Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “So it isn’t that you don’t like me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “That’s not the barrier. The barrier is that you hate me.”

  “No. It’s that—”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. And boy are you good at using them. Have you ever once in your life done something for another person that cost you something? All I’ve ever seen from you is selfishness and self-involvement and selfish pleasure.”

  He slumped forward and surrendered to tears, hoping they might soften her toward him, elicit a redemptive hug. But they did not. He struggled to think of a thing he’d ever done to harm her, a thing more visible than the occasionally unkind thoughts he had about her, to explain her hatred. Unable to think of one thing, he was forced to conclude that she hated him on principle, because he was an evil, selfish worm, and that she was testifying now merely to redress the abstract injustice of his being praised by other people.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be hard to hear. I mean, you are my brother. But maybe it’s good you picked my name tonight, because I’ve lived with you my whole life. I can see you better than other people can. I … I do want to get to know you better. You’re my brother. But first I have to see that there’s a person there worth knowing.”

  She stood up and left him in the closet like a city leveled by a hydrogen bomb. Out of the rubble, he painfully reconstructed the gist of what she’d said. She knew a lot more about his extracurricular activities than he might have imagined. (The only blessing there was that she didn’t seem to know that he sold drugs to seventh graders.) Ambrose thought he was “trouble.” (The only consolation there was the certainty that Ambrose would be angry if he knew she’d betrayed this confidence.) His seeming good works in Crossroads counted for nothing. (But at least she’d reported that people thought well of him.) He was a bad person. He merely used Judson.

  Too ashamed and self-pitying to leave the closet, he listened to the group reassembling in the function hall, the glad buzz of dyad partners who’d successfully worked on their relationships, the barking of Ambrose, the skillful strumming of guitars, the sing-along of “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” He wondered if anyone noticed he was missing. Though not yet in the inner circle, he was among the sophomores most likely to get there, a fairly bright star in the Crossroads sky, and he certainly would have noticed if, say, one of the stars in Orion’s Belt went dark. As the meeting broke up, he waited for a tap on the closet door from someone—a remorseful Becky, a worried adviser, a reassuring Ambrose, a fellow member who valued him, or even just someone who saw the strip of light under the door when the function-hall lights were turned off. That no one came to him, not one person, seemed to him a damning confirmation of Becky’s judgment. He was not a person worth knowing.

  It was partly to prove his sister wrong and partly to become a person whom Rick Ambrose ought to trust (and perhaps prefer to Becky) that he’d formed his new resolution that night. Not the purest-hearted of motives, surely; but one had to begin somewhere.

  Leaving only two Quaaludes behind in his strongbox, as a tiny Christmas present to himself, he readmitted Judson to their bedroom and hurried forth in his parka, under snow-threatening skies, to Ansel Roder’s house. A peculiarity of the Crappier Parsonage was that, although more in need of razing than of renovation, it stood in a much tonier part of town than the senior minister’s house. All of Perry’s old drug buddies lived close by. In his reluctance to liquidate the asset, he’d dithered past the start of Christmas vacation and now couldn’t rely on finding any of his regular customers behind the Lifton Central baseball backstop, but Roder was always Mr. Liquidity. The stuccoed Roder manse had a round turret with terra-cotta shingles. Inside were beam-ceilinged rooms whose least-fine piece of furniture was finer than Perry’s family’s finest. Such was the heating situation that Roder came to the front door barefoot and shirtless, like G.I. Joe on a beach holiday. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. “I’m getting this weird fuzz tone in my speakers.”

  Perry followed his friend up a broad staircase. “Both of them?”

  “Yeah, but only with the turntable, not the tape deck.”

  “That’s useful information. Let’s have a look.”

  He had neither the time nor the inclination to play stereo doctor, but one of the ways he balanced accounts with his friends was by applying his manifold dexterity to petty problems of theirs, home-appliance puzzles, clogged aquarium hosing, calligraphy for signage, forgery of parental handwriting, interpretation of dreams, anything involving glue or tweezers. Upstairs, in his bedroom, Roder blasted a bit of “Whiskey Train” on his powerful stereo, and Perry readily diagnosed and fixed the looseness of the phonograph’s needle cartridge. Without ceremony, he drew the asset from his parka pocket and tossed it onto Roder’s bed.

  Roder’s eyes widened. “That is a princely Christmas present, Perry.”

  “I was hoping you might buy it from me.”

  “Buy it.”

  Between them, unspoken, the matter of Roder’s perennial largesse, and the question of why Perry invariably accepted it if he had drugs of his own and didn’t share them.

  “I need funds,” he explained. “There’s something I want to get Jay for Christmas.”

  “Really. And so you’re selling … It’s like that story—Gift of the Madgie?”

  “Mā-jī.”

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if Jay sold his, I don’t know, so he could buy you a water pipe? Et cetera.”

  “‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a story about irony, yes.”

  Roder poked at the asset, perhaps counting the pills. “How much money do you need?”

  “Forty dollars would be good.”

  “Why don’t I just loan it to you.”

  “Because we’re friends and I don’t know how I’d pay you back.”

  “You mowing lawns again next summer?”

  “I’m supposed to be saving for college. There’s some oversight of my earnings.”

  Roder shut his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. “Then how did you manage to buy this shit? Have you been stealing?”

  Perry’s palms began to sweat. “That’s really neither here nor there.”

  “But don’t you think it would be a little weird if you ended up burning this with me after I had to buy it off you?”

  “I won’t do that.”

  Roder made a skeptical sound. This was the moment for Perry to announce, per the terms of his resolution, that he wouldn’t be burning anything with anyone anymore. But, again, the reluctance.

  “Look,” he said, “I know I can’t be as generous as you are. But if you consider it rationally, I don’t see why it matters who you bought from if the outlay is the same either way.”

  “Because it does, and I’m surprised you can’t see why.”

  “I’m not stupid. I’m looking at it rationally.”

  “You know, for a minute, I honestly thought you’d gotten me a present.”

  Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship? He hadn’t come to Roder’s intending to end their (passive, complicit, drug-using) friendship. But it was true that all they ever did together anymore was get high.

  “How about thirty dollars, then?” Perry’s face, too, was sweating. “So it’s partly a present, partly a, uh…”

  Roder had turned away and opened a dresser drawer. He dropped two twenties on the bed. “You could have just asked for forty dollars. I would have given it to you.” He scooped up the asset and put it in the drawer. “Since when are you a dealer?”

  Outside again, as he made his way down Pirsig Avenue, Perry tried to reconstruct why, fifteen
minutes earlier, he hadn’t thought to just ask Roder for the money, perhaps as a “loan” that both of them knew would not be repaid, and then flush the asset down a toilet, achieving the same result without hurting his friend: why he hadn’t imagined Roder reacting the way he had, which now made perfect sense to him. Never mind the nine-year-old Perry: the fifteen-minutes-ago Perry was a stranger to him! Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

  Whether it was the limitations of his intellect, vis-à-vis the mystery of the soul, or the difficulty of reconciling his new resolution with his thoughtless hurting of an old friend’s feelings, he felt a little downward tug inside him, the slipping of a gear, the first shadow of the end of feeling well, as he proceeded into the central shopping district of New Prospect. Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.

  As if the feeling could be outrun, he trotted on to New Prospect Photo. The camera he’d found for Judson was a mint-condition twin lens reflex Yashica. It had sat behind the window on a small white pedestal among twenty other used and new cameras, and Judson had agreed it was a beauty. As Perry entered the store, he almost didn’t glance at the window. But the white of an empty pedestal caught his eye.

  The Yashica was gone.

  Gift of the Fucking Magi.

  The store smelled of acid from the darkroom in the rear. Its owner, a hinily bald man, had an air of irritable oppression, understandable at a time when drugstores and shopping centers were killing his business. It was clear that when he looked up from the lens he was cleaning and saw Perry, a long-haired teenager, his first thought was shoplifter or waster of his time. Perry put his mind at ease by wishing him, with the intonation that bothered Becky, a very good afternoon. “I was hoping to purchase the twin lens reflex Yashica you’ve had in your window.”

  “Sorry,” the owner said. “Sold it this morning.”

  “That is very distressing.”

  The owner tried to interest him in a shitty Instamatic, and then some ugly older cameras, while Perry tried not to show how offended he was by the suggestions. They’d arrived at an impasse when his eye fell on a beautiful thing under the glass-top counter. A compact movie camera, European-made. Burnished solid-metal body. Adjustable aperture. He recalled the old movie projector in the storage room at home, the remnant of a more optimistic era, when the Hildebrandts might still have become a family that watched home movies as a close-knit group, and before the Reverend, set upon by wasps, had lost his camera over the side of a rowboat.

  “That’s forty dollars,” the owner said. “It sold for twice that, new, in nineteen-forties dollars. It’s Regular 8, though. You have to load it in a bag.”

  “May I see it?”

  “It’s forty dollars.”

  “May I see it?”

  When Perry wound the mainspring and took a peek through the viewfinder’s luscious optics, he keenly wanted the camera for himself. Maybe Judson would share it with him?

  Precisely the kind of thought that his resolution insisted that he banish.

  And so he banished it. He left the store forty-eight dollars poorer but palpably richer in spirit. Imagining Judson’s surprise at receiving not the camera they’d ogled but something even finer and cooler, he was certain that, for once, he was glad for another person. Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snowflakes, and wished the world could just stand still.

  From the street came the rumble of a familiar engine. He turned and saw the family Fury braking for the stop sign at Maple Avenue. The rear of the car was packed with cardboard boxes. At the wheel was his father, wearing an old coat that Perry hadn’t noticed missing from the third-floor closet. On the passenger side, angled to face his father, one arm draped over the backrest, was Larry Cottrell’s foxy mother. She waved to Perry gaily, and now the Reverend saw him. No attempt at a smile was made. Perry had the distinct impression that he’d caught the old man doing something wrong.

  Becky that morning had awakened before dawn. It was the first day of vacation, in past years a day for sleeping in, but this year everything was different. She lay in the dark and listened to the tick and wheeze of the radiator, the struggling clank of pipes below. As if for the first time, she appreciated the goodness of being snug in a house on a cold morning. Also, no less, the goodness of the cold, which made the snugness possible; the two things fit together like a pair of mouths.

  Until last night, she’d put make-out sessions in the category of non-obligatory activities. For five years she’d seen people making out all around her, and she knew girls who’d allegedly gone all the way, but she hadn’t felt ashamed of her inexperience. Shame of that sort was a trap girls fell into. Even the really pretty ones were afraid of losing popularity if they didn’t act the way boys wanted them to. As her aunt Shirley had said, “If you sell yourself short, that’s how the world will value you.” Becky hadn’t set out to be popular, but when popularity came to her she’d found she had a native instinct for how to manage and advance it. Being some athlete’s squeeze seemed like an obvious dead end. She wouldn’t have guessed how sweet it was to fall, and how much she would want to keep falling, and how altered she would feel in the aftermath, when she was by herself in bed.

  Light grew in the windows half-heartedly, leaving monochrome the poster of the Eiffel Tower above her desk, the original watercolor painting of the Champs-Élyseés that Shirley had left her, the pony-themed wallpaper that she’d picked out for her father to hang for her tenth birthday, when she was too young to understand she’d have to live with it forever. In gray light, the wallpaper was more forgivable. An overcast sky was just the weather she would have wished for on the day after the night her life had become more serious. No sun to mark the hour, no change in its angle to take her out of the state of having been kissed.

  When the alarm clock went off in her parents’ bedroom, one door over from hers, it wasn’t the usual cruel morning sound but a promise of everything the day ahead might hold. When she heard the faint buzz of her father’s shaver and the footsteps of her mother in the hallway, she was amazed she’d never noticed, until today, how precious ordinary life was and how lucky she was to be a part of it. So much goodness. Other people were good. She herself was good. She felt goodwill to all mankind.

  If she nevertheless waited, before getting out of bed, until the family car had whinnied to life in the driveway and her mother had come upstairs to dress, it was because she wanted to prolong her aloneness in the aftermath. She knotted herself into the Japanese silk robe that Shirley had bought her and soundlessly, in her bare feet, went down to the first-floor bathroom. The person who sat down to pee was a woman a man had kissed. Afraid of finding the change as invisible from the outside as it felt momentous from within, she avoided the eyes of this person in the mirror.

  The aftersmell of toast and eggs deflected her away from the kitchen and back up to her room. It seemed as if her stomach was fluttering because she had a thousand things to begin all at once, but the only thing she could actually think of doing was to tell someone that she’d been kissed. She wanted to tell her brother first, bu
t he wasn’t home from college yet. She stood at her front window and watched a squirrel angrily send another squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak tree. Maybe it was a matter of a stolen acorn, or maybe her mind just went there because she herself had stolen. The nervousness in her stomach was partly a thief’s adrenaline. For a moment, the aggressor squirrel seemed content to let the matter drop, but then the conflict escalated—hot pursuit up the trunk, further pursuit horizontally, a flying leap into the bushes by the driveway.

  She wondered if he was awake yet, what he was thinking about her, whether he had regrets.

  Outside her door, Judson was afoot and speaking to her mother about sugar cookies. Becky didn’t enjoy the domestic arts and was grateful to have a brother who did, especially in December, when her mother had the burden of upholding certain traditions, like the manufacture of sugar cookies in the shape of Christmas trees and candy canes, that she’d invented for the family. As far as Becky could tell, the holidays to her mother were just another chore, and it appeared that her own new feeling of goodwill was somewhat abstract, because it would have been a kindness to go and sit in the kitchen, maybe help with the cookies, and she didn’t want to.

  By way of compromise, she dressed in her best, faded jeans and took her application materials down to the living room (the only person she was actively avoiding, Perry, was unlikely to appear before noon) and set up camp in the armchair by the Christmas tree, whose decoration was another of her mother’s chores. Its scent recalled the frenzy that she and Clem as kids had whipped each other into when presents piled up beneath it; but now she was so much older. The light in the windows was somber, the sounds of cookie-making strangely distant. She might have been sitting in some far-northern place that smelled of conifers. In the kiss’s aftermath, she seemed to be watching herself from a point so elevated that she could see the earth’s curvature, the world newly three-dimensional and spreading out in all directions from her armchair.