Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “That’s Jimmy’s studio,” Marion said. “He won’t come out till dinnertime. Antonio’s at work, and I am—studying.” She indicated an open textbook on the table. “We also have two cats, who seem to have disappeared. They were just here.”

  Jimmy was her uncle, but Russ wondered about the other man. An unpleasant new feeling, possessiveness, came over him. “Who is Antonio?”

  “Jimmy’s companion. They’re—you know.” Marion looked up. “Or maybe you don’t.”

  How was he supposed to know anything?

  “They’re like husband and wife, except Antonio’s a man. It’s a terrible abomination.” She snickered. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”

  There were, at camp, two Quaker boys whom Russ’s cabinmates referred to as fairies. Only now did he understand that the appellation might encompass more than just their manner. He felt a queasiness, not only at the abomination but at Marion’s snicker.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as if sensing his discomfort. “I forgot where you come from. I’m so used to Antonio, it seems ridiculous that anyone could disapprove.”

  “So, you, uh—what part of Catholic teaching do you actually accept?”

  “Oh, lots of it. The Eucharist, Christ’s absolution of our sins, Father Fergus’s authority. Jimmy and Antonio would definitely have things to repent if they were Catholic, but I don’t see that it’s any of my business. Jesus says I shouldn’t cast stones.”

  Russ’s empathy for homosexuals began with Marion. Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption. Alongside his craving to bury himself in her was a wish to be filled up with her—to feel his heart pumping her essence, as if he were a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, into his unfurling, birth-damp wings. She’d spent three and a half more years on earth than he, had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a deeper and more incisive thinker. Because she swore by Roosevelt, Russ registered to vote as a Democrat. Because she read secular literature—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck—he read it, too. The same thing with jazz, the same thing with modern art, the same thing with clothes, and the same thing, especially, with sex.

  They passed his first visit at her kitchen table, talking about the soul and teachers’ college, about his grandfather and his doubts about his family’s faith. On his second visit, five days later, they hiked so far up the mountain behind Jimmy’s house they had to race the setting sun back down. Marion then sent him a letter in which there was little of substance, just a breezy account of her day, but he couldn’t stop rereading it. Each detail—that one of the cats had coughed up a hair ball on her bed, that her uncle had asked her to cook lamb chops for his birthday, that she might stop at the butcher on her way back from the post office, that she thought it might snow again—was more magically interesting than the next. He remembered hungrily rereading his mother’s early letters to him, which were likewise full of the quotidian. Now his mother’s letters so bored him that he barely skimmed them once. He couldn’t have cared less if she thought it might snow.

  His mother had taken to mentioning that one girl or another in their community had “really grown up,” a short phrase that encoded a longer message: he was to finish his service, choose a wife from one of a score of acceptable families, and settle down in Lesser Hebron. What he could write back to his mother without revealing his doubts had dwindled to the point of his repeating, essentially verbatim, not just sentences but whole paragraphs. Of his time with the Navajos, he’d written little more than that they were a proud and generous people who had great respect for the Mennonites. Of Marion, he wrote nothing at all. His sense that he and she had been ordained to meet was growing stronger by the day, and his family’s community didn’t forbid marriage to outsiders, merely discouraged it, but Marion was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. The safe course was to conceal her existence and hope for the best.

  Every second Friday night, most of the camp workers piled into trucks and went down to the movie house in Flagstaff, chaperoned by George Ginchy himself. The first time Russ had joined them, after losing his religion on the mesa, he’d been transfixed by the window movies opened on the larger world, and he’d been going ever since. On a Friday night in April, when he and the others trooped into the Orpheum, a small, green-coated figure was waiting for him, by secret prearrangement, in the last row of seats.

  Very soon, almost as soon as the lights went down, four soft fingers slipped into his callused hand. To hold a woman’s hand was so absorbing and momentous that the shouts of the Three Stooges, in the first short subject, were unintelligible to him. While Marion, for her part, seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at the twisting of ears and the collapse of a stepladder, the spectacle of violence struck Russ as a profanement of his moment with her; it hurt his eyes.

  When the feature started, a Sherlock Holmes picture, she lost interest in the screen and rested her head against his shoulder. She extended an arm across his chest, pulling herself closer. Basil Rathbone, meerschaum in hand, was speaking unintelligibly. Russ tried not to breathe, lest she let go of him, but she stirred again. Her hand was on his neck, turning his face toward hers. In the flickering light, a pair of lips surfaced. And, oh, their softness. The intimacy of kissing them was so intense it made him anxious, like a mortal in the presence of eternity. He turned his face away, but she immediately drew it back. By and by, he got the idea. He and she weren’t there to watch the movie, not one bit. They were there to kiss and kiss and kiss.

  When the credits rolled, she wordlessly stood and left the theater. The house lights came up on a world comprehensively transformed, made more vivid and expansive, by the joining of two mouths. Feeling wildly conspicuous, hoping he wasn’t, he slipped into a group of workers exiting the theater. Marion wasn’t in the lobby, but George Ginchy was.

  “You never cease to surprise me,” Ginchy said.

  “Sir?”

  “I took you for a God-fearing country boy. You almost squeaked with clean living.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Not with me.”

  Marion led him, in the weeks that followed, up a long and twisting stairway, scary to climb but delightful to linger on each step of—the first I love you in a letter, the first I love you spoken, the first kiss in public daylight, the hours shortened to minutes by kissing in her uncle’s parlor, the more frenzied nighttime grappling on the seat of the Willys, the unbelievable opening of her blouse, the discovery that even infinite softness had gradations, softer yet, softest of all—which finally led, on a cloudy afternoon in May, to her locking her bedroom door, kicking off her shoes, and lying down on her little bed.

  Through the sheer curtain on her window, Russ could see her uncle’s art studio.

  “Should we be in here?” he said. “It would be awkward if someone…”

  “Antonio’s in Phoenix, and Jimmy’s not my keeper. It’s not as if we have a better place.”

  “It could be awkward, though.”

  “Are you afraid of me, sweetie? You seem afraid of me.”

  “No. I’m not afraid of you. But—”

  “I woke up knowing today would be the day. You just have to trust me. I’m scared, too, but—I really think God intended this to be the day.”

  It seemed to Russ that God was in the cloudy light outside but not inside her bedroom. Somewhere on the stairway to this moment, he’d lost hold of the importance of preserving his purity until they were married.

  “Today’s good for other reasons, too,” she said. “It’s a good safe day.”

  “Is Jimmy not home?”

  “No, he’s in his studio. I mean I can’t get pregnant.”

  He didn’t love feeling always slow, always behind, but he did love Marion. It wasn’t accurate to say he thought about her night and day, because it was less a matter of thinking than of feeling filled with her, filled in the unceasing way that he imagined a mor
e truly religious person, a Navajo on the mesa, might be filled with God. And she was right: if not today, in her room, then when and where? He never wanted to stop touching her, but merely touching was never enough. His body had been telling him, albeit mutely, and yet so insistently that he got the message, that the pressure of her presence in him could only be relieved by releasing it inside her.

  Which he now did. In the gray light, on the quilted coverlet of her bed. The release came very quickly and was disappointing in its suddenness, surprisingly less satisfactory than his solitary chafings. An act no less crucial in his life than being baptized had lasted scarcely longer. Ashamed of how unmomentous the act had felt in the event, he became more generally ashamed. His proportions were as ungainly as hers were ideal, his boniness an affront to her softness, his skin a dismal gray against the creamy white of hers. He couldn’t believe she was smiling up at him, couldn’t believe the approval in her gaze.

  “Just rest there for a second,” she said, stroking his hair. “We’re only starting.”

  He didn’t know how she knew this, but again she was right. As soon as she said starting, his body told him she was right. The word in itself reelectrified it. That the crucial act could be repeated, after the shortest of breathers, would never have occurred to him. That it could be done four times, before the light faded and he had to rush away, was a dazzlement from which, he could already feel, as he urged the Willys up the steep road to camp, there would be no recovering. The Mosaic commandment against adultery, the plain dress of the women in Lesser Hebron, the proscription against dancing, the concealment of women’s necks: it was as if he’d grown up inside an ancient fort whose parapets and cannons faced out on peaceful fields, toward an enemy he’d seen no trace of. Now he understood why the fortifications were so massive.

  The next time they sinned, in her little room, on an unusually warm and muggy afternoon, with a cat thumping against her locked door, he fell from a height of carnality into an abyss of moral anxiety. He trusted Marion because of her unfeignable love of God, her self-blaming goodness. What she wanted was no more than what he wanted, and the spilling of seed wasn’t shameful per se. An arousal and emission that occurred in dreams, without his volition, could only be a natural function of the body. But to release his seed inside a woman he wasn’t married to, to lose himself in her flesh, to wallow in her private aromas, was manifestly different. He extricated himself and, despite the heat, pulled the coverlet over him.

  “Aren’t you worried,” he said, “about committing a mortal sin?”

  She scrambled to her knees. Her nakedness, blinding in its beauty, seemed of no consequence to her.

  “I don’t need to be a Catholic,” she said. “I want to be whatever you are. If you want to be Navajo, I’ll be a Navajo with you.”

  “That’s not a possibility.”

  “Then whatever you like. I needed to be at Nativity because—it was something I needed to do. I needed to pray and be forgiven. I prayed and prayed, and then there you were—my reward. Am I allowed to say that? You’re like my gift from God. That’s how miraculous you are to me.”

  “But then … don’t you think we should be married?”

  “Yes! Good idea! We can do it next week. Or tomorrow—how about tomorrow?”

  As if the blessing of matrimony had already descended, he pulled her onto him and kissed her. She threw aside the quilt and straddled him, handling him with an expertness he didn’t question; she was naturally expert at everything. Only in her whimpers, which she emitted in rhythm to their coupling, was any sense of lesserness detectable. She whimpered and spoke his name, whimpered and spoke his name. In his mind, she was already his darling little wife. But after the culminating pleasure had coursed through him, he returned to being a sinner in a sweat beneath another sinner.

  Her mood, too, had changed. She was crying, voicelessly, miserably.

  “Is something wrong? Did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Marion, I’m sorry, my God—did I hurt you?”

  “No.” She gasped through her tears. “You’re wonderful. You’re my—you’re perfect.”

  “Then what? What is it?”

  She rolled away and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t be a Catholic.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it means I can’t marry you. I was—oh, Russ.” She sobbed. “I was already married!”

  A sickening disclosure. Jealousy and uncleanliness, both bodily and moral, were compounded in the image of another man possessing her as he just had. A woman he’d believed to be pure and purehearted was previously used—befouled. He felt sick with disappointment. The depth of it revealed the height of the hope she’d given him.

  “It happened in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was married for six months and then divorced. I should have told you right away. It was terrible of me not to. You’re so beautiful and I’m—oh—I’m so—I should have told you! Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  She thrashed in her misery. A cruel part of him thought she deserved any amount of emotional punishment, but the loving part of him was moved. He wanted to kill the man who’d polluted her.

  “Who was it? Did he hurt you?”

  “It was just a mistake. I was still a kid—I didn’t know anything. I thought I was supposed to—I didn’t know anything.”

  The idea of an innocent girl’s mistake, for which she was now piteously remorseful, further softened his heart. But his anger and disgust had a life of their own. He’d thrown away his virginity on a woman who’d given hers to someone else, and now her nakedness was repellent, her smell appalling. He wished to God he’d never left Lesser Hebron. He swung his legs off the bed and roughly dressed himself.

  “Please don’t be angry with me,” she said in a calmer voice.

  He was too angry to speak.

  “I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes, but I’m not wrong about us. Please try, if you can, to forgive me. I want to marry you, Russ. I want to be yours forever.”

  He’d wanted the very same thing. Disappointment welled up in him and erupted in a sob.

  “Sweetie, please,” she said. “Sit down with me, let me hold you. I’m so very, very sorry.”

  He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him—it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people. Feeling compassion for this person, who was suffering and needed his care, he unlocked the bedroom door and ran out through the house, jumped into the Willys and drove a few blocks. He stopped beneath a cypress tree and wept for himself.

  She sent him two letters, on consecutive days, and he opened neither of them. The woman he loved was still there but occluded from him, separated by her own doing. It was as if his Marion were imprisoned in a Marion he didn’t know at all. He could almost hear his dear one crying out to him from inside the prison. She needed him to come and rescue her, but he was afraid of the other Marion—afraid of finding that it was she who’d written the letters.

  He’d done very little praying since he met her. Returning to it now, he laid his situation out to God and asked Him what His will was. The first insight to emerge was that God required him to forgive her. In trying to explain to God why he was angry, he saw that Marion’s offense—she’d been too embarrassed to mention her marriage sooner—was paltry; that, indeed, the greater offense was his own hard-heartedness. This led him to a second insight: for all his doubting, for all his liberation, he was still a Mennonite. At some level, he’d assumed that he would one day bring Marion home with him and there, although they might not settle in Lesser Hebron, receive his family’s blessing. Now the fact of her divorce had snuffed any chance of that. The extremity of his disappointment pertained not to her but to his parents, because he hadn’t yet fully broken with them. He was angry because her divorce compelled him to make a hard c
hoice.

  Unready to make it, still afraid to open her letters, he wrote to the only person who might understand his quandary. His grandfather must have replied to Russ’s letter immediately, because the reply arrived in camp just eight days later. The advice in it was unexpected.

  You don’t have to marry her—I’m here to tell you the sun will still rise in the morning. Why not enjoy the moment and see how you feel when your term of service ends? You’ll have plenty of time for marrying if you still feel the same, but a young man doesn’t always know his heart. Your gal already made her own mistake, and it sounds like she knows how to look after herself. That’s pure gold—yours to enjoy if you’re careful. So long as she’s not in a family way, there’s no reason to be hasty.

  A year earlier, Russ might have been alarmed by how tumorously his grandfather’s debauchery had consumed his moral principles. Now, instead, he felt a fraternity. It seemed to him that Clement was right in every respect but one—Russ already knew his heart, and it belonged to Marion. But there was more.

  As to your parents, I don’t guess they’ll forgive you if you marry her. Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no man’s business. I know firsthand the vengeance in his heart. Your mother’s a good woman, but she lost her mind to Jesus. She’s so deep in her faith you can scream at the top of the lungs and she won’t hear you. She thinks she loves you when she prays for you, but she only loves her Jesus.

  Russ didn’t need to reread Clement’s letter, then or ever. One reading was enough to burn every line of it into his memory.

  What the Bible meant by joy, and by the related words that recurred in it so frequently, joyful, joyous, rejoicing, he learned the following afternoon, when he went back to Marion’s uncle’s house. There was joy in his unconditional surrender to her—joy in his apology for the hardness of his heart, joy in her forgiveness, joy in his release from doubt and blame. How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant? There was joy in making love on a thunderstormy afternoon, and there was joy in not making love, joy in just lying and looking into her fathomless dark eyes. Joy in the first trip they made together to Diné Bikéyah, joy in the sight of Stella on Marion’s lap, joy in the sweetness of Marion’s way with children, joy in the thought of giving her a child of her own, joy in the desert sunset, joy in the star-choked sky, joy even in the mutton stew. And joy in George Ginchy’s invitation to a private dinner with him, joy in seeing her through Ginchy’s eyes. Joy when she first put her mouth on Russ’s penis, joy in her wantonness, joy in the abjectness of his gratitude, joy in its sealing of the certainty that he would never leave her. Joy in the corroborating pain of being apart from her, joy in their reunions, joy in making plans, joy in the prospect of finishing his education and catching up with her, joy in the mystery of what might happen after that.