Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “She left you?”

  “Marion, it’s been thirty years. Can’t we just…” He gestured limply.

  “All right. Show me your garden.”

  The wren buzzed again in the bushes, as uninterested as she in Bradley’s gardening. While he held forth about aphids and pruning cycles, morning sun versus afternoon sun, the mysterious death of a lemon tree, her idealization of him entirely disintegrated. The stiffness of his joints, when he crouched to show her a virginal hydrangea blossom, foretokened a near future in which, unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t have a loyal mate devoted to his care—not unless he married a third time. And why should she, who already had a husband, even younger than herself, do a blowsy old man such a favor? Why, indeed, if she wasn’t going to marry him, had she come to his house at all?

  It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.

  The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.

  “Oh, Bradley,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me?”

  She meant something definitively past. In the present, he was holding some weeds that he’d pulled, perhaps unconsciously.

  “You were good to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I put you through.”

  He looked at the weeds in his hand, let them fall to the gravel path, and took her in his arms. The two of them fit together as they once had. His chest, against her cheek, exposed by his half-open blouse, was still nearly hairless. Her eyes moist with pity for him, pity that he’d gotten older, she held him tight. When he tried to raise her chin, she averted her face. “Just hold me.”

  “You’re every bit as beautiful to me.”

  “I haven’t eaten in three months.”

  “Marion—Marion—”

  He tried to kiss her.

  “What I’m saying,” she said, extricating herself, “is I’m extremely hungry.”

  “You want lunch.”

  “Yes, please.”

  The tacky Oriental screen in his dining room saddened her. The disclosure that he’d become a vegetarian and a teetotaler saddened her. The vitamin pills he swallowed with his iced tea saddened her. The hemisphere of egg salad, on a bed of lettuce, saddened her so much she couldn’t touch it. Her chest was obstructed with the wrongness of her being there at all. That she’d imagined fucking—because this was what it was, this was the truth, this was why she’d starved herself and invented a pretext for going to Los Angeles—seemed so senseless to her, she wished she’d never done it with Bradley. She wished she’d never done it with anyone. To be fifty years old in a convent, to rise every morning and hear the sweet birds, to devote herself to loving God, to have that have been her life, instead of this one …

  “I thought you were hungry,” Bradley said.

  “I’m sorry. The salad looks delicious. I’m just—do you mind if I have a cigarette first?”

  His expression told her that he minded. He’d really become quite the health nut.

  “I can step out on the patio.”

  “No, it’s fine. I have an ashtray somewhere.”

  “I know,” she admitted. “I’m still the same mess. I was hoping I could fool you.”

  A suspicion appeared to dawn on him. “Do you—you do have a family?”

  “Oh, God, yes. That’s all real. I’ve got pictures I was going to show you. Here—”

  She jumped up and went to the front hallway. There, uppermost in her purse, were her Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t as if one cigarette would ruin his curtains. As she returned to the dining room, smoking it, she saw that there was no telling what else she might do. The intention to be fucked, her pesky little obsession with it, was, however senseless, persistent.

  Dropping a stack of snapshots on the table returned her to her senses. Invisible among the smiling faces of her children was the fetus she’d aborted. Bradley, too, no longer seemed sure he wanted her in his house. He went so far as to wave her smoke away from his nose. The pictures lay on the table unexamined. She asked him if he believed in God.

  “God?” He winced. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “God saved my life.”

  “That’s right. You married a minister. It’s funny it didn’t occur to me.”

  “That I have a relationship with God?”

  “No, it makes sense. You were always…”

  “Crazy?”

  He stood up, with a sigh, and went to the kitchen. She had no reason to keep starving herself, but cigarettes had become part of her autonomy. Bradley returned with a yellow ceramic ashtray. On its side were the words LERNER MOTORS.

  She smiled. “What ever happened to Lerner?”

  “He sold out after the war. The dealerships were moving farther out, and nobody wanted custom bodywork. That was always where Harry’s margin was.”

  She tapped the ashtray with her cigarette. “To Harry’s memory I dedicate this ash.”

  Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.

  She put out the cigarette and took a bite of salad. Bradley picked up his own fork.

  Only when she was leaving, an hour and a half later, might something have happened. She’d showed him her few photos, noting how he lingered on a recent school picture of Becky, and suffered through an interminable showing of his own. She would happily have spent another hour in his garden to spare herself a minute of his grandson pictures; her boredom was so aggressive, it verged on loathing. But she played the role of pastor’s wife, fascinated by Bradley’s offspring, and said nothing further to provoke him.

  At the front door, as she was leaving, he tried to revive her interest. To her loose farewell hug, he responded by gripping her fanny and pulling her into him.

  “Bradley.”

  “Please kiss me.”

  She gave him a brisk peck, and his hands were all over her. There was a blindness to his pawing, his nuzzling of her throat, his squeezing of her breasts, and this was how she knew for certain. She felt invisible, not excited. She patted his head and said she needed to get back to Judson.

  “You can’t stay another hour?”

  “No.”

  This wasn’t true. She’d told Antonio she might be out all evening. Bradley gripped her head and tried to make her look at him.

  “I never got over you,” he said. “Even when you were crazy, I didn’t get over you.”

  “Well. Maybe now is a good time.”

  “Why did you write to me? Why did you come here?”

  “I guess—” She laughed. Everything was light. The world was full of light. “I guess I wanted to finally get over it. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was God’s plan, not mine.”

  At t
he naming of God, Bradley let go of her. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s not—I have a perfectly nice lady friend from work. Better than I deserve.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s just—she isn’t you.”

  “Well. I suppose no one is, except me.”

  “Her family’s Japanese. She does our books.”

  “And I’m so grateful that you mentioned that.” She picked up her purse and clicked it shut. “I’d hate to think of you alone.”

  To walk away from his house without having surrendered herself—to be bathed in God’s approval; to know, for once, that she deserved it—was immeasurably better than to surrender. She felt so elated, she almost floated to her car. And she recognized this elation. A similar feeling had filled her thirty years ago, after Bradley, at a Carpenter’s drive-in, had ended their affair. It was true that the earlier elation had only intensified her obsession, had unspooled into madness, the making and unmaking of a baby. But this time it was she who’d done the ending. This time, the elation was of God, and she was sure that He would keep her safe.

  To survive the grandkids, she’d promised herself a cigarette, but now she saw that she didn’t have to smoke. God took and took, but He also gave and gave. Freed of the ghost of Bradley, freed of the morbid urgency of dieting, she could be free of cigarettes, too. Her elation held until, north of downtown, the freeway traffic came to a dead halt. She wanted to get back to Pasadena in time to swim before dinner, to be enveloped by water, and the traffic jam infuriated her. It turned out that she needed to smoke after all. And there was something else, a nasty little itch. With a glance at the car to her left, she felt herself between her legs. It was shocking how Bradley’s assault, which had left her unmoved in the moment, now aroused her. Would it really have been so bad to give him what he wanted? For the sake of her private parts, which three months of longing had tantalized and primed, she was sorry that she hadn’t. Smoke was drifting from the driver’s side of the car in front of her. She unrolled her own window and punched the lighter on the dashboard.

  Antonio’s apartment, when she finally got back, smelled of fried onions. The Monopoly box was on the living-room coffee table, evidence of an afternoon of fun. As soon as Antonio heard her, he came hurrying from the kitchen.

  “Russ called. You need to call him back.”

  She wondered if Russ had somehow sensed, via God, the choice she’d made; if he missed her, too. But a foreboding told her otherwise. God gave and God took. There was no phone service in Kitsillie.

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  “Just to call him right away. He left three different numbers.”

  “Where’s Judson?”

  “He’s grating cheese. I left the numbers by the bedroom phone.”

  And so began the remainder of her life. In the glass doors of the master bedroom was a lovely honey-toned light, in the garden the cheeping of birds, from the swimming pool the shouts of children, from the kitchen a smell of fried onions and beef, above Jimmy’s bare dresser his painting of the old Flagstaff post office, atop the other dresser a sepia photograph of Antonio’s mother in a filigreed silver frame: the first impressions were the ones that stayed with you forever.

  Russ’s voice was piteously pinched. He was at a hospital in Farmington, New Mexico, and Perry was—sleeping. They had him heavily sedated. The attempt—he’d tried to—dear God, he’d tried to harm himself. They’d brought him to the hospital, his head was bandaged, he was heavily sedated. Thank God, thank God, the juvenile hall hadn’t wanted him—at least the police knew enough to take away his shoelaces. All he could do to himself—all he had was an ugly bump on his forehead. But the reason—what had happened was—he’d burned down a farm building on the reservation. And then felony drug possession. Felony—two felonies. The lawyer—it was a mess—the crimes were federal but Perry was not of sound mind. They were taking him to Albuquerque in the morning because nobody in Farmington wanted the responsibility. The cops didn’t want him, the sheriff didn’t want him, the hospital didn’t want him, the juvenile hall absolutely didn’t want him—there was a place for mentally ill minors in Albuquerque. If she could get a flight to Albuquerque, he could meet her at the airport.

  Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still golden in the west, its light seemed dark in a deeper dimension, but this didn’t mean that God had left her. With the new darkness came a feeling of peace. To bask in His light, to experience the elation of that, was a privilege to be earned, a privilege to feel anxious about forfeiting. Now that her long-deferred punishment had commenced, she didn’t have to struggle or be anxious. Secure in God’s judgment, she could simply welcome Him into her heart.

  “Marion? Are you there?”

  “Yes, Russ. I’m here.”

  “This is terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

  “I know. It’s my fault.”

  “No, it’s my fault. I’m the—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “It’s not your fault. I want you to make sure Perry’s being looked after. If you think he’ll be all right, I want you to get some sleep. See if one of the nurses will give you a sleeping pill.”

  A wet, choking sound came through the long-distance hiss.

  “Russ. Sweetie. Try to get some sleep. Will you do that for me?”

  “Marion, I can’t—”

  “Hush now. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  Her calmness was like nothing she’d ever experienced. It seemed to reach to the very bottom of her soul. In everything she proceeded to do—carrying the phone back inside, finding her plane ticket and calling the airline, speaking to Russ again briefly, calling Becky and then explaining the change of plan to Judson, assuring him that Becky would be waiting at the airport in Chicago, and finally sitting down and eating, with leisurely relish, three crispy tacos dripping with warm beef fat—she could feel her feet securely grounded. She wasn’t afraid of what was still to come, wasn’t afraid of seeing Perry and dealing with the consequences, because her feet had found the bottom and beneath them was God. In coming to an end, her life had also started. Within you a calm capability—how funny that Bradley, in his sonnet, had been the one to notice. She wished the calmness had descended a day sooner, before she’d gone to his house. She could have said everything to him, instead of hardly anything, although maybe, not knowing God, he wouldn’t have cared to hear it.

  In the morning, at the airport, after meeting a gate agent and a stewardess, Judson asked why he couldn’t have stayed on with Antonio through the week. He was pouchy-eyed and grumpy from a short night of sleep. She, for her part, had slept astonishingly well, not waking once. The worst had happened—she didn’t have to fear it anymore.

  “You’ll have fun with Becky,” she said. “I bet she’ll take you out for pizza.”

  “Becky isn’t interested in me.”

  “Of course she’s interested in you. This is a chance to spend some time alone with her.”

  He looked down at his camera. “When is Perry coming home?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. He had a kind of breakdown. It could be a while before you see him.”

  “I don’t know what ‘breakdown’ means.”

  “It means something went very wrong in his head. It’s frightening, but there is a bright side. Whatever bad things he said to you, he wasn’t himself. Now that you know that he wasn’t himself, you don’t have to feel hurt.”

  “That’s not a bright side.”

  “Maybe consolation is a better word.”

  “I don’t want consolation. I want Perry to come back.”

  Outward the ripples of harm expanded: Judson would henceforth be a boy with a mentally i
ll brother. His own first impressions, the sound of her phone calls the night before, the morning smog on the freeway, the airplane he had to board by himself, would always stay with him. But God had made Judson healthy and strong. She could sense it in his love of Perry and in the contrast between them: Perry had never, in her hearing, expressed anxiety on his siblings’ behalf. The harm her sins had caused was immense, but only with Perry was it potentially irreparable. Judson bristled when she offered to go on the plane with him and get him settled. He said he wasn’t a baby.

  Before she boarded her own flight, she bought a paperback, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She didn’t expect that she could focus on a novel—it was several years since she’d been calm enough to read one—but she was sucked right in. She read all the way to Phoenix and then, on a second plane, all the way to Albuquerque. She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

  Her reading had turned morning in California into late afternoon in Albuquerque. Russ was waiting just inside the gate, in his sheepskin coat. He looked ashen and unslept. When she put her arms around him, she felt him shudder. As a kindness, she let go.

  “So,” he said. “They did transfer him.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No. You and I can go together in the morning.”

  In her homesickness, she’d lost sight of the trouble in their marriage. To see Russ in the flesh, so tall, so youthful, was to recall her cruelty to him and his pursuit of the Cottrell woman. Although she gathered that Cottrell had opted out, plenty of other women were available to distract him from the awfulness of a mentally ill son. In the wake of the calamity, it seemed all the likelier that he would end up leaving her. And she deserved to be left; she felt as capable of accepting divorce as she was capable of everything else. But the prospect did remind her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving Pasadena.

  When she lit up, in the baggage-claim area, he sighed with displeasure.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do as you please.”