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...
To her great surprise, a blond boy of seven or eight opened the front door. In her thousand imaginings of the scene, no one but Isabelle had ever come to the door.
The boy stared at her. She stared at him. The moment seemed to last about an hour.
“Mom,” the boy shouted over his shoulder. “There’s a lady here.”
He went away, and Isabelle Grant appeared with a dish towel in her hands. She was thick in the middle, not as tall as Marion had pictured her. Like Isabelle Washburn, she seemed more pitiable than murderable. This, too, was unexpected. “Can I help you?” she said.
In Marion’s face the chameleoning reds, not the least bit funny to her now.
“Miss?” Isabelle said. “Are you all right?”
“Your, uh, your husband,” Marion said.
“Yes?”
“Your husband doesn’t love you anymore.”
Now alarm, suspicion, anger. “Who are you?”
“It’s very unfortunate. But you bore him.”
“Who are you?”
“I … well. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“No. You must have the wrong house.”
“You’re not Isabelle Grant?”
“Yes, but I don’t know you.”
“Bradley knows me. You can ask him. I’m the person he’s in love with.”
The door slammed shut. Feeling that she hadn’t made herself sufficiently clear, Marion rang the doorbell again. From inside she heard children’s pounding footsteps. The door sprang open. “Whoever you are,” Isabelle said, “please go away.”
“I’m sorry,” Marion said, with real remorse. “I shouldn’t have tried to hurt you. But what’s done is done. You just don’t satisfy him. Maybe, in the long run, it’ll be better for you, too.”
This time, the door didn’t slam, it just clicked shut. She heard the deadbolt turning. After some unaccounted-for minutes, she found herself still standing on the welcome mat. It was all so disappointing. For days, she’d imagined that speaking to Bradley’s wife would entirely remake the world; that her mental pain, which had been growing steadily since he sent his dreadful letter to her, would cease in an instant and she would be in a world where decisions were easy. But the pain was still there. It now took the form of not knowing what to do next. She would have liked to simply stay standing on the welcome mat, but she was sane enough to recognize the badness of going to Bradley’s house—all she’d accomplished was to cause Isabelle pain without relieving her own. She turned and walked back to the sidewalk. Coming to a small park, she saw a box hedge behind which she could discreetly lie down. She rested her cheek on a tussock of grass between bare clods of earth. Although there was dog poop close enough to be smelled, she lay there until darkness fell.
When she got back to her building, Bradley’s LaSalle was parked in front of it. He could have let himself into her apartment, but he was sitting at the wheel. He jerked his head to indicate that she should get in with him. She was frightened, but she did it. She cowered against the passenger door, trying to make herself smaller.
“What do you want?” he said angrily.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, seriously. What do you want? Tell me what the hell you think you want.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s too late for sorry. I’ve got an unholy mess on my hands now. I swear to God, Marion, if you go anywhere near my wife again, I’m calling the police.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The same goes for Lerner. We’ll call the police, and you know what they’ll do? They’ll put you in a hospital. You’re not right in the head. It kills me to say it, but you’re not.”
“I’m throwing up a lot,” she agreed. “It’s hard to keep food down.”
He sighed in frustration. “For the last time: We can’t see each other again. Never, ever. Do you understand?”
“Yes. No.”
“No contact of any kind. Do you understand?”
She knew that it was important to say yes, but she couldn’t say it honestly.
“What you need to do now,” he said, “is get yourself home. Can you do that for me? I want you to go back to San Francisco and let your family take care of you. You are the sweetest thing. It’s killing me to see what’s happened to you. But what you did today was just beyond the pale.”
Her chest clotted up with a new worry: that she’d finally liberated Bradley but was now too wrong in the head for him to want her. The irony surged up and strangled her like stomach acid. She retched out five words. “Will she divorce you now?”
“Honey—Marion. How many ways do I have to find to say it? We can’t be together.”
“You and I.”
“You and I.”
The hyperventilating set in, and he reached into his jacket. The stack of money he put between them on the seat was thick. “I want you to take this,” he said. “Buy yourself a first-class ticket north. And then, as soon as you get to San Francisco, I want you to see the best psychiatrist you can find. Somebody who can help you.”
She stared at the money.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “But there’s nothing else I can give you. Please take it.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“No, you’re an angel. A sweet angel who’s in very bad trouble. I mean it—if there were anything else I could give you, I would do it. But this is all I’ve got.”
She finally understood that she was nothing to him but his paid slut. The money on the seat seemed to her a dangerous, loathsome reptile. She found the door latch and half fell, backward, from his car. With a loathsome hand, he extended the money toward her. “Please, Marion. For God’s sake.”
When she came out of her slippage, some morning or another, probably the very next one, she felt inexplicably better. It was as if her hatred of the man trying to pay her had made a crack in her obsession with Bradley Grant. The obsession was still in her, but it was weakened now, more readily observable for what it was. Inside her front door, wrapped in an advertising flyer and slipped under the door, she found the stack of money. She methodically cut each bill into tiny pieces and flushed them all down the toilet. This was a terrible mistake she had to make to ease her mental pain.
In the first days of December, less distracted by pain, she was capable of reading the newspaper again, taking an interest in Mussolini’s attack on Greece, and venturing forth to seek work. Her employer references weren’t in order, but she still had her looks. She found a job as a greeter at a big Safeway supermarket, offering customers bite-size samples of featured food products, and was surprised by how little she minded it. She liked having only one thing to say and saying it over and over. Repetition calmed her fear of the thing she was now able to admit was inside her. But the smell of certain foods, meat products especially, was revoltingly intense to her, and her fear was growing with the thing inside her. One day, when she was sticking toothpicks in miniature canned franks, her fear impelled her to walk out of the store, run home, and obey the commands of her feral intelligence. She hit herself in the stomach and jumped up and down violently. She swallowed a mouthful of ammonia and couldn’t keep it down. When she tried again and blew the ammonia out her nose, the explosion in her head was so extreme she thought she was dying.
In her narrative to Sophie, a straight line led from Bradley’s offer of money to the night she wandered the streets of downtown Los Angeles in the rain, raving on themes of sluttiness and murder, barefoot, her blouse soaking and unbuttoned, until she was picked up by the police. But the line hadn’t been straight. It had led through an eviction notice; a tearful scene with her property manager; telegrams to her mother and to Roy Collins, asking both of them for emergency money; and a phone call to Bradley at Lerner Motors. The property manager gave her until the end of December to pay her overdue rent. Her mother, it later turned out, was on a ski vacation with her friends. Roy Collins wired her twenty dollars of travel money, along with a terse offer to employ her. Bradley hung up the phone as soon as he heard her voice.