To Skin a Cat

PARTNERS

When Dean Robinson finally made partner at his law firm, his life changed. Edward Hooper, one of the older partners, did everything he could to make the transition easier. Between conferences and dinners with clients, the days of free-associating in his office seemed over for Dean.

“You’re certainly making this painless,” Dean told him one hot afternoon when a suffocating breeze moved from the high plains through the city. Dean had felt he ought to say something.

“An older lawyer did the same for me,” said Edward.

“I hope I can thank you in some way,” said Dean, concealing his boredom.

“I thanked mine,” said Edward, “by being the first to identify his senility and showing him the door. It was a mercy killing.” Dean perked up at this.

Edward Hooper’s caution and scholarly style were not Dean’s. Yet Dean found himself studying him, noting the three-piece suits, the circular tortoiseshell glass, and the bulge of chest under the vest. It fascinated Dean that Edward’s one escape from his work was not golf, not sailing or tennis, but the most vigorous kind of duck hunting, reclined in a lay-out boat with a hundred decoys, a shotgun in his arms and the spray turning to sleet around him. At Christmas, Edward gave the secretaries duck he smoked himself.

Friday evening, Edward caught Dean in the elevator. Edward wore a blue suit with a dark-blue silver-striped tie, and instead of a briefcase he carried an old-fashioned brown accordion file with a string tie. One side of the elevator was glass, affording a view of the edge of the city and the prairie beyond. Dean could imagine the aboriginal hunters out there and, in fact, he could almost picture Edward among them, avuncular, restrained, and armed. Grooved concrete shot past as they descended in the glass elevator. The door opened on a foyer almost a story and a half high with immense trees growing out of holes in the lobby floor.

“Here’s the deal,” said Edward, turning in the foyer to genially stop Dean’s progress. He had a way of fingering the edge of Dean’s coat as he thought. “One of my clients wants me for dinner tomorrow night. Terry Bidwell. He is the least fun of all, and I’d like you to walk through this with me. He’s the biggest client we’ve got.” Edward looked up from Dean’s lapels to meet his eyes with his usual expression, which hovered between seriousness and mischief. For some reason, Dean felt something passing from Edward to himself.

“What do you see me doing?” Dean asked.

“I see you massaging this fellow’s ego, forming a bond. It’s shitwork.”

“I’ll be there,” said Dean, thinking of his ticket to elevated parking. It occurred to him that being the only unmarried partner was part of his selection, part of his utility as a partner. But being singled out by the canny and dignified Edward Hooper was a pleasure in itself.

Dean left his car in town on Saturday night and rode out to the Bidwells’ with Edward. The house was of recent construction, standing down in a cottonwood grove where the original ranch house must have been; the lawn was carefully mowed and clipped around the old horse corral and plank loading chute. There was a deep groove in the even grass where thousands of cattle had gone to slaughter in simpler times.

Dean and Edward stepped up to the door, Edward giving Dean a little thrust of the elbow as though to say, “Here goes,” and knocked.

There came the barking of deep-throated dogs and the door parted, then opened, fully revealing Georgeanne Bidwell. She flung her arms around Dean, then held him away from her. She was an old girl friend, actually his favorite one.

“I can’t believe it!”

“Neither can I,” said Dean, feeling the absurdity of his subdued reply. Georgeanne, whom Dean had not seen in a decade, took him by the arm as though she needed it for support. “I haven’t seen this man since spring break in nineteen-what.”

Terry Bidwell appeared at the end of the front hall and blocked off most of its light. He took in his wife, clinging to Dean’s arm. “A little wine,” he said, “perhaps a couple of candles?”

Dean thrust out his free hand. “Dean Robinson,” he said. “How do you do?”

“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.

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.”

But something quite different began to happen. Word got out that Dean had stood up to his client. Evan Crow, an estate planner, seized Dean’s hand silently one afternoon. And when Dean suggested the whole thing didn’t sit very well with Edward Hooper, Evan got out his actuarial tables and, massaging the bridge of his nose, pointed out that Edward wouldn’t live long enough to make his opinion matter. Other lawyers in the firm stopped by, leaned into his office doorway clutching papers, and winked or left brief encouraging words that could be reinterpreted in a pinch. “Giving my all for love,” Dean reflected, “seems merely to have advanced my career.”

Finally, he bumped into Hooper once again. “Edward,” said Dean, speaking deliberately through his bandages. “I don’t know if you realize how low the water supplies are in the prairie provinces. But in case you don’t know or don’t want to, let me tell you that the old potholes that made such a lovely nursery for waterfowl are very much dried up. Wheat farmers are draining the wetlands in the old duck factory.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Do as you wish,” Dean drawled. “But I think that it is very much in your best interests if you never shoot another duck.”

Early one morning, before the coffee was made, before the messages from the day before were distributed through the offices and the informal chats had died out in the corridors, Dean’s phone rang. It was Edward Hooper. Dean hadn’t talked to him in months.

“Can you come down?”

“Of course.”

Dean had just put the jacket of his suit over the back of his chair. He started to put it back on but on second thought, ambled out the door toward Edward’s office in his vest. He gave the closed door a single rap.

“Come in.”

One hand in his pocket, he eased the door open. Edward was at his desk. Under a wall of antique duck decoys sat Terry Bidwell, elbows on the arms of a Windsor chair, fingers laced so that he could brace his front teeth on the balls of his thumbs. He seemed thoughtful. He tipped his face up and said, “How are you?”

“Never better,” said Dean, “and you?”

“I’m fine, Dean.”

Edward smiled with a vast owlish raising of his brows as if to say, “Where’s the end to all this surprise?”

“Terry,” said Edward measuredly, “asked to see you.”

“My size has gotten to where I need to see everybody,” Terry said.

“I’d heard you were clear up to Alberta,” said Dean.

“And the desert the other way.”

“How’s Georgeanne?”

“She’s off to the coast for a cooking seminar. Hunanese. And we bought us a little getaway in Arizona.”

“All that cactus,” Dean sighed.

“Let’s come to order,” Edward broke in. “I think Terry is looking for a little perspective on his air freight and charter service.”

“No, Edward,” said Terry patiently. “On everything.”

“I mean that,” said Edward.

“As in no-stone-unturned,” said Terry. “Ed, try to stay one jump ahead of me, okay?”

“Okay,” said Edward, looking into the papers in his lap.

“Instead of the other way around, Ed. Okay?”

Sometimes, Dean thought, silence can have such purity. It was so quiet in the room, like the silence of a house in winter when the furnace quits. Edward got to his feet slowly. He’s going to leave this building, thought Dean.

Edward shaped and adjusted the papers in his hand. He looked at them and squared up their corners. He set them on the desk. He gave Terry a small, almost oriental smile. “Good-bye,” he said, “you deserve each other.” He sauntered out, his gait peculiarly loosened.

“I guess we’ll have to take it from here,” said Dean, feeling the solitude and bitter glory of the partnership.