Are You A Balloon?

This story is damn depressing. Apparently that's life. I'm not sure I'll view balloons in the same cheerful way again. LOL When I read the first three paragraphs, I didn't know how the story would turn out. It sounded like it could be an epic of sorts, of illegitimate children and huge families. You know, those stories of landowners and plantations and such. 

But this is intended to be a short story, and the ending it wouldn't be sweet. It wouldn't end too well. Two men in love with one woman? And she might or might not have loved them back. At least she seemed to have finally found her happiness before her death. 

'Balloons' by Thomas McGuane, published in The New Yorker on May 3, 2021, explores marriages, friendships, and human connections. The 81-year-old author definitely writes with the experience of his years. The stoic voice comes through in the measured words. In answer to an interview question of whether he would be writing a series of books based in Montana, he said, 

A number of your recent stories have explored the ups and downs of marriages and relationships in small towns in Montana. Are you writing a series?

I hope not. Thinking about marriages has a retrograde quality, since it’s been a long time since it made sense to get married at all. I belong to this fading cohort, so I go on wondering about such hopeful arrangements. In fact, any outcome of hope interests me, in marriage or otherwise. 

It's a love story, and a story about complex human relationships and emotions. There's Joan and Roger, who married and divorced in Montana. Then there's the male protagonist with no-name who had a brief affair with Joan while the couple lived in Montana. Then the woman moved away back to her childhood home in Cincinnati and married another woman. At the end of it all, there's a suicide, aided by the pills of a frenemy-acquaintance. 

So Joan's the balloon who drifted away from both men, and perhaps others in her life, who never really knew her. Her identity seemed to be defined by someone else in her life, written so even in her obituary decades later. 

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 being within ten miles of each other.

So Roger wanted to be put to sleep and drift to Joan like one of those balloons sailing over the church where their marriage was consecrated, a few of them caught in the branches of the honey locust that shaded its 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 dialled 911, telling the operator that he had fallen and couldn’t “arise.” By the time help arrived, Roger was gone. I soon learned that the note he’d left behind thanked me by name for ending his life. So it seems he knew after all, and made sure I would be repaid accordingly. I had a full slate of patients that day, but I thought it best to wait at home.