Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

“I’m getting there, pardner,” said Terry Bidwell, looking at the hand and then taking it. Terry still seemed like the football star he had been. Georgeanne had always had a football player, and this was certainly the big one. His face was undisguised by its contemporary cherubic haircut, his thighs by his vast slacks. He smiled at Edward without shaking his hand and turned to lead them into the living room. Dean, behind him, marveled at the expanse of his back. But the face was most astonishing: handsome, it was nevertheless the face of a Visigoth.

A television glowed silently in the living room, running national news, and when the sports came on, Terry took a remote channel changer from his pocket, flipped on the volume, got the scores, and turned it down again. Terry didn’t pour them drinks, but he went to the bottles and named off the brands. Then he went to the half-size refrigerator, pulled open the door, and said, “Ice.”

“You’ve really made this place your own,” Edward said, gazing around. Is that a compliment? Dean wondered.

“It is our own,” said Terry. “I paid for it.”

Edward turned to Dean, but without full eye contact. “Terry has an air charter service that fills a gap.”

“The Northern Rockies?” said Terry. “A gap?” Terry’s excitement over this point gave Dean a chance to look at Georgeanne, still as pretty as when they had dated. She had a long chestnut braid down the middle of her back and bright, black eyes that missed nothing. At one time, she had seemed to be astonished at everything she heard; it was part of her charm. That astonishment had been modulated to the point that it was now a mystery whether she was hearing any of this at all.

Seeing her took Dean back to when everything had seemed possible, though he remembered being exhausted by the alternatives. What was that old dilemma? Whether to cover yourself with glory or with flannel. I am well on my way, thought Dean, to covering myself with flannel.

They moved like a drill team to the dining room. Next to the table was a vast window with a white grid overlay to suggest multiple panes. A pond had been dug out and landscaped, and the perfection of its grassy banks and evenly spaced, langorous willows depressed Dean. A silent woman in an apron began to serve the meal. Dean was in a swoon to find his old crush on Georgeanne still intact.

“Well,” said Georgeanne, raising her glass. “How good to see everyone so healthy and so prosperous!” They all raised their glasses. The burgundy made red shadows on the table cloth. Dean had his throbbing hand on Georgeanne’s leg. Edward stared at him and he removed it.

“You seem quiet,” said Terry to Dean. I wonder if he noticed, Dean thought, looking back at the slab face with its small ears, and the corded neck set about with alpaca. He couldn’t tell by looking over at Georgeanne, who seemed serene, practically sleepy.

“Dean has learned restraint since rising to partnership. It’s very becoming.”

“Partner!” said Georgeanne. Only a pretty woman could chance a screech like this one. Dean jumped.

“They’ve got me on a trial basis. I could be sent down any time.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” said Edward. “It’s quite final. That’s the charm.”

“We haven’t got titles in my racket,” said Terry. “Just the balance sheet and a five-year plan.”

Dean listened, nodding mechanically, and asked himself how Terry even got anyone to ride in his airplanes. He thought there would be a polite way to ask the question, but feared hearing all too clearly how America was beating a path to his hangar.

And he sensed something else: that Terry could be bridling at the idea that a smooth transition was underway here, from Edward, the firm’s certified gray eminence, to a rising star whose performance might be limited by an on-the-job-training atmosphere. Even Dean couldn’t guess how much of this might be true.

He dropped the thought because it led nowhere, and it was difficult to think of anything more than Georgeanne’s leg, the yellow dress with its wet hand print.

Dinner seemed to go on and on, a less attractive form of nourishment, thought Dean, than an I.V. bottle. The work at hand was the airing of Terry’s dream of “tying up the big open.” When Dean raised his eyebrows slightly at this notion and looked across at Georgeanne, he realized she watched his lips, the very ones that had just said “big open,” with rapture. He decided it was a smoke screen for the leg operation and drew them closer in complicity.

Nevertheless, this dinner where something was meant to happen, reminded Dean of his poor preparation for a life of enterprise. He had managed to reach maturity still thinking that you sat down to dinner only in order to get something to eat. Any kind of ceremony, it turned out, ruined his appetite. Like a child panicked by broccoli, he stole a glance at his unfinished meal.

Edward drove Dean back to his car in silence. It was late enough that the streets were quiet. Then, as if to emphasize his silence, Edward turned on the radio. When they got to Dean’s car, Edward said, “You didn’t do well, Dean.” Edward’s face looked very serious. “ And you had your hand on the leg of the client’s wife. Good night.”

Dean was in shock. After he had let himself into his apartment, he asked himself if he were crazy — he could think about nothing but Georgeanne and what he had viewed with pride as his courage that night — and decided that, well, maybe he was. He danced alone to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music.” The weight of the partnership began to lift.

On Monday, it was certain there was awkwardness between Dean and Edward. It was equally certain to Dean that it was Edward’s intention that this be so. They stopped outside the firm’s library for the usual lighthearted word and Edward gave him, he thought, rather a look.

“How was your weekend?”

“It was all right,” said Dean.

“Just all right?”

“Just all right, though it seemed improved once the part with your client was behind me.”

“Terry is a good client,” said Edward levelly.

“Is he,” Dean stated.

The chill expanded from Edward to other key lawyers in three days. During that time Dean went from acute discomfort to a feeling of rebellion. He took Edward aside downstairs in the foyer. Dean was breathless with crazy courage.

“Edward,” he said, “I’d like to see you retire. You’re becoming petty.”

“I get it now: you’ve gone crazy.”

“Duck hunter.”

Dean called Georgeanne from his office. “I still love you,” he said.

“Is that so,” she inquired. When he hung up the phone, it occurred to him that he was ruined. He called Edward’s office.

“Edward, don’t go around to your cronies and teach them to gaze at me like an undisciplined schoolboy. I don’t enjoy it. Even though I’m a partner in the firm, it’s taken all the strength I possess to stay interested in this inane profession in the first place.” Edward breathed on the other end in astonishment. Dean hung up.

Then he called Georgeanne again. This time he called her from the Bellevue Lunch — a lawyer’s hangout — on a wall-mounted phone at the end of a long row of red-leatherette-and-chromium stools.

“Let’s see each other right this minute,” he said.

“All right.” He could hear her backing up at his urgency. He offered up the idea that they drive down to the Indian Reservation. “At fairly high speed,” he added, “then turn around and get back with room to spare.”

They drove south to the reservation, a vast, mainly unpeopled area with scattered small impoverished ranches where four automotive hulks supplied spares for every running car. The awkwardness of a secret departure lasted for about ten miles. When they had dated, Georgeanne had been a precocious beauty, and Dean a confused and talented youth, planning to be a politician. He had just been kicked out of Alpha Tau Omega; she had just pledged Theta. She had stood him up for a linebacker and broken his heart.