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...
“If you don’t mind the noise,” Mr. Peters said.
The rain outside was hurling itself down vertically, the car lot a shallow lake with currents rippling in the showroom lights and cresting at the storm drains. Marion sat in Bradley’s dark LaSalle with him, facing a fence in an unlighted corner of the lot, while the rain made a warlike sound on the roof. In her head, she rehearsed a short sentence, I’m actually not hungry. Even in her head, she stumbled over the words.
Bradley asked her if she’d read his poem. She nodded.
“It’s a tricky form, the sonnet,” he said, “if you’re strict about the rhyme and meter. In the old days, the word order was more flexible, you know, In me thou seest, where late the sweet birds sang, but who talks like that anymore? I wonder if anyone ever really said In me thou seest.”
“Your poem is good,” she said.
“You liked it?”
She nodded again.
“Will you let me buy you dinner?”
“I’m not actually … actually not I’m—not hungry.”
“Hmm.”
“Maybe just take me home?”
The rain came down harder and then abruptly let up, as if the car had gone under a bridge. When Bradley leaned toward Marion, she shied from the magnetism.
“This is wrong,” she said, finding the voice she used to have. “This isn’t fair.”
“You don’t like me.”
She didn’t know if she liked him. The question somehow wasn’t pertinent.
“I think you have talent as a writer,” she said.
“On the basis of two little poems?”
“You do. I could never write a sonnet.”
“Sure you could. You could make one up right now. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme A. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme B.”
“Don’t ruin it,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t ruin what you wrote for me. It’s so beautiful.”
He tried again to kiss her, and this time she had to push him away.
“Marion,” he said.
“I don’t want to be that kind of girl.”
“Which kind is that?”
“You know which kind.” Her face cramped up with tears. “I don’t want to be a slut.”
“You could never in a million years be that kind of girl.”
She pressed on her face to stop the cramp. “You hardly know anything about me.”
“I can see into your soul. You’re the opposite of that kind of girl.”
“But you said your marriage is not negotiable.”
“I did say that.”
“Do you write poems for your wife?”
“Not since a very long time ago.”
“I don’t mind if you write poems for me. I like it. In fact, I love it. I wish—” She shook her head.
“Wish what?”
“I wish you’d write a play, or a movie, and I could star in it.”
Bradley seemed astonished. “That’s what you want?”
“It’s just a dream,” she hastened to say. “It isn’t real.”
He put his hands on the wheel and bowed his head. He could so easily have opened the door a crack and said he wasn’t sure about his marriage. He must have sensed that she wasn’t well. Perhaps he felt that lying to a nutty girl wasn’t sporting.
“What if I did,” he said. “What if I wrote a part for you. Maybe the daughter of the German ambassador—I almost think I could do it, as long as I could picture you in the role. That’s what I’m missing, something beautiful to picture instead of all the ugliness I bring home. I don’t get any support at all from Isabelle. She doesn’t even like it when I read a book. She’s jealous of a book! And boy does she get angry when I try to tell her about a new idea. It’s like she’s Dr. Freud and I’m the patient, just because I have ideas for a screenplay. ‘Oh dear, the patient is displaying symptoms again. We thought we’d cured him of ambition, and now he’s had a relapse.’ She’s so bitter about her own dreams, she can’t stand the fact that I still have my own.”
“Do you love her?” Marion said. Hearing herself ask this question made her feel older and wiser: capable.
“She’s good with the boys,” Bradley said. “She’s a good mother. Maybe a little too anxious—every little sniffle is a sure sign of whooping cough. But you wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.”
“She used to be interesting.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. She sure as hell isn’t now.”
Marion could simply have offered him friendship and inspiration. She wasn’t yet nutty enough to believe she could star in a movie he’d written. His stroke of genius salesmanship was to describe a person she felt like murdering. He didn’t know that his wife had the same name as Marion’s mother and her faithless school friend, but as soon as he gave her a more detailed Isabelle to hate, the door was open for nuttier thoughts to rush in. The thought that she, Marion, really was more capable than he. The thought that he was too kindhearted to face the obvious truth. The thought that only she could save him from unhappiness, only she could rescue him as a writer, by believing in him and helping him face the truth about his loveless marriage. What kind of vengeful witch got jealous of a book? Isabelle needed murdering for that, and the way for Marion to do it was to move over on the seat. She was short enough to kneel on it, slender enough to fit between him and the steering wheel, and once she was in his arms the dimension of moral significance disappeared.
Bradley Grant took her virginity on the seat of a 1937 LaSalle Series 50 with fogged-up windows, on the lot of Lerner Motors. The act hurt less than certain girls in Santa Rosa had led her to suppose it would, but later, in the bathroom at her rooming house, she discovered more blood than she expected. The white porcelain ran red as she rinsed her underlinens. Only in the morning did she realize that her monthly period had started.
There wasn’t much room for her condition to worsen, but in February it worsened. She felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity. At every turn, she encountered constriction, most cruelly in how little time she had alone with Bradley. All day, she worked within a hundred paces of him, but he said they had to be very careful. At lunchtime she pressed him into a corner of her old sanctuary in the parts department, but the room had a window through which their corner was obliquely visible. Harry Lerner had forbidden further selling of cars after closing time, and Bradley kept finding reasons he had to go home in the evening. They finally resorted, again, to the seat of his LaSalle. Although it seemed a lot riskier on a moonlit night, without fog on the windows, she kept him there until 10:45. The following week, on his day off, he took her to a motel in Culver City, but even there she felt constricted, because it wasn’t enough to make love. They needed to discuss the future, because surely Bradley now understood that he couldn’t stay married to Isabelle, and their lovemaking left no time for talk. Not until they were back in his car did she ask him if he’d started writing again.
“Not yet,” he said.
It was a reasonable and honest answer, but it greatly upset her. The distance to her house was diminishing as he drove, their time for talking dwindling, the cube filling up with water.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.
“Have you tried?”
“All I can think about is you.”
“That’s all I can think about, too. I mean—you.”
“I just don’t know if I can do it.”
“I know you can.”
“Not writing,” he said. “This. I don’t know if I’m cut out for loving two women at the same time.”