Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  At the Grove, five nights after their seemingly crucial conversation in the sanctuary, she’d seen Laura Dobrinsky standing on tiptoes to press her face to Tanner’s, and him letting himself be nuzzled, a contented smile on his face. Becky had felt stabbed in the gut. She’d fled to a bathroom stall and shed her first tears on account of a man. In her ensuing misery, she’d skipped both Sunday service and Crossroads, which she felt had failed to warn her that the risk in risk-taking was stabbing pain, and dragged herself through the last days of school before vacation.

  And then, last night, she’d subbed at the Grove. It wasn’t her usual night. When Tanner walked into the restaurant, alone, it shouldn’t have been with the expectation of finding her there. Assuming it was just wretched luck, she asked a veteran waitress, Maria, to take his table. She could feel him looking at her, but she didn’t look at him, not once, until the last of the other diners were leaving. He was slouched low, the picture of composure, an emptied dessert plate on his table. He waved her over.

  “What,” she said.

  “Are you okay? I looked for you in church on Sunday.”

  “I didn’t go. I’m not sure I’m into it anymore.”

  A taste from childhood was in her throat, a horrible self-spiting taste that she couldn’t help wanting more of.

  “Becky,” he said. “Did I do something? You seem pissed off with me.”

  “Nope. Just tired.”

  “I called your house. Your mom said you were here.”

  There was no law against just walking away. She walked away.

  “Hey, come on,” Tanner said, jumping up to pursue her. “I came here to see you. I thought we were friends. If you’re pissed off with me, you could at least tell me why.”

  Maria was watching them from the table she was wiping down. Becky continued on into the kitchen, but Tanner wasn’t afraid of the kitchen. She turned on her heel.

  “Figure it out,” she said bitterly.

  She knew her worth. He was required to say that he was done with the Natural Woman. Nothing less would do.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for being sorry.”

  “Becky—”

  “What.”

  “I really like you.”

  It wasn’t enough. She picked up a rag and returned to the dining room to wipe down tables. It wasn’t enough, and then she heard how hard he slammed the front door behind him. She heard the hurt of his having called her house and come looking for her, only to be treated so meanly, and suddenly the person she was but didn’t understand was running out into the night. Tanner was slumped against the side of his Volkswagen bus, his head bowed. At the sound of her feet, as they outran her better judgment, he looked up. She ran straight into his arms. A breeze from the south had risen, more springlike than autumnal. The hands she’d dreamed of were on her head, in her hair. And then, just like that, in the most unplanned and unconsidered way, it had happened.

  She was awakened by the telephone. She’d fallen asleep on her back, crossways on her bed, and opened her eyes to a gray sky framed by her window and broken by black branches. Her mother was tapping on her door.

  “Becky? It’s Jeannie Cross.”

  She went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom and waited for her mother to hang up downstairs. Jeannie was calling about a party that night at the Carduccis’. Becky appreciated that Jeannie was still including her, and she might have liked to accept the invitation for friendship’s sake. But she was going to the concert.

  “There’s a concert?”

  “Crossroads,” Becky said.

  A silence.

  “I see,” Jeannie said.

  “You know what, though? I’m going with Tanner.”

  “Tanner Evans?”

  “Yeah, he’s the headliner, and he’s taking me.”

  “Well, well, well.”

  Becky was tempted to say more, but she might already have said too much. Tanner didn’t quite know yet that he was taking her to the concert. In her mind, their very long kiss had been definitive, but much had been left unspoken, and she wouldn’t feel secure until the world had seen her walk into First Reformed on his arm. She asked Jeannie if she wanted to go shopping with her. It was almost funny how eagerly Jeannie said yes, after all these weeks of distance. But Jeannie wasn’t free until three thirty.

  “Shoot,” Becky said. “I’m meeting Tanner at four.”

  “Wow, Bex. Too busy with a guy.”

  “I know,” she said happily. “It’s weird.”

  “Tomorrow, though? I’m not doing anything all day.”

  Becky took a long shower and performed delicate work at the bathroom mirror, applying makeup that was enhancing without, she hoped, being noticeable. Perry banged rudely on the locked door, offered some commentary which she ignored, and went away. Dressing, too, she labored to strike a balance between elegance and Crossroads. She had to look good for at least the next ten hours, beginning especially at four o’clock. By the time she went down to the kitchen, her mother was bundling herself into a frightful old coat.

  “I’m late to my class,” her mother said. “Can you make sure you’re home by six?”

  Becky filled her mouth with a sugar cookie. “I’m not going to the Haefles’ party.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not negotiable.”

  “I’m not negotiating.”

  “You can discuss it with your father, then.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss.”

  Her mother sighed. “You know, honey, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make a young man wait. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but there is always tomorrow.”

  “Thank you for your input.”

  “I take it he managed to find you last night?”

  “I thought you were late for your exercise class.”

  Her mother sighed more heavily and turned away. Becky was sorry to have to freeze her out. Her goodwill was boundless, but her mother was wrong. Tomorrow was too late for the work she had to do. Tanner wasn’t headlining the concert, he was co-headlining it with Laura Dobrinsky. Becky needed every minute she could get with him before it started.

  The time had come to take action. A dull red gash had opened and closed below the clouds on the eastern horizon, over the fields of broken cornstalks distantly visible from the window of Clem’s room, while he typed the last sentences of his Roman history term paper. His desk, in the uneasy light, was stubbled over with red eraser morsels and cloud-colored ash. His clean-living roommate, Gus, had already decamped to Moline for the holidays, and Clem had seized on his absence to smoke heavily all night, powering himself forward with nicotine and with rage at his primary sources, Livy and Polybius, for contradicting each other, rage also at the dwindling of his hoped-for hours of sleep from six to three to zero, and rage, most of all, at himself for having spent Monday seeking pleasure in his girlfriend’s bed, allowing himself to believe that he could research and write a fifteen-page paper in two twelve-hour workdays. The pleasure he’d experienced on Monday now amounted to nothing. His eyes and his throat were on fire, his stomach on the verge of digesting itself. The paper he’d produced, on Scipio Africanus, was an ill-argued tangle of repetitive phrases for which he’d be lucky to get a B-minus. Its badness was the final confirmation of a thing he’d known for weeks.

  Without giving himself time to think, without even standing up to stretch, he rolled a clean sheet of erasable onionskin into his typewriter.

  December 23, 1971

  Selective Service Local Board

  U.S. Post Office Building

  Berwyn, Illinois

  Dear Sirs,

  I write to inform you that as of today I will no longer be enrolled as a student at the University of Illinois, thus no longer eligible for the student deferment that I was granted on March 10, 1971. I am prepared to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces if I am called upon. My date of birth is December 12, 1951. My draft number is 29 4 13 88 403. Please
advise if/when you would like me to report for induction.

  Sincerely,

  Clement R. Hildebrandt

  215 Highland Street

  New Prospect, Illinois

  Unlike his paper, the letter had the clarity of extensive forethought. But did typing it constitute an action? The words were barely more substantial on paper than they’d been in his head. Not until they’d been received and replied to would they attain power over him. At which point, exactly, could he be said to have taken an action?

  He gazed for a while at the ceiling of cloud above the distant cornfields, the ground-level haze that industrial agriculture seemed to generate in winter, a smog part dampness and part nitrates. Then he signed the letter, addressed an envelope, and applied one of the postage stamps he’d bought for writing to his parents.

  “This is what your son is doing,” he said. “This is how it had to be.”

  Feeling less alone for having heard a voice, if only his own, he ventured out to the bathroom. Its eternally burning lights seemed all the brighter now that everyone else had gone home. Some departed hall mate’s whiskers adhered to the sides of the sink at which he splashed water on his face. He considered taking a shower, but his core body temperature was at a low ebb and he thought he might convulse with shivers if he undressed.

  As he left the bathroom, the hall telephone rang. Its loudness was extraordinary and jolted him with dread, because he knew that only Sharon could be calling; she’d already called at midnight for a progress report and a pep talk. With regard to Sharon, his typing of the letter most definitely constituted an action. He stood outside the bathroom, immobilized by the ringing, and waited for it to stop. After the debacle of his wasted Monday, he no longer had a shred of faith in his power to resist the pleasure he took from her. The only safe plan now was to pack up his things, catch the first available bus to Chicago, and inform her of his action from New Prospect, by letter.

  To his surprise, a door at the end of the hall flew open. A hall mate in gym shorts stomped out and answered the phone. He saw Clem and shook the receiver at him.

  “Sorry,” Clem said, hurrying to take it. “I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

  The hall mate slammed his door behind him.

  “Did you finish?” Sharon said eagerly.

  “Yeah. Ten minutes ago.”

  “Hurrah! I bet you could use some breakfast.”

  “What I really need is sleep.”

  “Come have breakfast. I want to take care of you.”

  A wave of light-headedness washed over him. The mere sound of her voice was rushing blood to his groin. Change of plan.

  “All right,” he said. “But there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you when I come over.”

  His room, when he returned to it, was like a lidded charcoal fire. He opened the window and put on the peacoat that Sharon had chosen for him. The tissue-swelling elevation of his blood pressure was surely related to sex, but also perhaps to what he had to tell her. The letter he’d written had elements of aggression, and aggression was known to induce erections in men. The letter could lead to his going to Vietnam, where, although there was nothing arousing about being killed, he might be called upon to defend himself with a weapon. In his rational mind, he knew that killing was morally wrong and psychologically devastating, but he suspected that his animal self took a different view.

  Letter and term paper in hand, he left his building through the rear stairwell, which had never lost its smell of fresh concrete. The damp morning air penetrated straight through his coat to his core, but it was a relief to be free of the smoke-filled tunnel that sex and all-nighters had made of his existence since regular classes ended. In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake. It did him good to find the larger world still extant; it made him feel less crazy.

  Down the lane from the Foreign Languages Building, after he’d slipped his paper under the door of the classics department office, he came upon a mailbox. The next collection time was eleven a.m., and today was not a holiday. He faced the mailbox and considered his existential freedom to act or not to act. The strong thing to do was to drop his letter in the box. He might curse himself in the future—however wretched he felt now, army life was bound to bring worse—but if an action was morally right, a strong man was obliged to take it in the present. If he didn’t mail the letter now, he would arrive at Sharon’s with only the intention of mailing it, and he’d been down the intention-paved road before.

  He closed his eyes and fell asleep in a heartbeat, reawakening in time to catch himself from falling over. In his hand he found a letter to his draft board. The throat of the mailbox made a rusty-jointed gulp as the letter went down it. He turned away and broke into a sprint, as if he might outrun what he’d done.

  In the philosophy course he’d taken the previous spring, there was a curly-haired little mouse who sat in the same row he did, often wearing a pleated velvet French-style cap, and kept looking at him. One afternoon, when the bearded and beaded professor was holding forth on Sartre’s Nausea, extolling the idea that what we make of existence has nothing to do with what existence rawly is, Clem raised his hand to disagree. Reality, he said, operated according to laws discoverable and testable by scientific method. The professor seemed to think this proved his larger point—we impose our laws of science on a stubbornly unknowable reality. “But what about math?” Clem said. “One plus one will always equal two. We didn’t invent the truth of that equation. We discovered a truth that was always there.” The professor joked that they had a Platonist in their midst, and the hippies in the lecture hall turned to look at the square who’d challenged him, and the little mouse moved over to sit by Clem. After class, she praised his independence of mind. She adored Camus but couldn’t forgive Sartre for his communism.

  Sharon was an Honors student, the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She’d grown up on a farm outside the downstate town of Eltonville, where communists were held in very low esteem. For the rest of the semester, she and Clem had sat together in class, and when she asked him for his home address he was happy to provide it. He’d never had a female friend besides Becky. In the letter Sharon then sent him, while he was at home in New Prospect, doing shovel work for the local nursery, she wrote about the heat and desolation of her family’s farmhouse in the summer. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her brother Mike was in Vietnam, her father and her younger brother made the farm run, and a hired Croatian woman did the cooking and housework. Her father had always excused Sharon from chores, and in her boredom as a child and her sorrow as a teenager she’d found refuge in reading. Her ambition was to be a writer or, as a fallback, to teach English in Europe. She’d already vowed never to spend another summer in Eltonville.

  Clem wrote back to her and received a second letter so long she’d put three stamps on the envelope. It began with questions, devolved into stream of consciousness, short on punctuation, devoid of capital letters, and ended with a passage from Camus she’d copied out in French. He kept intending to take an evening and reply, but he never found the evening. He hung out with his friend Lester or watched TV with Becky, who’d cut back on her social life. Only when he returned to school and saw Sharon, walking by herself on the Main Quad, did the wrongness of his inaction come home to him. She threw him a hurt look, and this wasn’t right, he wasn’t a hurter, and so he pursued her. She greeted his apology with a shrug. She said, “I think I had a wrong idea about you.” Whether it was the challenge implicit in this, or the thing that people called guilt but was actually just a self-interested wish not to be thought ill of, he was moved to ask her out for pizza.

  What had started
their fight was the olive-drab jacket he wore to the pizzeria. For an antiwar protest the previous spring, he’d fashioned an electrical-tape peace sign for the back of it, and Sharon didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand the college peaceniks. Every morning, she said, she woke up afraid of hearing that her brother had been killed or maimed in Vietnam. Mike wasn’t a reader, he enjoyed hunting and fishing and had no ambition beyond inheriting the farm, but he was the kindest and most honorable person she’d ever known, and the peaceniks had only contempt for him. Who were they to spit on a person like her brother? They all had their student deferments, they got to smoke pot and have sex while people like her brother were dying, and they weren’t even grateful. They thought they were morally superior. Lucky white kids from the suburbs flashing their peace signs while other kids fought a war for them: it made her sick.

  Clem’s first response to her tirade had been condescension. Being female, and sentimental, Sharon didn’t seem to realize how grotesquely immoral the war was, or that her brother had been free to refuse to serve in it. He, Clem, in her brother’s place, would have refused to serve. But Sharon wouldn’t budge. Her brother loved his country and was a real man; when duty called, he reported. And what about all the boys from Black slums and Indian reservations her brother was serving with? They didn’t even know that not serving was an option. The result was that people like Clem got to be both safe and self-righteous.

  “What was your lottery number?” she asked him.

  “Terrible. Nineteen.”

  “So somebody right now is in the jungle because your parents sent you to college.”

  “But I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”

  “It’s the same thing. Somebody is there because you’re not. Somebody like Mike. You’re all about the ‘grotesque immorality’ of the war. What about the grotesque immorality of making poor people and uneducated people and Black people be the ones to fight it? Why isn’t that equally grotesque? Why aren’t you protesting that?”