Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I only brought twenty dollars.”

  “Well.” Sophie smiled pleasantly. “You can think of it as a Christmas present, if you want.”

  Marion shuddered.

  “The holiday seems to have a particular association for you,” Sophie said. “Will you tell me what it is?”

  Marion shut her eyes again. The Christmas she’d spent alone in Santa Monica later seemed like the last day that she and the outside world had been in balance. In the first weeks of 1940, storm after chaotic storm dumped rain on Southern California. The streets were black and oily with it on the evening she stayed late at Lerner Motors to type up papers on the preposterous sale that Bradley Grant had made. Sideways rain was slapping the window of her boardinghouse room long after midnight, when she wrote in her diary, Something awful has happened and I don’t know what to do. It must never, ever happen again.

  Bradley Grant was the star salesman at Lerner. Although Marion was lonely, she’d taken to eating her lunchtime sandwich in an unused room in the parts department. There, she at least had the undivided companionship of a book, until Bradley Grant began intruding on her. Bradley was fifteen years older than she was, but he had the fatless body of a teenager and a face whose handsomeness was hard to judge; there was something cartoonlike about the stretchiness of his features, especially his wide mouth. When he saw Marion with a volume of Maupassant stories, he invaded her lunch-hour sanctuary to hold forth on Maupassant. He was an avid reader, a literary man by training. He struck her as being most interested in himself, so overflowing with words that he had to troll the parts department to find an outlet for them, but one day he brought her his own copy of Homage to Catalonia, by the English writer George Orwell. He was distressed about the rise of Fascism in Europe, about which she knew essentially nothing. She duly read the Orwell and began to pay attention to the front page of the newspaper, in order to seem less ignorant to Bradley. One day, he remarked that a girl as intelligent and pretty as Marion ought to be in the front office, and the very next day she was transferred to the front office. At Lerner, the lesser salesmen were rank perspirers, changing their undershirts at midday, afraid of the pink slip every Friday, but Bradley Grant was so valuable to the dealership that only the owner, Harry Lerner, could overrule him. After her transfer, Marion continued to eat her lunchtime sandwich in the back. Becoming a front-office typist and file fetcher was hardly her idea of being discovered.

  On the day a person was born, only one date on the calendar, her birthday, was significant, but as she proceeded through life other dates became permanently exalted or befouled, the date her father killed himself, the date she married, the dates her children were born, until the calendar was densely checkered with significance. On the evening of January 24, a young man in a dripping fedora walked into the Lerner showroom shortly before closing time. A lesser salesman sidled up to him and got the brush-off. At Lerner, they called any man who came inside to flaunt his automotive knowledge, or to be fawned over for a couple of minutes, or just to get out of the weather, with no intention of buying, a Jake Barnes. Bradley Grant, who’d coined the name, and who’d already closed three sales that day, strolled up to Marion’s desk with an apple and ate it carefully while he studied the young Jake Barnes. “I like his shoes,” he said, dropping the apple core in her wastebasket. “Is there somewhere you need to be?” There was never anyplace Marion needed to be. Within a minute, on the floor, Bradley had a hand on the Jake Barnes’s shoulder and was helping him into a brand-new Buick Century. She watched Bradley’s features stretch into cartoons of astonishment, indifference, compassion, stern admonition. With a gliding tread that let him hurry without seeming to hurry, he returned to her and told her to keep the showroom open and a manager on duty. “Jake and I are making a little cash run,” he said, gliding away again. An hour later, he and the young buyer were back on the floor and Marion was typing up the paperwork.

  “How easy was that?” Bradley exulted when the buyer was gone. He was bumping one fist on the other like a dice roller. “What do you want to bet I can’t move another car today?” His energy reminded Marion of her father’s in the pre-crash years. They were the only ones left in the office, and he couldn’t sell a car without authorization from a manager. “There’s a T-bone steak in it for you,” he said to Marion. “What do you want to bet?” Before she could answer, he grabbed an umbrella and ran out of the showroom. From the front door, smoking a cigarette, she saw him working the cars braking at the corner of Hope and Pico, saw drivers rolling down their windows, saw him gesturing at their vehicles and then at the dealership. It was insane, and she didn’t know who he was doing it for, himself or her, but watching him brought her latent dread to the surface. Later, in Arizona, she came to think that the sight of Bradley in the rain, with his umbrella, had been a premonition of pure evil. People who weren’t seriously Catholic didn’t understand that Satan wasn’t a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind.

  “This gentleman has come to the sensible realization that he no longer wishes to drive a Pontiac,” Bradley said, ushering into the showroom a heavyset bald man who smelled of drink. It had taken him less than half an hour to find a customer, but he was soaked with sideways rain and street spray. He asked Marion to get the gentleman a cup of coffee while—he winked at her—he had a word with his manager, and then he asked her to pull the keys for the cherry-red ’35 Oldsmobile coupe for which the gentleman wished to trade in his Pontiac. The gentleman, he added, would be paying by personal check. The two men returned to the back lot, where the red car was parked. Marion might have walked out and let Bradley close the sale by himself if Roy Collins hadn’t made her such a rule-breaker. When the sucker drove away in his Oldsmobile, Bradley produced a flat pint bottle of whiskey and two clean coffee cups. Perched on a seat warmed by the sucker’s fat butt, at Bradley’s desk, she could see a small studio photograph of Bradley and his wife and their two little boys. She wondered if the T-bone steak was still coming or if he’d forgotten. She lit another cigarette and sipped the whiskey. “I sure hope that check doesn’t bounce.”

  “It won’t,” Bradley said, “but I’ll cover it if it does. Even without it, we did better than break even.”

  “His car was worth more?”

  “It’s one year old! I could have offered him a straight swap, but then he would have started thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute…’ So I made up a number and let him take me down to half of it.”

  “That was mean,” she said.

  “Not at all. Half the fun of owning a superior brand of car is knowing you could pay for it.”

  “You were doing him a favor.”

  “It’s psychology. This job is all psychology. My problem is I’m so damned good at it. Did you see me in the street? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  She shook her head and took another sip of whiskey.

  “It’s like a compulsion,” Bradley said. “I’m in it and I can’t get out of it, because I’m so damned good. People know they’re being suckered and they let me do it anyway. They come in here, they’ve made a solemn vow to themselves, they’re going to be strong, they’re going to drive a hard bargain. But they only buy a car once a year, or once a decade, or maybe they’ve never bought a car, and here’s me who sells cars day in and day out. They have no chance! I’m going to make them weak, and they’re going to go home and lie to their wife. They’re going to tell her they got a great deal. There’s only one red car on the lot, and the guy’s got to have it because it’s red and, goddamn it, there’s only one of them, and what are we going to do tomorrow morning? Get another red car out there. I swear this job is killing my soul.”

  Marion set her cup on his desk, intending to drink no more. She wondered if she should mention food, or simply go home to bed hungry, but the words kept pouring out of Bradley. In college, in Michigan, he said, he’d written plays and published poems in the college magazine, a
nd then he’d come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he’d met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for a living. Ideas came to him in the night, original script ideas—like, during the Spanish Civil War, the daughter of Hitler’s ambassador to Spain is secretly in love with a Republican intelligence officer, the Fascists are holding the officer’s wife and children hostage, he asks the daughter to help them escape from Spain, and she can’t be sure if he really loves her or if he’s only using her to save his family—he had a million ideas, but when was he supposed to work on them? At the end of a day, his soul was too deadened. The only shred of human decency still left in him, the only way he knew he wasn’t the worst person in the world, was how much he loved his boys. They were a weight on him, yeah, a drain on his creative energy, but the responsibility was the only thing standing between him and perdition. Did Marion understand what he was saying? The boys weren’t negotiable. His marriage wasn’t negotiable. He was never leaving Isabelle.

  There was an upsurge in Marion’s dread. “Your wife is named Isabel?”

  The woman in the studio portrait actually looked a little like Isabelle Washburn. She was older and thicker but similarly blond and small-nosed. Marion stared at the picture, and Bradley stood up and came around his desk and crouched at her feet.

  “There’s so much soul in your eyes,” he said. “Your soul is so alive, I see you and I feel like I’m dying. I’m—God! Do you have any idea how much soul there is in you? I look at you and I think I can’t live if I don’t have you, but I know I can’t have you … because … Or unless. Because. Unless. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  No amount of whiskey could have overcome her dread, but she drank what was left in her cup. The view from the street was obstructed by shiny floor models, but there were angles from which a person walking by could see Bradley at her feet in the showroom lights.

  “Say something,” he whispered. “Say anything.”

  “I think I should go home.”

  “Okay.”

  “And maybe find someplace else to work.”

  “God, no. Marion. I’d die if I couldn’t see your face anymore. Please don’t do that. I swear I won’t pester you.”

  It was strange to think that the man crouched at her feet had been having such thoughts about her. He was a fascinating person, but in the end, even if one discounted that he was married, he was just a car salesman. She’d weathered the upwelling of dread with her good sense intact. She made a move to stand up, but Bradley caught one of her hands and held her in place. “I wrote something about you,” he said. “Can I tell you what I wrote?”

  Taking her silence as consent, he recited a poem.

  A woman walks, her name is Marion

  Her hair is dark but smells of bright

  Sun piercing clouds with clarion splendor

  Her eyes downcast but full of light

  And darkness both, her mind a wide sky

  Both serene and threatening: untouchable

  “Who wrote that?” she said.

  “I did.”

  “You wrote that.”

  “It’s the first thing I’ve written since I don’t know when.”

  “You wrote that about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it again.”

  He recited it again, with a bashful sincerity that made him definitely handsome. She was having a delayed reaction to the whiskey, an opening of certain floodgates. The apparent tilting of the showroom floor seemed to prove that the cars had their parking brakes set. Despite having seen Bradley persuade a stranger, twice in three hours, that the stranger wanted something he shouldn’t have wanted, she wondered if he really might have talent as a writer. The subject of his poem was specific, not interchangeable. She herself had felt herself to be dark and light, sky-wide, and he’d made a rhyme with her name.

  “One more time,” she said.

  She thought a third hearing might tell her, for sure, if he had real talent. In fact, it told her nothing, because all she could hear was that he’d written a poem about her. She leaned back in the chair and let the whiskey shut her eyes. “Hoo-eee,” she admitted. The switch in her was in the Off position, which was another way of saying she didn’t care. Her father with a chain around his neck, dead on the bottom of the bay. Her sister uncatchable no matter how Marion might run. She didn’t care.

  When Bradley drew her to her feet and kissed her, it was as if her body were picking up at exactly the oversexed point it had left off with Dick Stabler. It was horrifying how much a man wanting her was what it wanted. She felt she couldn’t press herself against Bradley hard enough, she needed harder pressing, and Bradley gave it to her. He backed her against the immovable weight of a gleaming Cadillac 75 and pressed her where Dick Stabler hadn’t dared to. There was a thing that her hips were capable of doing but hadn’t ever done. To let them do it, to fully relax them, even upright, even in a dress, with Bradley between her knees in his still-damp trousers, felt momentous. Roy Collins, on the eve of her departure from Santa Rosa, had predicted what would happen if she wasn’t careful in Los Angeles. Roy hadn’t used the word slut again, but he’d made it very clear that if Marion got in trouble she could expect no further help from him. And now here she was, opening her legs for a married man. Over Bradley’s head, when he happened to lower it to her neck, she saw the uneven steps the office wall clock was taking toward eleven o’clock, the hour at which she’d be locked out of her rooming house. She was feeling ill with hunger as the whiskey wore off.

  As if putting a bookmark in a novel, she pushed him away and wordlessly moved to get a cigarette. He, too, said nothing while he turned off the bright lights, locked the front door, and led her to his ’37 LaSalle. By the time they reached her house, they had only ten minutes to talk before the night manageress threw the deadbolt.

  She put out the third of the cigarettes she’d chain-smoked. “I don’t see how I’m going to go to work in the morning.”

  “Same as you always do,” he said.

  There was a problem that needed solving before it worsened, but she suspected that the problem had no solution—that she was no stronger than the man who came to Lerner and saw the only red car. Rather than waste her last minutes on pointless talk, she slid over and put her arms around Bradley. The car shook in the gusts of wind and she with it. Inside the house, as soon as she’d shut her door behind her, she touched herself the way she’d learned to in the frustrated aftermath of making out with Dick Stabler. But those had been more innocent days. Now she felt too lonely to concentrate on dispelling her sexual urge, too scared of her badness to surrender to it. She needed to cry instead; and this was the first time the slippage occurred.

  It was one in the morning and she couldn’t account for two hours. Her sad little room, with its nicked and peeling furniture and its smoke-saturated fabrics, its lamp overbright but wrongly positioned for reading in bed, presented itself as a collection of random places that she thought she might have stared at, pushed her face into, banged her forehead against. Her bedspread lay in a heap in a corner. There was no fresh smoke, but her ashtray was upended on her bed, a dirty avalanche of old butts and ashes at the base of the pillow. Her impression was of a person who’d frantically defended herself against evil spirits beating on the window in the form of sideways rain. Now she was painfully hungry, but she appeared to be uninjured. No one in the world is more alone than I, she wrote in her diary.

  The next morning brought a break between storms. She ate a big plate of eggs before she went to work, and the sky above the city, the startling blue gaps between the rushing clouds, was an encouraging reminder of more innocent San Francisco winters. She thought she might be all right if she changed her routine, ate her lunch with the other office girls, and made sure never to be alone again with Bradley Grant. But when she arrived at Lerner and tried to sa
y good morning to her manager, she discovered that the slippage hadn’t left her uninjured.

  Her condition was that she could barely speak. The impulse that should have led to speaking was diverted into swallowing and blushing, a clotted sensation in her chest, an involuntary recollection of opening her legs. All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she’d spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.

  At lunchtime, in the lounge with some other girls, she sat in a posture of friendly attentiveness and tried to listen to their conversation, but her eyes refused to look at whoever was speaking.

  “… on sale at Woolworth’s, you wouldn’t think they’d…”

  “… an inch too wide to fit, how on earth do you measure it three times and get…”

  “… me to the premiere last Thursday, he knows the guy who…”

  “… but then your hands smell like orange all day, even if you wash them…”

  “… Marion?”

  Without raising her eyes, she turned toward the girl, Anne, who’d said her name. Anne was the one who’d invited her to Christmas with her family. Anne was kind.

  “I’m sorry.” Despite great effort to breathe, Marion’s voice was choked. “What did you say?”

  “What happened last night?” Anne repeated with a kind smile.

  “Oh.” Marion’s face burned. “Oh.”

  “Mr. Peters said Bradley was still selling at nine o’clock.”

  She thought her head might explode. “I’m so tired,” she found that she had said.

  “I bet you are,” Anne said.

  “What … do you mean?”

  “I don’t know where that man gets his energy. He’s like a selling fiend.”

  The lounge was a minefield of female eyes on her. She tried to say more but quickly realized it was hopeless. All she could do was stand up and go back to her desk. Behind her, in her imagination, there ensued an appalled discussion of her sluttiness.