Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
“That’s Jimmy’s studio,” Marion said. “He won’t come out till dinnertime. Antonio’s at work, and I am—studying.” She indicated an open textbook on the table. “We also have two cats, who seem to have disappeared. They were just here.”
Jimmy was her uncle, but Russ wondered about the other man. An unpleasant new feeling, possessiveness, came over him. “Who is Antonio?”
“Jimmy’s companion. They’re—you know.” Marion looked up. “Or maybe you don’t.”
How was he supposed to know anything?
“They’re like husband and wife, except Antonio’s a man. It’s a terrible abomination.” She snickered. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”
There were, at camp, two Quaker boys whom Russ’s cabinmates referred to as fairies. Only now did he understand that the appellation might encompass more than just their manner. He felt a queasiness, not only at the abomination but at Marion’s snicker.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if sensing his discomfort. “I forgot where you come from. I’m so used to Antonio, it seems ridiculous that anyone could disapprove.”
“So, you, uh—what part of Catholic teaching do you actually accept?”
“Oh, lots of it. The Eucharist, Christ’s absolution of our sins, Father Fergus’s authority. Jimmy and Antonio would definitely have things to repent if they were Catholic, but I don’t see that it’s any of my business. Jesus says I shouldn’t cast stones.”
Russ’s empathy for homosexuals began with Marion. Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption. Alongside his craving to bury himself in her was a wish to be filled up with her—to feel his heart pumping her essence, as if he were a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, into his unfurling, birth-damp wings. She’d spent three and a half more years on earth than he, had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a deeper and more incisive thinker. Because she swore by Roosevelt, Russ registered to vote as a Democrat. Because she read secular literature—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck—he read it, too. The same thing with jazz, the same thing with modern art, the same thing with clothes, and the same thing, especially, with sex.
They passed his first visit at her kitchen table, talking about the soul and teachers’ college, about his grandfather and his doubts about his family’s faith. On his second visit, five days later, they hiked so far up the mountain behind Jimmy’s house they had to race the setting sun back down. Marion then sent him a letter in which there was little of substance, just a breezy account of her day, but he couldn’t stop rereading it. Each detail—that one of the cats had coughed up a hair ball on her bed, that her uncle had asked her to cook lamb chops for his birthday, that she might stop at the butcher on her way back from the post office, that she thought it might snow again—was more magically interesting than the next. He remembered hungrily rereading his mother’s early letters to him, which were likewise full of the quotidian. Now his mother’s letters so bored him that he barely skimmed them once. He couldn’t have cared less if she thought it might snow.
His mother had taken to mentioning that one girl or another in their community had “really grown up,” a short phrase that encoded a longer message: he was to finish his service, choose a wife from one of a score of acceptable families, and settle down in Lesser Hebron. What he could write back to his mother without revealing his doubts had dwindled to the point of his repeating, essentially verbatim, not just sentences but whole paragraphs. Of his time with the Navajos, he’d written little more than that they were a proud and generous people who had great respect for the Mennonites. Of Marion, he wrote nothing at all. His sense that he and she had been ordained to meet was growing stronger by the day, and his family’s community didn’t forbid marriage to outsiders, merely discouraged it, but Marion was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. The safe course was to conceal her existence and hope for the best.
Every second Friday night, most of the camp workers piled into trucks and went down to the movie house in Flagstaff, chaperoned by George Ginchy himself. The first time Russ had joined them, after losing his religion on the mesa, he’d been transfixed by the window movies opened on the larger world, and he’d been going ever since. On a Friday night in April, when he and the others trooped into the Orpheum, a small, green-coated figure was waiting for him, by secret prearrangement, in the last row of seats.
Very soon, almost as soon as the lights went down, four soft fingers slipped into his callused hand. To hold a woman’s hand was so absorbing and momentous that the shouts of the Three Stooges, in the first short subject, were unintelligible to him. While Marion, for her part, seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at the twisting of ears and the collapse of a stepladder, the spectacle of violence struck Russ as a profanement of his moment with her; it hurt his eyes.
When the feature started, a Sherlock Holmes picture, she lost interest in the screen and rested her head against his shoulder. She extended an arm across his chest, pulling herself closer. Basil Rathbone, meerschaum in hand, was speaking unintelligibly. Russ tried not to breathe, lest she let go of him, but she stirred again. Her hand was on his neck, turning his face toward hers. In the flickering light, a pair of lips surfaced. And, oh, their softness. The intimacy of kissing them was so intense it made him anxious, like a mortal in the presence of eternity. He turned his face away, but she immediately drew it back. By and by, he got the idea. He and she weren’t there to watch the movie, not one bit. They were there to kiss and kiss and kiss.
When the credits rolled, she wordlessly stood and left the theater. The house lights came up on a world comprehensively transformed, made more vivid and expansive, by the joining of two mouths. Feeling wildly conspicuous, hoping he wasn’t, he slipped into a group of workers exiting the theater. Marion wasn’t in the lobby, but George Ginchy was.
“You never cease to surprise me,” Ginchy said.
“Sir?”
“I took you for a God-fearing country boy. You almost squeaked with clean living.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not with me.”
Marion led him, in the weeks that followed, up a long and twisting stairway, scary to climb but delightful to linger on each step of—the first I love you in a letter, the first I love you spoken, the first kiss in public daylight, the hours shortened to minutes by kissing in her uncle’s parlor, the more frenzied nighttime grappling on the seat of the Willys, the unbelievable opening of her blouse, the discovery that even infinite softness had gradations, softer yet, softest of all—which finally led, on a cloudy afternoon in May, to her locking her bedroom door, kicking off her shoes, and lying down on her little bed.
Through the sheer curtain on her window, Russ could see her uncle’s art studio.
“Should we be in here?” he said. “It would be awkward if someone…”
“Antonio’s in Phoenix, and Jimmy’s not my keeper. It’s not as if we have a better place.”
“It could be awkward, though.”
“Are you afraid of me, sweetie? You seem afraid of me.”
“No. I’m not afraid of you. But—”
“I woke up knowing today would be the day. You just have to trust me. I’m scared, too, but—I really think God intended this to be the day.”
It seemed to Russ that God was in the cloudy light outside but not inside her bedroom. Somewhere on the stairway to this moment, he’d lost hold of the importance of preserving his purity until they were married.