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...
“Yes, dear?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”
“I’m sure you don’t. You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”
The insult was naked and it shocked him. Time and again, in the early years of their marriage, he’d sensed that she was angry about something small or large he’d done or failed to do. Each time, he’d expected an explosion of the sort he knew occurred in other marriages, and each time her anger had faded into soft-spoken reproach, at worst a sulking that she maintained for a day or two and then let go of, until finally he’d understood that they weren’t a couple who had fights. He remembered feeling proud of this. Now it seemed like another instance of her deadness to him as a wife.
“I shouldn’t have to imagine,” he said. “If something is bothering you, the responsible thing is to tell me what it is, instead of making insinuations.”
“Be careful what you ask for.”
“Do you think I can’t handle it? There’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Tall words.”
“I mean it. If you have something to say to me, say it.”
“All right.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, her eyes crossing to focus on the coal. “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.”
The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her.
“It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”
Russ stared at her. A schizophrenic parishioner had once said the same thing to him.
“You’ve got your liberal religion,” she said, “you’ve got your second-floor office, you’ve got your ladies on Tuesdays, but you have no idea what it means to know God. No idea what true belief is like. You think you’re God’s gift, you think you deserve better than what you’ve got, and, well, yes, I find that more than a little annoying. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your children are amazing—at least one of them is a flat-out genius. Where do you think that came from? Where do you think the brilliance in this family came from? Do you think it came from you? Ah—fuck!”
She shook her hand and dropped the cigarette, which had burned her. She picked it up and took it to the sink. She appeared to be having some kind of nervous breakdown, and it ought to have worried him, ought to have repelled him, but it didn’t. He remembered an intensity so deeply buried in the past it might have been a dream, the intensity she’d possessed at twenty-five, the intensity with which he’d wanted her. And she was still his wife. Still lawfully his. Provoked by her abandon, he approached her from behind and put his hands on her breasts. Beneath the wool of her dress and the folds of middle-aged flesh was the off-kilter girl who’d maddened him in Arizona. The smoke in her hair and something equally foreign, a smell of liquor, were further provocations. It was exciting to touch the breasts of a drunk stranger.
He tried to turn her around, but she ducked under his elbow and broke free. When he took a step toward her, she skittered away.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Marion—”
“You think I’m sloppy seconds?”
She never rejected him. In matters of the bedroom, he was the rejecter.
“Fine,” he said angrily. “I was simply trying to—”
“You and she deserve each other. Go ahead and see if I care. You have my permission.”
The contempt in her voice robbed him of any joy he might have taken in her permission. She really was smarter than he was. As crazy as she was acting, she was right about that, and it didn’t matter if she was squat and red-faced, it didn’t matter if he slew dragons. As long as they stayed married—even if they didn’t—she would always have that on him.
“You seem to think it’s just me,” he said, shaking, “but it’s not just me. You’re as much to blame as I am. You’ve got it set up so I’m the only one who needs support. You’ve got your whole litany—support, support, support. No joy, no nothing, just support. Is it any wonder I’m sick of it?”
“You can’t be half as sick of it as I am.”
“But you’re the one who wanted this.”
“This?”
“You wanted the kids. You wanted this life.”
“You didn’t?”
“If it had been up to me, we’d be devoted to service. You wouldn’t be a housewife, and I damn sure wouldn’t be giving sermons to bankers and the bridge club.”
“You’re saying that I’m the one who dragged you down? That you’re the one who sacrificed? That you’re doing me a favor with this marriage?”
“At this point? Yes. That is what I think. If you want to know why, take a look at yourself in the goddamned mirror.”
It was the cruelest thing he’d ever said.
“That hurts me,” she said quietly, “but not as much as you wish it did.”
“I—apologize.”
“You don’t have the faintest idea who you married.”
“Since I’m so stupid, maybe you should go ahead and tell me.”
“No. You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What does that mean?”
She came over to him, stood on her toes, and tilted her face toward his. For a moment, he thought she might kiss him after all. But she merely blew a puff of air at him. It stank of tar and alcohol.
“Wait and see.”
“Do not crowd the gate area. If you insist on standing up, I’m going to need to see an orderly line. There is no reason to crowd the gate. Everyone holding a ticket will get a seat. If a second bus is needed, there will be a second bus. That bus will be making all the same stops. Due to inclement weather, we have system-wide delays, but there is equipment on the way. All you do by jostling is make yourself unhappy. The bus will not be boarding as long as I see jostling. No, ma’am, we do not have an estimated departure time as of yet. As soon as the equipment arrives and I see an orderly line, the boarding process will commence…”
On and on the voice went. It belonged to a heavy, dark-skinned woman whose exhaustion could not have exceeded Clem’s. On the lap of the very young mother seated next to him, a baby was sleeping with its arms outflung, its head dangling off the side of her thigh. Sixty or seventy people were at the gate, most of them Black, all traveling south to St. Louis, to Cairo, to Jackson, to New Orleans, in the cruel first hour of Christmas Eve. The station was reasonably warm, but Clem was still chilled in his core. He sat hugging himself tightly, his ticket clenched in his fist. A kiosk in the station was selling coffee, and he objectively observed the thing he rawly was, wondering if the thing might stand up and go to the kiosk. His exhaustion made his condition existential, beyond motive, like Meursault’s in The Stranger.
If, when he’d called the hippie house from the parsonage, the line hadn’t been busy, and if his mother, before sending him away with his duffel bag, hadn’t gone upstairs and returned with ten twenty-dollar bills and pressed them on him, and if he hadn’t then had time, on the inbound commuter train, to revisit the question of freedom, he might have done his mother’s bidding. Coming home to New Prospect and feeling loved by his father, hated by his favorite person in the world, and confused by his mother, he’d lost his bearings. His family had pulled him back into the conditioned lineaments of the self he’d taken action to escape. But the inbound train was slowed by heavy snow. By the time it dragged into Union Station, he’d recognized that he wasn’t obliged to step off the bus in Urbana; that he wasn’t a needle following the grooves of a familiar record; that radical freedom was still available. He’d had a month of mornings to wake up and reconsider his decision to quit school. Shouldn’t a decision so long and well considered outweigh a few hours with his family, on a night when he was wrecked by lack of sleep? He’d already seen his way clear of Sharon. If he went back to her now, his earlier reasoning would still be valid. He didn’t have the strength to meet the challenge of a woman, he wasn’t yet man enough. All that would come of going back to her was the pain of leaving her again. And so, when he reached the Trailways station, he’d bought a ticket for New Orleans. He’d never been to New Orleans. He had two hundred dollars, and he was glad to think of being alone.