Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Okay,” she said in a very small voice.

  “I told him, if he wants me to represent him, he’s got to flush this Europe thing where it belongs. He didn’t want to hear me, but he’ll hear it from you. You need to take him in hand and lay down the law. Will you promise to do that for me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the brains of the outfit. He’ll do whatever you say.”

  When she hung up the phone, the sun was still strong in the windows, but the kitchen seemed dusky, as if what had brightened it weren’t the sun but the dream of Europe. She felt punished and guilty and disappointed; sorry for Tanner, sorrier for herself. Tuning out Perry’s weird patter, she mechanically drove him to the church and mechanically drove home again. Never had she felt less like working her Friday-night shift.

  To ignore Gig’s advice, at the cost of his firing Tanner, would obviously be the height of selfishness. But Shirley had died imagining her niece on a Grand Tour of Europe, Becky had already given away nine thousand dollars of her money, and the alternatives to Europe were dismal: either another summer with her parents, waitressing at the Grove, or a succession of cornfields and depressing small cities, the steambath of July in the Midwest. She understood that this was the reality of the music business, but the vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner’s career was too perfect to be defeated by reality. She didn’t see how she could give it up.

  Her problem was still there in the morning, when she took her mother and Judson to O’Hare. She’d expected to feel liberated by her family’s absence, but Gig’s judgment of Tanner, its echoing of Clem’s, had deflated the romance of the coming week. As she watched Judson run ahead of their mother with his little suitcase, the two of them bound for a city of palm trees and movie stars, she felt desolated.

  From the airport, she went straight to the Grove. Gig’s first move as Tanner’s agent had been to pull the plug on his Friday-night shows there, and Becky, having now seen better places in the city, understood why. The Grove’s earth-tone decor and potted trees were tired, not trendy, its lounge acoustics lousy, its patrons tightfisted and Nixonite. By the time her shift ended, she felt so worn down that she called Tanner’s house and left a message with his mother, excusing herself from his gig in Winnetka. Interestingly, Tanner didn’t call her back.

  The next morning, however, his van rolled into the parsonage driveway at the usual Sunday hour. For reasons she didn’t immediately understand, she’d not only put on her best spring dress but applied a lot of makeup. The face in the bathroom mirror was not at all a girl’s, and maybe that was it. Maybe she wanted to place herself in a future from which she could look back at herself.

  Tanner had dressed up, too. In the misty morning light, wearing the suit he’d bought for his grandmother’s funeral, his hair thick and glistening on his shoulders, his eyelashes batting at the sight of Becky in her finest, he was absurdly gorgeous. Whatever else might be the case, she could never get enough of looking at him, and she was the woman whose mouth he then kissed. The kiss, exciting her nerves in the usual places, made her problem seem less consequential.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “do you want to go to First Reformed?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know—it’s Palm Sunday. It might be nice to be someplace familiar.”

  “I would love that.” She kissed him again. “It’s a great idea. Thank you for suggesting it.”

  She was happy that he’d made a definite wish explicit. And happy, after all, to return to First Reformed, on a Sunday when her father wasn’t there. Happy to see faces of surprise when she and Tanner made their entrance, happy to accept a palm twig from the greeters, Tom and Betsy Devereaux, happy to claim the pew she’d shared with Tanner at the first service she’d attended with him. It was strange to recall how she’d imagined, at that service, that they were there as a couple; strange how wishing for a future life and then actually inhabiting it made time feel unreal. As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.

  And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.

  She hadn’t found the answer in the other churches where she’d been looking. She’d found it where she’d started. This seemed to her a crucial fact.

  The spring morning into which she and Tanner emerged, after being cooed over in the parlor, admired by dewy-eyed matrons, was the warmest of the year so far. In the wake of her paroxysm, her senses were alive to the caressing breeze, to the fragrance of flowers and spring earth, to the blazing of the dogwoods by the bank building, to the song of unseen birds, and to her body’s own springtime urges. Because a visitation from God had stirred them up, they didn’t seem the least bit wrong to her. They were simply part of being His creature.

  “Let’s take a walk,” she said.

  “Your feet are going to hurt in those shoes.”

  “It’s so beautiful, I’ll go barefoot.”

  The sidewalk on Maple Avenue still had winter beneath it, a thrilling contrast to the warmth of the sun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone walking barefoot. The eight-year-old girl she’d once been was now eighteen and someday might be eighty. Her sense-memories of spring were confirming her insight from the sanctuary: time was an illusion.

  “It just happened again,” she told Tanner. “What happened at Christmas—it happened again while we were singing the Doxology. I saw God.”

  “You—really? That’s far-out.”

  “What’s strange is that yesterday was the total opposite. Yesterday I felt so dead, and now I’m so alive. Yesterday I had no idea what to do, and today the answer is so clear to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  In a few words, she recounted her conversation with Gig. To spare Tanner’s feelings, she omitted Gig’s judgments, but Tanner was angry even so. Although she gathered that Laura had been quite the screaming bandmate, Becky had only once seen him really angry, when Quincy made the band late for a gig in the city.

  “What the fuck? He called your house? Behind my back?”

  “You didn’t give him my number?”

  “That guy? No way. If he has something to say to me, I’m the one to say it to. Did you tell him that? Tell him he should be talking to me, not you?”

  “All I did was answer the phone.”

  “God, I am sick of this. He’s a good booker but a total sleaze. He’s been all over you since day one. I can’t believe he called you behind my back!”

  Tanner’s outburst, its assertiveness, was extremely pleasing to her.

  “I guess he thought,” she said, “that I was making you go to Europe.”

  “I already told him why I’m going. I told him I’ll find another agent if he can’t deal with it.”

  “Yeah, but, here’s the thing. Tanner, here’s the thing. Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

  He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “You don’t want to go?”

  “No, I do, but—that’s just vanity. I couldn’t see it yesterday,
but now I do. I want what’s best for you, not me. And Gig says it’s better not to go.”

  “Of course he says that. He’s all about the money—if I’m in Europe, he’s not taking his cut.”

  “But what if he’s right? What if it’s a career mistake?”

  “He knows zilch about the scene there. He said it himself—‘I know zilch.’”

  “He knows about the business here, though. If you want a record contract and you want to really break out, don’t you think you should listen to him?”

  Tanner stared at her. “What did he say to you?”

  “Just what I told you.”

  “I thought Europe was a thing we were doing together. That it wasn’t just about the music—I thought we wanted to have an experience together.”

  “That’s what I want, too. But … maybe it doesn’t have to be this summer.”

  “Becky. Do you not want to be with me?”

  There were tears in his eyes. They made her want to be with him.

  “Of course I do. I’m in love with you.”

  “Then fuck it. Let’s go to Europe.”

  “But, sweetie—”

  “Who cares if it’s a ‘career mistake’? The only things I care about are being with you and celebrating life with music. As long as I’m with you—Becky. As long as I’m with you, there’s no such thing as a mistake.”

  Across the street, in a yard dotted with eruptions of shaggy green grass, a man started up a lawn mower. It coughed and backfired in a cloud of blue smoke. The day was getting warmer by the minute, and the parsonage was just around the corner. Seeing the tears in Tanner’s eyes, and hearing him express, spontaneously, the exact same thought she’d had in the sanctuary—that only love and worship mattered—she felt as if her body might float into the sky. She took his hand and pressed it flat on her hip.

  “Let’s go to my house.”

  He knew right away what she was saying. “Now?”

  “Yes, now. I’m so ready.”

  “I’ve got practice at one thirty.”

  “You’re the front man,” she said. “You can tell them it’s canceled.”

  * * *

  In Rome, in early September, in the apartment where they were crashing, they met a German couple in their twenties who were heading to a farmhouse in Tuscany that the woman’s father owned, and Becky had jumped on their invitation to come along with them, although technically it was Tanner, not she, whom the Germans had invited, after hearing him play. Her own fishings for an invitation, her feigning of a lifelong desire to see the Tuscan countryside, her unfeigned rapture at the description of the farmhouse, had gone unnoticed, and this was ironic, because Tanner cared more about people than places and had no gripe with Rome. Becky was the one who couldn’t wait to get away. The heat in Rome was suffocating, and the crash pad, though huge and well situated, within sight of the Campo de’ Fiori, was essentially unfurnished—room after room with sun-damaged parquet floors and nary a table, nary a chair. She and Tanner were camped out in the corner of what might once have been a ballroom, beneath a window open to a smell of rotting vegetables. In the far corner was an unfriendly young couple, purportedly from behind the Iron Curtain, who traipsed around naked and coupled, unquietly, on the room’s only piece of furniture, a gilded sofa twelve feet long. Half a dozen other long-haired travelers were accepting hospitality from a man named Edoardo, a spritelike Italian who wore tight white pants and thin-soled loafers, without socks, and lived in two properly furnished rooms behind the kitchen. Becky and Tanner had met Edoardo on a side street where Tanner was busking and Becky was sitting on the pavement, writing in her travel diary. When Edoardo had dropped a five-thousand-lire note in Tanner’s guitar case and invited them to crash with him, they hadn’t needed to be asked twice. The night before, under a pillow in their tiny hotel room, near the train station, they’d discovered a balled-up, crusty tissue that hadn’t been there in the morning.

  The folk festival in Rome took place in the last days of August, and the organizers, while rejecting Tanner’s application, had allowed that performance slots sometimes opened up at the last minute. On the strength of that hope, and because Aunt Shirley had especially loved Rome, and because their Eurail passes were about to expire, they’d come down from Heidelberg four days early. In Heidelberg, where Tanner had played as an official invitee, albeit at eleven in the morning and to a disappointing crowd, they’d eaten free food, slept on cleanly sheeted German beds, and avoided cashing any of their remaining traveler’s checks.

  In Rome, they subsisted on tavola calda and agonized about buying a gelato. There were a thousand sights to see, but the only safe place Becky could be while Tanner busked was either right beside him or in the baking, furnitureless apartment; she couldn’t walk alone without being hassled by Italian men. Although Edoardo had urged them to stay for as long as they liked, they were camping on a parquet floor with only sleeping bags for padding. The image of a Tuscan farmhouse, shared with a pair of privacy-respecting Germans, was like a dream of respite. The Roman heat had frayed her nerves, no performance slot had opened up for Tanner, and they had a week to kill before they hitchhiked to Paris for an outdoor concert, headlined by the Who and Country Joe McDonald, that people had been talking about all summer. There was also the matter of Becky’s period being overdue. She was only a few days late, but she worried that the exhaustion of her tube of jelly, which she’d understood to be redundant and hadn’t replaced yet, had been a bigger deal than she’d supposed.

  The overnight flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, the cool rainstorms in Denmark, the warmth of Tanner’s reception in Aarhus, were now memories so distant that they might have been a different person’s. According to the little check marks in her travel diary, she and Tanner had made love three times in Aarhus and forty-six times since. Every day, whether she was seeing the sunflowers of van Gogh or just hanging out with American musicians, whether picnicking on the green flank of an Alp or being confounded by a shower that sprayed all over the bathroom floor, without a curtain or a sill, she’d felt delighted afresh to be in Europe, but every night she’d returned to a bitterness from which being loved and possessed by Tanner was her only escape.

  Tanner’s kindness, to her and to everyone they met, was basically a miracle. Even when she was bleeding and bitchy, he didn’t get cross with her. When they sprinted to catch a train, only to watch it pull out of the station, he just shrugged and said it wasn’t meant to be. When she had the stomach flu in Utrecht and begged him to go alone to the mainstage event, he not only refused to leave her, he said that even the sound of her throwing up was dear to him. When she caught herself wishing he were more assertive, she had only to think of his openhearted curiosity, his readiness to be amazed, his honest praise of singers farther along in their careers, his head-shaking bemusement when someone insisted on being a jerk, and his beautiful way of slipping into a jam session—how he followed along unobtrusively, observing the other players, and then, when the moment was right, cut loose and really jammed, displaying his superior musicianship, and was always happy to explain, if someone asked, how he’d played some difficult lick. The back pages of her travel diary were filled with addresses of Europeans who hoped to see him again and had offered him and Becky lodging. The Continental music scene, with its ethic of sharing, could sustain them long after their traveler’s checks ran out. Though Rome and its heat, all the assholes on their scooters, weren’t to her taste, and though Tanner would eventually need to restart his career in the States, she was in no hurry at all to go home.

  With the exception of Judson, who was too young to be relevant, her family had abandoned her. She hadn’t heard from Clem since their fight in February, Perry had spent four months in residential psychiatric treatment, at ghastly expense, and her parents had done their best to ruin her life. Not only had her father dispossessed her, with scarcely an apology, but her mother, instead of siding with her or sympathizing, had deferred to him without a murmur of resistance. Nev
er in her life had her parents been so united against her or so cloyingly into each other. They’d returned from Albuquerque, after Easter, like a pair of newlyweds—little pats on the fanny, wet smooches, treacly endearments, her father mooning at her mother, her mother breathy and submissive. Equally obnoxious was their new religiosity. Her father now began every meal with a lengthy prayer, applauded by her mother with tremulous amens. Although Becky had her own faith, she knew better than to inflict it on people waiting to eat. Although she herself had been guilty of public smooching, she had the very good excuse of not being a parent with grown children.

  Again, as when she received her inheritance, there had been a summons to her father’s home office. The third floor smelled of cigarettes—her mother had returned to her proper bed, but she hadn’t quit smoking—when Becky climbed the stairs to it. Her father’s desk was strewn with bills and legal documents. He kept glancing at them, repositioning them, while he explained his financial predicament and her mother gazed at him supportively. The upshot was that, to pay reparations to the Navajos whose barn Perry had burned, he wanted to “borrow” Becky’s college money.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that Perry should be the one to pay for that.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s no money left in Perry’s account.”

  “I’m talking about the money I gave him.”

  “It’s gone, honey,” her mother said. “He spent it all on drugs.”

  “It was three thousand dollars!”

  “I know. It’s a terrible thing, but it’s gone.”

  The news was both sickening and vindicating. Becky had long suspected that Perry was soulless and amoral. At least she could stop pretending she wanted a relationship with him.

  “What about Jay, though? What about Clem?”