Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “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.

  EASTER

  Russ awoke in a strange house. Wind was banging on the windows, repulverizing the snow on the branches outside them, and Marion’s side of their bed had not been slept in. Frightened that she hadn’t softened toward him, frightened by the permission she’d given him, frightened also by the problem of Perry’s drug use, he could feel how very reliant he’d become on her support. Turning instead to God, he prayed in bed until he was able to put on a robe and venture into the hallway. Behind closed doors, his three younger children were still asleep. The door and the curtains of Clem’s room were open wide, his absence stark in the morning light. Downstairs, in the kitchen, a pot of coffee was on the stove. He took a mug of it up to his office, and there he found Marion. She was kneeling amid gifts and ribbons and didn’t even glance at him. The sight of her, in the same dress she’d worn the night before, recalled the shock of desiring her, the shame of being rejected. From the doorway, without preamble, he told her that Perry had sold or given marijuana to Larry Cottrell.

  “It’s interesting,” she said, “that that’s the first thing you have to say to me today.”

  “I meant to bring it up last night. We need to deal with this immediately.”

  “I’ve already dealt with it. He told me he’d sold pot.”

  “He what? When?”

  She calmly ran scissors through a sheet of wrapping paper. Whatever Russ might do or say, she seemed to be a step ahead of him.

  “Last night,” she said. “He’s been struggling, and I think the fact that he was open with me—he’s doing better now. As far as I’m concerned, it’s ancient history.”

  “He broke the law. He needs to understand that there are consequences.”

  “You want to punish him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think that’s a mistake.”

  “I don’t care what you think. We will present a united front.”

  “A united front? Is that a joke?”

  Her coolness was worse than coldness. He had an urge to break into it, grab hold of her, impose his will. Their fight the night before had tapped into an unguessed reservoir of rage.

  She folded the wrapping paper around a shirt box. “Was there anything else, dear?”

  Hatred silenced him. Returning to the second floor, he heard Perry’s and Judson’s voices behind their door. It was only seven thirty, strangely early for Perry to be awake. Russ was disturbed to think that his nine-year-old son, with whom he had semiformal but cordial relations, as if they were longtime next-door neighbors, had been sharing a room with a trafficker in drugs. It didn’t reflect well on the nine-year-old’s father. But when, an hour later, while channeling his rage into shoveling the driveway, he saw Perry and Judson heading out with their sleds, Perry was in such boyishly eager spirits that Russ didn’t have the heart to confront him. It was Christmas Eve, after all.

  That night, at dinner—by tradition, spaghetti and meatballs—Perry was in charming form, and his manner with Becky had changed. Gone was his condescension, gone her defensiveness. Marion wouldn’t look at Russ, and all she ate was salad and a few strands of spaghetti. When she teased Becky about Tanner Evans, it fell to Judson to explain to Russ that Becky had a boyfriend, and Russ didn’t know which was more incriminating, that he was the last to learn this news or that he didn’t much care. He’d been living in a world consisting of Frances, God, Rick Ambrose, and the negative blot of Marion. Of his children, the only one he felt at all connected to was Clem, and it grieved him that Clem was with his girlfriend for the holiday; it
deprived him of a chance to atone for embarrassing him. For relief from his isolation, he let his thoughts turn to Frances. He imagined smoking marijuana with her, imagined its lowering of their inhibitions. Then he wondered what it said about God’s intentions that the marijuana in question had passed through Perry’s hands.

  Rising abruptly from the table, he said he’d forgotten an important call to a parishioner. As he left the room, Marion’s amused voice followed him. “Tell her I said Merry Christmas.”

  The third floor smelled of her disturbance. On the sill of the storage-room window, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette ends, and this was fine with him. It somehow ratified the permission she’d given him. Using the permission, he picked up the phone in his office.

  Frances, answering, brushed aside his apology for calling on a holiday—he was her pastor! He’d intended to let her wonder if he’d made peace with Ambrose and was going to Arizona, but he couldn’t help telling her immediately.

  “Hooray, hooray,” she said. “I knew I was right.”

  “You were right about Perry, too. He did sell marijuana.”

  “Of course I was right. Aren’t I always?”

  “Well, so, I could use your advice there. Are you, ah, private?”

  “Sort of. My folks are here for dinner.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt.”

  “I was just clearing the table. Tell me how I can help.”

  From two floors below came a burst of family laughter in which Perry’s arpeggio of hilarity was uppermost. Russ wondered if, a year from now, he wouldn’t have to call Frances; if he might be sitting down to dinner with her and her folks.

  “Well, apparently,” he said, “Perry’s cleaned up his act. At this point, I could just let it drop, but I feel some sort of punishment is in order.”

  “You’re asking the wrong gal. You may remember what’s in my sock drawer.”

  “I do. And the fact—well, the experiment we talked about. It complicates things for me. I can’t punish Perry and then—you know. It would be hypocritical.”

  “That’s an easy one. Just don’t do the second thing.”

  “But I want to. I want to do it with you.”

  “Okay, wow. I should probably get off the phone.”

  “Just quickly tell me if you’re still interested in doing this.”

  “Definitely getting off the phone.”

  “Frances—”

  “I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need to think about it.”

  “You were the one who suggested it!”

  “Mm, not quite. The just-you-and-me part was your idea.”

  He couldn’t have asked for a clearer indication that his desires were known to her. To be engaged in sexual implication, in his church-provided house, on a family holiday, was shameful and thrilling.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Merry Christmas. I’ll see you in church on Sunday.”

  “You’re not coming to the midnight service?”

  “No. But your eagerness is noted, Reverend Hildebrandt.”

  In the manner of the early Christians, who’d believed that the Messiah who’d walked the earth within living memory would soon return—that the Day of Judgment was just around the corner—Russ imagined that his situation with Frances, already so fraught with implication, so poised to blossom into rapture, would resolve itself in a matter of days. While he awaited her judgment, which seemed imminent, he postponed a confrontation with his son, and by the time he understood how long he might have to wait, Perry’s transgressions had become, as Marion had said, ancient history. Perry really did seem to be doing better. No longer an evasive, late-sleeping boy, he seemed slimmer and perhaps a little taller, and he was always in good spirits. Because Marion had taken to sleeping on the third floor and keeping odd hours, it sometimes happened that Perry, who now rose even earlier than Russ, made breakfast for him and Judson.

  Beginning with old Mrs. O’Dwyer, who’d succumbed to pneumonia, the new year brought a string of funerals for which Russ did all the counseling and officiating, while the Haefles vacationed in Florida. He still had the extra duties Dwight had given him when he left Crossroads, and now that he’d been reinstated in the group he felt obliged to attend Sunday-night meetings. To show Ambrose the sincerity of his repentance, while avoiding the hazard of counseling troubled teenagers, he volunteered to handle all the logistics for the Arizona trip—hiring the buses, reviewing the church’s liability policy, procuring project supplies, coordinating with the Navajos.

  Mired in work, he watched Marion race ahead of him. She was visibly losing weight, abetted by smoking and a regimen of punishing walks. He was included in the dinners she continued to put on the table, but she now sorted through the laundry hamper and set aside his clothes while she washed everyone else’s. He attended church functions without her, poured hours he couldn’t spare into sermons that refused to come into focus without her help, while she went out to the library, to lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and to the decaying clapboard theater that was home to the New Prospect Players. Her new independence smacked of women’s liberation, which he approved of at the societal level, and he might have approved of it in his wife if he’d been getting anywhere with Frances.

  But the day of judgment kept receding. On the Tuesday circle’s first outing to the inner city after Christmas, Frances attached herself so tightly to Kitty Reynolds that he couldn’t get a single private word with her. When he called her house, a few days later, in the guise of routine pastoral concern, she said she was late to class and would stop by his office later in the week. He waited, in vain, for eight days. Feeling unfairly at her mercy, casting about for leverage, he was inspired to invite an unmarried seminarian, Carolyn Polley, to come along on the next Tuesday outing. Carolyn was a friend of Ambrose and an adviser in Crossroads, and Russ hoped that by insisting that she ride with him, by making a fuss of introducing her to Theo Crenshaw, and by keeping her at his side throughout the day, he might provoke some jealousy in Frances. Instead he provoked a statement from Carolyn, in the awkwardly explicit style of Crossroads, that she had a boyfriend in Minneapolis. Frances herself was so chummy with Kitty Reynolds, so intimately murmuring, that Russ, in his jealousy, wondered if her hunger for new experiences might extend as far as lesbianism. Not once did she look at him directly. It was as if none of the tensy-tension between them, none of the innuendo on Christmas Eve, had ever happened.

  When the Tuesday circle returned to First Reformed, in the last light of day, he caught up with her before she could escape in her car. He chided her, gently, for not having stopped by his office. “I hope you’re not,” he said, “avoiding me for some reason?”

  She edged away from him. She was wearing a puffy parka and a stocking cap, not her fetching hunter’s ensemble. “Actually I am, a little bit.”

  “Will you—tell me why?”

  “It’s terrible. You’re going to hate me.”

  The twilight in January, the way it lingered in the western sky, partook of early spring, but the air was still bitterly dry and tasted of road salt.

  “I was feeling bad,” she said, “that I hadn’t listened to your records. I didn’t want to talk to you until I did, and so finally, last week, I had them all spread out in the living room, and then the phone rang, and I had to make dinner, and I forgot about them. When I went to turn a light on, I didn’t see them on the floor.”

  She sounded vaguely annoyed, as if it were the records’ fault.

  “I already talked to the record store,” she said. “They’re going to try to find replacements. I only stepped on two of them, but apparently one of them is very hard to find.”

  Russ’s heart felt stepped on.

  “You don’t have to replace them,” he managed to say. “They’re just worldly things.”

  “No, I’m absolutely going to.”

  “As you wish.”

  “See? You do hate me.”

  “No, I—just think I might have misread something. I thoug
ht that you and I were going to—I thought I could help you on your journey.”

  “I know. I was supposed to give you an answer about that.”

  “It’s all right. Perry’s doing much better—I’m not going to punish him.”

  “But I stepped on your records. The least I can do is give you an answer.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Except here’s another confession. I already sort of did the experiment, by myself. I can’t say it was life-altering. It was more like an hour-long head cold.”

  Russ turned away, to hide his disappointment.

  “I want to try again, though,” she said, touching his arm. “I’ve—there’s been a lot going on with me. But let’s you and me find a time. Okay?”

  “It sounds like you’re doing fine without me.”

  “No, let’s do it. Just the two of us. Unless you want to ask Kitty.”

  “I don’t want to ask Kitty.”

  “This’ll be fun,” Frances said.

  Her enthusiasm sounded effortful, and when he called her that night, calendar in hand, their search for a mutually workable date had a flavor of dreary obligation. The experiment could only be done on a weekday, while her kids were at school, and his regular church duties fell precisely on the days that Frances had open. With some foreboding, he agreed to meet her on Ash Wednesday.

  There was a foretaste of ash in his days of waiting for their date. The hope that Clem would reconsider his decision to quit school had already been dashed on Christmas Day, when he called to report that he hadn’t gone to his girlfriend in Urbana. He was alone in New Orleans—would rather spend Christmas in a squalid hotel room than with his family. Russ knew that the fault was his, and he wanted to write to Clem, to apologize and try to set things right, but he didn’t have a mailing address. In January, Clem called home periodically to ask Marion if a letter from the draft board had arrived. In February came the news that he’d spoken to the board and learned that it didn’t intend to call him up. The news ought to have been a pure relief for Russ, as it was for Marion, but he was hurt that he had to hear the news from Becky, hurt that Clem still hadn’t given them his address, hurt that he had no plans to come home. According to Becky, he was working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.