“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 meta
l 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.
THE ROAD ATLAS
Across the way, a woman was posting the special in the window of the hotel. It was hot all along the street, and the sky was hazy from the evaporation of irrigated fields. Bill Berryhill came out of his brothers’ office and looked for his car. He was wondering why he could not get through a common business discussion with them without talk of level playing fields, a smoking gun, a hand that would not tremble, who was on board and what was on line. When he got up from the table and said he had other things to do, Walter, the eldest brother, took the cold cigar from his lips and dangled it reflectively.
“Billy,” he said, “this is a family. Without your interest we’re clear to the axle. What are we going to do?”
Bill enjoyed the iridescence of this sort of thing and never meant to bring it to a stop. Walter was being a little bit dull, though, looking at Bill’s eyes for his answer.
“I’m not a team player,” said Bill. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”
The middle brother, John, wearing a bow tie and blazer, busied himself with papers, jerked his chin with a laugh.
“Where does that leave us?” John asked, clearly expecting no sane reply.
“You’re going to have to thumb it in soft,” said Bill.
Now he was looking for his car. He turned it up next to the hardware, a pink parking ticket fluttering under the windshield wiper. Beneath the other wiper blade, old tickets curled and weathered. The car, a Cadillac of a certain age, had a tall antenna on its roof. Inside, a big radio was bolted to the dash with galvanized brackets. Bill Berryhill relied on this for his cattle and commodity reports. On the back seat, a Border collie slept among receipts, mineral blocks, and rolls of barbed wire. He had a saddle in the trunk.
“I seem to lose my energy in those meetings,” Bill thought. He fished a Milk Bone out of the glove box, and the Border collie got to her feet. “Here, Elaine,” he said and reached it back. She snapped it away from him and he started the car. A glow of irrigation steam hung over everything. A breeze, an August breeze, would make it more comfortable but less beautiful. A woman ambled by, loosening the armholes of her wash dress. Bill angled the vent window at himself and drove through town, dialing at the big radio. He swept through the band before finding Omaha; he slumped down and took in the numbers.
To Skin a Cat Page 10