherders!), and reading lurid fiction and advanced psychoanalytic journals. It's not clear to what degree she understood any of her activities.
    The day of his marriage was apparently the last time Jake had bothered to give a thought to the pursuit of women. He seemed to have acquired Arlene in the same spirit with which in later life he acquired a lifetime supply of aspirin, and, a little after that, a lifetime supply of laxatives. Moreover, just as the aspirin and laxative were guaranteed not to produce any annoying side effects, so too he saw to it that periodic use of Arlene would be free of such effects also. There was an ill-intended rumor that he had Arlene take the pill and use an inter-uterine device, a diaphragm and a douche, while he used a contraceptive, always used her anus anyway and then always practiced coitus interruptus. Whatever his methods, they had worked. They were childless, Jake was satisfied and Arlene was bored and longed to have a baby.
    So my first option was clear: no more affair. Feeling rebellious I wrote as number two option, `I'll do whatever Arlene says we ought to do' (rather courageous in those days), number three I would attempt to re-seduce Arlene as soon as possible. Too vague. I'd try to reseduce her, hummm, obviously Saturday evening. (The Ecsteins were having a cocktail party.) Number four, I - I seemed to have exhausted the three obvious courses of action - no, wait, number four, I would say to her whenever I could get her alone that although I loved her beyond words, I felt that we should keep our love Platonic for the sake of the children. Number five, I would play it by ear and let my impulses dictate my behavior (another chicken's squawk). Number six, I would go to her apartment Tuesday afternoon (the next time I knew her to be alone) and more realistically rape her (i.e. no effort at softness or seduction).
    I looked at the options, smiled happily and flipped a die four: Platonic love. Platonic love? How did that get in there? I was momentarily appalled. I decided that it was understood by number four that I might be dissuaded from Platonism by Arlene.
That Saturday evening Arlene greeted me at the door wearing a lovely blue cocktail dress I'd never seen before (neither had Jake)