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...
Sophie smiled pleasantly, her hands folded on her belly, the ampleness of which didn’t seem to embarrass her. “Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.”
“Well, Becky was being a pill—she’s suddenly unbearable. I could handle it if it was just a matter of being irritable and secretive, but Tanner Evans called the house last night, trying to find her, and I didn’t hear her come home until after midnight, and this morning she was up bright and early, which is unusual. She isn’t telling me anything, but it’s obvious how happy she is. And I was thinking about the sweetness of being in love for the first time—how nothing in the world is sweeter.”
“Yes.”
“Tanner is a great kid. He’s talented, he goes to church, he’s really quite beautiful. When I think about my own adolescence, what a disaster it was … Becky is the total opposite. She’s a good person who makes good choices. I’m proud of her—I’m happy for her.”
Sophie smiled pleasantly. “So proud and happy, you had to eat six cookies.”
“Why not? I could starve myself for a year, it still wouldn’t make me eighteen again.”
“You really want to be eighteen again?”
“If I could go back and be like Becky? Unlive my life and do it over again? Absolutely.”
The dumpling seemed to resist an impulse to argue the point. “Okay,” she said. “And what else?”
She already knew the answer. The what-else was always Russ. Marion, in the waiting room, had seen patients emerging from the clinic with expressions more distraught than dental work could account for, and every one of them had been a middle-aged woman. From this she’d gathered that Sophie’s clientele consisted mainly of wives, depressed wives, wives whose husbands had left them or were about to, as the epidemic of divorce ravaged New Prospect. Given a clientele like this, it was understandable that Sophie would view all husbands as a priori suspect. To a hammer, everything looked like a nail. During their first “hour” together, Marion had sensed that Sophie disliked Russ sight unseen. In subsequent “hours,” she’d tried to explain that her marriage wasn’t the problem, that Russ wasn’t like other husbands, that he’d merely been shaken by a humiliating career crisis, while Sophie, in her pleasantly smiling way, had asked Marion why, if she wasn’t worried about her marriage, she kept showing up on Thursdays to talk about it. Finally, in August, Marion admitted that something had come over Russ—he was standing up straighter, taking better care of himself, while seeming acutely repelled by her and snapping at every little thing she said—and that she was no longer so sure what he might do. To Sophie, this represented a “breakthrough” on Marion’s part, and she’d graciously allowed that her marriage might be worth fighting to keep. She suggested that Marion put herself out into the world more, develop more of an independent life, give Russ a new context in which to see her. Maybe, since money was an issue anyway, she could take a half-time job? Or a university-extension course? Marion’s own plan of action for her marriage was to lose twenty pounds by Christmas. Sophie, who was far heavier than Marion, and yet apparently still attractive to her wiry little dentist husband, had approved her plan reluctantly. If she wanted to lose weight, she should do it for her own sake, as a way of taking control of her life.
“I think Russ lied to me at breakfast,” Marion said now, to please her paid friend, who took each fresh complaint about Russ as a sign of progress toward—what? A realistic recognition that her marriage was dead? “The minute he came downstairs, I could tell he was excited. His legs kind of waggle when he’s happy, he’s like a little boy. Or like Elvis—he can’t keep his hips still. He was wearing the shirt I got him for his birthday, which I knew would look nice on him, the blue in it picks up the blue in his eyes, and that seemed strange, because all he’s doing today is pastoral visits and a delivery run to the church in Chicago and an open house tonight, which he would have changed his clothes for anyway. So I asked him if he had any other plans, and he said no, and I started wondering about the delivery, because Frances Cottrell is in that circle. Frances—”
“The young widow,” Sophie said.
“Exactly. She’s going to wreck someone’s marriage, and now she’s in the service circle Russ leads in the inner city, and so I asked him who else was making the delivery with him. And it was like he was expecting the question. He practically interrupted me to answer. He said, ‘Just Kitty Reynolds.’ Kitty’s in the circle, too. She’s retired now—she used to teach at the high school. The thing was how quickly Russ answered. And then the shirt, and his legs waggling, so.”
“So.”
“Well, he never mentions her. Frances. I happened to see her in the parking lot one day when they were leaving for the city. The only time he’s ever referred to her was when I asked him about her that night.”
“She’s young.”
“Younger. She has a boy in high school.”
“Young is young,” Sophie said. “Costa likes to talk about the first warm day of spring, when the young women all come out in their summer dresses. It lifts a man’s spirits to be around attractive younger women. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I like seeing those summer dresses myself.”
It was interesting how Sophie, who played the prosecutor when Marion defended Russ, turned around and argued for tolerance when Marion impugned him. She wondered if this was a subtle therapeutic strategy or just a way to keep her coming back every week with twenty dollars.
“I guess I haven’t reached that higher plane,” she said irritably. “You know what I think made me eat the cookies? I think Becky was one too many happy people to handle in one morning.”
“You preferred it when Russ was suffering.”
“Maybe. Yes. Did we somehow determine that I’m not a bad person? If we did, I must have missed it.”
“You feel you’re a bad person.”
“I know I’m a bad person. You don’t have any idea how bad.”
Sophie’s smile gave way to a more censorious expression. The timing of her therapeutic frowns was comically predictable. Marion felt infantilized by it.
“I could have eaten the whole batch of cookies,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t was there wouldn’t have been any left for Judson. But I definitely could have eaten all of them. Six pounds in three months of starving myself, and it’s not as if anyone has noticed. It’s not as if I deserve to be thin. The disgusting thing I see in the mirror every morning is what I deserve.”
Sophie glanced at the spiral-bound notepad on her little side table. She hadn’t written on the notepad since the summer. There was a hint of threat in the glance.
“It’s not just me, by the way,” Marion said. “I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. If I really loved Russ, shouldn’t I be rejoicing to see him happy again? Even if it meant him being with the fair young widow and lying to me about it? I don’t really want him to be happy. I only want him not to leave me. When I saw him in that shirt this morning, I wished I’d never given it to him. If suffering is what it takes for him to stay married to me, I’d rather that he suffer.”
“You say that,” Sophie said, “but I’m not sure you believe it.”
“Also, for your information,” Marion said, her voice rising, “I’m paying you money I can’t afford to be here, so I don’t really care to hear about how well adjusted you and your husband are.”
“You may have misunderstood what I was saying.”
“No, I understood you very well.”
Sophie glanced again at her notepad. “What did you hear me to be saying?”
“That you’re not depressed. That you have a happy marriage. That you have no idea what it’s like to look at a girl in a summer dress and wish a terrible life on her, a life as terrible as your own. That you’re lucky enough not to know how lucky you are. That you’ve never had to find out how selfish all human love is, how bad all people are, and how the only love you can be sure isn’t selfish is loving God, which isn’t much of a consolation prize, but it’s all we’ve really got.”