Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  He pressed his palm between her legs, testing the spring of the curls beneath the flannel. He moved up for a closer view while he pulled down her pajama bottoms. Oh, the beauty of what he uncovered! The inexhaustibleness of its invitation! It was true that, if he’d been as forthright in his preferences as she was in hers, he might have asked her to leave her pajama top on. He was on friendly enough terms with her breasts, but he’d gained access to them so early on that he hadn’t had time to become properly fascinated with them, as a treasure to dream of uncovering, and they’d seemed a bit irrelevant ever since. He liked them better in a bra. Best of all would be to have her top-clad and bottomless, like a collegiate female faun, Honors student above the waist, creature of his wettest dreams below. But he’d never found a way to express this preference uninsultingly, and she seemed to prefer being fully naked.

  She shed her pajama top and tugged on the shoulders of his shirt. She liked him naked, too—considered it especially bad form to leave one’s socks on—but this morning he didn’t feel like undressing. He’d had a taste of aggression and felt like doing what he wanted, even if he couldn’t tell her what to do. He had an image of a soldier fucking in his boots, defended by his clothes. When she tugged again on his shirt, he resisted.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  He set about the only work for which he’d lately had ambition. Spread out before the horizon of her rib cage, sloping into the valley of her navel and up to a grove of wiry curls too close to be in focus, were the mobile white plains of her belly. Her hands, to either side, gripped the bed as she regulated contact with his tongue. He was amazed by his body’s reserves of energy; it spoke to the primacy of reproductive function to an organism. No matter how he’d lashed his brain cells with cigarettes, they’d been too spent to pull weight in his final pages on Scipio Africanus, and yet here were the muscles of his neck and tongue, indefatigable, soldiering forward on the promise of a reward accruing not even to them but to his penis. His neck postponed its aching, his temples their pounding with champagne, his eyes the resumption of their burning, until he could obey the deeper animal imperative and release its boiling madness.

  She gave a sharp cry. For a moment, rocked by its own galvanism, her body seemed to dismember itself. He lingered to push his tongue as far into her as it would reach, to taste what his penis couldn’t, and then moved up to look into her eyes. They were beady, the darkest of browns; her smile was lopsided, as if he’d broken it. He put a pillow under her butt, the way she liked it, and pulled his pants halfway down. It bordered on miraculous how completely her little person accommodated him. He lowered his full weight onto her and lay still, trying to etch into his memory the feel of total penetration. He wondered how many months or years it would be before he next felt it with someone.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yeah. Just pausing.”

  “You know what I was imagining? That we were together in Paris. That we got caught in a thunderstorm and went back to our hotel room soaking wet. I was imagining you making me come while the rain came down harder and harder on the boulevards.”

  Even the word come could not overcome the turnoff of picturing them in Paris. The four of them standing in line to get inside the Louvre. Becky tall and clean and radiantly good-natured, his mother studying a guidebook and making some wry comment about it—he hated to imagine Sharon in that picture. He hated to imagine himself, condemned every morning to lie in a heavily fucked-upon French bed where everything was hot and red and sleep-depriving, with crusted semen on the sheets, condemned to wishing he could be wherever Becky was instead, maybe downstairs in a breakfast room with fresh napkins and baguettes, she and their mother having some lively conversation that he would have liked to be a part of. Becky he never regretted being near, because nearness was all he wanted from his sister. When he pictured himself and Sharon entering that Parisian breakfast room, stinking of après-sex cigarettes, their eyes red and puffy-lidded, the glowing image of Becky receded and faded like an angel’s. Even in the real world, he was losing her—had been losing her ever since the night in September when Sharon had taken off her bathrobe. The more Sharon was in the picture, the less Becky could be. His penis was deflating.

  “Oh, baby,” Sharon said. “You must be so tired.”

  He nodded, glad to let her think that.

  “I have an idea, though,” she said. “I was thinking we could both come back here right after Christmas. Do you want to do that? We could spend all day reading ahead for classes and be together every night. I don’t want you to feel like you’re falling behind with your work because of me.”

  He’d burned through all his glucose. The imperative had dwindled to nothing.

  “But that’s not the thing I wanted to tell you.” She repositioned herself to look into his eyes. “Can I tell you something important? I’ve been wanting to say it for weeks now.”

  He waited with dull dread.

  “I’m in love with you,” she said. “Am I allowed to say that?”

  It was exactly as he’d feared.

  “I am so in love with you, baby.”

  It was exactly as he’d feared, but somehow the effect was the opposite of what he might have expected. A wave of masculine well-being was sweeping through his body. The knowledge that he fully possessed this person, the thrill of that conquest, and something more savage, the sudden enhancement of his capacity to inflict pain on her: it was hitting him like a full-bore shot of testosterone. The imperative stormed back to life, and he unthinkingly obeyed it, with a thrust. It was astonishing how different it felt to be inside a woman he’d caused to fall in love with him, how comprehensively his genital nerves now felt connected to her. It was almost as if, until this moment, he’d never had sex. He gave another thrust. The pleasure was outrageous.

  “So, what do you think?” she said.

  “I think you’re amazing,” he said, humping away.

  “Okay.” She faintly nodded, as if to herself.

  He paused and lowered his face to kiss the mouth that had spoken the magic words. She turned her face away from his.

  “Why didn’t you want to take your clothes off today?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like it might be exciting, somehow.”

  Again the dubious little nod.

  “Sharon,” he pleaded. He knew that a conversation needed to be had, and that it would not be a good conversation, but his very strong preference was to have it just a little bit later. By way of expressing this preference, he shut his eyes and moved his hips again. The pleasure was undiminished, but she immediately spoke again.

  “I want you to say you’re in love with me, too.”

  He opened his eyes. As far back as September, when the needle of his mind had stuck in a groove playing Sharon, he’d had the impulse to say he was in love with her. He’d suppressed it because he was following her lead in everything and had gathered that romantic declarations weren’t comme il faut. It was true that, after his crisis at Thanksgiving, he’d been glad he’d kept his mouth shut earlier. But now he could feel, in his own nerves, how transformative it might be for Sharon to hear the magic words from him. It was so transformative, in fact, that he felt he could speak them with some honesty.

  “You don’t even have to mean it,” she said. “I’m just curious how it feels to hear it.”

  He nodded and said, “I’m not in love with you.”

  It took him a moment to realize that his tongue had slipped. He truly hadn’t meant to say that. He was aghast.

  “Say you are, though,” she said.

  “I was trying to. It just came out wrong.”

  “To put it mildly!”

  He extended his arms, looked down at their furry point of contact, and shook his head against a bitter truth in him. “I … I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I can say it.”

  Her face twisted up as if the truth had scalded it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.
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br />   “It’s okay.” She managed a wry smile. “I tried.”

  “God, Sharon, I am so sorry.”

  “It’s really okay. You can go ahead and finish.”

  She was generous to the last, but even in his supremely inflamed state he understood the wrongness of taking more pleasure from her now. He started to withdraw.

  “No, do it,” she said, trying to pull him back in. “Just forget I said that thing.”

  “I can’t.”

  She was weeping. “Please do it. I want you to.”

  He couldn’t. He remembered the sex talk, or what had passed for a sex talk, that his mother had given him before he left for college. Whatever else he might hear on campus, she’d said, sex without commitment was empty and ruinous. This was the ancient wisdom. As with the parietal rules, he was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid. Beneath him was a weeping girl to prove it.

  Getting out of bed made him conscious of the obscenity of his erection. While Sharon lay and wept, he yanked up his jeans and put on his peacoat. In the hippie bedroom below them, a familiar bass line started up, the same Who album they’d been hearing for weeks. He shook Sharon’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and struck a match. Back in September, he’d tried one of her Parliaments and liked it. By the time he’d realized that smoking, like sex, did not in itself confer manhood, he was wretchedly addicted.

  “Can I make you some toast?” he said.

  No answer. Sharon had pulled the bedspread onto herself and was facing the wall, her crying detectable only as a faint shaking of her curls. Her bed was a double mattress on a box spring, her desk a hollow-core door on sawhorses, her bookshelves pine one-by-tens with cinder-block supports. He remembered his first sight of her books, the great quantity of French-language paperbacks, the austere whiteness and uniformity of their spines. Back then, three months ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything sexier in a woman than high intelligence. Even now, if he and she had been all mind and genitals and nothing else, he might have imagined a future for them.

  He wondered if he should simply leave now—whether this would be the kind thing to do or the cowardly thing. He’d planned to break up with her by letter because he wanted to speak to her mind-to-mind, rationally, well clear of the inviting pit. But now he’d hurt her, and she was crying. Maybe the situation spoke for itself? Maybe further talk would only be hurtful? He sat down on the edge of her bed, drew smoke into his abused lungs, and waited to see what he would do. Again the existential freedom, to speak or not to speak. Beneath the floor, the Who continued their thumping.

  “I’m not coming back next semester,” he heard himself say. “I’m dropping out.”

  Sharon rolled over immediately and stared at him, her cheeks wet.

  “I’m giving up my deferment,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever they want me to do, which probably means Vietnam.”

  “That’s insane!”

  “Really? You were the one who said it was the right thing to do.”

  “No, no, no.” She sat up and hugged the bedspread to her chest. “It’s already unbearable that Mike is there. You can’t do that to me.”

  “I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it because it’s right. My lottery number is nineteen. It’s just like you said—I should have gone already.”

  “God, Clem, no. That is insane.”

  In the year of his childhood when his genius brother had been old enough to play chess and young enough to be beaten, Clem had always, before moving to checkmate, asked Perry if he was sure about the last move he’d made. He’d considered this a gracious question for an older brother to ask, until one day Perry had choked up with tears—as a little kid, Perry had always been crying about one thing or another—and told Clem to stop rubbing it in. It was unclear to him now why he’d imagined that Sharon’s response would be any different.

  “Vietnam won’t kill me,” he said. “We’re out of ground combat.”

  “When did you start thinking this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Is it because I said I was in love with you?”

  “No.”

  “It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love—oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.”

  He took a last puff on his cigarette and carefully mashed it out in her ashtray. “It wasn’t anything you said. I already sent the letter.”

  She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “I mailed it on the way over here.”

  “No! No!” She began to beat on him with her little fists, not painfully. The sex scent rising off her and the aggression of his speech act inflamed him afresh. He thought of the time he’d staggered around her room with her impaled on him, how her smallness had made this excellent thing practicable. Fearful of falling back into the pit after so nearly breaking free of it, he grabbed her wrists and made her look at him.

  “You’re a wonderful person,” he said. “You’ve totally changed my life.”

  “That’s a good-bye!” she wailed. “I don’t want a good-bye!”

  “I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you everything.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Can’t you see this isn’t equal? I love who you are, but I’m not in love with you.”

  “Now I wish I’d never met you!”

  She threw herself onto the foot of the bed. The pity he felt was infinitely realer than the idea of being a soldier. He pitied her for being so small and loving him, and for the logical bind in which he’d put her, and for the irony of her having made him the person who would leave her, by introducing him to more existential forms of knowledge. He wanted to stay and explain, to talk about Camus, to remind her of the necessity of exercising moral choice, to make her understand how indebted he was to her. But he didn’t trust his animal self.

  He leaned over and pressed his face into her hair. “I do love you,” he said.

  “If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave,” she replied in a clear, angry voice.

  He shut his eyes and was instantly half asleep. He forced them open. “I’ve got to go pack up my room.”

  “You’re breaking my heart. I hope you know that.”

  The only way out of the pit was to stand up, be strong, and walk away. When he opened her door and heard her cry out—“Wait!”—it nearly broke his own heart. Shutting the door behind him, he was seized by a spasming that he was surprised to recognize as sobbing. It was wholly autonomic, as uncontrollable as vomiting but less familiar—he hadn’t cried since the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. In a salty blur, he ran down a damply carpeted flight of stairs, past a thudding mass of Who sound in which the treble now was audible, down through a sharp smell of morning pot ignited in the common rooms, and out into cold, gray Urbana.

  Five hours later, at the bus station, where snow had begun to fall, he handed over his duffel bag and his mammoth suitcase, the lugging of which across campus he’d taken as a foretaste of basic training, and claimed one of the last free seats on the Chicago bus. It was an aisle seat deep in the smoking section, with a baby shrieking in the seat directly behind it. Clem was missing Sharon so much, was aching so steadily at the lost hope of any future meeting, was feeling so persistently close to further tears, that he might as well have been in love with her. Though greater concentrations of smoke than were already in the bus could hardly be achieved, he took a cigarette from his peacoat, flipped up the lid of his seat’s ashtray, and tried to suppress his emotions with nicotine. The monstrous job of breaking Sharon’s heart was behind him, but there was still more work ahead of him today.

  Camus was wholly admirable, and his thinking made
sense when Clem and Sharon discussed it. When Clem was alone, though, he could see a problem with Camus. Perhaps because he was French, Camus was a closet Cartesian—he assumed the existence of a unitary consciousness that rationally deliberated moral choices, when in fact a person’s real motives were complex and uncontrollable. Clem, borrowing from Sharon, had a good moral argument for giving up his student deferment. But if the moral argument were all he’d had, he might not have written to the draft board. Other strong choices were available. For example, he could have worked to raise public awareness of the immorality of deferments; he could have broken up with Sharon simply because their relationship made it hard for him to study. The particular choice he’d made was aimed squarely at his father.

  For the longest time, for more than sixteen years, Clem had admired his father precisely for his strength. In the beginning, in Indiana, where the parish house had been decaying faster than his father could keep up with its maintenance, Clem had been awed, even frightened, by the roping and contraction of his father’s large muscles when he swung a pickax or drove a nail; by the torrents of sweat that ran off him when he scythed weeds on a hot August day. The sweat had a unique, indefinable scent—not stinky, more like the smell of a young toadstool or fresh rain, but still upsetting to Clem in its intensity. (It was a revelation, much later, when he worked for the nursery in New Prospect, to catch the exact same smell from his own soaking T-shirts. As far as he knew, no one in the world except him and his father produced that smell. He wondered, indeed, if anyone else could smell it.) One push from his father at a swing set had sent him so high that he clutched the chains in fear of falling off. One mild flick of his father’s wrist, and a baseball came at Clem so hard it stung his palm through his glove. And the yelling. His father’s voice, raised in anger (always at Clem, never at Becky), was a sound so blasting that a spanking, which his father did not believe in giving children, might almost have been preferable.

  In Chicago, he’d come to appreciate his father’s moral strength as well. When he read To Kill a Mockingbird, in junior high, he recognized Atticus Finch and felt proud. His political views were a perfect replica of his father’s, and they must have been authentic, because they survived his mother’s praise of them. He shared his father’s abhorrence of the Vietnam War and his belief that the struggle for civil rights was the defining issue of the day. During his father’s campaign to desegregate New Prospect’s public swimming pool, he went ringing doorbells by himself, handing out literature and repeating verbatim his father’s words about racial prejudice. Although he didn’t have his father’s scope of action, didn’t have a pulpit to preach from, didn’t ride a bus to Alabama, he followed his example in smaller ways. The jocks at Lifton Central who persecuted the faggots, the wussies, soon learned to keep away from him. When he saw someone weak being picked on, he became so hot with anger and so numbed to pain that he could hold his own in a fight. He mostly wasn’t friends with the kids he defended—they were social pariahs for a reason. He was just doing what his father had taught him was right.