"The coyote manoeuvre" — Futterman remembered Barry Spackman, a young lawyer at his firm using the term talking to a contemporary in the locker room of the gym at the East Bank Club. He asked what it meant. Spackman told him that a "real coyote" is what you call a terrible woman you have slept with the night before. When you wake up the next morning in bed with your arm under her head, you look at her and want to bite off your own arm, as coyotes are said to chew off a leg caught in a trap, to make your escape. 

Futterman, whose arm is now under Stacy Shanahan's head, in his bedroom in his apartment on Schiller, in the bed he and his wife had shared for decades, the sun slanting into the room, does not feel in the least like making the coyote manoeuvre. Before he had quite come awake, he felt rather pleased, the warm body of a young woman next to his. Then he thinks, "Christ! What have I done!" Through bleary eyes he notes the digital alarm clock on his night table: 11:27 am.

Futterman hasn't a clear notion how this had come about. He remembers leaving his firm's offices with Ms Shanahan, putting her in a cab, getting in beside her. He remembers having a full, just opened bottle of champagne in one hand and another unopened bottle under his arm, and Ms Shanahan holding two plastic fluted glasses. After that, things get blurry: there was much laughter, he struggled with the keys to his apartment while trying to hold on to the champagne bottles. The last thing he can remember is deciding, the hell with it, not to put the shoe trees in his shoes . . . 

Futterman is naked, and he looks over to his wife's antique vanity and sees the two champagne bottles, now empty, and the two plastic glasses. He hears himself groan lightly. This is not like him, David Futterman, a man who writes the wills and plans the estates for wealthy clients, solid, square prudential David Futterman, a grandfather of three, in bed with a young woman he barely knows and with far from less than complete knowledge of how he got here.