The Coming of the Quantum Cats

16 August 1983

8:20 P.M. Nicky DeSota

When my beeper sounded I had one hand on the gearshift, ready to jump into second, and the other sticking out the window to signal a left turn. My attention was on the traffic cop, who was taking an annoyingly long time to let the Meacham Road traffic through. My head was full of adjustable rate mortgages, points, GI loan eligibilities, and whether or not I could still get in a swim with my girl friend after dinner. It was a Tuesday. Therefore a good time to swim, because sometimes on a weekday night, after it gets dark, the lifeguard looks the other way if somebody goes topless.

The beeper shattered all of that.

I hate to let a phone go on ringing. I took a chance, I took my hand off the gearshift to pick up the phone. "Dominic DeSota speaking, yes?" I said, just as the cop remembered that there was traffic waiting on Meacham, and waved peremptorily to me to make the turn.

So then everything happened at once.

The motorman on the interurban trolley saw that I was hesitating, so he started across the intersection at the same moment I stepped on the gas. The operator on the other end of the phone said something that sounded like Chinese, or maybe Choctaw. It wasn't either of those, it was just that she wasn't tuned in right. You know how they get when it's near the end of a shift and they're getting tired and a little sloppy and they just make a stab at your frequency without worrying about getting it exact? I didn't understand a word of what she said. I didn't care just then, either, because all of a sudden there was a twenty-ton lump of tandem trolley right in front of me, a lot too close for me to stop. The trolley couldn't turn away. I had to. And there was only one way I could go to miss the collision, and unfortunately the traffic cop was standing right in the middle of that way.

I didn't hit him.

That was more to his credit than to mine, though. He jumped out of the way. Barely out of the way. Enough so that I took the polish off his boots but didn't mangle his toes.

I don't blame him for giving me a ticket. I would have done the same thing. I would have done a lot worse; I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd run me in then and there, but he didn't. He just kept me hanging for three-quarters of an hour, parked on the shoulder of the road in front of the forest preserve, with all the other motorists rubbernecking at the poor simp who was getting a ticket as they went by. He spaced it out. He'd come over and ask for my license and study it for a while. Then he'd go back to untangle the traffic snarls while he thought it over. Then he'd come back and ask for some other I.D., or for my employment history, or about how long I'd lived around Chicago or how come I didn't know a car was supposed to yield the right-of-way to a trolley.

In between times I kept trying to raise my beeper call. In my business you live by the telephone; somebody calls up and needs a mortgage, and if you don't service them right away they'll just call somebody else. Besides, this particular call had sounded a little worrying. It was hopeless. You never get the same car-phone operator twice, of course. The ones I did get were highly amused at my quaint notion that they had nothing better to do than check out calls that had already been passed along to the subscribers. Then, when I insisted, they were scandalized. "Do you have any idea, Mr. Dominic," demanded one, "how many call slips I'd have to look through to find yours?"

I said, "I guess about a million, as long as you're looking under the wrong name. It's not Mr. Dominic. It's Mr. DeSota. Dominic DeSota."

To that thrust, no counter. Instead, "You're not even sure she had the right frequency," she said, as indignant as though I'd betrayed her trust by switching the frequencies on her myself. "The call could have been for somebody else's number completely."

"Not, I think, with my name," I offered, but by then the traffic cop was on his way back, to ask me if my parents had been citizens of a foreign power or whether I had any communicable diseases. He looked quite annoyed to see that I was talking on the phone instead of devoting my complete attention to the repenting of my sins. "Forget it," I told the operator. Took my ticket. Licked the officer's boots (metaphorically). Swore I'd never do it again (fervently). Drove at a prim thirty-two miles an hour to my bachelor home, and wished that the day had gone better. It hadn't. It didn't show any signs of getting that way. Greta didn't answer her phone. That meant she'd gone out shopping or something. By the time she got back the pool in the Mekhtab ibn Bawzi Forest Preserve would be closed for the night. And I hadn't clinched the mortgage deal. And I hadn't even called the prospects back to keep them on the stick.

And I wondered, I truly wondered, if through the squeaky, squawky static on that abortive beeper call I had really heard, as I almost thought I had heard, the words "to the FBI."

What I started out to be was a real-estate dealer ... well, no, tell the truth and shame the Devil, what I really started out to be was a scientist of some kind. But there's no living in that, so by the time I got to college I was studying real estate.

Then I got sidetracked into mortgages.

If I tell somebody that the reason for the switch was that mortgage brokers have a more interesting life than realtors, they just stare at me. It's true, though. There's a lot of excitement to mortgages. You're making people's dreams come true, you see, and there are no more interesting people to be around than dreamers. Sometimes the dreams worry me a little, because some of the dreamers are pathetically young couples, just married; I don't know if they know what they're getting into, with interest rates all the way up to five and a half, sometimes five and five-eighths percent. But they pay the rates. They borrow thousands of dollars, sometimes two or three years' pay, to get the vine-covered cottage of their dreams. And I was the one who helped them make those dreams come true.

It would have been even more satisfying, I guess, to be a loan officer at a big bank somewhere. Around Chicago that doesn't happen unless you're a relative of somebody powerful, and somebody powerful isn't Italian, of course. In banking, it's Arab. Not that that's so unusual—how many banks are there in America that aren't Arab backed? Certainly not very many of the big and prosperous ones. So there wasn't much future for me in a bank job, but the Arabs didn't bother about some of the service jobs, such as mortgage broker.

Maybe the reason for that was that they didn't know what a mortgage broker was. Most people don't. I was the one who interviewed the clients, helped them choose the product they could afford—or could almost afford—checked out their credit ratings, guided them through the preparation of the application forms and the securing of the waivers and variances and permits everyone needs if he wants to own a house.

It's a living. It's also interesting—I know I keep on saying that, perhaps to convince myself. My girl Greta says it to me when I don't say it to myself; she is a big believer in a solid job and savings in the bank before you get married, and we're going to get married one of these days. The job will make that possible.

One of these days.

Meanwhile, it's still interesting, I say for at least the third time, and it also gives me time to myself when I want it. The time when I want time to myself is usually when I can spend it with Greta. The company has a rule that every one of us salesmen must put in five hours a week "floor time"—that's being there, on the floor of the agency, for drop-in or phone-in customers. Outside of that I make my own hours. So when Greta is on a run—she's a stewardess—I put in long days. When she's between assignments I try to make time to be with her. I'm really pleased she has the job she has. . . . No, that's a lie. I'm not. I worry about all the guys she meets, back and forth between Chicago and New York, and where she stays when she overnights in New York. Of course all the stews are chaperoned by the Little Fatimas, but chaperons can be evaded. We know all about that, Greta and I. I really hate the idea that I'm teaching her how to do that in Chicago, and she's using those skills with somebody else in New York. I hate to think that.

So I try not to think it.

And I did get to go swimming with her that night, after all. As soon as I got home I skinned down to my underwear, pulled down the shades, locked the doors, and took a bottle of beer out of the secret under-the-stairs cupboard. While it was chilling in the freezer compartment I tried again to check out my mysterious phone call. By then it was hopeless, of course. My call slip was well buried under hours of accumulation of others. But then I sat down with that luscious cold bottle, sweat glistening along its sides. The phone rang. Greta. "Nicky, honey? You in the mood for a late swim?"

I was, of course. I swallowed the beer so fast it made my teeth crackle as it went past, put on my suit, was already in the water by the time she got there and dove in beside me.

There weren't many people in the pool at that hour, but all the male eyes were aimed at her as she came off the diving board. Greta is a pretty sight. She is five feet eight, blonde, green-eyed, very slim waisted. Men look at her a lot. In a bathing suit, even in the skirted, thigh-length kind of suit our pool guards made mandatory, men sometimes drooled. I know. I did it myself.

I swam her down to the dark end of the pool to kiss her. They'd put the lights out to save electricity, and only the bathing pavilion was still bright. We stood in water about shoulder high on me, chin high on Greta, sort of bouncing on the tips of our toes the way you do in the water, and I kissed her thoroughly, and then pulled her close to kiss her again.

She kissed me back. For quite a long time. Then she pulled away and let some of the cold water get between us, sort of giggling. When I reached out again she said, "Uh-uh, honey. You're getting me real steamed up."

I said, "I wish—" and she stopped me.

"I know what you wish. Maybe I do, too, but we can't."

"There's nobody around this part of the pool

"Oh, Nicky, you know that's not it. What if I, you know, got, well, caught?"

"That's not very likely." No response to that. "Anyway, there are things that can be done."

"No, they can't, Nicky dear. Not if you mean the 'A' word. I could never destroy my child's life. Anyway, those places aren't easy to find, and then who knows if they'll kill you or spoil you for life?"

The trouble was that she was right and we both knew it. There wasn't a day that went by without some police raid on a back-door abortionist, with the criminal dragged away by the police and all the patients trying to hide their faces from the news cameras. We certainly didn't want that.

There was hardly anyone left in the pool now. No one seemed to notice that we weren't swimming. Greta eased back closer to me, did not resist when I kissed her again.

"Nicky?" she whispered in my ear.

"What, honey?"

Faint giggle, then a whisper so low I could hardly hear the words: "What about going topless now?"

I looked around. Apart from a couple of elderly men in bathing suits and robes, finishing out a checker game, the only person left in the pool area was the lifeguard. He was reading a newspaper under the exit light.

"Why not?" I said.

And I reached down between us and slowly, slowly unzipped the top part of my bathing suit.

Now, you have to remember that going topless is not really some big crime. In the city code it's called a Class 3 misdemeanor— that means they never arrest you for it, just give you a ticket, as for parking in the wrong place. The fine is never more than five or ten dollars and the judges hardly ever give a jail sentence. Often when a man goes topless they'll let him off with just a warning, if it's a first offense.

So I did not expect what happened.

I did not expect that all the pool lights would come on at once. The checker players yawped in surprise as someone came running right through them, sending the board flying. That was only one someone, and there were others coming from all directions— through the men's dressing room, through the ladies', even over the fence; and they all converged on me. Two large men jumped right in the pool, clothes and all, to grab me and drag me out.

Greta stood staring; chin-deep in the water—terrified and bewildered, and no more so than I.

The world whirled, and didn't stop whirling until they had me bent over the hood of a car, just outside the pool fence. The metal was hot; the car had just got here, and it felt as though it had been driven hard. They made me spread my feet wide apart, while a nastily unfriendly cop's hand ran over the wet seat of my bathing suit—searching for weapons, for God's sake? There were two other cars, headlights on and pointed straight at me, at least half a dozen men—and they were pointed straight at me too; I was the center of it all.

And the only thing I could think of to say was, "Listen! All I did was take my damn top off!"