Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

“Well, I would never have guessed that!”

“Please don’t evict me. I’ll get a maid.”

“You look like you could cry.”

“Can I touch you?” Bobby asks.

“We shook hands once,” she said.

“Can I touch your hand again? I’m desperate.”

When Bobby has finished seducing Jane in the sordid shambles of the bedroom, he says, “I want my Marianne back.” His throat seizes. Tears stream onto his wino face.

“You make me feel like a stand-in.”

“You are a stand-in.”

This flings Jane into all the ugliness of her trade, and before she can stop herself she says, “I’m going to have your ass evicted if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in hell.”

But then Bobby begins to cry a little, and once again she hates herself for being mean, a sensation Bobby has not experienced. He whimpers, “Please help me.” He’s beginning to acquire the tiniest bit of a new erection.

During the long day in bed, Bobby tells Jane everything he knows about Marianne, Donna, and Chino. Plus what he heard about Jan and La Costa. He keeps checking to be sure that Jane really knows the town. Too, he likes her hard flat-sided buttocks, her irrational exclamations, and her lingerie. Sometimes he cries a little, but Jane is drawn to him because he is crying less and less. Finally, he has a shower and puts on his striking clothes. How handsome! she will recall thinking.

Chino is in the luxurious living room of his condominium. He is speaking to Max, a hearty mid-forties salmon canner and developer from up north. Chino plays a marvelous new role; compared to the love birds in Presidio Heights, Chino and Max are just plain happier.

“North Beach had grown tiresome, even to me,” Chino explains. “The fire escapes made everything a little vulgar. Would you not say so?”

“I accept your work, Donald.” Max smiles. Chino has gone back to “Donald Arthur Jones.” Max is the only one with manners enough to accept it. The girls keep calling him Chino, as if he were some beaner from down yonder.

“And that one little door with no place to go. And the aging beatniks! Ugh! But that one little door made it seem so much like a drive-up window. I’m no McDonald’s!”

“How much is that fresh face?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“Rather steep, isn’t it?”

“You know the law. Think of my risk. She’s very pretty, very educated. She has no reason to be here.”

Max pays him, remarking, “Don’t overbook her. A thing like that can lose its bloom overnight.”

Chino looks like a pixie as he opens the door to Marianne’s room. She lies curled up on an enormous bed covered by a huge, wholesome, handmade quilt. She faces the wall. She hears the door close, then Max’s gruff voice: “Get up.”

Three in the morning and the same bed. Marianne is bound, gagged, and naked, eerily delineated by a small amount of light that is sufficient, nonetheless, to reveal her tangled hair, stained face, and sense of all-consuming defeat and pollution. The light snaps on and La Costa stands in the doorway staring expressionlessly at Marianne. La Costa’s large eyes blink regularly until she has taken it all in. Then she goes into sudden motion, freeing Marianne from the knots that bind her face, hands, and feet. Marianne gets up. The new freedom nauseates her for a moment.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes. Are you La Costa?”

“Uh huh. Why don’t you come here and lie down?” La Costa makes the ravaged bed with deft, efficient movements. The elephantine Max twisted everything in his ardor.

“I want some water. I want to walk.”

La Costa leads Marianne toward the kitchen, slowly and by the arm.

“When I feel like a child, I cry and suck my thumb. Even in front of a john. But never in front of a pimp. The good pimp has only one weakness, which is his desire to kill whores. He is watching and he is waiting.”

“Like a hawk,” says Marianne.

Back in Marianne’s room you can just make out the two faces as they talk like children at a slumber party.

Marianne asks, “What about Chino, though?”

“I think he’s hilarious.”

“Hilarious.”

“He read that more Americans can recognize the McDonald’s hamburger commercial than the national anthem. So he decided he and McDonald’s were in direct competition.” La Costa begins to sing, “You deserve a break today at McDonald’s.” But she is interrupted, at first by Marianne’s rhythmic sobbing and finally, “I’ve been raped I’ve been raped I’ve been raped.” La Costa rests a hand on Marianne’s back and looks out the window, slowly shaking her head.

In front of Melvin Belli’s office, which is a bogus old San Francisco — style place with a theater-set law library in the front window, two whores are using the reflection to improve their makeup. Belli’s occasional appearances on the other side of the glass are of the same order.

About a block away, Bobby gives Jane a send-off. She is dressed pretty much like the girls at the window. They watch her approach warily.

“What’s happening?” asks Jane.

“We’re innocent, officer,” says the first girl, a Chinese.

“I’m looking for a girl I used to know in the life. Name of Donna.”

“Madonna?”

“Donna.”

“Donna who?”

“Donna from Hamtramck with a chipped tooth.”

“Where did you work?” the Chinese girl wants to know.

“Out of a high rise on Sansome. I had a book.”

“What’d you quit for?” asks the white girl.

“I didn’t like the humiliation.” Jane doesn’t have her heart in this. She doesn’t want to find Donna and she doesn’t want to find Marianne. She feels like a dope in this hooker suit Bobby got her. The cheapie sequined pantyhose are squeezing her ass like an anaconda.

The white girl says. “It isn’t no humiliation unless you don’t get paid. You were never in the life.”

“What’s the difference? I’m not going to stand here and argue all night. Just tell me where a person could bump into Donna.”

“Last time we seen her, which was tonight”—the Chinese girl walks off in disgust and casts a satirical wave to Bobby—“she was working the fake ship at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.”

Bobby and Jane glide down Powell Street in a taxi, headed for Bernstein’s. The imitation ship’s bow projects over the sidewalk. And in front of a window full of back-lit swimming fish stands Donna. The street is Atlantis.

“There she is!”

Bobby jumps out and Donna is gone like a deer. He sprints a few yards and quits. Bobby climbs back in and slumps in real depression.

The driver says, “Give her ten minutes and she’ll be in Moar’s cafeteria.”

At Moar’s, Bobby and Jane get out and rush inside. The door nearly slams in Jane’s face. Inside, Donna sits beneath Benjamino Bufano murals that depict brotherly love. She’s drinking a cup of coffee. They go to her table.

Donna says, “A working girl can’t get nowhere today. You’ve got your nerve.”

“I’m Jane Adams.”

“Are you with the law?”

“Let’s just say I’m helping Bobby find his — find somebody.”

“Bobby’s a God damned deviate, and he had her up there working for free.”

“Up where?”

“Look, I’m not telling anything.”

“Would it take money?” Bobby asks.

“No.”

“Something. What?”

“Pain pills. Fifty thousand Percodans.”

“We could land you in jail.”

“So land me.”

“Donna,” Jane asks, “what’s the problem?”

“The problem is I still think my ship will come in. So far, the only one’s been at Bernstein’s. My cousin married a hippie trial lawyer and got out of the life. They adopted a three-year-old Chicano right off of a Hallmark card and live in Pacific Heights two blocks from the Russian Embassy. What’s wrong with that? My only trip to Pacific Heights and I drew a seventy-year-old eye-ear-nose-throat guy and he had a dead monkey in a footlocker. I gave him his money back. You know what? I can’t stand it. And I won’t talk. And if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to start screaming!”