The New Yorker Radio Hour - Thomas McGuane Reads “Balloons”

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Thomas McGuane reads his story from the May 10, 2021, issue of the magazine. McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collections “Gallatin Canyon,” “Crow Fair,” and “Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories,” which came out in 2018. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Thomas McGuane read his story, Balloons from the May 10th, 2021 issue of the magazine. McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collection's Gallatin Canyon, Crow Fair, and cloudbursts collected in new stories, which came out in 2018. Now here's Thomas McGuane.

Boones. Ten years before Joan Krebs left her husband, Roger, and moved back to Cincinnati. I spotted the two of them dining alone by the bricked-up fireplace and the old Eagle Grill. She was a devoted daughter, her father, a sportsman with well-bred dogs, who arrived once a year to peer at Roger and inspect the marriage. Roger always saluted his father-in-law's departure, with the words, good riddance. In those days, Joan stirred up our tone

with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn't possibly last. There was nothing wrong with Roger, but talking to him was laborious. As the founder of the once famous nomad agency, he sold high-end recreational properties to members of his far-flung society,

and he had taken on the language of his clients. after he described a drought-stricken, abandoned part of the state as a, quote, tightly held neighborhood. He came to be known as tightly held Krebs or T.H. In the areas of Montana that were subject to his creative hyperbole, people bought god-alphal properties, believing that they were unacquired taste. Renowned for his many closings,

Roger was on the road a lot. This worked perfectly for gentlemen. and me. Joan made it clear at the beginning of our affair that this was not her first rodeo. She added, I never do it to get anywhere. That was all the justification we needed. I thought of Benjamin Franklin's obscure dictum about, quote, using veneery, and was reassured that our girl, Joan was more ethical than that early American icon. I wouldn't say I envied Roger, and I may even have enjoyed the limitations. I had all the advantages without the cares. The little I knew of their love life was a glancing mention of Roger's vocalizations in importuning. Joan said she felt

as if she were being regaled by him. I regret that I fell in love with her and worse, never got over it. When I stopped at their table at the eagle, Roger rose to his feet, pressed his napkin to his chest and gave me a hearty welcome. Hardy by Roger's somewhat 90 standards, that is. I hugged Joan when she stood, running the tip of my forefinger, up the small of her back, and feeling her shiver. She rewarded me with a twinkle. The three was set, and they beamed at me with intense curiosity.

There were several ways of viewing Roger, the nicest one credited him with enthusiasm in Bono Me. and this really was more helpful than, say, applying the standards used in one of Hemingway's cafe scenes where the queries were all about who was or who wasn't a phony. When Joan, Roger and I sat together, we were, strictly speaking, three phonies. There are a good many non-phonies scattered around the dining room.

They looked rather dull. You've come at the right time to settle a gentle dispute, Roger saying. Joan says that I alone approve of the fellow in the subway who shot the muggers. Please take my side. Mugging should be risky, as risky as speeding or mountain climbing. Four boys were shot, Joan said, leaning on her elbows and seizing her head. I glanced her way and she held my gaze, her imperturbable face breaking slowly into a smile. No chance Roger would note any of this midway through.

his mugging aria. Risk, he went on. Look at all the deaths on K2. When you set out to rob, beat, or knife people, you should share in the peril. I want muggers to know that it's a dangerous sport.

Every game has rules. My hat's off to the stout-hearted fellow who filled them with lead. He could have been stabbed or something. Knives. They had knives. Quite inadvertently, as my hand rested

in my lap. My fingers touched Jones. I let them intertwine. Roger noticed after all. A little wine, he asked, some candles. Good one, but even this didn't stop him. He looked up and thought, in school we had to write an essay on one of Dante's circles of hell, he said. We could pick whichever circle we wanted. I picked the sea of excrement. He smiled. I'm a realist. I'm a realist. you see. Joan and Roger once came to my parents' house for a visit. My father can be formal with new people, and they seemed wildly animated. Dad was charming and cordial, but when they left, he said, I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, and I wouldn't trust the wife farther than I could throw her. I was wrong to think that Roger would just find someone else. When Joan left him,

he went steadily downhill. He closed the age of the age of the. and after a few years, almost no one remembered the moniker tightly held Krebs or his spectacular commissions. He was known as the man who had occupied every barstool in town and fallen off a few. He kept a little pistol in his pocket and took a shot at a man in the Manhattan bar, but missed and was forgiven. He was not the sort of person who should have had a gun in his pocket. He sued so many people frivolously that the courts classified him as a, quote, vexatious litigant. He went on seeing me, and in fact, all the doctors in town. Inevitably, I served as an audience for the various tributes in his remarkable diction

that he directed to the memory of Joan. Aid and alcohol had given him an eerie, brittle quality in some of the lapses of wet brain. I sensed, rightly, I think, that all of this was meant to pry out of me, whether Joan and I had had in his parlance, quote, a bit of a flutter. I won't deny that it made me anxious. Roger sat before me on a chair next to my examining table, a crumpled man with a high forehead showing thin blue veins. He began to speak as though others too awaited his remarks.

Nothing fortified Joan like a libation presented at an unexpected hour, adding to the gaiety of nations. It was Joan on our first hiking trip, who surprised the pothunters of Utah, forcing their retreat. Joan was a stranger to fear. And so on. The visuals that ran through my mind of Roger's present life, falling in and out of low bars, made it hard to follow his speech. She arrived with college friends, a pair of list of suffragettes. She caught my eye, and I made my play.

Joan was a long-legged, taped ankle thoroughbred, but there was a snag. She only had eyes for cowboys. I took a stand. I explained that the ones on the big hats were premature ejaculators. Whatever experience she'd had, that seemed to ring a bell. Roger's hands were shaking. I once spent a December night in the stockman with Roger while he ranted about his long-ago clients. I'm well rid of those fat cats and their range rovers, he said.

When we left the bar, he buttoned his big coat tightly before struggling into his side-swiped red Mustang convertible with its duct tape top. A pair of teetering patrons observed Roger's efforts to climb into the car. One said, perfect. The other said, seriously. As he continued to summarize his life with Joe, and I fought off my daydreaming to note that he seemed to be heading somewhere, and indeed he was. My guess was that he's going to demand a direct answer about Joan and me, but I was wrong.

Roger thought I was the right doc to euthanize him. I'm not depressed, but I'm ready to go, he said. I won't feel a thing. He dropped his hands flat on the table and tilted back. Roger, you're the picture of health besides no, no, and no, I said. I couldn't possibly put you to sleep. Around here, assisted suicide was murder. Roger was weeping.

He was a terrible little man. Whatever else happened to the health of old aristocrats, it was rare for them to be fat. And I suppose there might have been some satisfaction in granting his wish. But the thought of providing such a service to a man with whose wife I had been intimate made me queasy. Some goody-two-shoes in law enforcement

would have been on me like a cheap suit. I was close to retirement, owned property in Del Mar, and didn't want to have to make new friends in prison showers. He spoke more plainly. I want to be with Joan. I was a good husband.

I forgave her. He stared at me hard. I'm not proud to say that I considered his little pistol. I want to go to heaven and be with her there. Is Joan dead, Roger? Yes, Roger said.

Let me show you something. He stood up and began looking through his pockets, doing a frantic St. Vitus dance, until he pulled a wrinkled page from inside his jacket, Joan's obituary. I read it quickly. It didn't say much about Joan, except that she was survived by her wife,

a cosmetic dentist, and their dog olive. It said more about Joan's great-grandfather who had owned barges on the Ohio River and built one of the banks in Cincinnati. Did you know she was a dyke, Roger asked. No. You can't tell by looking at them, can you? Of course not.

I saw this and you could have knocked me over with a feather. He crumbled up the obituary, then gazed at it without seeming to know where to put it. He threw it at me. With effort, I came up with something thoroughly put. tepid. Roger, she's been gone from you for many years. I felt the pressure, but I didn't tip my hand, despite Roger's glare. That's right, but I always thought she'd come back, he said. Now be a good little doctor and grant my wish. I'd like to be on my way. You just sashay over to my house with some Scyonara beans and we'll call it even. I won't help you, Roger. I hope you'll understand.

Roger got to his feet and plucking a tissue from the box beside my examining table turned to me with an expression of lofty annoyance. You tin pots, sawbones, you've never done a bit of good, not even on the smallest matters. It took a moment for me to react. You can always do it yourself, Raj. Lots of people have. I delivered this amiably a helpful tip. Close the door to your garage and start the car for Christ's sakes. Once he left, I brooded over the corn, beef, and sauerkraut sandwich I brought to the office. After lunch, I took a walk.

No accident, a long walk I knew well, climbing the sandstone bluff behind the clag, which at the top opened onto a somnolent grassland that seemed to extend forever to the snowy range in the distance. Almost a mile away was the deserted Lutheran church where Joan and Roger were married. It was so picturesque that people still dusted it off from time to time for weddings. It was a place I found hardening whenever I felt inspired to walk so far, especially on a day when I had let my anger and sadness get away from me. Lifted by the breeze, the long grass looked like silk, small circular shapes of several colors bobbed and drifted like ghosts in the summer air above it.

I had it in my mind, maybe from childhood, that a soul was something that floated around and went where it pleased. I thought of Joan dead, her green now deceased eyes, her contempt for everyone who was not interested in her looks. I guess she'd had enough of bozos like Roger and me. I walked a long way toward those bobbing ectoplasms before I understood that they were just married balloons floating on zephyrs. One more couple into the unknown. I remembered the crowd of out-up-towners at Joan and Roger's wedding and how they praised the quaint old church with Norman Rockwell references. I had never seen two such good-looking people as Joan and Roger at their peak. I felt the appeal of meeting up with Joan in the next world, except that, unlike Roger, I didn't believe in it.

I hadn't heard boo about her in years, dead or alive. When you were in Cincinnati, she once told me, it was hard to tell the difference. I'd wanted to go there to see her, but she'd said, stay out of Cincinnati, you? Had our relationship continued, I suppose I would have learned firsthand why we had no business of being. within 10 miles of each other. So Roger wanted to be put to sleep and drifted Joan like one of those balloons, sailing over the church where their marriage was consecrated. A few of them caught on the branches of the honey locust that shaded his door.

Do people really have such faith anymore? It was never easy to see what those two were doing together in the first place. But accepting that it must have been what they wanted, helped me decide to grant Roger's wish, and I did. He made a tidy job of it. Seated in his eames chair, one of his remaining luxuries. Roger took the ingredients I'd supplied, then dialed 911, telling the operator that he had fallen and couldn't, quote, arise.

By the time help arrive, Roger was gone. I soon learned that the note he left behind thanked me my name for ending his life. So it seems he knew after all made sure I would be repaid accordingly. I had a full slate of patience that day, but I thought it best to wait at home. That was Thomas McWain reading his story balloons. He's been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 1994. You can hear more New Yorker fiction read by the authors on New Yorker.com and on the New Yorker apps available from the App Store or from Google Play.

On the New Yorker Fiction podcast, we invite writers to choose stories from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, Tea Obrecht reads Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane. You can subscribe to that and other New Yorker podcast by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this podcast by rating and reviewing The Writer's Voice in Apple Podcasts. Her theme music is by Jordan Batiste and Ross Michaels of North American Plastics. The writer's voice is produced by Michelle Moses. I'm Deborah Treasman. Thanks for listening.