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...
Offsetting her self-imposed demotion was her rise in Tanner Evans’s estimation. Not only had the thought of her with Tanner not left her; after she publicly declared herself a Crossroads person, the thought had acquired new urgency. Certain people who thought less of her for going religious might think again if they saw her with Tanner Evans. This was a calculation, but her feelings had quickly fallen in line with it. She imagined holding one of Tanner’s hands in hers, touching the tips of his long fingers one by one. She imagined his hands clasped on her belly, the way she’d seen them clasped on Laura Dobrinsky’s. She imagined him writing a song about her.
At the Grove, on the Friday after her first Crossroads meeting, she resisted the urge to find him and tell him what she’d done. She’d enjoyed the meeting, and she planned to go to the next one, but as soon as she saw Tanner arrive with his guitars she wondered if she’d capitulated too easily. If she’d offered more resistance, he might have kept pressing her, and teasing her.
The Bleu Notes were playing without the Natural Woman that night. By the time their first set ended, Becky was putting chairs up on tables in the empty dining room. The urge was there but she resisted it. And was rewarded when Tanner came looking for her.
“Hey,” he said, “I saw Rick Ambrose. You know what he told me?”
“No.”
“You actually went! I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d totally pissed you off.”
“You did piss me off.”
“Well, and apparently it worked.”
“Yeah, once. I’m not sure I’ll go back.”
“You didn’t like it?”
She shrugged, trying to maintain her resistance.
“You’re still pissed off with me,” he said.
“I still don’t see why you care if I’m in Crossroads.”
She hoisted a chair onto a table, feeling his eyes on her. She expected him to ask what she’d made of Crossroads. Instead he asked her if she wanted to stay for the second set.
“I’m not allowed in the back room,” she said, “except to get drink orders.”
“You work here. No one’s going to card you.”
“Where’s Laura?”
“She went to Milwaukee for the weekend.”
“Well, then, I don’t think I’d better.”
Tanner looked away, blinking. He had wonderful eyelashes.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s cool.”
All the way home and well into the night, she revised the evening in her head. Her chance had come and gone so suddenly, she hadn’t had time to think it through. Had she said no because she considered it unethical to sneak around behind Laura’s back? Or was it because the idea of being a temporary replacement, a second-stringer, was insulting? If only she hadn’t said no so quickly! Deflection of male advances had become a reflex, because until now the advances had always been deflection-worthy. But what if she’d stayed for the second set? And hung out afterward with Tanner and the band, and let him drive her home, and then seen him again the next day, and the day after that, while Laura was in Milwaukee?
She didn’t get a second chance. The following Friday, Laura was back at the Grove, playing with Tanner, doing harmonies with him and then a solo song at the piano, “Up on the Roof,” that Becky fled into the kitchen to avoid hearing even distantly. That Sunday, she almost didn’t go to Crossroads, since there seemed to be nothing further to be gained with Tanner by going. But when seven o’clock rolled around she experienced a pang of actual loneliness, not a feeling she was used to. She threw on her only halfway scruffy coat, a corduroy jacket that Clem had outgrown, and ran-walked down to First Reformed, arriving just in time to be chosen by Rick Ambrose as a dyad partner.
The instruction was Share something you’re struggling with that the group might help you with. Ambrose led her to his office, which he had the privilege of using for dyad exercises, and offered to share first. His dark eyes uncharacteristically cast down, rather than boring into hers, he spoke of being frightened by the size and intensity of the group he’d helped create, the power that so many kids had given him over their lives. It was hard for him to maintain humility, and he worried that his relationship with God was suffering, because the horizontal relationships within the group were so compelling. “It’s easier to pray when you feel weak,” he said. “It’s easier to pray for strength than for humility, because humility is what you need to pray in the first place. Do you know what I mean?”
“I haven’t really tried to pray yet,” Becky said.
“That’s the next step,” Ambrose said. “I don’t just mean for you. This group started as a Christian fellowship, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m a little worried about what we’ve unleashed. What I’ve unleashed. I’m worried that, if it doesn’t end up leading us back to God, it’s just an intense kind of psychological experiment. Which could just as easily end up hurting people as liberating them.”
Even by Crossroads standards, his disclosure seemed extreme to Becky. She was flattered by his openness with her, which she took as another token of their affinity. But she was only a high-school kid, not his spiritual adviser.
“I know it’s a sore subject,” she found herself saying, “but one thing my dad is good at is keeping religion front and center. It’s always made me uncomfortable. But maybe it was a good contribution he made to the group?”
Ambrose winced. “I hear what you’re saying.”
“I mean, it’s great, what you’re doing. I’m not a pray-er. I like that I don’t have to do that. But…”
But what? Suggest that her father be reinstated in Crossroads? She cringed at the thought of him and his Christ talk at a Sunday-night meeting. She would quit the group in a minute if he came back.
“And what about you?” Ambrose said. “What are you struggling with?”
To reciprocate his openness, she told him that she had feelings for Tanner Evans. That Tanner was the reason she’d joined Crossroads. That, if she was not mistaken, Tanner was interested in her, too. That she wanted to pursue a relationship with him, but she didn’t think it was right to get between him and Laura. What should she do?
If Ambrose was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I love Tanner,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever had a better experience in this group. If everyone were like him, I wouldn’t be worried about where we’re going. He really did find his way back to God, and he had a beautiful way of keeping it light.”
“But Laura,” Becky suggested.
“Laura gave me constant shit. And I respected that. If Laura’s got a problem with a person, the person’s going to hear about it.”
“Okay.”
“But Tanner is mellow, and that cuts both ways. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is. But I can tell you my impression, which is that Laura was always the one driving that relationship. For Tanner it was more like the path of least resistance.”
Helpful information.
“But maybe,” Becky said, “I should just keep away?”
“If you want to be safe, yes. Do you want to be safe?”
She already knew that safety, like passive aggression, was a dirty word in Crossroads. Safety was the opposite of risk-taking, without which personal growth could not occur.
“It’s not your job to hide your feelings,” Ambrose said. “It’s Tanner’s job to deal with them, and with his own feelings.”
Like her father, Ambrose had told her what to do while claiming not to, but it didn’t bother her when Ambrose did it. The problem was how to show her feelings. She loved safety! Her entire life to date had been organized around it! But since she’d blown her chance with Tanner, it was now up to her to take some kind of initiative, and she didn’t like the image of herself coming on to him. It would be extremely unsafe, not to mention difficult to manage if Laura was in the vicinity, and she wasn’t sure she’d be good at it anyway. She decided instead, as a semi-unsafe measure, to write him a letter.