Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I think Russ lied to me at breakfast,” Marion said now, to please her paid friend, who took each fresh complaint about Russ as a sign of progress toward—what? A realistic recognition that her marriage was dead? “The minute he came downstairs, I could tell he was excited. His legs kind of waggle when he’s happy, he’s like a little boy. Or like Elvis—he can’t keep his hips still. He was wearing the shirt I got him for his birthday, which I knew would look nice on him, the blue in it picks up the blue in his eyes, and that seemed strange, because all he’s doing today is pastoral visits and a delivery run to the church in Chicago and an open house tonight, which he would have changed his clothes for anyway. So I asked him if he had any other plans, and he said no, and I started wondering about the delivery, because Frances Cottrell is in that circle. Frances—”

  “The young widow,” Sophie said.

  “Exactly. She’s going to wreck someone’s marriage, and now she’s in the service circle Russ leads in the inner city, and so I asked him who else was making the delivery with him. And it was like he was expecting the question. He practically interrupted me to answer. He said, ‘Just Kitty Reynolds.’ Kitty’s in the circle, too. She’s retired now—she used to teach at the high school. The thing was how quickly Russ answered. And then the shirt, and his legs waggling, so.”

  “So.”

  “Well, he never mentions her. Frances. I happened to see her in the parking lot one day when they were leaving for the city. The only time he’s ever referred to her was when I asked him about her that night.”

  “She’s young.”

  “Younger. She has a boy in high school.”

  “Young is young,” Sophie said. “Costa likes to talk about the first warm day of spring, when the young women all come out in their summer dresses. It lifts a man’s spirits to be around attractive younger women. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I like seeing those summer dresses myself.”

  It was interesting how Sophie, who played the prosecutor when Marion defended Russ, turned around and argued for tolerance when Marion impugned him. She wondered if this was a subtle therapeutic strategy or just a way to keep her coming back every week with twenty dollars.

  “I guess I haven’t reached that higher plane,” she said irritably. “You know what I think made me eat the cookies? I think Becky was one too many happy people to handle in one morning.”

  “You preferred it when Russ was suffering.”

  “Maybe. Yes. Did we somehow determine that I’m not a bad person? If we did, I must have missed it.”

  “You feel you’re a bad person.”

  “I know I’m a bad person. You don’t have any idea how bad.”

  Sophie’s smile gave way to a more censorious expression. The timing of her therapeutic frowns was comically predictable. Marion felt infantilized by it.

  “I could have eaten the whole batch of cookies,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t was there wouldn’t have been any left for Judson. But I definitely could have eaten all of them. Six pounds in three months of starving myself, and it’s not as if anyone has noticed. It’s not as if I deserve to be thin. The disgusting thing I see in the mirror every morning is what I deserve.”

  Sophie glanced at the spiral-bound notepad on her little side table. She hadn’t written on the notepad since the summer. There was a hint of threat in the glance.

  “It’s not just me, by the way,” Marion said. “I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. If I really loved Russ, shouldn’t I be rejoicing to see him happy again? Even if it meant him being with the fair young widow and lying to me about it? I don’t really want him to be happy. I only want him not to leave me. When I saw him in that shirt this morning, I wished I’d never given it to him. If suffering is what it takes for him to stay married to me, I’d rather that he suffer.”

  “You say that,” Sophie said, “but I’m not sure you believe it.”

  “Also, for your information,” Marion said, her voice rising, “I’m paying you money I can’t afford to be here, so I don’t really care to hear about how well adjusted you and your husband are.”

  “You may have misunderstood what I was saying.”

  “No, I understood you very well.”

  Sophie glanced again at her notepad. “What did you hear me to be saying?”

  “That you’re not depressed. That you have a happy marriage. That you have no idea what it’s like to look at a girl in a summer dress and wish a terrible life on her, a life as terrible as your own. That you’re lucky enough not to know how lucky you are. That you’ve never had to find out how selfish all human love is, how bad all people are, and how the only love you can be sure isn’t selfish is loving God, which isn’t much of a consolation prize, but it’s all we’ve really got.”

  Sophie drew a slow breath. “You’re giving me a lot today,” she said. “I’d like to understand better where it’s coming from.”

  “I hate Christmas. I can’t lose weight.”

  “Yes. I’m sure that’s a disappointment. But I’m sensing something else here.”

  Marion turned her face toward the door. She thought of the money in her hosiery drawer and the ugly cheap cassette recorder she’d bought for Perry. It wasn’t too late to go out and get him a set of good stereo components, or a really nice camera, something he would truly enjoy having, something to atone in some tiny way for the blackness she’d put in his head by being his mother. The other kids would be all right, but she was very much afraid that Perry wouldn’t, and it was unbearable to know that the instability she could sense in him had come from her. If she kept seeing Sophie, the money would be gone by summer, and all she’d have to show for it would be the biweekly moments when Sophie, with an odd backhanded motion, without looking, reached behind her and opened a credenza drawer to fish out another handful of free physician samples of Sopor™, methaqualone, 300 mg. The samples were the one indisputably useful thing Marion got for her twenty dollars a week. A prescription would have been cheaper, but she hadn’t wanted to be a woman with a prescription. She’d preferred to pretend that her anxious depression was temporary and the drug samples were an ad hoc way of managing it. Perry’s most worrisome symptoms had abated, and in the fall he’d joined the church’s youth fellowship, and she’d allowed herself to believe that Sophie was right—that the problem was her marriage. She’d believed that Sophie could help her get better. But she wasn’t getting better. The Sopors did help her sleep more soundly than being confessed once had, but at least in the confessional she’d been able to speak the worst truths about herself. She could be as crazy and unhappy as she wanted without being expected to fight to save her marriage, which she now believed there was no saving, because she’d never deserved it in the first place, because she’d obtained it by fraud. What she deserved was punishment.

  “Marion?” Sophie said.

  “It’s not working.”

  “What isn’t working?”

  “You. This. Me. None of it.”

  “The holidays are very hard. The end of the year is hard. But the feelings that get stirred up can be useful to work with.”

  “A breakthrough,” Marion said bitterly. “Are we having another breakthrough?”

  “You feel you’re a bad person,” Sophie prompted. Twenty dollars was the bottom of her fee scale, but it evidently still bought Marion the right to be hateful, as she never allowed herself to be with anyone else, and to receive pleasant smiles in return.

  “It’s a fact, not a feeling,” she said.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  Marion closed her eyes and didn’t answer. After a while, she began to wonder what would happen if she continued to say nothing, stayed silent for the rest of their “hour,” and then left the office without another word. She had enough Sopors to last another week, and she was very tempted to refuse to give Sophie anything more to work with, to make the dumpling just sit there and look at a patient whose eyes were clo
sed, to punish her for not having helped her get better, to drive home how little she was better; to be the person who was withholding, not the wife and mother being withheld from. Each potentially therapeutic minute she stayed silent was another forty cents wasted, and the deliberate waste of minutes was tempting in the same self-spiting way that eating cookies had been. The only waste more evilly satisfying than to say nothing for the rest of the “hour” would have been to be silent from the moment she sat down. She wished she’d done that.

  After several minutes of silence, marked only by the whir of dental equipment down the hall, she gave Sophie a half-lidded peek and saw that her eyes, too, were closed, her expression neutral, her hands loosely clasped on her lap, as if to demonstrate her powers of professional patience. Well, two could play at that game.

  In the summer, in the early rush of their paid friendship, Marion had told Sophie the truth about certain things she’d outright lied to Russ about, or had omitted to mention and now could never tell him. The principal facts were that she’d spent fourteen weeks in a mental hospital in Los Angeles in 1941, following a severe psychotic episode, and that, contrary to what she’d told Russ in Arizona, soon after she’d met him, she had not had a brief, failed marriage to an unsuitable man in Los Angeles. There really had been a man, who really had been married, albeit not to her, and she’d felt obliged to warn Russ that she was previously used goods. She’d made her “confession” in a legitimate storm of tears, fearing that her having been “married” and “divorced” would cause her beautiful good Mennonite boy to recoil in horror and refuse to see her again. Thankfully, Russ’s forgiving heart and his sexual attraction to her had carried the day. (It was his more sternly Mennonite parents who later recoiled.) She’d believed that she’d become a new person in Arizona, firmly grounded in reality by her conversion to Catholicism, and that the ghastly events in Los Angeles no longer mattered. By the time she gave Russ half the truth of half her story, she’d stopped going to confession.

  It wasn’t until she found her way into Sophie’s box, more than twenty years later, that she realized how much she’d needed to unburden herself. Because patient confidentiality was as strict as the confessional’s, she could have safely gone ahead and told the dumpling everything, but some things were only for her and God (and, once upon a time, in Arizona, God’s priestly intercessor) to know. The absolution Sophie had given her was not of her sins but of her fear that she was manic-depressive. Apparently, she was merely chronically depressed, with obsessional and mildly schizoid tendencies. Compared to manic depression, these terms were a comfort.

  Up to a point, the story she’d told Sophie in the summer, while Sophie jotted on her notepad, was the same story she’d told the young Russ. It began with her father, Ruben, the capable son of a German Jewish widower in the San Francisco shoe-repair trade, who’d attended Berkeley around the time of the great earthquake. Rooting for Berkeley’s football team, the Golden Bears, Ruben had gotten the idea of starting his own business to manufacture athletic uniforms. The nation had gone crazy for high-school and collegiate sports, and after he finished college he had some success selling uniforms to high schools. The universities, however, were controlled by men from old California families who conducted all their business in the same Jew-excluding milieu. Marion reckoned it was partly cold business calculation, partly social ambition, and presumably some modicum of sexual attraction that led Ruben to pursue an “artistic” young woman from that milieu. Marion’s mother, Isabel, was a fourth-generation Californian from a family whose once-extensive property holdings, in the city and Sonoma County, had largely been squandered—poorly husbanded, inopportunely liquidated, charitably donated to garner status points, inadvisably divided among shiftless offspring—by the time she met Ruben. One of Isabel’s brothers ruthlessly managed what was left of the family’s land in Sonoma, the other was a landscape painter of scant means and little note. Isabel herself had vague musical aspirations, but all she actually seemed to have done with herself was appreciate culture in San Francisco, ride around in the cars of richer friends, and spend long weekends at their country houses. How exactly Ruben found his way into one of those houses, Marion never learned, but within two years he’d parlayed an advantageous marriage into contracts with the Stanford and Cal athletic departments. By the time Marion was born, he was the largest manufacturer of athletic gear west of the Rocky Mountains. He built Isabel a three-story house in Pacific Heights, and it was there, as a rich girl (for a while), that Marion had grown up.

  In her memory, the house was darker than a Catholic sky. Thick curtains further dimmed the fog-enfeebled daylight falling on the heavy, stained-oak furniture then in style. Her mother seemed to view both her and Shirley as aberrations that her body had unaccountably twice housed for nine months, their births a regrettable interruption of her social life but otherwise a relief on the order of passing a kidney stone. Her father’s heart might have had room for two daughters if the first one, Shirley, hadn’t filled it inordinately. His obsessionality (the dumpling’s word) served him well in his business, Western All-Sport, to which he devoted sixty and seventy hours a week, but at home it served to make Marion feel invisible. Ruben’s darling was Shirley. When he happened to look at Marion directly, it was often to ask, “Where’s your sister?” Shirley was the really pretty one, even as an infant, and took his adoration as her due. On Christmas morning, she didn’t tear through her immense haul of presents with a normal child’s greed. She unwrapped them like a wary retailer, carefully inspecting each of them for flaws of manufacture, and sorted them by category, as if checking them against a mental invoice. The repeated chiming of her voice—“Thank you Daddy”—was like the chinging of a cash register. Marion took refuge from the excess by absorbing herself in a single doll, a single toy, while her mother yawned with open boredom.

  Christmas for her mother was an enforced separation from the four friends with whom she did everything. The friends were from old families with less depleted fortunes, and, although three of them had husbands and children of their own, all five were in love with themselves as a unit. They’d been the marvelous fivesome of the Class of 1912 at Lowell, where they’d jointly decided that, if the world had a problem with their marvelousness, it was the world’s problem, not theirs, and for the rest of their lives they never tired of lunching together, shopping together, attending lectures and theater together, reading books together, advancing worthy civic causes together. Marion came to see that her mother’s place in the fivesome had always been the most precarious—she’d begun with the least money and then married a Jew—and therefore the most fanatically defended. Isabel lived in fear of being the fifth wheel, and at Christmas she fretted about the three friends whose husbands were also good friends, the non-fivesome gatherings that might be happening without her.

  Spoiling Shirley wasn’t the only thing her father couldn’t stop doing. Beginning when Marion was six or seven, he never seemed to sleep at all. Awakening at a small hour, she could hear him playing ragtime, self-taught, on the piano two floors below. He was also a self-taught architect and spent other nights alone with his drafting tools, forever redesigning an even bigger house. At work, he bought businesses above and below him—his obsessive goal was to open a nationwide chain of sporting-goods stores—and he made more speculative investments as well, employing his special insight as a stock picker, his special gift for well-timed margin purchases. He smoked enormous cigars and wore a coonskin coat to Cal football games, sometimes taking Marion to sit with him in his fifty-yard-line seats, since Shirley and her mother had no interest. He talked nonstop throughout the game, in a technical language mostly beyond a seven-year-old’s comprehension. He knew the name of every Golden Bear player and carried a little notebook in which he drew Xs and Os to show Marion how a play had worked, or to design new plays that he intended to show Cal’s head coach, Nibs Price, whose job, he confided to her, he could have done better. He never behaved rudely, but his voice was loud an
d excited, and Marion was uncomfortably aware that other fans kept looking at him.

  How like a mental illness a nation’s economy was! She later wondered how much longer, if the stock market hadn’t crashed when it did, her father’s manic period might have lasted, and whether, if his illness had set in later, he could have managed to be manic in the midst of a depression. These hypotheticals were hard to entertain, because the coincidence of the market’s crash and her father’s crash seemed so inevitable in hindsight. In the weeks following Black Tuesday, he duly scrambled to salvage what he could of his highly leveraged holdings, but his voice, on the phone in his study, from which he communicated with New York before going to the office, sounded the way it had when he’d made funeral arrangements for his father. Marion came home from school and found him in the parlor in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, staring at the cold grate of the fireplace. Sometimes he spoke to her about the singular misfortune that had befallen him, and the little she understood of margin purchases and mining futures, as an eight-year-old, was still more than her mother and her older sister cared to know. Her mother was scarcer than ever, and Shirley was coldly disappointed by the diminished flow of goods to her, the meagerness of Christmas in 1929, the vaporization of the Larkspur weekend house in whose pool she’d been assured she would be swimming the following summer.