Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Author:Jonathan Franzen [Franzen, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The amplified harmonies of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” stripped of reverb by the density of the crowd inside the function hall, came through the open doors. Two girls in mittens and pom-pommed stocking caps were at a table in the vestibule. They wanted three dollars.

“I’m not here for the concert,” Clem said. “I’m looking for Becky Hildebrandt.”

“She’s here. But we’re not supposed to—”

“I’m not giving you three dollars.”

Inside, the heads of taller concertgoers were silhouetted by stage lights. Seated in a half circle, with dreadnought guitars, behind cantilevered mics, were the Isner brothers and a statuesque girl, Amy Jenner, whose hair was longer than her torso. Clem remembered Amy well. Two years ago, in a Crossroads exercise, she’d given him a note that said You’re sexy. The assertion was so absurd that he’d taken it to be a joke, but seeing Amy now, having learned from Sharon what the world was made of, he understood it differently. The prettiness of Amy’s voice, as she sang of hating to see her lover go, salted the wound he’d inflicted on himself in Sharon’s bedroom.

On the bus to Chicago, he and the baby behind him had finally slept, but it hadn’t been worth the cost of waking up. Returning to his consciousness of the actions he’d taken, to his aloneness with the knowledge of them, was like the reverse of awakening from a bad dream. After a brutal portage to the train station, he’d caught the 7:25 to New Prospect, where a good Samaritan had offered him a ride. He’d dropped his bags at the parsonage and charged back out into the snow, lashing himself forward. He was determined not to sleep until he could wake up knowing he wasn’t alone.

He moved into the crowd, looking for Becky, but the concert was also a reunion. He was immediately pounced upon by a mature edition of Kelly Woehlke, a girl he’d grown up with at First Reformed. They’d never been friends, and on any other night the hug she gave him might have seemed unwarranted. Tonight the touch of a warm body nearly made him cry. His few real Crossroads friends were too anti-sentimental to bother with a reunion, but other alumni were crowding around him, and despite how peripheral he’d felt in the fellowship, how unwowed by the trust-building exercises and the rhetoric of personal growth, he received their hugs gratefully, as if they were the condolences of family. He wondered what Sharon would make of all the hugging. Then he wished he hadn’t wondered, because every specific thought of Sharon, no matter how innocuous, triggered another wave of guilt and hurt.

By the time he’d circled through the crowd, not finding Becky, the Isner brothers and Amy Jenner were rousingly singing of what they would do with a hammer at various times of day. Clem’s energy was spent, and the loudness of the scene had become somewhat hellish. He’d run aground by the stage, stalled out in front of a stack of speakers, when his friend John Goya’s little brother Davy approached him.

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