Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“He drinks, he swarms…”

They were still a distance from the bridge at this point and Stanton swung the boat back in a sharp bank that was a reply to Janey. When they were a short distance from the bridge, Stanton cut the engines. The boat continued to drift, swinging slowly sideways. Stanton hurried below and came up with a megaphone, thrusting it out to Quinn’s vision. As they glided now, turning sideways toward the bridge, he lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes, hung them around his neck, raised the megaphone and called, “What’s the trouble? What are you walking for, you people?” The crowd overhead was distant, silhouetted against the gibbous, china sky. Answering voices came but couldn’t be made out. “I can’t hear you!” Stanton called and the indistinct voices came again. The group above had stopped and looked down at them. “Look, take my advice: regular bus service begins in thirteen months; stay where you are!” A speck appeared against the sky, enlarging very rapidly to splash beside the boat, disappear and bob up again, a lady’s shoe. Stanton contemplated it. “Ah, well,” he said, tired. He threw the megaphone down the companionway and started the engines, which once again began their heavy, fuel-devouring drone.

Years had passed since they were here together. As boys, they had lived for such trips. The last one had been ruined by the oppressive and ridiculous presence of Stanton’s father who wandered over the property with hunched, lugubrious shoulders, stopping people on paths, people with fishing rods and picnic lunches, to tell them what an ungrateful handful his son was; what a nasty little ingrate, his mother chimed in, not to know what side of his bread the butter was on. Quinn remembered the gentlemen, the women too, stopping in their green sportsman’s kingdom to consider a series of rhetorical questions put to them by the boozy couple. The strange fact was that because Stanton at seventeen stayed sober, the deteriorated pair felt he was trying to be superior, to be condescending. And until the time they threw him out of the house to go to college, they skulked around and drank on the sly.

Stanton nosed the boat to the front of the dock; then, reversing its engines so that a heavy churn of disturbed water revolved away and under the pilings, he swung the stern up snug and shut off the ignition. “The boat came in handy once. We made a fast exit from the El Convento Hotel in San Juan where I had been lewdly handled by Janey’s Aunt Judy, who is younger than she is.”

“Vernor, don’t do that,” Janey said.

“What were you escaping?” Quinn asked.

“Turpitude.”

“Ah, then.”

“This Aunt Judy was the love of my life, such as it is.”

“We believe you, darling; but do shut up.”

“No wantum to.”

“Do anyway.”

“I lived on the boat and made a regular appearance at the El Convento, walking up from the dock through San Juan memorably dressed in a white linen suit made for me in Martinique—”

“Why don’t you stop talking, darling?”

“Because I am obliged to recognize the great pleasure that it brings to others. Anyhow, brilliantly attired in this suit and wearing a chest protector constructed entirely of Yankee dollars, I went to the El Convento where as a matter of ritual I blew fifteen hundred at chemin de fer and ascended to the third-floor workshop of my two lady friends.”

“I’m not Cinderella.”

“No, ma’am.”

Janey said to Quinn, “In Vernor’s simple world, women are either Cinderellas or professionals.”

“That’s right!” said Stanton happily. Janey looked at him.

“I am not either one,” she said.

“My world is a horse opera. You know that. Where was I?” he asked Quinn.

“Going up the stairs.”

“Okay, and it was a question of whether or not someone had gotten at Judy before I could get at her. I considered it a good week when I batted, so to speak, five hundred. It was usually much—” he cleared his throat “—worse. Nevertheless, I fell in love. And we had a dry-run honeymoon.”

“Oh, Vernor, what’s the point?”

He went on, “We sailed away, away, over the sea. Judy and Vernor. Hearts and flowers. Away. The moon rose in hugeness over the Caribbean with a single wind-bent palm courtesy of Eastman Kodak in the foreground. Judy and Vernor, somewhat closer in the foreground, scuffled hectically and made love like … monsters. ” He paused and said, “Oink.”

“Do you want to see his vaccination?” Janey asked Quinn.

“No, but you’re kind to offer.”

“It didn’t work out. Judy packed and left me and Janey in the hotel and we just got sort of real attached. Didn’t we, sugar? Hm? — Oh, look, you’re the one I love now! That was before, the monster stuff.”

“You be the judge,” she said. This seemed to make him nervous and Quinn therefore welcomed it.

“You’re coming down a little hard, aren’t you, darling? Where’s your sense of humor?”

She lit another of her innumerable cigarettes, dragged on it, throwing the match away, and said, exhaling smoke, “No, you weren’t trying to be funny, I guess.” She waved the smoke away with the hand that held the cigarette.

* * *

Early the next morning, Stanton appeared in Quinn’s doorway with a globe of iced orange juice which he put with a glass next to Quinn’s bed. “The first Bug House party is tonight,” he said. “There’d be no living here if we missed it.”

“Thanks,” Quinn said, pointing at the juice. He poured a glassful of it. “Yes, I’ll go.”

“All the old turds have arrived for long stays too. Jensen, Fortescue, Spengler, both Van Duzens, Jaycox, Laidlaw, Scott. All the people that hate us.”

“Okay, I’ll go.”

“I’m glad you’re willing. This is now my residence and I’m afraid it will need a little softening up before it’s much of a place to live in.” Quinn stiffened. “That’s where you would be some help to me.” Quinn thought that this must be the measure of how thoroughly he had succumbed at the bridge yesterday: Stanton’s consideration of him as an automatic accomplice was restored.

Stanton lit a cigarette, looked upward and blew white smoke into the morning sun. “Why don’t you cut out this business baloney?” he asked. Quinn didn’t want to answer. He was susceptible and he didn’t want ridicule.

“Because I like it,” he answered anyway.

“You love it.”

“I like it. A lot.”

“Hire a manager, why don’t you, and join me in making the world tense. We’ll foment discord.”

“That was before. Besides, you’re a married man now.”

“Not so,” said Stanton, “Janey won’t marry me.”

“She won’t?” asked Quinn lamely.

“Under your hat. We get wedding presents.”

“Why won’t she marry you?” This embarrassed Stanton.

“Says I’m too mean and crazy. She says she’s sorry she loves me and I don’t blame her. I think it’s bad luck for her too. I’m not domestic.”

By the time Stanton left, it was almost noon. Quinn made himself lunch and got his fishing gear together and went to the river above the woodcock marsh. It was too bright. His floating line threw a beaded shadow along the bottom; and though Quinn worked hard for nearly an hour and a half and until his eyes ached from the concentration, he failed to raise a single fish. He put on his Polaroid glasses and kept wading until he came to a turning cutbank that terminated in a round, flowing pool, deep and alder-rimmed. Right away, he saw the silver, dull flashes of nymphing trout in its depths. He tried combination after combination on them without success until the perspiration ran off him. On a hunch, he tied on a small green nymph and caught four good rainbows in a row before he put the rest off their feed.