Crossroads

“Let’s see what happens,” he said.

They hunched forward, side by side, under the exhaust fan. The marijuana smoke was scalding, and he might have stopped at one lungful if Frances hadn’t insisted that one wasn’t enough. She took sip after sip of smoke, holding the little cigarette like a dart, and he followed her lead. They didn’t stop until the remainder was too small to be handed back and forth. She went to the sink, dropped the “roach” in the garbage disposal, and opened a window. The snowflakes outside struck Russ as peculiar, artificial, as though strewn by someone standing on the roof. Frances stretched her arms above her head, raising the hem of her dress and with it, again, the question of underwear.

“Wow,” she said, splaying her raised hands. “This is much better. I wonder if you have to do it twice before you get the full effect.”

Though this was Russ’s first time, he was definitely getting an effect. The realization had hit him, like an anvil, that February was flu season—one of her kids could easily come home sick and discover him with their mother. The possibility seemed far from minimal, indeed quite strong, and he was appalled that he hadn’t considered it until now. The hour also suddenly felt not at all like morning. It felt closer to the hour when school let out—he could almost hear the final bell, the tumult of liberated kids, Frances’s among them. In the glare of the kitchen lights, he further realized, he was highly visible to her next-door neighbors. Looking around for a switch, he noticed that she’d left the room.

From the front of the house, at a sickeningly high volume, easily loud enough to attract the attention of neighbors, if not the police, came the sound of Robert Johnson singing “Cross Road Blues.” Russ discovered that he’d turned out most of the kitchen lights, but the one overhead was still burning. In the midst of searching for the switch, he understood that he could simply leave the kitchen.

The living room was blessedly dusky. Frances had thrown herself onto a sofa and bunched up her dress in the process. Russ glimpsed a sliver of white panty and searingly wished he hadn’t. His interest in the question of underwear was obscene. The loudness of Robert Johnson was an emergency.

“What do you think?” she called to him happily. “Are you feeling anything?”

“I’m thinking,” he said, but this wasn’t true, because, whatever he’d been thinking, he’d now forgotten it. Then, surprisingly, he remembered. “I’m thinking we should turn the music down.”

Even as he said it, he knew it was hideously square. He braced himself for shaming.

“You have to tell me everything you’re feeling,” she said. “That was the agreement. Actually, there was no agreement, but what’s the point of an experiment if we don’t compare results?”

He went to the stereo console and turned down the volume—too far. He therefore raised it again—too far. He lowered it again—too far.

“Come sit with me,” Frances called from the sofa. “I’m so aware of my skin—you know what I mean? It’s like the Beatles, I want to hold your hand. I’m just so—it’s like I’m here but my thoughts are in every corner of the room. Like I’m blowing up a gigantic balloon and the air is my thoughts. You know what I mean?”

I went down to the cross road, babe, I looked both east and west

Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, babe, in my distress

Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. To have loaned Frances his records, imagining that some particle of authenticity might adhere to him and redeem him, was the pinnacle of fraudulence.

“Oh Reverend Hildebrandt,” she called in a singsong voice. “A penny for your thoughts.”

The record label rotating below him was not Vocalion. The record was an LP, not a 78. Dimly, through his confusion, came the fear that she’d replaced his valuable antique with a cheap modern compilation, but instead of being angered he experienced a kind of menace. The revolving vinyl was like a vortex, a dark drain down which he was being sucked toward darker death. There had to be a special place in hell for him. If indeed hell, its sulfurous fires, existed. If hell weren’t exactly where he was standing, in his detestable fraudulence, right this minute. He felt his back go warm with a body’s proximity.