The Year of the Jackpot (3 page)

He took his raincoat from her, hung it up, and said, “Sit down, Meade.”

She said uncertainly, “I had better go.”

“If you must, but I had hoped to talk with you.”

“Well—” She sat down on the edge of his couch and looked around. The room was small, but as neat as his necktie and as clean as his collar. The fireplace was swept; the floor was bare and polished. Books crowded bookshelves in every possible space. One corner was filled by an elderly flat-top desk; the papers on it were neatly in order. Near it, on its own stand, was a small electric calculator. To her right, french windows gave out on a tiny porch over the garage. Beyond it she could see the sprawling city, where a few neon signs were already blinking.

She sat back a little. “This is a nice room—Potiphar. It looks like you.”

“I take that as a compliment. Thank you.” She did not answer; he went on, “Would you like a drink?”

“Oh, would I!” She shivered. “I guess I’ve got the jitters.”

He stood up. “Not surprising. What’ll it be?”

She took Scotch and water, no ice: he was a Bourbon-and-gingerale man. She soaked up half her highball in silence, then put it down, squared her shoulders and said, “Potiphar?”

“Yes, Meade?”

“Look, if you brought me here to make a pass, I wish you’d go ahead and make it. It won’t do you a bit of good, but it makes me nervous to wait.”

He said nothing and did not change his expression.

She went on uneasily. “Not that I’d blame you for trying—under the circumstances. And I
am
grateful. But… well, it’s just that I don’t—”

He came over and took both her hands. “I haven’t the slightest thought of making a pass at you. Nor need you feel grateful. I butted in because I was interested in your case.”

“My
case?
Are you a doctor? A psychiatrist?”

He shook his head. “I’m a mathematician. A statistician, to be precise.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it. But I would like to ask some questions. May I?”

“Oh, sure! Of course! I owe you that much—and then some.”

“You owe me nothing. Want your drink sweetened?”

She gulped the balance and handed him her glass, then followed him out into the kitchen. He did an exact job of measuring and gave it back.

“Now tell me why you took your clothes off,” he said.

S
he frowned. “I don’t know. I
don’t
know. I don’t
know
. I guess I just went crazy.” She added, round-eyed, “But I don’t feel crazy. Could I go off my rocker and not know it?”

“You’re not crazy… not more so than the rest of us,” he amended. “Tell me, where did you see someone else do this?”

“Huh? I never have.”

“Where did you read about it?”

“But I haven’t. Wait a minute—those people up in Canada, Dooka-somethings.”

“Doukhobors. That’s all? No bareskin swimming parties? No strip poker?”

She shook her head. “No. You may not believe it, but I was the kind of a little girl who undressed under her nightie.” She colored and added, “I still do—unless I remember to tell myself it’s silly.”

“I believe it. No news stories?”

“No. Yes, there was! About two weeks ago, I think it was. Some girl in a theater—in the audience, I mean. But I thought it was just publicity. You know the stunts they pull here.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t. February 3rd, the Grand Theater, Mrs. Alvin Copley. Charges dismissed.”

“How did
you
know?”

“Excuse me.” He went to his desk, dialed the City News Bureau. “Alf? This is Pot Breen. They still sitting on that story?… Yes, the Gypsy Rose file. Any new ones today?”

He waited. Meade thought that she could make out swearing.

“Take it easy, Alf—this hot weather can’t last forever. Nine, eh? Well, add another—Santa Monica Boulevard, late this afternoon. No arrest.” He added, “Nope, nobody got her name. A middle-aged woman with a cast in one eye. I happened to see it… who, me? Why would I want to get mixed up? But it’s rounding into a very, very interesting picture.”

He put the phone down.

Meade said, “Cast in one eye, indeed!”

“Shall I call him back and give him your name?”

“Oh, no!”

“Very well. Now, Meade, we seemed to have located the point of contagion in your case—Mrs. Copley. What I’d like to know next is how you felt, what you were thinking about, when you did it.”

She was frowning intently. “Wait a minute, Potiphar. Do I understand that
nine other girls
have pulled the stunt I pulled?”

“Oh, no. Nine others
today
. You are—” he paused briefly—“the three hundred and nineteenth case in Los Angeles County since the first of the year. I don’t have figures on the rest of the country, but the suggestion to clamp down on the stories came from the eastern news services when the papers here put our first cases on the wire. That proves that it’s a problem elsewhere, too.”

“You mean that women all over the country are peeling off their clothes in public? Why, how shocking!”

H
e said nothing. She blushed again and insisted, “Well, it
is
shocking, even if it was me, this time.”

“No, Meade. One case is shocking; over three hundred makes it scientifically interesting. That’s why I want to know how it felt. Tell me about it.”

“But—all right, I’ll try. I told you I don’t know why I did it; I still don’t. I—”

“You remember it?”

“Oh, yes! I remember getting up off the bench and pulling up my sweater. I remember unzipping my skirt. I remember thinking I would have to hurry because I could see my bus stopped two blocks down the street. I remember how
good
it felt when I finally—” She paused and looked puzzled. “But I still don’t know why.”

“What were you thinking about just before you stood up?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Visualize the street. What was passing by? Where were your hands? Were your legs crossed or uncrossed? Was there anybody near you? What were you thinking about?”

“Nobody was on the bench with me. I had my hands in my lap. Those characters in the mixed-up clothes were standing nearby, but I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t thinking much except that my feet hurt and I wanted to get home—and how unbearably hot and sultry the weather was. Then—” her eyes became distant—“suddenly I knew what I had to do and it was very urgent that I do it. So I stood up and I—and I—” Her voice became shrill.

“Take it easy!” he said sharply. “Don’t do it again.”

“Huh? Why, Mr. Breen! I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“Of course not. Then what happened after you undressed?”

“Why, you put your raincoat around me and you know the rest.” She faced him. “Say Potiphar, what were you doing with a raincoat? It hasn’t rained in weeks. This is the driest, hottest rainy season in years.”

“In sixty-eight years, to be exact.”

“Sixty—”

“I carry a raincoat anyhow. Just a notion of mine, but I feel that when it does rain, it’s going to rain awfully hard.” He added, “Forty days and forty nights, maybe.”

She decided that he was being humorous and laughed.

He went on, “Can you remember how you got the idea of undressing?”

She swirled her glass and thought. “I simply don’t know.”

He nodded. “That’s what I expected.”

“I don’t understand—unless you think I’m crazy. Do you?”

“No. I think you had to do it and could not help it and don’t know why and can’t know why.”

“But
you
know.” She said it accusingly.

“Maybe. At least I have some figures. Ever take any interest in statistics, Meade?”

She shook her head. “Figures confuse me. Never mind statistics—
I want to know why I did what I did!
”

He looked at her very soberly. “I think we’re lemmings, Meade.”

S
he looked puzzled, then horrified. “You mean those little furry mouselike creatures? The ones that—”

“Yes. The ones that periodically make a death migration, until millions, hundreds of millions of them drown themselves in the sea. Ask a lemming why he does it. If you could get him to slow up his rush toward death, even money says he would rationalize his answer as well as any college graduate. But he does it because he has to—and so do we.”

“That’s a horrid idea, Potiphar.”

“Maybe. Come here, Meade. I’ll show you figures that confuse me, too.” He went to his desk and opened a drawer, took out a packet of cards. “Here’s one. Two weeks ago, a man sues an entire state legislature for alienation of his wife’s affection—and the judge lets the suit be tried. Or this one—a patent application for a device to lay the globe over on its side and warm up the arctic regions. Patent denied, but the inventor took in over three hundred thousand dollars in down payments on North Pole real estate before the postal authorities stepped in. Now he’s fighting the case and it looks as if he might win. And here—prominent bishop proposes applied courses in the so-called facts of life in high schools.”

He put the card away hastily. “Here’s a dilly—a bill introduced in the Alabama lower house to repeal the laws of atomic energy. Not the present statutes, but the natural laws concerning nuclear physics: the wording makes that plain.” He shrugged. “How silly can you get?”

“They’re crazy.”

“No, Meade. One like that might be crazy; a lot of them becomes a lemming death march. No, don’t object—I’ve plotted them on a curve. The last time we had anything like this was the so-called Era of Wonderful Nonsense. But this one is much worse.” He delved into a lower drawer, hauled out a graph. “The amplitude is more than twice as great and we haven’t reached peak. What the peak will be, I don’t dare guess—three separate rhythms, reinforcing.”

She peered at the curves. “You mean that the lad with the arctic real estate deal is somewhere on this line?”

“He adds to it. And back here on the last crest are the flagpole sitters and the goldfish swallowers and the Ponzi hoax and the marathon dancers and the man who pushed a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose. You’re on the new crest—or you will be when I add you in.”

She made a face. “I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. But it’s as clear as a bank statement. This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, ‘
Wubba, wubba, wubba.
’”

She shivered. “Do you suppose I could have another drink? Then I’ll go.”

“I have a better idea. I owe you a dinner for answering questions. Pick a place and we’ll have a cocktail before.”

She chewed her lip. “You don’t owe me anything. And I don’t feel up to facing a restaurant crowd. I might—I might—”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said sharply. “It doesn’t hit twice.”

“You’re sure? Anyhow, I don’t want to face a crowd.” She glanced at his kitchen door. “Have you anything to eat in there? I can cook.”

“Um, breakfast things. And there’s a pound of ground top round in the freezer compartment and some rolls. I sometimes make hamburgers when I don’t want to go out.”

She headed for the kitchen. “Drunk or sober, fully dressed or—or naked, I can cook. You’ll see.”

H
e did see. Open-faced sandwiches with the meat married to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by scraped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his refrigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized. They ate it on the tiny balcony, sopping it down with cold beer.

He sighed and wiped his mouth. “Yes, Meade, you can cook.”

“Some day I’ll arrive with proper materials and pay you back. Then I’ll prove it.”

“You’ve already proved it. Nevertheless, I accept. But I tell you three times—which makes it true, of course—that you owe me nothing.”

“No? If you hadn’t been a Boy Scout, I’d be in jail.”

Breen shook his head. “The police have orders to keep it quiet at all costs—to keep it from growing. You saw that. And, my dear, you weren’t a person to me at the time. I didn’t even see your face.”

“You saw plenty else!”

“Truthfully, I didn’t look. You were just a—a statistic.”

She toyed with her knife and said puzzled, “I’m not sure, but I think I’ve just been insulted. In all the twenty-five years that I’ve fought men off, more or less successfully, I’ve been called a lot of names—but a ‘statistic?’ Why, I ought to take your slide rule and beat you to death with it.”

“My dear young lady—”

“I’m not a lady, that’s for sure. But I’m
not
a statistic, either.”

“My dear Meade, then. I wanted to tell you, before you did anything hasty, that in college I wrestled varsity middleweight.”

She grinned and dimpled. “That’s more the talk a girl likes to hear. I was beginning to be afraid you had been assembled in an adding machine factory. Potty, you’re really a dear.”

“If that is a diminutive of my given name, I like it. But if it refers to my waist line, I definitely resent it.”

She reached across and patted his stomach. “I like your waist line; lean and hungry men are difficult. If I were cooking for you regularly, I’d really pad it.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“Let it lie, let it lie. Potty, do you really think the whole country is losing its buttons?”

He sobered at once. “It’s worse than that.”

“Huh?”

“Come inside. I’ll show you.”

T
hey gathered up dishes and dumped them in the sink, Breen talking all the while.

“As a kid, I was fascinated by numbers. Numbers are pretty things and they combine in such interesting configurations. I took my degree in math, of course, and got a job as a junior actuary with Midwestern Mutual—the insurance outfit. That was fun. No way on Earth to tell when a particular man is going to die, but an absolute certainty that so many men of a certain age group would die before a certain date. The curves were so lovely—and they always worked out. Always. You didn’t have to know
why;
you could predict with dead certainty and never know why. The equations worked; the curves were right.