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...
“Today’s good for other reasons, too,” she said. “It’s a good safe day.”
“Is Jimmy not home?”
“No, he’s in his studio. I mean I can’t get pregnant.”
He didn’t love feeling always slow, always behind, but he did love Marion. It wasn’t accurate to say he thought about her night and day, because it was less a matter of thinking than of feeling filled with her, filled in the unceasing way that he imagined a more truly religious person, a Navajo on the mesa, might be filled with God. And she was right: if not today, in her room, then when and where? He never wanted to stop touching her, but merely touching was never enough. His body had been telling him, albeit mutely, and yet so insistently that he got the message, that the pressure of her presence in him could only be relieved by releasing it inside her.
Which he now did. In the gray light, on the quilted coverlet of her bed. The release came very quickly and was disappointing in its suddenness, surprisingly less satisfactory than his solitary chafings. An act no less crucial in his life than being baptized had lasted scarcely longer. Ashamed of how unmomentous the act had felt in the event, he became more generally ashamed. His proportions were as ungainly as hers were ideal, his boniness an affront to her softness, his skin a dismal gray against the creamy white of hers. He couldn’t believe she was smiling up at him, couldn’t believe the approval in her gaze.
“Just rest there for a second,” she said, stroking his hair. “We’re only starting.”
He didn’t know how she knew this, but again she was right. As soon as she said starting, his body told him she was right. The word in itself reelectrified it. That the crucial act could be repeated, after the shortest of breathers, would never have occurred to him. That it could be done four times, before the light faded and he had to rush away, was a dazzlement from which, he could already feel, as he urged the Willys up the steep road to camp, there would be no recovering. The Mosaic commandment against adultery, the plain dress of the women in Lesser Hebron, the proscription against dancing, the concealment of women’s necks: it was as if he’d grown up inside an ancient fort whose parapets and cannons faced out on peaceful fields, toward an enemy he’d seen no trace of. Now he understood why the fortifications were so massive.
The next time they sinned, in her little room, on an unusually warm and muggy afternoon, with a cat thumping against her locked door, he fell from a height of carnality into an abyss of moral anxiety. He trusted Marion because of her unfeignable love of God, her self-blaming goodness. What she wanted was no more than what he wanted, and the spilling of seed wasn’t shameful per se. An arousal and emission that occurred in dreams, without his volition, could only be a natural function of the body. But to release his seed inside a woman he wasn’t married to, to lose himself in her flesh, to wallow in her private aromas, was manifestly different. He extricated himself and, despite the heat, pulled the coverlet over him.
“Aren’t you worried,” he said, “about committing a mortal sin?”
She scrambled to her knees. Her nakedness, blinding in its beauty, seemed of no consequence to her.
“I don’t need to be a Catholic,” she said. “I want to be whatever you are. If you want to be Navajo, I’ll be a Navajo with you.”
“That’s not a possibility.”
“Then whatever you like. I needed to be at Nativity because—it was something I needed to do. I needed to pray and be forgiven. I prayed and prayed, and then there you were—my reward. Am I allowed to say that? You’re like my gift from God. That’s how miraculous you are to me.”
“But then … don’t you think we should be married?”
“Yes! Good idea! We can do it next week. Or tomorrow—how about tomorrow?”
As if the blessing of matrimony had already descended, he pulled her onto him and kissed her. She threw aside the quilt and straddled him, handling him with an expertness he didn’t question; she was naturally expert at everything. Only in her whimpers, which she emitted in rhythm to their coupling, was any sense of lesserness detectable. She whimpered and spoke his name, whimpered and spoke his name. In his mind, she was already his darling little wife. But after the culminating pleasure had coursed through him, he returned to being a sinner in a sweat beneath another sinner.
Her mood, too, had changed. She was crying, voicelessly, miserably.
“Is something wrong? Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head.
“Marion, I’m sorry, my God—did I hurt you?”
“No.” She gasped through her tears. “You’re wonderful. You’re my—you’re perfect.”
“Then what? What is it?”
She rolled away and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t be a Catholic.”
“Why not?”
“Because it means I can’t marry you. I was—oh, Russ.” She sobbed. “I was already married!”
A sickening disclosure. Jealousy and uncleanliness, both bodily and moral, were compounded in the image of another man possessing her as he just had. A woman he’d believed to be pure and purehearted was previously used—befouled. He felt sick with disappointment. The depth of it revealed the height of the hope she’d given him.
“It happened in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was married for six months and then divorced. I should have told you right away. It was terrible of me not to. You’re so beautiful and I’m—oh—I’m so—I should have told you! Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
She thrashed in her misery. A cruel part of him thought she deserved any amount of emotional punishment, but the loving part of him was moved. He wanted to kill the man who’d polluted her.
“Who was it? Did he hurt you?”
“It was just a mistake. I was still a kid—I didn’t know anything. I thought I was supposed to—I didn’t know anything.”
The idea of an innocent girl’s mistake, for which she was now piteously remorseful, further softened his heart. But his anger and disgust had a life of their own. He’d thrown away his virginity on a woman who’d given hers to someone else, and now her nakedness was repellent, her smell appalling. He wished to God he’d never left Lesser Hebron. He swung his legs off the bed and roughly dressed himself.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said in a calmer voice.
He was too angry to speak.
“I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes, but I’m not wrong about us. Please try, if you can, to forgive me. I want to marry you, Russ. I want to be yours forever.”
He’d wanted the very same thing. Disappointment welled up in him and erupted in a sob.
“Sweetie, please,” she said. “Sit down with me, let me hold you. I’m so very, very sorry.”
He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him—it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people. Feeling compassion for this person, who was suffering and needed his care, he unlocked the bedroom door and ran out through the house, jumped into the Willys and drove a few blocks. He stopped beneath a cypress tree and wept for himself.
She sent him two letters, on consecutive days, and he opened neither of them. The woman he loved was still there but occluded from him, separated by her own doing. It was as if his Marion were imprisoned in a Marion he didn’t know at all. He could almost hear his dear one crying out to him from inside the prison. She needed him to come and rescue her, but he was afraid of the other Marion—afraid of finding that it was she who’d written the letters.
He’d done very little praying since he met her. Returning to it now, he laid his situation out to God and asked Him what His will was. The first insight to emerge was that God required him to forgive her. In trying to explain to God why he was angry, he saw that Marion’s offense—she’d been too embarrassed to mention her marriage sooner—was paltry; that, indeed, the greater offense was his own hard-heartedness. This led him to a second insight: for all his doubting, for all his liberation, he was still a Mennonite. At some level, he’d assumed that he would one day bring Marion home with him and there, although they might not settle in Lesser Hebron, receive his family’s blessing. Now the fact of her divorce had snuffed any chance of that. The extremity of his disappointment pertained not to her but to his parents, because he hadn’t yet fully broken with them. He was angry because her divorce compelled him to make a hard choice.