Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?

  “It’s incredible,” she said. “The amount of instruments they have. They give you the sense that you’re utterly in control, and that’s the way Bobby was with us. We needed his approval, and he controlled us by making it conditional. Larry had to be a star athlete, and I couldn’t have a little fun talking to a neighbor. For me, the most terrible thing about the crash was imagining him losing control of the aircraft. He must have felt so furious.”

  The sky was darkening, the traffic slow. How many millions of dollars did an F-111 cost? How could a nation that called itself Christian spend billions of dollars on weapons of death? The instrument panel of Russ’s Fury consisted of a speedometer and three gauges, one of them broken. The car urgently needed new brakes and new snow tires, but Marion had asked for two hundred dollars for Christmas shopping. The sum had struck him as excessive, but he’d been mindful of how little else he’d given her lately, mindful of the four hours alone with Frances that he’d contrived to give himself for Christmas. He’d imagined that the four hours would fly by all too quickly. Now he wondered how he could survive another minute of hearing about the kind of man she loved. There was a hard, sour knot in his throat.

  “I’ve been talking a lot to Kitty about this,” Frances said. “I’m never going to be a bra-burner, but she’s given me some books that make a lot of sense to me. It’s not that Bobby was physically abusive. He was just cold, cold, cold. In a way, though, that was almost worse. I was the little wife, and the only thing that mattered was that I do everything exactly right. It was the opposite of a marriage of equals. When I look back now, I realize that our neighbors all thought I was married to a jerk. The only people who didn’t think so were his pilot buddies, and they were jerks, too. I mean, obviously, it’s terrible, the way he died—I feel so sorry for him. But sometimes I almost wonder if I’m better off without him. Is that bad of me?”

  “Marriage is difficult,” Russ said.

  “But does it have to be difficult? Is yours difficult? Or—sorry, maybe I can’t ask that.”

  If Russ had had the nerves of a test pilot or a heart surgeon, now would have been the time to open his heart and declare that his marriage was a miserable thing, held together by habit and vow and duty. Now would have been the time to make his pitch. But his complaint with Marion was that she was heavy and joyless, unexciting to him, dulling of his edge. He didn’t see how he could voice this complaint without sounding like a jerk.

  “Anyway,” Frances said, “you did me a huge favor, putting me in touch with Kitty and getting me into the Tuesday circle. It’s exactly what I needed. I’ve been taking a class at Triton College, and that’s been good, too. All in all, I was having a pretty good fall. But then—”

  “I know,” Russ said. “I want to apologize again for what happened with Ronnie. That was my mistake.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks. You don’t have to apologize. What happened was that Philip got in touch with me again. He called me out of the blue and said his mind was clearer now. He’d broken things off with the nurse, and could I find it in my heart to forgive him? I didn’t think I could, but he sent me roses and called me up again. He really turned on the charm, and things just kind of clicked. The weekend after Thanksgiving, after the thing with Ronnie, I went in to the city and had a whole afternoon and evening with him.”

  The snow was still melting when it hit the pavement, but the forecast called for as much as eight inches. If Russ and Frances got stuck somewhere, it would mean additional hours with a heart surgeon’s girlfriend.

  “Everything felt different, though,” she said. “It was partly the books I’ve been reading, but it was partly—it was partly what you’ve given me. I mean, the Tuesday circle, and, I don’t know, just the example of a different kind of man. Philip took me to Binyon’s, and when the waiter came he took the menu out of my hand and ordered for me. The old me would have liked that—it would have made me feel safe. But—and then we were in his apartment, with the amazing view, and I was looking at the family pictures on his piano. I picked one up, and I must have set it down wrong, because he came over and moved it, like, one inch further back. He came all the way across the room to move the picture one inch. Which probably makes him a great surgeon, but I thought to myself: Uh-oh. Here we go again. You know what I mean?”

  Russ was feeling whipsawed, despairing one moment, daring to hope the next.

  “It was like I’d wanted to replace Bobby with someone like Bobby. I guess that’s the kind of man I’m attracted to, or one kind of man. Bobby could be charming, too, when he’d been a jerk to me and I was mad at him. I realized that if I stayed with Philip I’d probably have another kid or two—I think he wants his own kids—and that would be the end of me. He’d be controlling everything. But so, anyway, I didn’t get home till nearly midnight—”

  After having intimate relations with the surgeon? Russ had no grasp of contemporary dating protocol.

  “And I found Larry in the family room by himself, watching TV. He’s old enough to babysit for Amy, but he seemed a little weird. I bent over to give him a kiss, and I couldn’t believe it. He smelled like pot and mouthwash. He’d gotten high after Amy went to bed! I couldn’t believe it. I knew he’d had a hard time after Bobby died, and starting a new school in ninth grade wasn’t any picnic, but he’s a good kid, and he’s doing a lot better this year, thanks to Crossroads. He still has bad posture, he still hides his face with his hair, but he seems to be maturing. When I realized he was high, my impulse was to feel guilty about leaving him and Amy alone for so many hours. I told him I was disappointed that he’d taken a stupid risk while he had responsibility for his sister, but I wasn’t going to punish him. I just needed to know some things, such as where he got the marijuana. But his hair is hanging in his face, he won’t look at me, won’t answer. I ask him if there’s marijuana in the house. He still won’t answer, and that’s when I kind of lose it. I demand that he show me where his pot is, I march him up to his room, and you know what? He’s got a whole bag of it! I take it away from him, I ask him again where he got it, and you know what he says? He says, ‘I’m not a nark.’ It made me so angry, I took away his TV privileges for a month.”

  Russ had an uneasy sense of where her story was heading. The coin had dropped when she mentioned Perry.

  “So, like I said, this is awkward,” she said. “But I thought you should know.”

  “You think Larry got the marijuana from my son.”

  “I don’t know for sure. But the two of them are together a lot, and Larry—it’s sweet—he’s obviously smitten with Perry. They come home from school and go straight to his room. Larry builds models, and I can smell the glue and the paint when they’re up there. I don’t care if they spend their time building models. I’m not sure I even care if they smoke pot. Larry says half the kids at school have tried it, which is probably an exaggeration, but I gather it’s pretty common. But to have a whole bag of it, a good-size bag—that didn’t seem like Larry.”

  God damn Marion.

  The previous spring, when the gross extent of Perry’s misbehavior had come to light, Marion had thrown religion in Russ’s face—had accused him of an Old Testament fixation on commandments, accused him of forgetting the New Testament forgiveness he preached on Sundays. According to Marion, Perry needed love and support, not punishment. He’d skipped a total of eleven days of school and had forged Russ’s handwriting on notes explaining his absence, but Marion insisted that his problems were psychological, not moral. The boy was hypersensitive and moody and couldn’t sleep at night. Marion, pleading for compassion, had proposed psychiatric counseling for him (as if they had the money for that). In Russ’s view, Marion herself was the problem. From the very beginning, she’d indulged Perry in his moods and hi
s whims, his incessant whining and crying as a toddler, his pompous superiority as he got older. Although Russ was aware that all four of his kids, to varying degrees, preferred Marion to him, because she was always near them, always at home while he was away serving others, Perry’s preference for his mother was the most glaring and exclusive. Russ might have felt jealous of their closeness if he’d liked Perry better and Marion still excited him. He’d chosen to leave them to each other, and now, as a consequence of her coddling and his indifference to it, Perry had embarrassed them in front of the junior high school authorities.

  He’d clearly sensed moral fault in Perry, and he should have suspected drug use, but he’d been led astray by Marion’s story of a gifted, sensitive child who only wanted to get some sleep. Summoning Perry to his office in the parsonage, where he had a stack of handwritten notes addressed to the junior-high principal and penned in a hand that he had to admit was uncannily like his own—Perry was undeniably a boy of many talents—Russ had undertaken to impose, on his girly-haired son, the discipline that Marion had failed to.

  “You can’t be sleeping in the daytime,” he’d said. “You need to sleep at night like the rest of us.”

  “Dad, I would love to,” Perry said. “But I can’t.”

  “There are plenty of mornings when I don’t feel like getting up and going to work. But you know what? I get up and do it. If you just make yourself do it, one day, you’ll be so tired at night you’ll go to sleep. And then you’re on a normal schedule again.”

  “With all due respect, that’s easier said than done.”

  “You’re very bright, and I’m sorry if you’re not challenged enough at school. But part of growing up is learning to be disciplined. All I ever see is you reading a book or messing around with your art supplies. You should be outside, tiring yourself out. I wonder if you should join an intramural softball team.”

  Perry stared at him with insolent incredulity. Russ tried to contain his irritation.

  “You need to do something,” he said. “Starting this summer, I want to see you working. That’s the rule in this family: we work. I want you to set a goal of earning fifty dollars a week.”

  “Becky didn’t have to work in tenth grade.”

  “Becky was involved in cheerleading, and she’s working now.”

  “She hates that job.”

  “Well, that’s what self-discipline is. You may not like it, but you work anyway. I’m not trying to punish you, Perry. I’m doing this for your own good. I want you to start looking for work tomorrow. That way, you’ll have it lined up when summer comes.”

  To Russ’s disgust, Perry began to weep.

  “Frankly,” Russ said, “I’m letting you off very lightly. I should be taking away all your privileges for what you did.”

  “This is punishment.”

  “Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying. This is not punishment. You can always mow lawns if you can’t find anything else. If mowing lawns was good enough for Clem, it’s good enough for you. I guarantee you’ll sleep at night if you’ve been mowing grass all day.”

  Marion had complained to Russ, in her mild but stubborn way, that mowing lawns was a senseless waste of Perry’s talents, a painful assault on his sensitivities, but Russ had been vindicated by the ensuing improvement in Perry’s habits. In the summer, Perry had slept from midnight to late morning, normal for a teenager, and in September, on his own initiative, he’d joined Crossroads. Aligning himself with Rick Ambrose was probably his idea of revenge for having been forced to mow lawns, and Russ had refused him the satisfaction of disapproving. The truth was that he’d felt increasingly repelled by Perry, vaguely nauseated by his adolescent body. The afterschool hours that Perry spent in Crossroads, the entire weekend he was away on a Crossroads retreat, had been a relief from the corporeal affront of him.

  But now Russ wondered if what had repelled him was simply Perry’s bad character, his smug enjoyment of the secret of his drug use. It was all the goddamned fault of Marion. She wouldn’t hear a word against her precious son, and Perry had exploited her trust in him, and now, in the eyes of Frances, who’d become the source of delight in Russ’s life, Perry had reduced him to an unsuspecting square whose son had lured her Larry into drugs. God damn Marion. He could already taste the cruel pleasure of informing her that Perry was a drug user, of rubbing her nose in what her coddling had wrought: of making her pay for the humiliation of his learning it from Frances. He would make Perry pay, too.

  But if Perry turned around and made insinuations? If he asked Russ, in Marion’s presence, where he’d been going with Mrs. Cottrell and a car full of boxes? Russ, God help him, had felt compelled to lie to Marion at breakfast—to tell her that he was delivering the food and toys with Kitty Reynolds.

  “Don’t you want to take the turn here?” Frances said.

  Skidding a little, rattling toys in the rear cargo area, he veered across two slushy lanes to make the turn onto Ogden Avenue. Horns blared behind him.

  “You shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. “Rick Ambrose says a lot of other parents are dealing with the same thing.”

  Street-credible Rick Ambrose, his finger on the pulse of contemporary youth.

  “You were talking to Rick about Larry?” Russ managed to say.

  “Yeah, but don’t worry—I didn’t nark out Perry. I mean, I just did, to you. But not to Rick. I only wanted a little guidance on how to think about fifteen-year-olds smoking pot. Rick said the one thing I don’t have to worry about is Crossroads. Apparently they have very strict rules against drugs and drinking on Crossroads time. Against sex, too. Although, poor Larry, I don’t think I have to worry about that one yet. I’ve never even seen him look at a girl. The person he has a crush on is Perry.”

  Russ struggled to think of something wise to say, something to compete with Ambrose’s special insight into young people.

  “Coming home and finding Larry high,” she said, “was a real eye-opener. I came down with a wretched cold, and when I finally got over it I felt like I’d turned a corner. Like I needed to get my life on a different kind of track—be more involved with my kids, stop chasing the fantasy second husband. I want to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I want to get more involved with you and Kitty and your work, and I asked Rick if there’s a way for me to get involved in Crossroads, too. Part of it is feeling I have to be a kind of father for Larry and Amy, not just a mother. But part of it is just—do you ever feel like you were born too early?”

  “You mean, do I wish I were younger?”

  “Yeah, I guess we all end up wishing that. But I’m talking about what’s happening now. I mean, the simple fact that girls can wear the same clothes as boys now—I missed all that. I missed the Beatles. I missed living with a guy before I decided if I should marry him, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea in my case. I feel like I was born fifteen years too early.”

  “But what you’re describing,” Russ said, “was already happening in the early fifties. The spirit in New York, in Greenwich Village, when I was there, was everything you’re describing, except, in a way, it was purer.”

  “In New York, maybe. It sure wasn’t happening in New Prospect.”

  “Well, personally, I’m not sure I wish I’d been born any later.” He warned himself not to oversell Greenwich Village, since he and Marion had lived there for only two months, following two years in seminary housing on East Forty-ninth Street. “What galls me about so-called youth culture now is that people seem to think it came out of nowhere. The kids today think they invented radical politics, invented premarital sex, invented civil rights and women’s rights. Most of them have never even heard of Eugene Debs, John Dewey. Margaret Sanger, Richard Wright. When I was in Birmingham in 1963, a lot of the protesters were my age or older. The only real difference now is the fashions—different music, different hair. And that’s just superficial.”

  “You really think that’s the only difference? If there’d been a group like Crossroads w
hen I was in high school, I would have joined it in a heartbeat. If I’d read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem when I was twenty, my whole life might have gone differently.”

  Russ frowned. He’d known that Ambrose was a menace, but the gravity of the threat from Kitty Reynolds was unanticipated.

  “I’m only saying,” he said, “that civil rights and the antiwar movement and, yes, feminism are the fruit of seeds that were planted a long time ago.”