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...
A suspicion appeared to dawn on him. “Do you—you do have a family?”
“Oh, God, yes. That’s all real. I’ve got pictures I was going to show you. Here—”
She jumped up and went to the front hallway. There, uppermost in her purse, were her Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t as if one cigarette would ruin his curtains. As she returned to the dining room, smoking it, she saw that there was no telling what else she might do. The intention to be fucked, her pesky little obsession with it, was, however senseless, persistent.
Dropping a stack of snapshots on the table returned her to her senses. Invisible among the smiling faces of her children was the fetus she’d aborted. Bradley, too, no longer seemed sure he wanted her in his house. He went so far as to wave her smoke away from his nose. The pictures lay on the table unexamined. She asked him if he believed in God.
“God?” He winced. “No. Why do you ask?”
“God saved my life.”
“That’s right. You married a minister. It’s funny it didn’t occur to me.”
“That I have a relationship with God?”
“No, it makes sense. You were always…”
“Crazy?”
He stood up, with a sigh, and went to the kitchen. She had no reason to keep starving herself, but cigarettes had become part of her autonomy. Bradley returned with a yellow ceramic ashtray. On its side were the words LERNER MOTORS.
She smiled. “What ever happened to Lerner?”
“He sold out after the war. The dealerships were moving farther out, and nobody wanted custom bodywork. That was always where Harry’s margin was.”
She tapped the ashtray with her cigarette. “To Harry’s memory I dedicate this ash.”
Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.
She put out the cigarette and took a bite of salad. Bradley picked up his own fork.
Only when she was leaving, an hour and a half later, might something have happened. She’d showed him her few photos, noting how he lingered on a recent school picture of Becky, and suffered through an interminable showing of his own. She would happily have spent another hour in his garden to spare herself a minute of his grandson pictures; her boredom was so aggressive, it verged on loathing. But she played the role of pastor’s wife, fascinated by Bradley’s offspring, and said nothing further to provoke him.
At the front door, as she was leaving, he tried to revive her interest. To her loose farewell hug, he responded by gripping her fanny and pulling her into him.
“Bradley.”
“Please kiss me.”
She gave him a brisk peck, and his hands were all over her. There was a blindness to his pawing, his nuzzling of her throat, his squeezing of her breasts, and this was how she knew for certain. She felt invisible, not excited. She patted his head and said she needed to get back to Judson.
“You can’t stay another hour?”
“No.”
This wasn’t true. She’d told Antonio she might be out all evening. Bradley gripped her head and tried to make her look at him.
“I never got over you,” he said. “Even when you were crazy, I didn’t get over you.”
“Well. Maybe now is a good time.”
“Why did you write to me? Why did you come here?”
“I guess—” She laughed. Everything was light. The world was full of light. “I guess I wanted to finally get over it. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was God’s plan, not mine.”
At the naming of God, Bradley let go of her. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not—I have a perfectly nice lady friend from work. Better than I deserve.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just—she isn’t you.”
“Well. I suppose no one is, except me.”
“Her family’s Japanese. She does our books.”
“And I’m so grateful that you mentioned that.” She picked up her purse and clicked it shut. “I’d hate to think of you alone.”
To walk away from his house without having surrendered herself—to be bathed in God’s approval; to know, for once, that she deserved it—was immeasurably better than to surrender. She felt so elated, she almost floated to her car. And she recognized this elation. A similar feeling had filled her thirty years ago, after Bradley, at a Carpenter’s drive-in, had ended their affair. It was true that the earlier elation had only intensified her obsession, had unspooled into madness, the making and unmaking of a baby. But this time it was she who’d done the ending. This time, the elation was of God, and she was sure that He would keep her safe.
To survive the grandkids, she’d promised herself a cigarette, but now she saw that she didn’t have to smoke. God took and took, but He also gave and gave. Freed of the ghost of Bradley, freed of the morbid urgency of dieting, she could be free of cigarettes, too. Her elation held until, north of downtown, the freeway traffic came to a dead halt. She wanted to get back to Pasadena in time to swim before dinner, to be enveloped by water, and the traffic jam infuriated her. It turned out that she needed to smoke after all. And there was something else, a nasty little itch. With a glance at the car to her left, she felt herself between her legs. It was shocking how Bradley’s assault, which had left her unmoved in the moment, now aroused her. Would it really have been so bad to give him what he wanted? For the sake of her private parts, which three months of longing had tantalized and primed, she was sorry that she hadn’t. Smoke was drifting from the driver’s side of the car in front of her. She unrolled her own window and punched the lighter on the dashboard.
Antonio’s apartment, when she finally got back, smelled of fried onions. The Monopoly box was on the living-room coffee table, evidence of an afternoon of fun. As soon as Antonio heard her, he came hurrying from the kitchen.
“Russ called. You need to call him back.”
She wondered if Russ had somehow sensed, via God, the choice she’d made; if he missed her, too. But a foreboding told her otherwise. God gave and God took. There was no phone service in Kitsillie.
“Did he say what it was about?”
“Just to call him right away. He left three different numbers.”
“Where’s Judson?”
“He’s grating cheese. I left the numbers by the bedroom phone.”
And so began the remainder of her life. In the glass doors of the master bedroom was a lovely honey-toned light, in the garden the cheeping of birds, from the swimming pool the shouts of children, from the kitchen a smell of fried onions and beef, above Jimmy’s bare dresser his painting of the old Flagstaff post office, atop the other dresser a sepia photograph of Antonio’s mother in a filigreed silver frame: the first impressions were the ones that stayed with you forever.
Russ’s voice was piteously pinched. He was at a hospital in Farmington, New Mexico, and Perry was—sleeping. They had him heavily sedated. The attempt—he’d tried to—dear God, he’d tried to harm himself. They’d brought him to the hospital, his head was bandaged, he was heavily sedated. Thank God, thank God, the juvenile hall hadn’t wanted him—at least the police knew enough to take away his shoelaces. All he could do to himself—all he had was an ugly bump on his forehead. But the reason—what had happened was—he’d burned down a farm building on the reservation. And then felony drug possession. Felony—two felonies. The lawyer—it was a mess—the crimes were federal but Perry was not of sound mind. They were taking him to Albuquerque in the morning because nobody in Farmington wanted the responsibility. The cops didn’t want him, the sheriff didn’t want him, the hospital didn’t want him, the juvenile hall absolutely didn’t want him—there was a place for mentally ill minors in Albuquerque. If she could get a flight to Albuquerque, he could meet her at the airport.