“Every part of him was cool and wet moving swiftly through the water, nothing, nothing in his way.”

That's a quote from the yearbook page of ex-Willkie Farr & Gallagher co-chairman Gordon Caplan, who graduated from Trinity, an elite private school in Manhattan, in 1984. It turns out I know several of his classmates, who shared the yearbook.

I have reservations about mining high school yearbooks a la Brett Kavanaugh for insight into a man 35 years later. But this particular quote—a standalone sentence on his page that's attributed to “G.R.C”—Caplan's initials— is so striking in its imagery. His exact reference is unclear, but it suggests a slippery, stealthy person racing ahead without obstacles.