Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

“Please, Rick. I’m not demanding—I’m asking. Please do me this favor.”

  Ambrose shook his head. “I’m not running a dating service.”

  It seemed to Russ, as it had all winter, that every piece of good news—in this case, that Frances was evidently still on for Arizona—came paired with news more than bad enough to negate it. Ambrose had seen through him, and there was nothing he could do. He had no grounds for appeal beyond his having imagined a long walk alone with Frances, a hike up into the pinyon forest, a first kiss on a wind-scoured hilltop; and this was no argument at all. The Lord was with Ambrose.

  When Russ went home that night, Becky informed him that she wasn’t coming on Spring Trip. A day earlier, he would have been relieved to hear it—she and her friends had signed up for Kitsillie, where she would have observed his attentions to Frances—but now it only seemed like another sign of their estrangement. Under the influence of Tanner Evans, Becky was becoming ever more hippieish and defiant, and she’d been staying out to all hours, even during the week. When Russ had tried to impose a weeknight curfew, she’d run to Marion, which had led to an impasse, resolved in Becky’s favor.

  “I thought you were looking forward to the trip,” he said.

  She was sprawled on the living-room sofa with her Bible. In her hands, in the militancy of her rejection of him, the Bible was oddly distasteful.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m not into it.”

  The hippieish locution into it was also distasteful. “Into the trip? Or Crossroads generally?”

  “Both. It’s like Ambrose said—it’s more of a psychological experiment than Christianity. It’s teenybopper relationship dramas.”

  “I seem to recall that you’re still a teenager yourself.”

  “Ha ha good point.”

  “I’d looked forward to some time with you in Arizona. Is the idea that you’ll be alone here?”

  “That is the idea, yes.”

  “I hope you won’t burn the house down with some party.”

  She gave him an insulted look and reopened her Bible. He no longer understood her at all, but it was true that her social life now seemed to consist of Tanner Evans. Because she and Russ and Perry had planned to go to Arizona, Marion was taking Judson to Los Angeles for spring vacation, treating him to Disneyland and visiting her uncle Jimmy, who was in a nursing home there. The trip was an extravagance, but Russ had known better than to argue, and Marion’s absence was a problem only now that Becky had decided to stay home. Very probably, Becky intended to use the empty parsonage to sleep with Tanner, which was another distasteful thought, mitigated only by Russ’s fondness for Tanner. Despite her new religiosity, Becky dressed and carried herself like someone sexually active—he really didn’t understand her. He only knew she’d never be his little girl again.

  Early the next morning, he awakened with an idea so obvious he was amazed he hadn’t seen it sooner: Keith Durochie had told him not to go to Kitsillie. Keith had said that there was plenty of work in Many Farms, and who was Russ to argue with a Navajo elder? More to the point: Who was Ambrose?

  A path to a week with Frances clear ahead of him, he went to his church office and waited until the hour was late enough to call Keith’s house. The woman who answered, on the fifteenth or twentieth ring, was not Keith’s wife.

  “He’s at the hospital,” she said. “He’s sick.”

  Russ asked what had happened, but apparently the woman had said all she could. Distressed, he called the offices of the tribal council, which Keith was a longtime member of, and learned from a secretary that Keith had suffered a stroke. How bad a stroke Russ couldn’t ascertain—the Navajos had taboos regarding illness. Setting aside his distress about Keith, he said he was arriving with three busloads of teenagers on Saturday night and needed to know where to go. The secretary connected him, through a loudly buzzing internal line, to a council administrator whose first name was Wanda and whose family name he didn’t catch. Perhaps because of the buzzing, she spoke with plangent enunciation.

  “Russ,” she said, “you do not have to worry. We know that you are coming. You do not have to worry that we are not expecting you.”

  Over the buzzing, Russ explained that Keith had suggested he avoid the mesa and go to Many Farms instead. To this, there was no response from Wanda, only buzzing.

  “Wanda? Can you hear me?”

  “Let me be completely honest and straightforward with you,” she said plangently. “Keith has had trouble on the mesa, but we have a federal mandate. There is work to be done at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. We have delivered cement and lumber to the school, and we will be very grateful for your help.”

  “Ah—mandate?”

  “It is a federal mandate and we have supplies for you. One of the women from the chapter has agreed to cook for you, as you requested in your letter. Her name is Daisy Benally.”

  “Yes, I know Daisy. But Keith seemed to feel we’d be better off in Many Farms.”

  “We know that a group is coming to Many Farms. All of the arrangements are in place.”

  “Well, then, maybe, if you could accommodate two groups there, instead of one—”

  “Russ, I am speaking to you in all respect. We are not expecting two groups in Many Farms. I will personally meet you here on Saturday and explain the work that we are hoping you will do at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. I will look forward to meeting you.”

  Russ felt powerless against Wanda’s plangency, all the more so as a bilagáana. He hoped she might be easier to talk to in person, or that Keith would be well enough recovered to overrule her.

  On Thursday night, after a long effort to fall asleep, he dreamed he was alone and lost on the Black Mesa, trying to get down from a trackless mountain. Far below him, he saw sheep and horses in a rock-strewn paddock, but to reach the trail leading down he had to climb higher, on ever stonier and steeper slopes. The terrain was unexpectedly vast, and the direction he was climbing seemed wrong, but he had to keep going to make sure. Finally he reached a cliff impossible to scale. Looking back, he saw that he was on a slope too nearly vertical to be descended. He saw sheer rock and yawning space and understood that he was going to die. Coming awake, in the barrenness of his marital bed, he recognized his situation. No path with joy at the end of it could be as arduous and convoluted as attaining Frances had become.

  But this was a wee-hour recognition. By the time the buses rolled into the First Reformed parking lot, twelve hours later, his path seemed clear again. If Frances would only show up, he could sort things out in Many Farms. A cold March breeze was blowing, daffodils blooming along the church’s limestone flanks, the sun bright, the air chilly. In his old sheepskin coat, a clipboard in hand, Russ directed seminarians and alumni advisers in their toting of Crossroads tool chests, cans of Ballerina Pink and Sunshine Yellow, crates of rollers and brushes, Coleman lanterns. A parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, pulled up beside Russ in a late-model Lincoln and suggested that he load the buses closer to the church doors. Ted nodded at the seminarian Carolyn Polley, who was struggling with a tool chest. “That little girl is going to get hurt.”

  Russ held up his clipboard, to indicate his supervisory role. “Feel free to pitch in.”

  Ted seemed disinclined. He was a real-estate lawyer, a soloist in the church choir, a beefy former U.S. Marine, and thought very well of himself.

  “I’m concerned about drinking water,” he said. “Do we have drinking water?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t I run down to Bev-Mart and buy us a bunch of five-gallon bottles. Darra said some of the kids last year had diarrhea.”

  “I doubt it was from the water.”

  “Simple enough to bring some.”

  “A hundred and twenty kids, eight days—that’s a lot of bottles.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “The water on the reservation comes from wells. It’s not a problem.”

  Ted made the face of a man unused to deferring. It wa
s a mistake, Russ thought, to bring a male parishioner on a trip where he would be subordinate to a junior minister. Russ could well imagine Ted’s opinion of him and his pastoral impracticality, his feeble salary, his indetectable contribution to the general good. The opinion was subtly implicit in Ted’s offer to buy water—to open his fee-fattened wallet, to effortlessly exercise his spending power. Putting him in Russ’s group had been selfish of Ambrose, if not deliberately cruel.

  As the family cars streamed in, releasing kids in their paint-smeared jeans and their dirtiest coats, with their Frisbees and their sleeping bags, Russ had eyes for only one car. From within the misery of his suspense he glimpsed the relief of being free of Frances, of receiving a definitive no and moving on, of being anywhere else but where he was. When he finally spied her car on Pirsig Avenue, his misery made the moment of reckoning—whether she was joining him or simply dropping off Larry—feel curiously weightless. Thy will be done. As if for the first time, he appreciated the peace these words afforded.

  The peace lasted until she stepped out of her car, wearing her hunting cap. When he saw Larry open the trunk and remove not only a fancy backpack, suitable for alpine trekking, but a large and feminine fabric suitcase, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. It swept away his equanimity, exposed its falseness, stopped his breath. He was going to have her.

  Secure in his presentiment, he busied himself with his clipboard, checking off the names of Crossroads members in the Kitsillie group. Unlike three years ago, bus assignments were now determined by destination, not by clique. Someone, presumably Ambrose, had drawn a heavy line through Becky’s name. Russ still half hoped and half feared that Becky would change her mind, but when he saw her and Perry pull up in the family Fury, without Marion along to drive it home, he knew she wasn’t coming. She didn’t even get out of the car while Perry retrieved his duffel bag.

  As the Fury left the parking lot, Frances marched up to Russ. He pretended to consult his clipboard. “Oh hey,” he said.

  Her eyes were glittering with drama. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you. You didn’t think I had the guts. It looks like you’re stuck with me and my phony self-reproach after all.”

  He struggled not to smile. “That remains to be seen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to Kitsillie. Rick wants you in the Many Farms group.”

  She drew her head back. “In Larry’s group? Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Larry doesn’t want me anywhere near him. Why did Rick do that?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Does he think I can’t hack it on the mesa?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “That is extremely annoying. I hope you didn’t make him do that.”

  Russ had won the fight against smiling. “No. Why would I?”

  “Because you’re mad at me.”

  “It was Rick’s decision, not mine. Take it up with him if you’re not happy.”

  “The only reason I came was to be with you on the mesa. Well, not the only reason. But I am very, very annoyed.”

  In her face was the disappointment of a spoiled child, a slighted VIP. Maybe she was thinking of the Acapulco trip that she’d forgone.

  “Who took my place?” she said. “Who’s going with you?”

  “Ted Jernigan, Judy Pinella. Craig Dilkes, Biff Allard. Carolyn Polley.”

  “Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. Russ wondered if his jealousy-provoking gambit might actually have worked. As he watched her stalk away, the arduousness of the long path behind him felt like nothing. She wanted to be with him, and he’d managed to conceal his delight.

  Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas, Rick Ambrose standing in his army jacket beside Dwight Haefle, who’d come outside to behold the glory of it all. As Frances walked up to the two men, Russ averted his eyes (Thy will be done) and went looking for the Kitsillie kids whose names were still unchecked. They were due to leave in ten minutes, at five o’clock, and the buses were still empty. There were last-minute runs to the drugstore, tragic partings of friends on different buses, the suitcase in need of late excavation from a luggage bay, the forgotten sack dinner, and, as always, in Russ’s experience, the one or two kids who were late.

  “David Goya?” he shouted. “Kim Perkins? Anybody seen them?”

  “I think they’re upstairs,” someone said.

  Inside the church, as he climbed the upper stairs, he heard voices go silent at his approach. Sitting in the Crossroads meeting room, on a pair of legless couches, were David Goya, Kim Perkins, Keith Stratton, and Bobby Jett. Cool kids all; friends of Becky and Perry. Russ sensed that he’d caught them doing something wrong, but he didn’t see or smell anything forbidden.

  “Guys, come on,” he said from the doorway. “We need you downstairs.”

  Glances were exchanged. Kim, in stiffly new blue overalls, jumped up and gestured to the others. “We’re going, okay? Let’s just go.”

  Keith and Bobby looked to David as if the decision was his.

  “You guys go,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” Russ said. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  “No, no, no,” Kim said.

  She pushed past him, out the door. Keith and Bobby followed, and Russ waited for David to explain. The agedness of David’s face and hair was so peculiar, it might have been endocrine.

  “Seen Perry?” he said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Let me put it differently. Does Perry seem okay to you?”

  Before the question was even out of David’s mouth, Russ intuited its pertinence. The scenario that came to him was complete and convincing: Perry would contrive to mess things up at the last minute, and all would be lost with Frances.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he said to David. “You and I can talk on the bus.”

  “You haven’t noticed anything. He hasn’t seemed at all strange to you.”

  It was true that Perry had been notably scarce in recent weeks, more like his former furtive self, no longer rising so early, but Russ said nothing. He needed to keep the bad scenario at bay.

  “I saw him last night,” David said, “and he wasn’t making any sense. He can be that way sometimes—his brain works too fast to keep up with. But this seemed different. More like a problem with the entire circuit board. The reason I mention it is I’m concerned he might be violating the rules.”

  Time was passing. Things of interest to Russ were happening in the parking lot. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “So, you think—has he been smoking pot again?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Laudably or regrettably, that appears to be a thing of the past—I gather he made some kind of promise to you. My concern here is that I violate the rules myself if I fail to report a rules violation. My concern is that even now, as we speak, he isn’t unimpaired.”

  God damn Perry. The scenario now included a call to Marion, explaining that she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because her son was messing up again, to which she might object that she’d already bought her plane tickets, to which Russ would reply that his job obliged him to lead a group in Arizona, whereas she and Judson were going to Los Angeles purely for pleasure, and that, moreover, she was the one who’d insisted that Perry was doing better.

  David looked down at his long, bony hands. “I’m not just covering my ass, by the way. Something is definitely not right with him.”

  “I appreciate your honesty.”

  “Although, having taken the step of mentioning it, I’d be grateful if Kim and Keith and Bobby could be included under the umbrella of immunity.”r />
  “I’ll speak to him,” Russ said. “You get yourself on the bus.”

  His fear, as he went downstairs, was both new and familiar. His primary feeling about Perry had always been fear. At first it was fear of his operatic tantrums, later fear of his intellectual acuity, its application to mockeries too subtle to be called out and punished, its implicit piercing of Russ’s every fault and weakness. Now the fear was more existentially parental. He and Marion had brought into the world a being of uncontrollable volition, for whom he was nonetheless responsible.

  In the parking lot, kids were mobbing the buses, rushing to claim seats. Looking around for Perry, Russ saw the most wonderful thing. The woman he wanted was standing by the Kitsillie bus. The driver was stowing her suitcase below. With a more delicious kind of fear, Russ hurried over to her.

  “Here I am,” she said aggressively. “Like it or not.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “Dwight saved the day. I asked Rick why I wasn’t going to the mesa, and you know what he said? That you could use another man up there. I told him that was incredibly demeaning to me. I told him Larry’s at an age where the last thing he wants is his mother in his hair. I said maybe Rick should tell Larry he’d ruined his whole trip. And you know Dwight, always the diplomat. He asks Rick if there’s anyone I can trade places with. Which it turns out Judy Pinella is perfectly happy to do. I don’t know what Rick was thinking, but if he thinks I don’t care if I get the full experience, up on the mesa, he doesn’t know me.”

  She was full of self-regard, full of entitlement, and Russ was smitten with every bit of it.

  “Plus,” he suggested, “you and I get to be together.”

  She made a coy face. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

  “It’s a good thing.”

  “Maybe you don’t hate me so much after all?”

  This time, there was no suppressing a smile, but it didn’t matter—she obviously knew very well how he felt. It was inconceivable to her that anyone could resist her. And this, more than anything else, had set the hook in him. He couldn’t get enough of her self-love.