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...
Bradley was due back on the night of Saturday the 27th and had promised to come and see her on Sunday. She spent Saturday night on her back with her eyes open, because to close them was to picture him in bed with his Isabelle, to consider the countless hours that Isabelle had had to undermine his confidence as a writer, and to entertain the suspicion that Isabelle was right: to see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite. In the morning, unslept, unbathed, she boiled and ate two eggs and lay down again. The sun had an evil new trick of changing its position suddenly, jumping forward, as if to mock her for Bradley’s non-arrival. It was setting by the time she heard a tapping on her door, the turning of a key. How she must have looked when he saw her on the bed! Flat-haired, puffy-eyed, parched-lipped, mad. He kneeled on the floor and kissed her cheek. She didn’t feel a thing.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “We had a mouse problem. Mouse poop all over the kitchen. I finally found a nest of them in the space behind the phonebook drawer. Four little baby mice in chewed-up phonebook paper. I tried to ladle them out with a metal spoon, so I could let them go outside, but they started crawling away—it was horrible. I had to crush them with the spoon, which turns out to be pretty hard when you’re reaching inside a cabinet and you can’t see what you’re doing and your wife is screaming in your ear.”
How many times did you fuck her? someone said loudly. The atrocious word argued against its having been her, but who else could it have been?
“I wanted to be here earlier,” Bradley said, as if he hadn’t heard the question, “but everything was such a mess. The boys were fighting, they had too much time together in the car, and, Jesus, the mice. The parents are still in the cabinets somewhere. I can’t stay long.”
“Why stay at all?” she definitely said.
“I’m sorry. I know it was hard for you, but it was hard for me, too.”
“You don’t know what hard is.”
“Marion. Honey. I do know.” With a mouse-butchering hand, he brushed hair from her eyes and stroked her head. “I’ve done a bad thing—a bad thing to you. You’re so beautiful, so fragile, so serious. Oh God, you’re serious. And I’m just a goddamned car salesman.”
She began to cry, hysterically. It ate into the little time they had, but it was a release from the desiccated paralysis she’d suffered for two weeks. It restored her to sensation again, and by and by it had the added cruel benefit of making Bradley stay far longer than he’d intended to—of complicating the lies he’d have to tell when he got home—because he couldn’t resist her fragility. Her tear-wet face compelled a rough undressing of her, and she was serious, all right. As he had his way with her, she focused intensely on his face, alert to any subtle sign that his pleasure in her had diminished. Her own pleasure had become incidental. The only thing that mattered was Bradley.
Three nights later, he surprised her by showing up at her office and asking her out for a hamburger. As he drove to a Carpenter’s, her feral intelligence, which was warning her that no good could come of surprise changes to their routine, was at war with the hope that he’d finally found the courage to leave Isabelle. Her feral intelligence was correct. In his car, at the drive-in, after eating his burger in nervously wolfing bites, while hers sat untouched on her lap, he licked a bit of bloody ketchup from his finger and said he’d done some hard thinking on his vacation. He said—oh, what was it he was saying?—find my way to putting them through the pain of made my bed and now I’ve got to lie deserve a man who’s worthy of your one-hundred percent not fifty percent because fifty percent is not be alone with you again because you’ll never stop being the person not fair to you isn’t fair to I’m never going to be a realistically realistic it’s just not fair to I should have known worst thing terrible realistically so terrible get over it never get over it … While Bradley’s rubbery features stretched expressively, she could feel the varieties of redness surging in her own face, tomato, scarlet, crimson, garnet, beet, as if she were a chameleon. Imagining how comical she looked, she started laughing.
He stared at her, and the worry in his face was even funnier to her. She waved a limp hand, as helplessly laughing people did by way of apology, and tried to control herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. Another mirthful snort escaped her. “I was thinking about the baby mice.”
“Jesus. Why are you laughing at that?”
“Because—poor you. Having to mash them with a spoon.” She giggled and then laughed harder, caving forward with it. Perhaps she was aware that Bradley couldn’t very well abandon her while she was acting crazy, but she was legitimately in the grip of her hilarity. He would certainly think twice before he took her out in public again. This thought, too, was hilarious to her.
“Should I be worried about you?” he said when she’d finally regained control.
“You should worry about yourself,” she said. “I’m a lot bigger than a mouse.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does it sound like it means?”
He glanced at the Ford coupe parked to his left, the uniformed backside of a female carhop leaning in the passenger-side window.
“I need you to believe that I will never get over this,” he said, his expression very serious. Marion adjusted her own expression correspondingly, but her attempted severe frown felt so ridiculous that she giggled at it.
“Please, please, please,” he said.
“I’m trying to be serious, but maybe you had me wrong.”
“We have to stop,” he said.
“Oh. Why?”
“I told you. It was the very first thing I told you. I’m not going to destroy my family. I’m not going to leave the mother of my children.”
“You also said you’d die if you couldn’t be with me. Does that mean you’re going to die now?”
He covered his face with his hands. If she’d ever really liked him, she definitely didn’t now, but the matter of liking was more irrelevant than ever. She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.
“I’ll probably die if I can’t be with you,” she said, in a factual tone.
“No, you won’t. You’re going to find somebody who’s better for you.”
“Do you see what I’m saying, though?”
“Honestly, I’m not following all of it.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, opening her door. “That’s all. I know you’re wrong.”
As she made her way home, past Westlake Park, she didn’t feel low. She felt nervously elated, like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. She and Bradley were in a crisis that she needed all her wits to navigate. To have walked away from the drive-in voluntarily, to not have made a screeching scene and begged him to reconsider, seemed in hindsight an inspired tactic. Now she just needed to be patient. Between his job and his family duties and his attentiveness to her, Bradley had been too overstretched to exercise his talent as a writer. The fantasy of him returning to her apartment, unannounced, in the middle of the night, after a month of separation, fired up by the screenplay he’d written and desperate to get her opinion of it, the fantasy of their reading the pages together and her finding them magnificent, was so compelling to her, so enjoyably repeatable and refinable, that she hardly slept that night. In the morning, she felt like skipping on her way to work. Instead of burying her head in a newspaper, she chatted with the other typists and smiled at the unmarried men.