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...
Less than a mouthful of air was left in the cube. All Marion was able to say with it was “Oh.”
“It’s tearing me in two,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I’ve wanted like you. Everything about you is exactly right. It’s like I was born with your face imprinted on my brain.”
She didn’t have the same feeling about him. If she’d passed him on the street a year ago, she wouldn’t have looked twice. For a moment, as if from outside herself, she could glimpse the outlines of the thing inside her, the obsession that was growing in her, and recognize it as an object foreign to a normal person’s desires. But then, in a blink, she was inside it again.
“Let’s go back to the motel,” she said.
“We can’t.”
“It wasn’t enough. I need more time with you.”
“I want more, too, but we can’t. I’m already late.”
Late meant Isabelle. The prospect of relinquishing Bradley felt so life-threatening to Marion that if she murdered Isabelle it would be an act of self-defense. She began to hyperventilate.
“Marion,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s even harder for me. It’s tearing me in two.”
He said more, but her breathing drowned it out. Black cars and white buildings, winos with paper bags and women in sheer stockings, loving two people and tearing me in two. Either she breathed so hard she passed out or another slippage was occurring. The hand that Bradley put on hers, in front of her rooming house, was burning cold. She still couldn’t hear what he was saying, she only knew she had to get away.
The second slippage was worse, the number of hours unaccounted for greater, and afterward she found scrapes on her knuckles, a red bump on her forehead. She was an hour late for work the next morning and wept disproportionately when Mr. Peters mildly chided her. At lunchtime, fearing suffocation if she stayed inside, fearing death if Bradley tried to speak to her, she fled the dealership and walked randomly on named and numbered streets. Snowfall from the storms extended down the spectral mountains, but the March sun was strong, spring already in the air. She was beginning to breathe more freely when she caught sight of a familiar face. Coming toward her, in the crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Ninth Street, was Isabelle Washburn. Marion lowered her head, but Isabelle stopped her by the arm.
“Hey, kid. Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”
Underneath a light coat with a sheen both lavender and green, Isabelle wore a green-on-white polka-dot dress, not cheap. She’d side-curled her hair and adopted a slack-jawed way of speaking that sounded copied from the movies. It transpired that she blamed her nincompoop cousin, rather than her utter lack of acting talent, for the failure of her plan for being discovered, but she was making okay money as a photography model and living with some other gals in a bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre. It could have been Marion’s imagination, diseased by her own wantonness, but Isabelle’s repeated references to her landlord gave her the impression that he was more than just a landlord. Her artificial new way of speaking suggested a heart hardened by rough experience. “So anyways, that’s me,” she said. “Whatcha been up to yourself?”
“I’m well,” Marion said, which was so funny to her she almost laughed.
“Landed on your feet and all that?”
“Fine, fine. Yes. I have a steady job. Which I should probably get back to.”
Isabelle frowned. “Whadja do to your head?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
Isabelle dug in her purse. “Lemme put some powder on that.”
Right there on the street corner, Marion let her erstwhile friend apply makeup to the bump on her forehead. The casual sisterliness of the ministration choked her up. Isabelle raised her chin with her finger and inspected her with a professional eye. “That’s a little better,” she said, closing her compact. “You know, we really ought to get together sometime. You used to crack me up so much. Remember Hal Chalmers and Pokie Turner? Dick Thtabler? You ought to just drop in if you’re ever out my way. I’m literally right behind the Egyptian, on Selma, it’s a bright-red house, you can’t miss it.”
Isabelle seemed to have forgotten that she’d dumped Marion nine months ago. Her life in the meantime had been so crowded with event that high school was already historical to her, and indeed it did now seem remarkable that Marion had ever imagined their remaining friends after graduation. But she no longer felt like murdering Isabelle. Instead, she felt sad about what life was doing to her. Nine months later, when life had done even worse to Marion and she had no one to turn to, she not only remembered Isabelle’s sloppy kindness at the corner of Ninth and Grand. She remembered that Isabelle lived in a bright-red bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre.
She’d become—had made herself—a problem Bradley had to manage. A few days after her second slippage, a blond customer in her thirties had come to the showroom. Nearly all the customers at Lerner were men, and Marion hadn’t seen Bradley work his magic on a woman since she’d become obsessed with him. Suddenly the cartoonish plasticity of his features seemed grotesque. After the woman left, without buying, Marion’s hatred of his wife came to a screaming boil and blew a gasket in her head. When he went to the men’s room, she followed him into it and threw her arms around his neck, tried to climb him. Her question was when they could make love again. She desperately needed to make love with him again, and in his fear of being caught in the men’s room he agreed. They went back to Culver City that very evening. The pleasure sex gave her was increasing exponentially with each encounter. Bradley avowed that, until that night, he’d never understood what passion was. He avowed that he was absolutely mad for her. When he drove her home, he told her she had to quit working at Lerner and find a better place to live.
She went to work in the steno pool at a property-management company where a former Lerner salesman, a friend of Bradley’s, worked. The friend found her an efficiency apartment in Westlake, and Bradley paid three months’ rent in advance, peeling bills off the stack he kept folded in his front pocket. Technically, this made her a kind of prostitute, but to her the bills represented so many dollars that wouldn’t go to his wife and his boys, dollars rightfully hers, redeemable against a future in which she’d be his wife. Her surety was their rightness for each other. Through April and May and June, she experienced the rightness on the apartment’s Murphy bed, among the cigarette burns on the carpet, on the checkered oilcloth that covered the little dining table. After sex, the words she struggled to speak elsewhere came easily. Bradley brought her new books to read, and she now followed the war in Europe avidly, because it interested him. Most thrilling to her was his Spanish screenplay, for which she was acting out the character of the German ambassador’s daughter. As their joint idea for the story emerged in detail, she made shorthand notes on it in bed, a nude stenographer. Working on the story excited her extremely and excited Bradley, too. When he took the pad and pencil from her and set them aside, she lay back for him in a state of not-herselfness, imagining herself as the ambassador’s daughter, as if she were the actress playing her. At work, it wasn’t hard to find an idle hour for typing out the story notes, sometimes adding new ideas of her own. The unattached young men in the office might have known about her situation with Bradley—she seemed to be invisible to them. She was the taciturn girl who was proficient in Gregg and didn’t misspell words.
In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.