Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

“It’s not the same.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Did you sleep with that English rotter?”

“Obviously yes.”

“I’ll bet he was a bum lay.”

“You’ll never know.”

“I can guess.”

“Let’s put it this way,” says Marianne measuredly. “He beat the hell out of that plainclothesman.”

“Don’t keep running my face in that one!”

“Bobby, honey, you’d better figure out what you’re up to. I mean, this is all very adventurous, but if you can’t handle it, you better think of something you can.”

“Is that some kind of attack on my nerve?” Bobby says sharply. Who is this dumb bunny trying to put on the spot?

Marianne has no trouble finding Donna at her predictable table the next day. The same bartender is in the corner like a heron spotting minnows.

“May we have our belongings back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m not very nice. Blah, blah, blah.”

“That’s right,” says Marianne. “You’re a useless girl. And your fingerprints are on everything. I’m going from here to the police unless we can have our things back.”

“Better have your boyfriend go. You’ve got a record.”

“That’s fine. Is that how you would prefer it?”

“I’ll tell you something better. All your stuff is up to Chino’s place, ’n’ that. Your boyfriend went up and hassled my guy, and it was a question of my getting back in the first place. I’m not interested in being a house pet with a view of the ocean. Part two, I love my guy. Can you follow that? If you want your stuff, go get it.”

“Thank you very much, I will.”

It must be that Chino can feel the vibration of someone on the fire escape because once more he is smiling on the landing, this time at brave Marianne, who seems primly ascending, like someone distributing leaflets for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Good morning,” she says. “I’ve come to see about my things.”

Chino holds the door for her. Still sleepy, he looks more like Donald Arthur Jones; “Chino” is for as the day goes on. But it does seem the latter is coming on rather rapidly.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “The odds and ends Donna lifted. The money is in my bank and the credit cards are back in circulation.”

“Well,” Marianne says, feeling very much as though she were at the World Trade Center, “start thinking about how you’re going to get them for me.”

“Why?” Chino is narrowing down.

“Because we need them.”

“Who? You and what’s his name, Errol Flynn? Errol Flynn needs them. You don’t.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That means you’re not going anywhere. Errol Flynn is going to have to do his own cooking and washing until he can find some more live-in help. His old lady just found a new job.”

“I’m looking for a girl named Donna. You remember, a tall brunette who sits at that table, that one there, next to the sidewalk?”

“I don’t know her,” says the bartender.

“Come on, she sits right there! I left a hundred bucks with you to cover her drinks.”

“I don’t remember that either.”

“She’s here every day!”

“Lower your voice or I’ll have you bounced.”

“I … I’m sorry. I have a job to do. I want to clean up this neighborhood. I could’ve used your help.”

“Sorry.”

“If it turns out I needed your help bad, I’m coming back to see you.” Bobby’s got his hand on the gun, and he’d like to shoot this fucker’s lights out.

“Whatever blows your dress up,” says the unflappable bartender as he swishes mai tai glasses in the suds.

Bobby stands on Chino’s landing with his ear to the door. He can hear incoherent murmuring from within. He’s got the gun in front of him and he’s turning the knob as slowly as he can. The latch clicks and the door is free. Bobby kicks it wide open, jumping inside with the gun held two-handed, straight in front of him.

Three Chinese house painters babble in abject terror in the completely bare flat. Bobby gapes at the emptiness as he backs out amid the oriental cacophony.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry.…”

“So sorry,” they echo, nervously trying to get with it.

In a regally anonymous condominium, high in the middle of the city, each of whose windows gives onto a merciless view of the ocean and the far bridges of the bay, the silent corridors reach past the sealed doors like a nervous system. A door opens; a well-dressed man backs into the corridor trailing a woman’s arm. It drops away and swings back into the doorway. He says thank you and goes. The girl is not Marianne; she is on the couch beyond in a nightgown. But the door closes.

At the Garden Court the next day, under the splendid green-house roof, Chino is having lunch with Marianne, whose terror and beautiful clothes have made her ravishing, beautiful. Chino is attempting a vain, somehow intimate speech to her. He seems to think only of Marianne.

“My job is to provide the illicit. Is that not so? In recent years I am up against hippies, sluts, and, worst of all, experimenters. And many of our country’s people have become queer. What can I offer a successful man besides mere convenience? I am not McDonald’s! I wish to be something more than a drive-up window. My clients are not … swingers! My clients are powerful, friends of the system. On the level of pure merchandise, they are happy with what I give and they … remunerate me so I can go on as a well-paid, quietly efficient person of crime. But … I think now I have something for the discerning, something which is not now easily obtained, not without crazy and needless risk. My clients have families and concerns; they need to express themselves.”

“What is it you can offer them?” Marianne asks, in terror of this knife-wielding animal playing the gent at the table.

“I can offer them an unwilling lady, an intelligent woman who hates everything that is happening to her.”

“But what if I learn to like it?” Marianne asks him desperately. Learning to like it is the only card she holds.

“Then you are just another one of the girls. You become commonplace.”

“To whom?” A disappearing pulse of courage.

“To me, to yourself. What’s the difference?”

Jane Adams, the lady realtor, a woman of energy and brains, is on the porch of Bobby’s Presidio Heights house running down a rumor. Jane hates this. She wanted to make a living and this is it. The porch is covered with glass from a broken bottle that has been thrown from inside. Jane states as she enters, “Why not say it? I’ve had complaints.”

The place is a mess, with half-finished meals and newspapers slung over the furniture.

“This certainly proves the value of a damage deposit,” says Jane, hating the position she’s in, this real-estate sham. Every time she has said “ranchette,” “bungalow,” “younger couple,” “handyman’s dream,” has been, she now feels, a black mark on her soul. But Bobby’s hauteur helps her through the moment.

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says jauntily.

“I’m thinking in terms of eviction.”

“You’ll need a hot lawyer.”

“I’ll get one. I rather thought your friend would be tidier.”

“She’s been kidnapped. Tough to be tidy, under the circumstances.”

It’s very quiet.

“Have you reported this to the police?”

“On, yes, first thing.”

“And what happened?”

“They said she had merely left. She had a record, which they said indicated that she had simply moved on.”

“A record for what?”

“Prostitution.”