Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  She went to work in the steno pool at a property-management company where a former Lerner salesman, a friend of Bradley’s, worked. The friend found her an efficiency apartment in Westlake, and Bradley paid three months’ rent in advance, peeling bills off the stack he kept folded in his front pocket. Technically, this made her a kind of prostitute, but to her the bills represented so many dollars that wouldn’t go to his wife and his boys, dollars rightfully hers, redeemable against a future in which she’d be his wife. Her surety was their rightness for each other. Through April and May and June, she experienced the rightness on the apartment’s Murphy bed, among the cigarette burns on the carpet, on the checkered oilcloth that covered the little dining table. After sex, the words she struggled to speak elsewhere came easily. Bradley brought her new books to read, and she now followed the war in Europe avidly, because it interested him. Most thrilling to her was his Spanish screenplay, for which she was acting out the character of the German ambassador’s daughter. As their joint idea for the story emerged in detail, she made shorthand notes on it in bed, a nude stenographer. Working on the story excited her extremely and excited Bradley, too. When he took the pad and pencil from her and set them aside, she lay back for him in a state of not-herselfness, imagining herself as the ambassador’s daughter, as if she were the actress playing her. At work, it wasn’t hard to find an idle hour for typing out the story notes, sometimes adding new ideas of her own. The unattached young men in the office might have known about her situation with Bradley—she seemed to be invisible to them. She was the taciturn girl who was proficient in Gregg and didn’t misspell words.

  In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.

  Bradley was due back on the night of Saturday the 27th and had promised to come and see her on Sunday. She spent Saturday night on her back with her eyes open, because to close them was to picture him in bed with his Isabelle, to consider the countless hours that Isabelle had had to undermine his confidence as a writer, and to entertain the suspicion that Isabelle was right: to see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite. In the morning, unslept, unbathed, she boiled and ate two eggs and lay down again. The sun had an evil new trick of changing its position suddenly, jumping forward, as if to mock her for Bradley’s non-arrival. It was setting by the time she heard a tapping on her door, the turning of a key. How she must have looked when he saw her on the bed! Flat-haired, puffy-eyed, parched-lipped, mad. He kneeled on the floor and kissed her cheek. She didn’t feel a thing.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “We had a mouse problem. Mouse poop all over the kitchen. I finally found a nest of them in the space behind the phonebook drawer. Four little baby mice in chewed-up phonebook paper. I tried to ladle them out with a metal spoon, so I could let them go outside, but they started crawling away—it was horrible. I had to crush them with the spoon, which turns out to be pretty hard when you’re reaching inside a cabinet and you can’t see what you’re doing and your wife is screaming in your ear.”

  How many times did you fuck her? someone said loudly. The atrocious word argued against its having been her, but who else could it have been?

  “I wanted to be here earlier,” Bradley said, as if he hadn’t heard the question, “but everything was such a mess. The boys were fighting, they had too much time together in the car, and, Jesus, the mice. The parents are still in the cabinets somewhere. I can’t stay long.”

  “Why stay at all?” she definitely said.

  “I’m sorry. I know it was hard for you, but it was hard for me, too.”

  “You don’t know what hard is.”

  “Marion. Honey. I do know.” With a mouse-butchering hand, he brushed hair from her eyes and stroked her head. “I’ve done a bad thing—a bad thing to you. You’re so beautiful, so fragile, so serious. Oh God, you’re serious. And I’m just a goddamned car salesman.”

  She began to cry, hysterically. It ate into the little time they had, but it was a release from the desiccated paralysis she’d suffered for two weeks. It restored her to sensation again, and by and by it had the added cruel benefit of making Bradley stay far longer than he’d intended to—of complicating the lies he’d have to tell when he got home—because he couldn’t resist her fragility. Her tear-wet face compelled a rough undressing of her, and she was serious, all right. As he had his way with her, she focused intensely on his face, alert to any subtle sign that his pleasure in her had diminished. Her own pleasure had become incidental. The only thing that mattered was Bradley.

  Three nights later, he surprised her by showing up at her office and asking her out for a hamburger. As he drove to a Carpenter’s, her feral intelligence, which was warning her that no good could come of surprise changes to their routine, was at war with the hope that he’d finally found the courage to leave Isabelle. Her feral intelligence was correct. In his car, at the drive-in, after eating his burger in nervously wolfing bites, while hers sat untouched on her lap, he licked a bit of bloody ketchup from his finger and said he’d done some hard thinking on his vacation. He said—oh, what was it he was saying?—find my way to putting them through the pain of made my bed and now I’ve got to lie deserve a man who’s worthy of your one-hundred percent not fifty percent because fifty percent is not be alone with you again because you’ll never stop being the person not fair to you isn’t fair to I’m never going to be a realistically realistic it’s just not fair to I should have known worst thing terrible realistically so terrible get over it never get over it … While Bradley’s rubbery features stretched expressively, she could feel the varieties of redness surging in her own face, tomato, scarlet, crimson, garnet, beet, as if she were a chameleon. Imagining how comical she looked, she started laughing.

  He stared at her, and the worry in his face was even funnier to her. She waved a limp hand, as helplessly laughing people did by way of apology, and tried to control herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. Another mirthful snort escaped her. “I was thinking about the baby mice.”

  “Jesus. Why are you laughing at that?”

  “Because—poor you. Having to mash them with a spoon.” She giggled and then laughed harder, caving forward with it. Perhaps she was aware that Bradley couldn’t very well abandon her while she was acting crazy, but she was legitimately in the grip of her hilarity. He would certainly think twice before he took her out in public again. This thought, too, was hilarious to her.

  “Should I be worried about you?” he said when she’d finally regained control.

  “You should worry about yourself,” she said. “I’m a lot bigger than a mouse.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What does it sound like it means?”

  He glanced at the Ford coupe parked to his left, the uniformed backside of a female carhop leaning in the passenger-side window.

  “I need you to believe that I will never get over this,” he said, his expression very serious. Marion adjusted her own expression correspond
ingly, but her attempted severe frown felt so ridiculous that she giggled at it.

  “Please, please, please,” he said.

  “I’m trying to be serious, but maybe you had me wrong.”

  “We have to stop,” he said.

  “Oh. Why?”

  “I told you. It was the very first thing I told you. I’m not going to destroy my family. I’m not going to leave the mother of my children.”

  “You also said you’d die if you couldn’t be with me. Does that mean you’re going to die now?”

  He covered his face with his hands. If she’d ever really liked him, she definitely didn’t now, but the matter of liking was more irrelevant than ever. She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

  “I’ll probably die if I can’t be with you,” she said, in a factual tone.

  “No, you won’t. You’re going to find somebody who’s better for you.”

  “Do you see what I’m saying, though?”

  “Honestly, I’m not following all of it.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said, opening her door. “That’s all. I know you’re wrong.”

  As she made her way home, past Westlake Park, she didn’t feel low. She felt nervously elated, like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. She and Bradley were in a crisis that she needed all her wits to navigate. To have walked away from the drive-in voluntarily, to not have made a screeching scene and begged him to reconsider, seemed in hindsight an inspired tactic. Now she just needed to be patient. Between his job and his family duties and his attentiveness to her, Bradley had been too overstretched to exercise his talent as a writer. The fantasy of him returning to her apartment, unannounced, in the middle of the night, after a month of separation, fired up by the screenplay he’d written and desperate to get her opinion of it, the fantasy of their reading the pages together and her finding them magnificent, was so compelling to her, so enjoyably repeatable and refinable, that she hardly slept that night. In the morning, she felt like skipping on her way to work. Instead of burying her head in a newspaper, she chatted with the other typists and smiled at the unmarried men.

  For a number of weeks, she was sustainedly elated—uplifted by her certainty that her strategy of not pestering Bradley, of letting him wonder about her and feel remorseful, of leaving him alone to write, would bring him back. Imagining that he could somehow see her and be jealous, she let one of the young men from the office take her to dinner and a movie. Afterward, she couldn’t remember the man saying anything at all, which led her to wonder if she’d talked nonstop about Hitler and Ribbentrop and Churchill. Perhaps she had. The man didn’t ask her on another date, and this was fine with her, because he barely existed. The edges of existence more generally had begun to fray, her lack of sleep taking its toll. Finally, one evening in September, she decided to leave work early and go and see Bradley at Lerner Motors. The date, 9/9, was irresistibly auspicious.

  Bradley was drinking coffee with Mr. Peters and blanched at the sight of her. Nervous but residually elated, she greeted the other girls as if they’d been great friends of hers. One of them had an engagement ring, another was expecting and about to quit, a lesser salesman had been fired. To reconcile her urgent need to speak with her utter lack of personal things to speak about, Marion expressed strong opinions, derived from the newspaper, about the situation in Europe and the necessity of American intervention. One by one, the girls excused themselves, until only Anne remained. Anne remarked, kindly, that Marion didn’t seem well, and Marion allowed that she’d been having trouble sleeping. Anne asked if she’d like to come home with her and have some soup.

  “No, I’m here to see Bradley,” Marion said. “He still owes me a T-bone steak.”

  Anne’s expression became grave.

  “He’s a man of his word.”

  “Why don’t you come home with me instead,” Anne said.

  “Another time,” Marion said, walking away. Her head was pounding and her body felt made entirely of chalk. She might have preferred to be asleep if sleep had been a possibility. Bradley was standing by the still-unsold Cadillac 75 with a red-haired man, an obvious Jake Barnes, and listening with cartoonish raptness. He had a way of making every customer feel astonishingly interesting. Marion walked up to the Jake Barnes and said, “I’m very sorry, but I believe I was here before you.”

  Bradley’s gaze looped all around her without alighting on her. “Marion,” he said.

  The Jake looked at his watch. “It’s all right.”

  “No, no.” Bradley placed a hand on her back and turned her away. “You need to wait,” he told her, as if speaking to a child.

  “Is that not what I’ve been doing?”

  “Just—wait. All right?”

  She waited, prominently, smoking a cigarette, on one of the leather couches for customers. The inside of her mouth was chalky, too. Her lack of sleep had broken the formerly continuous world into sharp fragments. The worried looks of Anne and Mr. Peters, at their desks, glanced off her like arrows off a thing of chalk.

  Without knowing how she got there, she found herself outside with Bradley, on the sidewalk around the corner from Lerner. The tops of the street-shadowing buildings blazed in the setting sun. The air was acrid with motor exhaust.

  “Oh, honey,” he was saying. “You look so tired.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. Just—have you been eating enough?”

  “I eat eggs. I like eggs. I’m sorry.”

  “You keep saying you’re sorry when it’s me who should be sorry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Bradley squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God.”

  “What?” she said eagerly.

  “It’s killing me to see you again.”

  “Will you come home with me?”

  “It’s better if I don’t.”

  “You don’t have to stay long.”

  He sighed. “There’s a PTA meeting I promised Isabelle I’d go to.”

  “Is it an important meeting?” she said, genuinely curious.

  The long wait was over. She stood patiently outside a phone booth while he lied to his wife. She was patient in his car with him, too. It was he who was impatient—as soon as they were inside her building, he pushed her against the wall by the mailboxes and kissed her savagely. She still felt chalky, but apparently to him her flesh was pliable, and that was enough.

  Except that it wasn’t. The goal of her waiting had been achieved, but the waiting had stretched the connection between her obsession and its object past the breaking point. Their lovemaking, repeated several times before he left her apartment, delighted her only in what it signified. The actual person on top of her, the panting car salesman with coffee breath, was a stranger to the world she lived in now. Although she clearly signified something to him, too, she was beyond trying to imagine what it was.

  Later, in Arizona, she couldn’t remember why she’d told him he didn’t need to be careful. Maybe, being confused about so many things, she’d been confused about her time of month. Maybe, knowing that Bradley didn’t love the alternative to being careful, and not daring to diminish his pleasure in their reunion, she’d simply hoped for the best. Or maybe, although she definitely didn’t remember wanting to be pregnant, her feral intelligence had disastrously miscalculated without her being aware of it. But there was also the fact that, despite her obvious unwellness in the head, Bradley had believed her when she said he didn’t have to be careful. Was it possible that he, too, without being aware of it, had wanted to make a baby? In Arizona, in the absence of any clear memory, she concluded that her pregnancy had been God’s plan for her, His way of testing her: that His will manifested itself in the actions of His children, regardless of their reasons. This settled the question.

 
When she told the story of her crack-up to Sophie Serafimides, it wasn’t hard to omit the pregnancy, because more than enough other things had happened to explain her landing in a locked ward. There was the late night, a week after the first reunion, when Bradley showed up at her door with a half-emptied whiskey bottle. There was the second night of that sort. There were the two weeks in which she didn’t see him, and then the dreadful letter he sent her. There was her second visit to Lerner Motors, which didn’t go well, and her third visit, when she tried to make Bradley smell her hand, with which she’d touched herself privately, and was hustled out the door by Mr. Peters. There was her ensuing catatonia at the property-management company, which resulted in her being fired. There was the stretch of days that she mostly couldn’t account for, interminable days in an apartment on which rent would soon be due. Finally, there was the warm November afternoon when she went to Bradley’s house, whose address she’d found in the phonebook, to have a word with his wife.

  The neat, nearly identical houses on Keniston Avenue looked to her like toy houses or a movie set. She was very frightened when she rang Bradley’s doorbell, but she couldn’t think of any other way to show him he was wrong. Paradoxically, she needed to enlist his wife’s help. When Isabelle learned that Bradley was in love with someone else, namely Marion, whose face had been imprinted on his brain at birth, she’d understand the folly of her marriage. Imagining Bradley divorced was more pleasurable and less strenuous to Marion than wondering why she hadn’t had her monthly period. She hoped it was only because she was malnourished and emotionally stressed—she’d heard of such things—because her chances with Bradley depended on her being his liberation. A baby would make him feel trapped and disgusted, and she could never play the German ambassador’s daughter if she was fat with one.

  To her great surprise, a blond boy of seven or eight opened the front door. In her thousand imaginings of the scene, no one but Isabelle had ever come to the door.