The Sporting Club by Thomas McGuane

stopped selecting pictures from the pack and Quinn, with plenty to think about, didn’t request another. But he did ask if he could see more later and she answered that she carried a load of stuff with her in these little cases, everything from coral jewelry she bought in Puerto Rico to more pictures to lavaliers to catalogues of the Prado, the Pitti and the Uffizi galleries; and that he was welcome to look through it all; there was nothing she liked better than going through other people’s belongings; nor Quinn, who intended in his gratitude to tell something about Stanton that would be admirable. He had intended so the minute he saw her today, but couldn’t; not that there wasn’t anything to tell, or that it wouldn’t be understood. He didn’t want to.
    *   *   *
    He went up to the club to call the office. He had neglected to check in and knew things would have piled up by now. The telephone was in the storage closet. On the shelf beside the phone there was a stack of old Pere Marquette directories which had grown in twenty years since the Second World War from nine to seventeen pages; and from five pages of Olsons to eleven. There was a chest of narrow, sectioned drawers, containing the flies that Jack Olson tied during the winter. The drawers were labeled with tape. Quinn pulled open the drawers and smelled the camphor. Inside each square section the flies were clustered new and perfect and infinitely more consequential-looking than the gross castings and fittings and flanges Quinn’s factory produced. Next to the phone was a pencil sharpener with a rotating ring perforated with various-sized pencil holes, only one of which showed a graphite stain; on the floor below was a cone of fine shavings that Quinn for some reason wanted to put a match to and up would go flies, telephone directories, Centennial Club and Quinn of Quinn Industries. “Mary Beth?”
    â€œBoss man!”
    â€œGive me the news.”
    â€œI’ve got you booked solid as of July one.”
    â€œWhat’s happening July one?”
    â€œYou’re coming back…”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBoss man!”
    Business had windrowed nastily. Every sale or renewal marked a new all-time high. The factory picnic was coming up in two weeks, which affair marked the cycle of Quinn’s business life: he had begun it by directing and producing the factory picnic of the year before. Mary Beth had taken the matter of customer gifts into her own hands and had subscribed to a service, run by canny New England sharpers, which shipped live lobsters at five times their real value in containers shaped like tricorn hats and decorated with facsimile signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
    â€œI’ll never come back,” said Quinn, “you can’t make me.” He thought of the containers opened, dying lobsters crawling over his calling card.
    Mary Beth had more surprises: he was now a charter subscriber to the Hamtramck Polish war memorial; he had bought twenty tickets to the Fourth of July Arc Welders’ Ball; he had agreed to speak before the Dexter Jaycees; he had become a member of the Society of Production Consultants, whatever that was; his tax lawyer had made him chairman of the board instead of president, and so on. Quinn’s interest flagged with these permutations and he grew wan. Mary Beth sensed his lassitude. She became assertive and seemed to swagger. Quinn was glad that they were separated by hundreds of miles of insulated wire. If he were in the office, she would make one of her outlandish bids for sex by hitching around the place in a way that aroused Quinn’s scientific interest rather than his ardor.
    Mary Beth was a Canadian and affected rugged Windsor tweeds that seemed to carry the stench of the highlands in them. She had pink cheeks too and sandy hair, genetically wind-tossed. Sometimes she brought Quinn presents from