Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

When the linebacker was phased out they saw each other again but had changed to being friends. They had kept trying to flood themselves anew with romance in a spell of sex and courtship, but it failed absolutely.

Dean and Georgeanne recounted this period as they traveled the reservation, growing comfortable again.

“I just figured it out,” said Dean in alarm.

“What?”

“We’re friends, just good friends.”

She looked out her window and stared at the elevation of an irrigation canal and the iron wings of a floodgate beyond. Plovers hunted along the plowed ground, and the sky was extremely blue.

“I’m afraid you’re right.” The air whistled in the window vents. “We probably ought to start back.”

After a mile or two, Georgeanne said, “A penny for your thoughts.” Actually, Dean was thinking, for almost the first time, of what was implied by being any old lawyer in any old firm anywhere in the country.

“It’s not going to work,” he said. “Nice weather, though.” Georgeanne quietly watched the prairie fly past.

They drove north to return. The country behind the city was flat, dry-land farm country, and the city when first seen looked like a sequence of grain elevators. As you closed in, the elevators turned out to be hotels and offices, really quite normal but for their isolation in space.

Dean drove Georgeanne straight to her house. The driveway ran up alongside a delivery door, providing a degree of privacy. Two flowering crab apple trees stood by the door, and the air was full of their smell and the sound of bees in their crooked branches.

When Dean got out to help Georgeanne with her door, Terry stepped up from somewhere and knocked him flat. The impact took a few moments to recede, at which point Dean realized he was on his back in the driveway. Terry opened the door to the house with one hand and shoved his wife through headlong with the other. I can call it attempted homicide, Dean thought, then negotiate an orderly retreat. He got to his feet and leaned on the car for a moment. His right cheekbone had swollen so that it stood out in his vision. Can this actually happen to a partner in a law firm, he wondered.

When his head cleared slightly, he staggered through the door with the most vitality and purpose he had felt in a long time. Terry stared at him in astonishment from the beside the refrigerator. Georgeanne stood nearby with her hands over her face. Dean tottered forward and struck Terry across the mouth with an open hand. Terry let him have it again, and Dean went down in a heap. He wasn’t quite knocked out but he couldn’t tell if he was alone in the kitchen or not. He gingerly felt the bone bridge of his nose and found it detached. He was face down in a fair amount of blood, and the desire to get away from that, as much as anything else, impelled him to get moving again.

He crossed a strangely quiet living room on all fours. He wanted to keep going rather than wait until he felt well enough to get to his feet. He could make out a small amount of sound, and he tracked it down a carpeted corridor to an open door. He crawled through that door and discovered Terry having sex with Georgeanne. He had her pinioned on a daybed, and his huge body jerked over her. Dean sprang on him and sank his teeth in his back. A shower of glass cascaded over Dean as his head struck the mirror. He heard Georgeanne’s scream; then he went head first into the metal frame of the daybed and this time he was out. He was out for such a short time, his first thought on waking was to admire his own vigor. He had reached Georgeanne’s house at 2:19, been knocked out and now almost fully recovered by — checking his watch—2:35. It had been years since he felt this good. He could hear an argument from elsewhere in the house, and it pleased him that Georgeanne was taking up for him.

He blotted the blood from his eye sockets with the draperies and looked around. He was in a kind of den with leather furniture, a globe, and a big glass ashtray in a wooden frame with a cork center for knocking pipe ashes loose. The blood spots on the draperies seemed to watch him.

The pain was going over him in waves. The light from the window was clear and yellow and made him feel with sudden emotion the rarity of daily life, the wondrous speckling of the trivial, the small-but-necessary, and the tissue of small delusions that keep good people going.

He got up and went to the living room. Terry and Georgeanne were sitting on the sofa in an attitude that suggested peace was in the making. Georgeanne said peevishly, “Haven’t you had enough?”

“Yes, I’ve had enough.”

“I’m trying to persuade Terry about the truth of our relationship,” she said, and, as a caution, “I believe I am getting somewhere.”

“I don’t think I can drive … myself home.”

“We’ll be right with you,” said Terry. They leaned toward each other in a way that prevented Dean from hearing what they were saying, though he could tell he had brought them closer together. “Why don’t we drive Dean to the hospital. I’ll follow you.”

Dean slumped in the front of his own car while Terry drove. Georgeanne led the way in their gleaming four-door along the crowded boulevard toward downtown. It was a shining fall day when the air of the countryside invaded the city. Dean did up his seat belt and gazed at the changing foliage.

“I hope this has been worth it to you, pardner,” said Terry.

“It has,” said Dean thickly. “It’s opened up the future.” His head nodded up and down as he confirmed this with himself.

Georgeanne stopped at the first intersection and Terry would have done the same, except that Dean reached his leg over and flattened the accelerator with his foot. They rear-ended Georgeanne in a grand splintering of safety glass and a thunder of metal like the rush of things in a vacuum. When all had come to a stop, Terry waved in the air toward Dean what were meant to be further blows but whose force was negligible because of the effects of the accident. “I hope Georgeanne is okay,” said Dean wanly. His injuries had not been added to, but he was in great pain and overcome by the strangeness of his situation.

All three were taken to the hospital for observation, then released. Before they left, one young doctor took Dean aside and asked, “What is all this, anyway?”

“Well, it started out as a misunderstanding.”

“Is it a ménage of trois?” asked the doctor. He cocked his head to one side as though the question arose from his love of science.

“No, doctor,” said Dean, “but your vastly filthy mind has made me feel worse when I didn’t think that was possible.”

“You’re on kind of a tear, aren’t you. I wouldn’t be smarting off if I were in your shape.”

Dean went home.

The first day back at work, Edward asked to see him in his office. Dean was still widely bandaged, and he hoped Edward might pull up short of an actual inquisition. Dean’s lips fluttered in a sudden exhalation.

“I was only going to suggest,” said Edward, indicating a preferred chair to Dean with a broad open palm, “that if you were thinking of leaving the firm, this would be an admirable time.”

Dean let out a brand-new guffaw. “Not thinking of it,” he said, surprised at his own vigor.

“I see.”

“Is there some sort of decertification procedure for new partners?”

“Dean, what happened? You snapped. Terry will probably take his business elsewhere.”

“Good riddance. Less shitwork for you.”

“And Georgeanne has aged ten years.”

“It’s about time.” Dean was aware that Edward’s face was moving toward him. It was hypnotic. Was Edward on his feet? Was his chair gliding? The face came forward, and as it did it grew more like a mask. The mask made a final and mythic ceremony of disappointment, an emotion too small to have ever held the attention of an important tribe. “You evil puke,” said the mask. “We’ll find a way to cut off your balls.”