Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Perry said. “If you could just set me up, I’d be happy to pay full retail price, and I’ll be on my way again.”

  The guy continued to nod. He’d been edgy and distracted the last time Perry saw him, six weeks ago, behind the A&P, but nothing like this. It came to Perry that he was looking at a speed freak. He’d heard about them but had never seen one. He didn’t want to leave, because the crater was waiting for him, right outside the house, but a self-preservative instinct was asserting itself. He turned toward the door.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, where you going?” The guy bounded over and put his hand on the door. There were ugly sores on the inside of his arm, a very rank odor coming off him. “What are you doing to me? I can’t deal with the dimensions of this.”

  “If you can’t help me—”

  “You’re fucking me over. Every one of you is fucking me over. I don’t have any weed, all right? Merry Christmas, Happy New Year—where’s your money?”

  “I think I’d better go.”

  “No no no no no no. You like the pills, you like the ’ludes, I’ve still got Ludydudies.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m not in the market.”

  The guy nodded vigorously. “That’s okay, man, we’re still good. Just don’t go anywhere, right? Stay here, don’t move, I’ve got something else for you.”

  In his bare feet, with his hitching gait, he lumbered into the rear of the house, where the dog howled again. His eagerness, the shift in power it represented, was somewhat alleviating Perry’s fear, and he wondered what the something else might be.

  The guy returned shaking a glass jar like a maraca, a Planters Peanuts jar with several hundred pills in it, a quantity that told Perry they couldn’t be valuable. Amphetamines, presumably. Not a substance he’d ever had reason to try.

  “Take a handful,” the guy said, “there’s no such thing as too many.”

  The lid of the jar hit the entry rug with a dull clank and rolled away. The open jar was offered with a trembling hand.

  “What have we here?” Perry said.

  “Take like four of ’em and chew ’em—you’ll see, there’s no such thing as too many, you’ll forget about your weed. Chew ’em up and wait a minute, it’ll hit you. The first four are on me, because, shit, man, it’s Christmas, I’ll give you another forty for your twenty dollars, you’ll forget about your weed, this shit’s like a bomb, take take take. If you like it, which you will, I can set you up with the big bomb. Take take take.”

  The dark crater had appeared in front of Perry; it was both behind him and in front of him, which could only mean that he was falling into it. He held out his hand.

  Having performed the task that Frances had set him, having secured a place on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ returned to his office in a state of exultation. On the desk where his lady had sat in her hunting cap, her legs parted, he saw an Arizona landscape unfolding. In his mind, he was already driving deep into this landscape. He was tempted to call her immediately and report his accomplishment, but all afternoon, all evening, she’d been running the show, provoking his ardor, withholding rewards, and this needed to stop. It was he who’d slain the dragon! He who’d had the guts to knock on Ambrose’s door! Better, he thought, to leave her in suspense. Better to let her wonder until she finally had to ask. And then, casually, let drop that he’d forgiven Ambrose and was going to Arizona.

  He locked his office and went down to the parking lot. In the snow on his Fury’s rear window, some teenaged hand had inscribed the word OOPS. Hearing the music from the function hall, he recalled that he and Frances wouldn’t be alone in Arizona; there would also be busloads of potentially hostile young people. It occurred to him that he was still wearing his sheepskin coat.

  He had a guilty impulse to go back for his other one, but he was done with being gutless. He could wear whatever goddamned coat he pleased. He no longer cared if Marion knew he’d spent the day with Frances. In the future, yes, if he commenced an affair and it grew into something larger, a new life, a second chance, the repercussions would be daunting, but for now his only detectable crime was the little lie he’d told at breakfast. If Marion remarked on the sheepskin coat, made the mildest insinuation, he would blast her with the news that Perry was a pot smoker. Even better, he would tell her about Ambrose. For three years, she’d been maligning Rick, reinforcing Russ’s grudge against him, and when she learned that Russ had forgiven him, unilaterally, without consulting her, she was bound to feel betrayed. No doubt she’d imagined she was being a loyal wife. But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago. Frances had restored him to his courage, his edge, by believing he was capable of more.

  Not trusting his tires on the unplowed hill on Maple, and being in no hurry to lay eyes on Marion, he drove the long way home to Highland Street. Again and again today, for six hours, he’d glanced at the face of his female companion and liked what he saw. It was such a simple thing, a lightness that so many other men took for granted, to walk into a McDonald’s with Frances and not be embarrassed to be seen with her, but to him the relief of it, the contrast with the daily disappointment of seeing Marion, had felt almost miraculous. Where Frances’s hair, even flattened by the hunting cap, had flattered her, each of the hairstyles that Marion had tried in recent years had been wrong in a different way, too short or too long, each serving to accentuate the redness of her skin, the thickening of her neck, the pinching of her eyes by adipose and insomnia. He knew it was unfair of him to care. It was unfair that his eye should be more painfully affronted by his wife than by the many objectively worse-looking women in New Prospect. It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness. Sometimes, when she looked especially dumpy at a church dinner, he sensed a satisfaction in being unsightly to him, a wish to make him suffer along with her for what he and their marriage had done to her, but most of the time her unhappiness excluded him. Hating her looks was yet another of the jobs she quietly and capably took on for him. Was it any wonder he was lonely in his marriage?

  When he finally reached the parsonage, a large Oldsmobile, Dwight Haefle’s, was backing out of the driveway. He tried to go around it, but Dwight stopped at an angle and lowered his window. Russ could only lower his.

  “We missed you at the party,” Dwight said.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

  “Marion mentioned that you and Mrs. Cottrell had some trouble in the city?”

  Dwight’s expression was unreadable in the incidental light. What was he doing at the parsonage? How had Marion known that Russ was with Frances and not Kitty Reynolds?

  “No, ah, no injuries,” he said.

  “I brought you some leftovers, in case you’re hungry.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank Doris.”

  Dwight’s window went up again, quickly and smoothly. The Oldsmobile, its power windows, its capabilities and newness, seemed emblematic of the senior minister’s invulnerability to temptations of the flesh. The Lord was with him; but so was Doris. Russ was a wreck at the wheel of a wreck, but he had Mrs. Cottrell.

  Only when he’d pulled into the driveway and cut the engine did he recall that Clem might be at home. He wanted to see Clem as little as he wanted to see Marion, but he knew he needed to speak to him again. He needed to revise what he’d said earlier—take the same risk he’d taken with Ambrose and be honest, confess to the complications of his heart and forgive, as he had with Ambrose, the hurtful things his son had said. Nothing less was demanded of the man he was becoming.


  Inside, in the kitchen, he found Marion and Judson at the table with a carton of eggnog. Judson was leaning back with a nog-smeared glass in his hand, coaxing the last viscous drops into his mouth. A faint scent of bacon was in the air.

  “Good Lord,” Marion said. “There you are.”

  “Hi, Dad,” Judson said.

  “Hello, lad. You’re up pretty late.”

  “Perry took me to the Haefles’. I got to watch a movie, and it was excellent, it was in New York City, and there was a gigantic department store, the one that does the Macy’s parade—”

  “Judson, honey,” Marion said, “why don’t you run upstairs and get your teeth brushed. I’ll come up and tuck you in.”

  “I’d like to hear more about that movie,” Russ said heartily.

  Without seeming to hear him, Judson got up and left the kitchen. Only for Marion did his children have ears. He pried off the work shoes that Ambrose had earlier unlaced.

  “I’m sorry I missed the party.”

  “I’m sure you are,” she said. “It was a laugh a minute.”

  From the chill in her voice, without looking at her, he gathered that his lie at breakfast hadn’t gone unnoticed. He was tempted to explain it away—to volunteer that Mrs. Cottrell had unexpectedly taken Kitty’s place. But this would have been the old Russ.

  “Is Clem here?”

  “No,” she said.

  “He’s—have you seen him?”

  “I sent him back to Champaign.”

  Now he looked at her. Her face was as red as ever, her hair no better, but there was something steely in her eyes.

  “One of us needed to do something,” she said. “I gather you did less than nothing.”

  “He’s going back to Champaign? Now?”

  “There’s a midnight bus and apparently a girl he’s involved with. I don’t know if he’ll change his mind, but it’s a start.”

  Russ looked away from her. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to talk to him again.”

  “If only you hadn’t been detained…”

  “I already apologized for being late. I didn’t realize—”

  “That he was having a major crisis?”

  “I tried to reason with him.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “I—not well.”

  She laughed at him. Laughed and stood up and went to the coat hooks by the door, removed something from a coat pocket, and shook it. Though small, the white object she extracted with her lips was so alien, had such a powerful charge, that it was like a third presence in the room. The bacony smell, he realized, was coming from his wife.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Smoking,” she said.

  “Not in my house.”

  “This isn’t your house, Russ. That’s a silly idea you need to let go of. The house is the church’s, and I’m the one who’s always in it. In what sense is it yours?”

  The question took him aback. “It is part of my compensation as a minister.”

  “Oh dear.” She laughed again. “You want to argue with me? I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  He saw that she was angry, perhaps inordinately so, about his little lie. She lit a burner on the stove and leaned over it, holding her hair away from the flame.

  “Put that out,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but put that out.”

  With mirth in her eyes, she blew smoke in his direction.

  “Marion. What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “If you’re angry with me about missing the party—”

  “Truth be told, I was hardly even thinking of you.”

  “I had an accident in the city. I ended up going with Mrs. Cottrell, by the way. Kitty couldn’t, ah. Kitty couldn’t make it. She, ah…”

  He could feel himself being dragged down, by the inertia of marriage, into a well-established pattern of evasion. As long as he stayed with Marion, he would never change.

  “You and I have a lot to discuss,” he said threateningly. “It’s not just Clem. There’s also a problem with Perry you need to know about. And— I went to see Ambrose. I thought it was—”

  “Russ, really. I’m just having a cigarette.”

  The sight of her smoking, in the middle of the kitchen, was uncanny. If she’d stripped out of her clothes and shaken her breasts at him, it wouldn’t have been any stranger. There was something of sex in the gasp of her drag on the cigarette.

  “Although I do wonder,” she said, exhaling, “how you think it would work. Even at the level of fantasy, how do you picture it working?”

  “How what would work?”

  “You’d still have four kids to support. You’d still be making seven thousand dollars a year. Is the idea that you’d go and live on her charity? Forgive me for wondering how well you’ve thought it through.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Again Marion laughed. “I hope she’s good at writing sermons,” she said. “I hope she likes cooking your meals and washing your underwear. I hope she’s ready to have the relationship with your kids that you’re too busy saving the world for. I hope she’s up for dealing with your insecurity every night of the week. And you know what else? I hope she keeps a close eye on you.”

  For the second time in two hours, he was being taunted. Although, in strict point of morality, he deserved it, he had a physical urge, stronger even than he’d had with Clem, to strike his wife. He felt like batting the cigarette from her hand, slapping her in the face, knocking the smile off it, so angering was the contrast between his family’s disrespect and Frances’s ingratiations.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said stiffly, “that you resented helping me with my sermons.”

  “I don’t, Russ. The help is freely given.”

  “In the future, I will write them all myself.”

  She took another puff on the cigarette. “Whatever you like, dear.”

  “As for the rest of it,” he said, “I won’t dignify it with an answer. I’ve had a very long day, and I’m going to bed. I would only thank you not to smoke in a house where the rest of us need to sleep.”

  In response, she made an O with her lips and blew a smoke ring. Her mouth stayed open.

  “God damn it, Marion.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”

  “I’m sure you don’t. You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”

  The insult was naked and it shocked him. Time and again, in the early years of their marriage, he’d sensed that she was angry about something small or large he’d done or failed to do. Each time, he’d expected an explosion of the sort he knew occurred in other marriages, and each time her anger had faded into soft-spoken reproach, at worst a sulking that she maintained for a day or two and then let go of, until finally he’d understood that they weren’t a couple who had fights. He remembered feeling proud of this. Now it seemed like another instance of her deadness to him as a wife.

  “I shouldn’t have to imagine,” he said. “If something is bothering you, the responsible thing is to tell me what it is, instead of making insinuations.”

  “Be careful what you ask for.”

  “Do you think I can’t handle it? There’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Tall words.”

  “I mean it. If you have something to say to me, say it.”

  “All right.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, her eyes crossing to focus on the coal. “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.”

  The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her.

  “It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”

  Russ stared at her. A schizophrenic parishioner had once said the same
thing to him.

  “You’ve got your liberal religion,” she said, “you’ve got your second-floor office, you’ve got your ladies on Tuesdays, but you have no idea what it means to know God. No idea what true belief is like. You think you’re God’s gift, you think you deserve better than what you’ve got, and, well, yes, I find that more than a little annoying. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your children are amazing—at least one of them is a flat-out genius. Where do you think that came from? Where do you think the brilliance in this family came from? Do you think it came from you? Ah—fuck!”

  She shook her hand and dropped the cigarette, which had burned her. She picked it up and took it to the sink. She appeared to be having some kind of nervous breakdown, and it ought to have worried him, ought to have repelled him, but it didn’t. He remembered an intensity so deeply buried in the past it might have been a dream, the intensity she’d possessed at twenty-five, the intensity with which he’d wanted her. And she was still his wife. Still lawfully his. Provoked by her abandon, he approached her from behind and put his hands on her breasts. Beneath the wool of her dress and the folds of middle-aged flesh was the off-kilter girl who’d maddened him in Arizona. The smoke in her hair and something equally foreign, a smell of liquor, were further provocations. It was exciting to touch the breasts of a drunk stranger.

  He tried to turn her around, but she ducked under his elbow and broke free. When he took a step toward her, she skittered away.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Marion—”

  “You think I’m sloppy seconds?”

  She never rejected him. In matters of the bedroom, he was the rejecter.

  “Fine,” he said angrily. “I was simply trying to—”

  “You and she deserve each other. Go ahead and see if I care. You have my permission.”

  The contempt in her voice robbed him of any joy he might have taken in her permission. She really was smarter than he was. As crazy as she was acting, she was right about that, and it didn’t matter if she was squat and red-faced, it didn’t matter if he slew dragons. As long as they stayed married—even if they didn’t—she would always have that on him.