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...
Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still golden in the west, its light seemed dark in a deeper dimension, but this didn’t mean that God had left her. With the new darkness came a feeling of peace. To bask in His light, to experience the elation of that, was a privilege to be earned, a privilege to feel anxious about forfeiting. Now that her long-deferred punishment had commenced, she didn’t have to struggle or be anxious. Secure in God’s judgment, she could simply welcome Him into her heart.
“Marion? Are you there?”
“Yes, Russ. I’m here.”
“This is terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.”
“I know. It’s my fault.”
“No, it’s my fault. I’m the—”
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s not your fault. I want you to make sure Perry’s being looked after. If you think he’ll be all right, I want you to get some sleep. See if one of the nurses will give you a sleeping pill.”
A wet, choking sound came through the long-distance hiss.
“Russ. Sweetie. Try to get some sleep. Will you do that for me?”
“Marion, I can’t—”
“Hush now. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Her calmness was like nothing she’d ever experienced. It seemed to reach to the very bottom of her soul. In everything she proceeded to do—carrying the phone back inside, finding her plane ticket and calling the airline, speaking to Russ again briefly, calling Becky and then explaining the change of plan to Judson, assuring him that Becky would be waiting at the airport in Chicago, and finally sitting down and eating, with leisurely relish, three crispy tacos dripping with warm beef fat—she could feel her feet securely grounded. She wasn’t afraid of what was still to come, wasn’t afraid of seeing Perry and dealing with the consequences, because her feet had found the bottom and beneath them was God. In coming to an end, her life had also started. Within you a calm capability—how funny that Bradley, in his sonnet, had been the one to notice. She wished the calmness had descended a day sooner, before she’d gone to his house. She could have said everything to him, instead of hardly anything, although maybe, not knowing God, he wouldn’t have cared to hear it.
In the morning, at the airport, after meeting a gate agent and a stewardess, Judson asked why he couldn’t have stayed on with Antonio through the week. He was pouchy-eyed and grumpy from a short night of sleep. She, for her part, had slept astonishingly well, not waking once. The worst had happened—she didn’t have to fear it anymore.
“You’ll have fun with Becky,” she said. “I bet she’ll take you out for pizza.”
“Becky isn’t interested in me.”
“Of course she’s interested in you. This is a chance to spend some time alone with her.”
He looked down at his camera. “When is Perry coming home?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. He had a kind of breakdown. It could be a while before you see him.”
“I don’t know what ‘breakdown’ means.”
“It means something went very wrong in his head. It’s frightening, but there is a bright side. Whatever bad things he said to you, he wasn’t himself. Now that you know that he wasn’t himself, you don’t have to feel hurt.”
“That’s not a bright side.”
“Maybe consolation is a better word.”
“I don’t want consolation. I want Perry to come back.”
Outward the ripples of harm expanded: Judson would henceforth be a boy with a mentally ill brother. His own first impressions, the sound of her phone calls the night before, the morning smog on the freeway, the airplane he had to board by himself, would always stay with him. But God had made Judson healthy and strong. She could sense it in his love of Perry and in the contrast between them: Perry had never, in her hearing, expressed anxiety on his siblings’ behalf. The harm her sins had caused was immense, but only with Perry was it potentially irreparable. Judson bristled when she offered to go on the plane with him and get him settled. He said he wasn’t a baby.
Before she boarded her own flight, she bought a paperback, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She didn’t expect that she could focus on a novel—it was several years since she’d been calm enough to read one—but she was sucked right in. She read all the way to Phoenix and then, on a second plane, all the way to Albuquerque. She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.
Her reading had turned morning in California into late afternoon in Albuquerque. Russ was waiting just inside the gate, in his sheepskin coat. He looked ashen and unslept. When she put her arms around him, she felt him shudder. As a kindness, she let go.
“So,” he said. “They did transfer him.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No. You and I can go together in the morning.”
In her homesickness, she’d lost sight of the trouble in their marriage. To see Russ in the flesh, so tall, so youthful, was to recall her cruelty to him and his pursuit of the Cottrell woman. Although she gathered that Cottrell had opted out, plenty of other women were available to distract him from the awfulness of a mentally ill son. In the wake of the calamity, it seemed all the likelier that he would end up leaving her. And she deserved to be left; she felt as capable of accepting divorce as she was capable of everything else. But the prospect did remind her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving Pasadena.
When she lit up, in the baggage-claim area, he sighed with displeasure.
“I’m sorry.”
“Do as you please.”
“I’m going to quit. Just not … today.”
“It’s fine with me. I’m tempted to take it up myself.”
She extended the pack to him. “Want one?”
He made a face. “No, I don’t want one.”
“You just said you were tempted.”
“It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake.”
Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.
“We need to rent a car,” he said. “Kevin Anderson drove me down here—he’s on his way back to Many Farms. Do you have the credit card?”
“I do.”
“You didn’t wear it out in Los Angeles?”
“No, Russ. I did not wear it out.”
In the rental car, which conveniently already stank of smoke, he acquainted her with the financial dimension of the calamity. A tribal council administrator, Wanda, had recommended a lawyer from Aztec, oddly named Clark Lawless, whom Russ had met the day before and been impressed with. Because Lawless was the best, he was expensive, and Perry had committed two felonies in the state of New Mexico. As a mentally incapacitated juvenile, he would be charged with the crime of “delinquency,” for which the sentence would typically be confinement in a mental-health facility, followed by at least two years in a reformatory. But Perry was an Illinois resident. Provided that his parents agreed to have his mental illness treated, at their own expense, Lawless was optimistic that a judge would grant them custody. Lawless was well liked at the district courthouse.