Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

All of them — Spengler with his foul chronicle, Earl Olive sucking his paws in the woods, Stanton pouring salt in every handy wound, Fortescue leading his squad up and down the hill between explosions like Pavlov’s dogs, Quinn and Janey soft-shoeing it around one another — all of them seemed to move away from each other like lines on a globe that would converge invisibly beyond. But maybe too that point of convergence would be a fantastic dogfight or Western-movie saloon debacle replete with screaming frontier twats, bloodied heads, breakaway chairs, collapsing shelves of bottles. Why not? Already the physical ruin of the club was past comprehension. A lake over seventy years old that had become part of the general memory of the county’s wildlife was a suppurating mudbowl. And it was Quinn who had seen the lake last, moving like an express train on its glassy trajectory down the Pere Marquette. But what still astonished him was the readiness for calamity there had been in the air. Even the shed with its compact wooden boxes of dynamite lying waxed and fuseless in rows convenient to the land must have longed for use. Then the aftermath was a hangover; indulgence shrunk away to nothing; everyone was stopped, wooden; only Earl Olive was at large, functional, decisive and arbitrary as a child or goblin. Quinn reflected upon Olive, calling up only a few traits: his considerable size, his wide cheekbones, the mouth the distant corners of which each indicated a small, low ear; and of course the hair, long but close like the hair of a puppet. “… the assignment of club finances to professional management in the late fifties…”

“Dum de da dum,” Stanton hummed aggressively.

“May I go on?”

“If you can,” Fortescue said to Stanton who looked at him, raised open palms and silently mouthed the word, “Me?” This small gesture struck Fortescue in the face like a blow. A suffusion of red flashed and the perimeter of white around his eyes grew wide. Quinn fought to keep from awarding Stanton points for this precise and economical shot.

When Spengler finished what was only the prologue of his chronicle, he asked for comments from the floor; and Scott said he hoped that in his final treatment Spengler would “flesh out” what had merely been suggested in the introduction. Spengler answered, “Clearly,” and Scott rising to the tacit challenge and in fact getting himself into something of a snit suggested that the prose could stand a little “pruning” too, a little “cleaning up” if not actual “reworking” from “stem to stern.”

“You could pay attention,” Stanton said to Spengler; “this man is a pro and he’s good.”

“I thought I made it clear that this was an early draft.”

“Darn it, you did,” said Stanton, turning to Scott. “Professor Scott, I would have thought your experience down there at Moo U., if you’ll pardon the expression, would have taught you a little flexibility. What say you give old Spengler a fighting chance?” Fortescue interrupted Scott’s reply.

“We don’t need a moderator,” he said. “We can do without one.”

“Then shut up,” said Stanton.

“Look—”

“Or get out. Pack.”

Janey’s fingers closed around Quinn’s arm.

“ What do you mean?” Fortescue said after a minute. One felt behind the mad spaniel face legions of tiny soldiers.

“I mean simply this: in a larger and more irritating sense you’ve been moderating this whole club and I for one am bored with it. The solutions I have indicated have been shutting up or getting out. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it, Mister Fortescue. But I’ll say this: I won’t be interrupted by you again. You’re a bore, you’re a professional phony and for the twenty years I’ve watched you strut around here it has been all I could do to keep from booting you right in the seat of your smug and comfortable pants.” Spengler and Scott were gone. The others, folding blankets, broke up too and were gone. Fortescue turned undamaged on his heel and vanished into the black pentagram of the tent’s entrance. More would be heard from that quarter. Stanton followed unhappily after. Quinn wondered what was changing him. This had been the painful fetching up of purest bile; and if that was so, why did he do it? Was it an airing of old resentments, as he said; or had he linked these activities too with abstractions? Because it wasn’t funny and because it could be seen as the beginning of a new and more menacing form of irresponsibility, Quinn used it to imagine himself intervening to protect Janey, then taking her away for her own good.

A cycle of these ran through Quinn’s mind: he bolts with her in a car, an airplane, a Pullman; then she is before him as she had been in the clearing that afternoon; now, he himself stands over her with rifle and bowie knife, eyes thinned by the line of horizon, slowly shifting like radar, without carnal inclination. The girl at his feet could be a piece of precious statuary. Suddenly the vision is replaced by one of Lu, pissing in the weeds then wandering off, butt aloft and splayed like that of a plucked turkey. Toying with himself like this was deliciously painful. Janey had become a sweet emotional abscess; it was exquisite to touch the knife to it.

* * *

Back in the room in Stanton’s house, he gazed weakly and bravely through the high window. He was in bed now, his hands crossed on his chest. Janey had made a sick boy’s meal for him of sandwiches and bouillon with a pot of strong black tea. He nipped at the sandwich’s delicate edge and thought, Am I the one? A plastic transistor radio on the windowsill whispered “I’m a hog for you, baby” to the solid oink and snuffle of a Detroit blues band. He studied her, studied the perfect lateral movement of her eyes. He wondered if he moved his own as characteristically; he had learned making faces in the mirror that you never saw your own eyes move; this crucial detail was forever a mystery to the narcissist. Too bad. It explained a lot; for instance, in Janey it showed her care as a listener: in that lateral motion was attention and consideration. Quinn was pleased to have isolated it. He looked around the room that seemed as fresh as a newly drained spring. What was all this glee about? He sat straight upright, heedless of the headboard. “Did you ever have a job?” he asked.

“Had a lot of jobs.”

“Such as?”

“I was a model, a librarian, a guide in a champagne factory.”

“You were? Where was that?”

“It was the only champagne company in Waco and it wasn’t a good job. I took thirty tours a day and made the same speech over and over. The tour started upstairs where it was usually about a hundred degrees and it ended up in the cellars fifty degrees colder. So, I always had the grippe until I demanded to be put upstairs or down. They put me downstairs. My job was to rotate the bottles so the residue would settle evenly. I had to wear a fencing mask in case a bottle blew up. I got pneumonia and went back to the mineral spring.”

“Do you plan to get married?” Quinn asked, his eyes traveling over slatted, white-painted walls with their streaks of paint beading. Janey was biting her cheek again. Quinn reached and pushed her chin with his forefinger to make her stop.

“Well!” she said. “If I could do it right!”

“What kind of wife would you make?”

“A good one!”

“I’d marry you myself,” Quinn said, wrapped up in his own fraudulence.

“Well, I wouldn’t marry you!”

“Why not?” He was still looking at boards, fixtures and chairs, a real interior decorator. Janey was no longer biting her cheek. And Quinn felt that he had to explain who he was and that he could do it quickest by indirection, by talking about the hats he had worn, cars he had owned, the women he had been with, the fly rods he used, the profits he had made. It worked in the past; why wouldn’t it work now? It wouldn’t work now. He knew that by instinct.