Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “It was Arizona,” Ambrose said, more seriously. “That trip completely changed the dynamic. That’s what made this whole thing real.”

  Russ, already giddy, felt even giddier. Arizona was his place. He, no less than Ambrose, had changed the dynamic. In his giddiness, through the winter and into the early spring, he plunged into the spirit of the times. He took the risk of rapping about his feelings, he opened himself to new styles of music. He found that shutting his eyes and raising a clenched fist, while speaking of Dr. King or Stokely Carmichael, whose hand he’d once shaken, had a powerful effect on the young people. Though it never sounded quite convincing, he took to using curse words such as bullshit. He let his hair grow over his collar and started a beard, the latter lasting until Marion remarked on his resemblance to John the Baptist. He was stung enough to shave the beard, but he felt that Marion was becoming a drag. He preferred the excitement of the attention he was getting from the new breed of girls in the fellowship. They swore as bluely as the boys did, they were loud and gross in the sexual innuendoes they traded with the boys, and yet, being suburban, their naïveté was even greater than his had been at their age. None of them had decapitated a chicken or seen a bank seize a man’s ancestral farm. Russ believed he could offer them a depth of authentic experience lacking in young Ambrose. He put more thought into his Sunday-night prayers than he put into his Sunday-morning sermons (Marion did much of that thinking for him anyway), because the dream he’d once had in New York, the vision of a nation transformed by vigorously Christian ethics, was alive in the blue-jeaned throng in the First Reformed function hall, not in the sleepy gray heads in the sanctuary.

  Among the new converts to the fellowship was a young woman, Laura Dobrinsky, who was tight with Tanner Evans and thus instantly popular. At her first meeting, Russ had greeted her with a hug that she did not return, and at subsequent meetings he’d been unsettled by the openly hostile way she stared at him. It seemed strangely personal, unlike anything he could remember being the object of. Per the discussions of adolescent psychology he’d had with Ambrose, Russ hypothesized that Laura had a problem with her father and was seeing him in Russ. But one afternoon in March, ten days before the Arizona trip, he emerged from the church library, where he’d been consulting references for a sermon, and heard Laura Dobrinsky uttering the words That dude is such an unbelievable fucking dork. From the silence that fell as he rounded a corner and saw half a dozen girls seated in the corridor, and from the glances the girls then exchanged, the smirks they imperfectly suppressed, he conceived the hurtful suspicion that Laura had been referring to him. Especially hurtful was that one of the girls smirking was the popular, blond Sally Perkins, who a few weeks earlier, after school, had come to his office and opened up to him about her unhappiness at home. Most of the popular kids preferred to go to Ambrose with their troubles, and Russ had been surprised and gratified that Sally had come to him.

  Returning to his office, he tried to cheer himself with the thought that Sally Perkins wouldn’t have come to him if she thought he was a dork, and that, even if Laura Dobrinsky did think so, it was silly to let himself be hurt by a girl with wildly unresolved anger issues, and also that maybe she hadn’t been referring to him, maybe the dork in question was Clem, which would explain the girls’ embarrassment when they saw Clem’s father; but he was still in distress when Rick Ambrose came knocking on his door.

  Taking a seat, his expression pained, Ambrose told Russ that he’d been hearing some complaints—or not complaints, concerns—about Russ’s style of ministry. Some of the kids seemed uncomfortable, in particular, with Russ’s weekly prayers. Ambrose himself was fine with them, but he suggested that Russ consider “toning it down a bit” with the scriptural language. “Do you know what I mean?”

  He could hardly have found a worse moment to criticize Russ. “I put a lot of thought into those prayers,” Russ said. “When I cite Scripture, it’s always in direct relation to the theme that you and I have chosen for the week.”

  Ambrose nodded judiciously. “Like I said, I don’t have a problem with it myself. It’s just something you should be aware of. Some of the kids we’re drawing don’t have any religious background. Obviously, the hope is that everyone will find their way to an authentic faith, but people need to find their own way, and that takes time.”

  Because of Laura’s remark, Russ felt angrier than Ambrose’s tactful words merited. “I don’t care,” he said. “This is a church for believers, not a social club. I’d rather lose a few members than lose sight of our mission.”

  Ambrose pursed his lips and blew a silent whistle.

  “Who are the people complaining?” Russ said. “Is there anyone besides Laura Dobrinsky?”

  “Laura is definitely the most outspoken of them.”

  “Well, and I would not be sorry to see her leave.”

  “She’s a handful, I agree. But the energy she brings is really valuable.”

  “I’m not going to change my style because one angry girl is complaining to you about me.”

  “It’s not just her, Russ. This is something we need to deal with before we leave on Spring Trip. I wonder if you’d be willing…” Ambrose glowered at the floor. “I wonder if we should open up part of the meeting on Sunday and talk about where we stand, as a group, with expressions of Christian doctrine. You could hear Laura, she could hear you. I think it could be a really valuable conversation for the group to have before we all get on the bus.”

  “I’m not interested in a public shouting match with Laura Dobrinsky.”

  “I’ll be there to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. I promise, I will back you up. I just—”

  “No.” Russ stood up angrily. “I’m sorry, but no. That does not sound right to me. I’m happy to let you do your thing, but I would ask that you let me do mine.”

  Ambrose sighed, as if to suggest a withholding of approval, but he said nothing more. Russ was left with the impression that much whispering was being done behind his back, and that he would do well to strengthen his relationships with the group’s rowdier element. At the next Sunday meeting, the last before Arizona, he made friendly forays into that element. Whether the negative vibe he got from it was real or just the product of his paranoia, it gave his movements a marionette-like clumsiness; a dorkiness. Sitting in the huge group circle at the end of the meeting, he sought the eyes of Sally Perkins, hoping to exchange a warm smile, but she seemed determined not to look at him.

  On the Friday afternoon before Palm Sunday, aware of the emotional bonding that occurred on long bus rides, he stationed himself between the two interstate buses in the First Reformed parking lot and waited to see which of them would be preferred by the kids with whom he needed to bond, so that he could board it. But the normally visible forces of teenaged social physics were scrambled in the parking lot. Parents stood chattering among haphazard piles of luggage, preteen siblings ran on and off the buses, latecomers arrived with tooting car horns, and everyone kept pestering Russ with logistical questions. He was loading five-gallon drums of paint into a bus’s luggage bay when, behind his back, the hidden social forces resolved into a mob of long-haired kids outside the other bus, which Ambrose had chosen.

  Too late, he saw that he and Ambrose should have discussed their bus assignments—that he should have insisted on having a chance to repair his rapport with Laura Dobrinsky’s clique. Riding west into the night, in the unpreferred bus, he felt exiled. Even when he succeeded, the next morning, in trading places with Ambrose, the scene on the other bus was unsatisfactory. The kids had been awake all night, laughing and singing, and now they only wanted to sleep. Tanner Evans kindly sat down with him, but soon Tanner, too, was sleeping. By the time they reached the reservation, Russ had become afraid to look over his shoulder at the kids behind him. It was a relief to know that most of them were going on with Ambrose to the demonstration school at Kitsillie, up high on the mesa.

  Waiting in the settlement of Rough Rock was Russ’s Nava
jo friend Keith Durochie. The back of Keith’s Ford pickup was heaped with new and scavenged plumbing supplies. He informed Russ that he and the other elders were expecting him to install a septic line and put a sink and toilet in the school. When Russ replied that Ambrose, not he, was leading the Kitsillie contingent, Keith didn’t hide his displeasure. He’d seen, the year before, the kind of skills Ambrose had.

  Russ waved Ambrose over and explained the situation. “How would you feel about doing some plumbing work up there?”

  “I would need help,” Ambrose said.

  “This is the job at Kitsillie,” Keith said to Russ. “This is what we have for you this year.”

  “Shoot,” Russ said.

  “I kept the equipment safe all winter.”

  “I’m willing to give it a try,” Ambrose said. “Between Keith and Clem, we’ll probably be okay.”

  Keith threw Russ a look—Clem was seventeen—and turned to Ambrose. “You stay here,” he said firmly. “Let Russ go to Kitsillie.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Rick,” Russ said. He didn’t want to be the white guy arguing with a Navajo, but the kids going to Kitsillie had counted on being with Ambrose. “I think we should talk about this.”

  “I’m no kind of plumber,” Ambrose said. “If that’s the job, I’d be more comfortable trading places with you.”

  Keith walked away, satisfied that the matter was settled, and Ambrose hurried off to the kids with whom he was unexpectedly spending a week in Rough Rock. Russ could have pursued him and made him speak to the Kitsillie group, made him explain why he’d chosen not to join it, but instead he placed his trust in God. He thought that God’s will might be at work in Keith, guiding the course of events, offering Russ a providential chance to forge better relationships with the popular kids. Submitting to His will, he shouldered his duffel bag and boarded the Kitsillie bus; and there it was instantly clear that God had harsher plans for him.

  The week on the mesa was torture. Everyone, even his own son, thought he was lying about why he’d replaced Ambrose, and to tell them the full truth—that Keith Durochie had a low opinion of Ambrose—would have been unfair to Keith and unkind to Ambrose. Russ was still stupid about Ambrose, still considered him a friend worth protecting. But he wasn’t stupid otherwise. He saw how acidly the group resented him for being there. He saw the lengths to which Laura Dobrinsky and her friends went to avoid working with him, he felt their hatred at every nightly candle talk, and he knew he had a pastoral responsibility to raise the issue. He tried repeatedly to have a private word with Sally Perkins, who not long ago had trusted him enough to confide in him, but she kept eluding him. Afraid that terrible things might be said to his face in a group confrontation, he chose to endure his misery in silence until Ambrose could confirm the reason he’d stayed behind in Rough Rock.

  By the time the two groups reunited, Russ was too low to beg Ambrose to make a clarifying statement. He waited for Ambrose to do it voluntarily, but Ambrose had had an amazing week in Rough Rock—had wowed the half of the group that still related to Russ; had gained ground on Russ’s own turf—and he seemed oblivious to Russ’s misery. Witnessing the pointedly joyous hugs with which the Kitsillie group greeted Ambrose, Russ lamented his heart’s generosity. He rued that he hadn’t heeded Marion’s warnings. Only now could he see that he and his young associate had been engaged, from the beginning, in a competition of which only one of them had been aware.

  And even then, even knowing that Ambrose was not his friend, had never been his friend, he was shocked by the audacity of Ambrose’s betrayal of him. At the first Sunday meeting after Arizona, when Laura and Sally stood up to lacerate Russ’s heart and hurl their teenaged acid in his face, Ambrose did nothing to stop it—just stood in a corner and glowered with disapproval, presumably of Russ himself—and when the majority of the group walked out of the fellowship room, which was baking in an April heat wave, Ambrose sided not with his colleague, not with the well-mannered kids from the church that employed him, but with the rabble from outside the church, the hip kids, the popular girls, and left Russ to ask God what he’d done to deserve such punishment.

  He got the answer, or at least an answer, some endless minutes later. Ambrose returned to Russ and asked him to come downstairs. “I tried to warn you,” he said as they descended the stairs. “I really think this could have been avoided.”

  “You said you would back me up,” Russ said. “You said, quote, you wouldn’t let it get out of hand.”

  “And you refused to have the conversation.”

  “I’d say this qualifies as out of hand!”

  “This is serious, Russ. You need to hear what Sally just told me.”

  The air was scarcely cooler on the second floor. Ambrose led Russ into his unventilated office, where Laura and Sally were seated on his sofa, and shut the door. Laura gave Russ a cruel smile of victory. Sally stared sullenly at her hands.

  “Sally?” Ambrose said.

  “I don’t really see the point,” Sally said. “I’m done with this church.”

  “I think Russ has a right to hear from you directly.”

  Sally closed her eyes. “It’s just that I’m totally creeped out. It’s just what a nightmare Spring Trip turned out to be. It was like my worst nightmare when he walked onto that bus. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “There was a reason Russ and I traded places,” Ambrose said. “He was better at the work that needed to be done up there.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure he found some reason. But the way it felt to me was that I couldn’t get away from him.”

  The office was unbearably hot. Russ was appalled and frightened and perplexed. “Sally, look at me,” he said. “Please open your eyes and look at me.”

  “She doesn’t feel like opening her eyes,” Laura said in a righteous tone.

  “I just wanted him to leave me alone,” Sally said. “I got a really creepy feeling, that time in his office. And then, I couldn’t believe it, he followed me to Kitsillie.”

  Worse even than her refusal to look at Russ were the words he, his, him. They reduced him to the It in an I–It relationship.

  “I don’t understand,” he said to Sally. “You and I had a good conversation in my office, and it would have been wrong of me not to follow up. That’s what I do as a minister. I don’t know why you think I’m somehow singling you out.”

  “Because that’s how it feels to me,” she said. “How many ways do I have to find to tell you to leave me alone?”

  “I truly wasn’t aware of trying to push you. I just wanted you to know that I’m available. That I’m a person you can trust and open up with.”

  “That’s the thing,” Laura said. “She doesn’t trust you.”

  “Laura,” Ambrose said. “Let Sally speak for herself.”

  “No, I’m done,” Sally said, jumping to her feet. “He ruined Spring Trip for me. He gives me a bad feeling about this whole group. I’m done.”

  She fled the office. With a withering glance at the It that was Russ, Laura stood up and followed her. It seemed to Russ, in the silence that ensued, that only he was sweating. When Ambrose leaned back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head, the underarms of his denim shirt were enviably dry.

  “I don’t know what to do here, Russ.”

  “I was only trying to help her.”

  “Really? She says you complained to her about your sex life with Marion.”

  Sweat flowed from so many of Russ’s pores, it felt like a skin he was shedding. “Are you out of your mind? That is simply a lie.”

  “I’m just reporting what she said.”

  Blindsided by the accusation, Russ tried to shake his head clear, tried to remember his exact words in his conversation with Sally.

  “That’s not correct,” he said. “What I said to her was—I said that marriage is a blessing but can also be a struggle. That the enemy in a long relationship is boredom. That sometimes there’s not enough love in a
marriage to overcome that boredom. And then—you have to understand, there was a context to it.”

  Ambrose waited, glowering.

  “We’d been talking about her parents’ divorce, how angry she is at them, and I thought we were close to a breakthrough. When she asked me if I was ever bored in my marriage, I felt I had to share something honest with her. I thought it was important for her to know that even a man of the cloth, even a pastor she respects—”

  “Russ, Russ, Russ.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Not answer honestly?”

  “Within reason. There’s a certain art to it.”

  “She asked me, ‘Are you bored in your marriage?’”

  “I’m sorry to say that’s not how she remembers it. As she understood it, you were coming on to her.”

  “Are you out of your mind? I have a fifteen-year-old daughter!”

  “I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. But can you see why she might have perceived it that way?”

  “She came to see me. If anyone was doing the coming-on, it was—do you know what I think happened? It was Laura. As soon as she saw Sally getting closer to me, putting her trust in me, Laura turned her against me. The person with the dirty mind here is Laura. Sally was perfectly comfortable with me until Laura got ahold of her.”

  Ambrose seemed unexcited by Russ’s theory. “I know you don’t like Laura,” he said.

  “Laura does not like me.”

  “But take a step back and look at yourself. What were you thinking, talking about your sexual boredom to a vulnerable seventeen-year-old? Even if she was coming on to you, which I don’t believe, you had a clear responsibility to shut that down. Hard. Right away. Unambiguously.”

  It didn’t matter if Ambrose’s glowering was just a trick. Under the pressure of it, Russ stepped back and was mortified by what he saw: not the sexual creepiness he stood accused of (the girls of the fellowship were taboo to him in umpteen ways) but the fatuousness of thinking he could ever be as hip as Ambrose. More than once, he’d heard Ambrose confess to the group that he’d been an arrogant, heartless prick as a teenager, and Russ had seen how thrilled the group was, not only by Ambrose’s honesty but by the image of him breaking female hearts. Made giddy by attention from a popular girl, Russ had imagined that he’d mastered the skill of honesty himself and could somehow erase his own timidity as a teenager, retroactively become a boy at ease with the likes of Sally Perkins. In his giddiness, he’d confessed, at least by implication, that Marion no longer turned him on. He’d felt the need to shed Marion, break free of her, in order to be more like Ambrose; and now his vanity stood shamefully revealed. His only thought was to get away, find fresher air, and seek comfort in God’s mercy.