Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I’m going to quit. Just not … today.”

  “It’s fine with me. I’m tempted to take it up myself.”

  She extended the pack to him. “Want one?”

  He made a face. “No, I don’t want one.”

  “You just said you were tempted.”

  “It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake.”

  Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.

  “We need to rent a car,” he said. “Kevin Anderson drove me down here—he’s on his way back to Many Farms. Do you have the credit card?”

  “I do.”

  “You didn’t wear it out in Los Angeles?”

  “No, Russ. I did not wear it out.”

  In the rental car, which conveniently already stank of smoke, he acquainted her with the financial dimension of the calamity. A tribal council administrator, Wanda, had recommended a lawyer from Aztec, oddly named Clark Lawless, whom Russ had met the day before and been impressed with. Because Lawless was the best, he was expensive, and Perry had committed two felonies in the state of New Mexico. As a mentally incapacitated juvenile, he would be charged with the crime of “delinquency,” for which the sentence would typically be confinement in a mental-health facility, followed by at least two years in a reformatory. But Perry was an Illinois resident. Provided that his parents agreed to have his mental illness treated, at their own expense, Lawless was optimistic that a judge would grant them custody. Lawless was well liked at the district courthouse.

  “That’s a blessing,” she said.

  “You haven’t seen Perry. He hasn’t said a coherent word since they picked him up. He just moans and covers his face. I give a lot of credit to the Farmington police. They put him in the cell that was closest to the desk. If they hadn’t been on top of it, he might have broken his skull open. My guess is that he’s—I mean, based on my counseling experience— I suspect he’s manic-depressive.”

  She gasped, in spite of herself, at the evil hyphenated word. Outside the car, a blighted part of Albuquerque was passing by. Warped plywood on storefronts, broken bottles in the gutter. Her father in the evil state, playing ragtime at three in the morning, before the crash.

  “Are we sure it wasn’t the drugs? What drugs did he have?”

  “Cocaine.”

  “Cocaine? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Neither have I. Neither has Ambrose. Where he got it, why he had so much of it—no idea.”

  “Well, could that be why he crashed? If he was withdrawing—”

  “No,” Russ said. “I’m sorry, but no. It’s my fault, Marion—I knew he wasn’t right. David Goya told me he wasn’t right. He was obviously not right, and now—there was another thing, last night. Early this morning. When he came out of sedation, they had to restrain him again. He’s psychotically depressed.”

  A pair of hands was moving randomly in front of her. She directed them toward the cigarettes in her purse. It was good to give them a task.

  “Anyway,” Russ said, “we’re looking at a long recovery. I don’t know if they’ll bill us for his time in the facility here, but Lawless is going to cost at least five hundred dollars, probably a lot more. Then however many weeks or months in a private hospital, and further treatment after that. Are you sure you want to be hearing this now?”

  She’d got a cigarette lit. It helped a little. “Yes. I want to know everything.”

  “We also need to pay for the barn he burned. It was on tribal land, and I’d be shocked if the owners had insurance. I gather there were tractors, other equipment, plus the building itself. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, but it’s thousands. I called the church office while I was waiting for you, and Phyllis checked the liability policy—it won’t help us. We do have the three thousand that Becky gave Perry. We can also borrow some of the money she gave Clem and Judson. But we’re going to need a lot more.”

  “I’ll get a full-time job.”

  “No. This is my responsibility. The question is whether I can get a big enough loan.”

  “I’ll work until I’m eighty, if that’s what it takes.”

  Russ veered over and braked to a hard stop, so he could look at her directly. “We need to get something straight. This is entirely my responsibility. Do you understand?”

  She shook her head emphatically.

  “I didn’t listen to you,” he said. “A year ago. You wanted to send him to a psychiatrist, and I didn’t listen. Five days ago—again, I didn’t listen. He was as good as telling me he’d lost his mind. And—God! I didn’t listen.”

  She sucked on the cigarette. “It’s not your fault.”

  “And I’m telling you it is. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  Through the windshield, she watched an emaciated kid, not much older than Perry, shamble out of a liquor store. His shirt was untucked, his pants barely clinging to his hips. He had a bottle in a paper bag.

  “Where are we going? I’m already sick of this car.”

  “It is entirely my fault, and that’s the end of it.”

  “I don’t care whose fault it is. Just get me out of this car. I’m having a panic attack.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t smoke.”

  “Where are we going? Why are we stopped here?”

  With a heavy sigh, Russ put the car back into gear.

  The next thing she knew, they were in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn, and her desperation to leave the car had passed. The car now seemed relatively secure to her. She closed her eyes while Russ went inside to register.

  It was strange, considering God’s everpresence in her, how rarely she felt moved to pray. In her guilt, in Arizona, she’d prayed incessantly, but she’d stopped when she married Russ, just as she’d stopped keeping a diary. Only after the births of her children, for which thanks were manifestly due, could she remember really praying. The weekly prayers she said in church were more lateral than vertical, more about belonging to a congregation. God already knew what she was thinking, so she didn’t need to tell Him, and it seemed silly to trouble an infinite Being for minor favors. But the favor she needed now was large.

  Dear God, I accept your will, and you’ve given me no more than what I deserve. But please let it be your will that Perry gets better, the same way you once let me get better. Please also let it be your will that I don’t go crazy again. I want to be myself, I want to be fully present for Russ, and you know how I love you. If you would keep my mind clear enough to recognize your will, I would be so very grateful. Whatever your will requires of me, I will gladly do.

  She opened her eyes and saw two sparrows, one more boldly patterned than the other, picking through detritus at the base of a concrete parking strip. She felt calmer for having asked. It was the asking that mattered, not the answer. She decided that, for the remainder of her life, she would pray every day. In a world suffused with God, prayer ought to be as regular as drawing breaths.

  Cheered by this insight, she got out of the car with her purse. Russ was crossing the parking lot with the room key. She ran up to him and said, “Have you prayed?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Let’s go do it. We can get the luggage later.”

  He seemed worried about her, but she didn’t feel like stopping to explain. Their room was at the very end of the first floor. She hurried ahead while he followed with the key.

  The room was stuffy, the late sun beating on the curtains. She immediately kneeled on the floor. “Here, anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Will you kneel with me?”

  “Um.”

  “We’ll pray, and then we can talk.”

  He still seemed worried, but he kneeled by her and knit his fingers together.

  Oh, God, she prayed. Please be merciful to him. Please let him know you’re there.

  This was all she had to say, but Russ apparently had more. It might have been five minutes before he stood up an
d turned on the air conditioner.

  “I know it’s private,” she said, “but—did you find Him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If we’re going to get through this, we need to stay connected.”

  “I’m not like you. You were always so—it was always easy with you and God. It’s not so easy for me.”

  He made her access to God sound slutty, like her talent for quick orgasms. She joined him in the air conditioner’s coolish outflow. It was a very long time since the two of them had been alone in a hotel room, almost as long as since Bradley had taken her to one. Had she ever been alone with a man in a hotel room without having sex? Possibly not.

  “Usually it helps to be in a bad place,” Russ said. “But the place I’m in now is so bad…”

  His shoulders began to shake, and he covered his face. When she tried to comfort him, he shuddered.

  “Russ. Honey. Listen to me. I ignored things, too. I could see Perry wasn’t right, and I ignored it. This isn’t your fault.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I believe I do.”

  “You have no idea what I’ve done! No idea!” He looked around wildly. “I’m going to get the luggage.”

  She took her purse to the bathroom and unwrapped a drinking glass. The thinness of the woman in the mirror was a continuing surprise. Russ would now be stuck with this woman indefinitely, and she wondered if he might want her again. However deserving she was of God’s punishment, she was surely still allowed some pleasure. She wondered, indeed, if priming herself for Bradley but returning to Russ, excited and unsatisfied, had been part of God’s plan. She freshened her lipstick.

  Russ was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, as if replicating Perry’s condition. She sat down by him and touched him. When he shuddered, yet again, a suspicion crept into her.

  “So,” she said. “What is it that you think you did?”

  He rocked himself and didn’t answer.

  “You said I had no idea. Maybe you’ll feel better if you tell me.”

  “It’s all my fault.”

  “So you keep insisting.”

  “I—oh. What to say. God told me what to do, and I didn’t listen. And then Ambrose…”

  “Ambrose?”

  “He was waiting for me. Kevin reported Perry missing, and the sheriff had already put out a bulletin, so Kevin went straight to Farmington, but Wanda and Ambrose had to wait for me in Kitsillie. They waited an hour. An hour.” He shuddered. “I don’t think I mentioned to you— I didn’t mention that one of the parent advisers in Kitsillie was … So, Larry Cottrell was down in Many Farms, and his mother was on the mesa, and we’d had some trouble. The group, I mean. One of the Navajos broke into the school, and I had to … we had to … that is, I and, uh…”

  “Larry’s mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Frances Cottrell was with you in Kitsillie.”

  “Yes.”

  Now, at last, she saw the totality of the punishment God intended. Since her fight with Russ at Christmas, he’d made any number of overtures to her, and she’d spurned every one of them. From the overtures, and from his generally low spirits, she’d inferred that the Cottrell woman had opted out of an affair; Marion had gone so far as to make fun of him. Now, in a flash, she saw why he’d returned to Crossroads. Once upon a time, he’d beguiled her with his talk of the Navajos, and it had worked, and so he’d tried it again with the Cottrell woman, and again it had worked. The Cottrell woman was a fool. She herself was a fool. She had no one but herself to blame.

  “And now you’re here with me,” she said. “It must be very strange for you. That we have to deal with this together. That we still happen to be married.”

  He gave no sign of hearing her.

  “I want you to leave me here alone,” she said. “Let me take responsibility. I want you to go and be as happy as you can. This isn’t your problem to deal with.”

  He was hitting himself in the head with the heels of his hands. He was lost in his misery, like a little boy, and she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. He was her big little boy, entrusted to her care by God, and she’d driven him away. She grabbed one of his hands, but he kept hitting himself with the other.

  “Honey, stop. I don’t care what you did.”

  “I committed adultery.”

  “So I gather. Please stop hitting yourself.”

  “I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!”

  “Oh dear. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?”

  The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment.

  “I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.”

  “Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”

  “Russ, Russ. I’m the one who gave you permission. Don’t you remember?”

  “Stop looking at me! I can’t stand you looking at me!”

  She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be saying that he still cared what she thought of him, still in some way loved her. To spare him from her gaze, she went outside with her purse.

  The sun was low, the distant mountains furrowed with deep shadows. At the edge of the parking lot, in the dry residue of a puddle, a sparrow was giving itself a dust bath. The air smelled like Flagstaff and was cooling off rapidly, as it had in the years when she’d walked home at this hour from the Church of the Nativity, counting her steps. She lit a cigarette and watched the sparrow. It was groveling on its belly, prostrating itself, raising its little face to the sky, flicking up dust with its wings, cleansing itself in dirt. She saw what she had to do.

  She put out the cigarette and returned to the room. Russ was slumped on the edge of the bed.

  “Are you in love with her? You can tell me the truth—it won’t kill me.”

  “The truth,” he said bitterly. “What is the truth? When a person is utterly fraudulent, what does love even mean? How can he judge?”

  “I’ll take that as a qualified yes. And what about her? Do you think she loves you?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “We all make mistakes. I’m just trying to think practically. If you love her and you think she might love you, I don’t want to stand in your way. You can let Perry be my responsibility.”

  “I never want to lay eyes on her again.”

  “I’m saying I release you. This is your chance to walk away, and I’m warning you. Right this minute is the time to take it.”

  “Even if she loved me, which I doubt, the whole thing is too vile.”

  “That’s only because you’re feeling guilty. The minute you see her again, you’ll remember that you love her.”

  “No. It’s poisoned. Having to sit in that truck with Ambrose for three hours…”

  “What does Rick have to do with it?”

  Russ shuddered in his sheepskin coat. She’d bought it for him in Flagstaff.

  “Do you know what I did to you?” he said. “Three years ago? Marion, do you know what I did? I told a seventeen-year-old girl that I’d lost interest in you sexually.”

  Suddenly cold, she went to her suitcase for a sweater. The summer dress was uppermost. She couldn’t bring herself to handle it.

  “And you know what else? I never told you the real reason the group kicked me out. It was because I was drooling all over that girl. I didn’t even know I was doing it, but she could see it. And Rick—Rick was there, too. He knows who I am, and—God, God.”

  A low voice spoke, her own. “Did you touch her?”

  “Sally? No! Absolutely—no. Never. I was just lost in my vanity.”

  She had her own vanity. She no longer felt like reciprocating his confession.

  “It wasn’t even true,” he said. “When I saw you coming off the p
lane—what I said to that girl simply wasn’t true. You are very, very attractive to me.”

  “Yeah, wait until I’m fat again.”

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. I just want you to know—”

  “That you’ve humiliated me?”

  “That I need you. That I would be completely lost without you.”

  “Nice. Maybe you should fuck me while you’re at it. It seems to be your thing.”

  This shut him up.

  “Better do it while you can. I’ve started eating again.” She moved into his field of vision and ran her hands down her flanks. “These hips aren’t going to last.”

  “I know you’re hurt. I know you’re angry.”

  “What does that have to do with fucking?”

  “I mean, yes, if you could forgive me—if we could find our way back—then, yes, I would very much like to … find our way back. But right now—”

  “Right now,” she pointed out, “we’re alone in a hotel room.”

  “And our son is in a ward three blocks away.”

  “I’m not the one going on and on about what I’ve fucked. Or couldn’t fuck but really, really wanted to.”

  He covered his ears. Her chest was heaving, but not only with anger. In taunting him with the dirtiest of words, in a hotel room, she’d accidentally turned herself on. There was an itch to be scratched, and it really did seem as if everything else could wait. She pushed his knees apart and dropped to her own.

  “Marion—”

  “Shut up,” she said, unbuckling his belt. “You have no rights here.”

  She unzipped him, and there it was. The beautiful and hateful thing. Interested in seventeen-year-olds, interested in home-wrecking forty-year-olds, apparently even somewhat interested in his wife. She lowered her face to it, and—good Lord. He hadn’t showered.

  A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable. It was as if, instead of repulsing the assault she’d provoked from Bradley, she’d surrendered to it and were catching a whiff of the aftermath. Though the matter of the seventeen-year-old still had to be dealt with, the Cottrell matter seemed settled. Withholding her mouth would suffice as punishment. She pushed him onto his back and stretched out on top of him.