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...
Definitely pregnant and definitely not interested in carrying his baby, she took a streetcar out to Hollywood. The streets were dry and dusk was falling, the holiday tinsel and ribbons in store windows emerging from the cheapening glare of daylight to glow and beckon. She was able to entertain rational thoughts and ordinary feelings—resentment of her mother, the thought of the darkness that had fallen on Europe, hatred of Bradley and his wife, appreciation of the fender lines of a custom-body Cadillac passing the streetcar, curiosity about her sister in New York, the question of Shirley’s own sexual experience or lack thereof—for no more than a few seconds before the terror of her situation welled up in her afresh and scattered them. When she saw the Egyptian Theatre, she stepped off the streetcar and asked a newspaper seller where Selma Avenue was. Her main hope now was Isabelle Washburn. Even if Isabelle couldn’t give her money, she could provide sisterly advice and sympathy, which Marion was very much in need of. In the dark, it was hard to tell the colors of houses, but eventually she found a distinctly red one. Dim, warm light was in the curtained front windows. She walked right up to the door and knocked. Almost immediately, the door opened; and there stood Satan.
She didn’t know it was Satan. The man was short, almost elfin, with a full white beard and suntanned cheeks, a large shiny tanned bald spot on his head, and kindly wrinkles around his eyes. “Come in, come in,” he said, as if he’d been expecting her. Marion said she was looking for Isabelle Washburn. “Isabelle no longer lives here,” the man said, “but come in. Please.”
“Are you the landlord?”
“Why, yes, I am. Please come in.”
In the living room were comfortably weary chairs, framed soft-focus head shots of young actresses or models, also a framed poster for King Kong. A bottle of red wine and a stemmed glass of it stood on a coffee table. “Let me get you a glass,” the man said, disappearing.
Farther back in the house, water was splashing in a bathtub, skin squeaking resonantly on porcelain. The white-bearded man returned with a glass, sat down, and filled it. He seemed very happy to see Marion.
“I just need to find Isabelle,” she said.
“I understand. But you’re shaking like a leaf.”
This was undeniable, and the wine looked good to her. She sat down and drank some. It was much weaker than the whiskey she’d drunk with Bradley. By the time she’d explained how she knew Isabelle and had come to the red house, her glass was empty. When the man moved to refill it, she didn’t stop him. The wine helped her rise with the upwellings of her fear, like a buoy on deep ocean.
“I’m afraid I don’t actually know where Isabelle is at present,” the man said, “with respect to her street address and so forth. But I know one girl who might.”
“That would be good,” Marion said, drinking.
“You’re a very comely young woman,” he added for no obvious reason.
Marion reddened. The wine was both weak and not so weak. She heard a door open, water draining from a tub, the soft stepping of bare feet, a door closing.
“So the girl,” she said. “The person who knows where she lives.”
“Oh, dear, you look terrified,” the man said. “Are you frightened? Marion? Why are you so frightened?”
“I just want to find Isabelle.”
“Of course,” he said. “I can help you with that.”
There was a kindly light in his eyes, a sort of gentle mirth.
“I’m a helpful person,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first girl to come here in trouble. Is that what it is? Are you looking for Isabelle because you’re in some kind of trouble?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Marion? You can tell me. Are you in trouble?”
Her trouble was too large to be spoken. To emerge from her in words, it needed to be broken into smaller pieces and arranged in a coherent sequence, and even if she’d been capable of the breaking and the arranging she would have been telling a total stranger that she was carrying a married man’s child. As the stranger waited for her to answer, she noticed a different, less kindly sort of light in his eyes. She noticed that his shirt was untucked and that he had quite a potbelly. She must have been mistaken about Isabelle’s romantic interest in her landlord.
“It’s man trouble, isn’t it,” he said.
She couldn’t breathe, and she had no intention of answering, not even with a nod.
“I see,” he said. “And is your man still in the picture?”
Had she nodded? Apparently she had. She went ahead and shook her head.
“I’m very sorry,” the man said.
“But the girl you mentioned. The one who knows where Isabelle is.”
“Would you like me to telephone her?”
“Yes. Please.”
He left the room. Marion’s glass was empty, as was the bottle. While she waited, a series of small noises culminated in a clicking of heels, a woman entering the room. She stopped when she saw Marion. She was dressed in a narrow skirt and a matching jacket with padded shoulders. Her mouth, crimson-lipsticked, had a hard set to it. “You here about the room?”
“No,” Marion said.
“Good for you.”
The woman turned and left the house. The man returned with a corkscrew and a second bottle of wine. Marion waited in suspense while he opened it.
“No luck,” he said, pouring. “Jane hasn’t seen her since before Thanksgiving. She thinks she might have gone back to Santa Rosa. Apparently she’d talked about doing that.”
Isabelle’s returning to Santa Rosa seemed strange to Marion, but everything seemed strange to her. She wished she hadn’t already spent the travel money Roy Collins had wired her. Imagining Isabelle in Santa Rosa made her homesick for the place.
“We’ll have to think of something else for you,” the man said.
“I think I’ll go to Santa Rosa.”
“Yes, that would be one plan. Although, of course, we’re not sure that Isabelle is actually there. She could have gone anywhere. She could still be right here. All Jane said was that she hadn’t seen her in a while.”
“But it sounds like … I’ll bet she went home to Santa Rosa.”
“Mm.”
He took a sip of wine, possibly to hide a smile. Why would he be smiling? Marion stood up and thanked him for making the call.
“Sit down, dear,” he said. “You don’t want to go back to Santa Rosa. It’s a Podunk town—people talk. You’re much better off in the big city. We can arrange things here that would be difficult, if not impossible, in Santa Rosa. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She did understand. Bradley had once asked her exactly the same question, and she was fast. Sitting down again, accelerated by the wine in her, she landed unexpectedly and tilted sideways.
“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” the man said. “I’ve had this house for fifteen years, and there’s nothing I haven’t seen. So why don’t we speak frankly, you and I.”
The thing was growing in her, and it was Bradley’s. This was the fact she couldn’t get around. She didn’t want to have the thing inside her. It reminded her of the boy who’d answered the door at his house, the horror of Bradley having children, the horror of his marriage, the horror of what she’d done to herself.
“Perhaps you’ve missed a monthly,” the man said. “Perhaps more than one?”
She affirmed it with a whimper.
“How many?” he said. “Surely not more than two—you’re skinnier than a post.”
She shook her head.
“I like a skinny pretty little girl,” he commented in a throatier way. “And you are definitely that.”