Audio: Thomas McGuane reads.
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 in 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 town 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 “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-awful properties, believing that they were an acquired taste. Renowned for his many closings, Roger was on the road a lot; this worked perfectly for Joan 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 “using venery,” 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 and 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. Hearty by Roger’s somewhat dainty 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 of us sat, and they beamed at me with intense curiosity. There were several ways of viewing Roger; the nicest one credited him with enthusiasm and bonhomie, and this really was more helpful than, say, applying the standards used in one of Hemingway’s café scenes, where the queries were all about who was or wasn’t a phony. When Joan, Roger, and I sat down together, we were, strictly speaking, three phonies. There were 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 sang. “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 stouthearted 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 Joan’s. 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 in 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, 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.”
Iwas wrong to think that Roger would just find someone else. When Joan left him, he went steadily downhill. He closed the agency, 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 Mad Hatter 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 “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. Age and alcohol had given him an eerie, brittle quality and 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, “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 pot hunters 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 lissome 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 in the big hats were premature ejaculators. Whatever experience she’d had, that seemed to ring a bell.”
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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 in their Range Rovers,” he said. When we left the bar, he buttoned his big coat tightly before struggling into his sideswiped red Mustang convertible with its duct-taped top. A pair of teetering patrons observed Roger’s efforts to climb into the car. One said, “Perfect,” and the other, “Seriously!”
As he continued to summarize his life with Joan, I fought off my daydreaming to note that he seemed to be heading somewhere, and, indeed, he was. My guess was that he was going to demand a direct answer about Joan and me, but I was wrong: Roger thought that I was the right doc to euthanize him. “I’m not depressed, but I am 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, and, 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 supposed 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 and began looking through his pockets, doing a frantic St. Vitus’s 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 crumpled 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 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 sayonara 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-pot 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, Rog. Lots of people have.” I delivered this amiably, a helpful tip. “Close the door to your garage and start the car, for Christ’s sake.”
Once he left, I brooded over the corned-beef-and-sauerkraut sandwich I’d brought to the office. After lunch, I took a walk—no accident, a long walk I knew well, climbing the sandstone bluff behind the clinic, 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 heartening 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-of-towners at Joan and Roger’s wedding, and how they’d 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 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. ♦
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