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...
“My God,” he said. “It really is you.”
She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. If she’d daydreamed for a hundred years, she couldn’t have imagined him in sandals. This led to a third and very unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me,” he said, beckoning her inside. “How was the freeway? It’s usually not bad at this time of day.”
He shut the door and made a move to hug her. She stepped sideways. The house was a split-level and smelled faintly of old person. The art and the furnishings were tamely Far Eastern.
“What a lovely house.”
“Yeah, I have the vitamin craze to thank for that. Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. I was thinking we could eat on the patio, but it’s a little too cool, don’t you think?”
“It was nice of you to make lunch.”
“God, Marion. Marion! I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I can’t either.”
“You look—you look like yourself. A little older, a little grayer, but—great.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
Broad in the beam, favoring an apparently sore hip, he led her down into the living room, from which a tall hedge and a flower garden were visible. The clamminess of her dress, a vestige of her terror, seemed sad to her now. On a wall lined with bookshelves, she noticed recent Mailer, recent Updike.
“I see you still read.”
“God, yes. More than ever. I’m still working, but the company kind of runs itself. A fair number of days, I don’t even go down to the office.”
“I don’t read the way I used to.”
“With a house full of kids, that’s not surprising.”
Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondered if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.
He was staring at her, his smile almost goofy. In her evident fascination to him, she felt a stirring of the role she’d once played, the role of dangerous-crazy, the role of bluntly saying whatever came to mind.
“Did you live here with your second wife?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I cannot believe I’m seeing you. How many years has it been?”
“More than thirty.”
“God!”
He came at her again, and she slipped away to the rear windows. He hastened to open a French door. “I’ll show you the garden. I love the privacy of it.”
In other words, he didn’t have an ocean view.
“I’ve got the gardening bug,” he said, following her outside. “It comes on like clockwork when you’re sixty. I always hated yard work, and now I can’t get enough of it.”
There was a large bed of roses. The sky was gray-blue in the haze, the shadows of the patio furniture indistinct. A bird was buzzing in the hedge, perhaps a wren. She could hear it very clearly.
“Your second wife,” she said. “Did she live here with you?”
He laughed. “I’d forgotten how direct you are.”
“Really? You forgot?”
It was an unfair thing to say. She’d forgotten, too, for many years.
“I want to hear about everything,” he said. “I want to hear about your kids, I want to hear about—your husband. Your life in Chicago. I want to hear about everything.”
“I’m just curious about your second wife. What was she like?”
His face soured. “It was painful. A mistake.”
“She left you?”
“Marion, it’s been thirty years. Can’t we just…” He gestured limply.
“All right. Show me your garden.”
The wren buzzed again in the bushes, as uninterested as she in Bradley’s gardening. While he held forth about aphids and pruning cycles, morning sun versus afternoon sun, the mysterious death of a lemon tree, her idealization of him entirely disintegrated. The stiffness of his joints, when he crouched to show her a virginal hydrangea blossom, foretokened a near future in which, unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t have a loyal mate devoted to his care—not unless he married a third time. And why should she, who already had a husband, even younger than herself, do a blowsy old man such a favor? Why, indeed, if she wasn’t going to marry him, had she come to his house at all?
It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.
The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.
“Oh, Bradley,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me?”
She meant something definitively past. In the present, he was holding some weeds that he’d pulled, perhaps unconsciously.
“You were good to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I put you through.”
He looked at the weeds in his hand, let them fall to the gravel path, and took her in his arms. The two of them fit together as they once had. His chest, against her cheek, exposed by his half-open blouse, was still nearly hairless. Her eyes moist with pity for him, pity that he’d gotten older, she held him tight. When he tried to raise her chin, she averted her face. “Just hold me.”
“You’re every bit as beautiful to me.”
“I haven’t eaten in three months.”
“Marion—Marion—”
He tried to kiss her.
“What I’m saying,” she said, extricating herself, “is I’m extremely hungry.”
“You want lunch.”
“Yes, please.”
The tacky Oriental screen in his dining room saddened her. The disclosure that he’d become a vegetarian and a teetotaler saddened her. The vitamin pills he swallowed with his iced tea saddened her. The hemisphere of egg salad, on a bed of lettuce, saddened her so much she couldn’t touch it. Her chest was obstructed with the wrongness of her being there at all. That she’d imagined fucking—because this was what it was, this was the truth, this was why she’d starved herself and invented a pretext for going to Los Angeles—seemed so senseless to her, she wished she’d never done it with Bradley. She wished she’d never done it with anyone. To be fifty years old in a convent, to rise every morning and hear the sweet birds, to devote herself to loving God, to have that have been her life, instead of this one …
“I thought you were hungry,” Bradley said.
“I’m sorry. The salad looks delicious. I’m just—do you mind if I have a cigarette first?”
His expression told her that he minded. He’d really become quite the health nut.
“I can step out on the patio.”
“No, it’s fine. I have an ashtray somewhere.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I’m still the same mess. I was hoping I could fool you.”