Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “We shouldn’t have used those quotes if we couldn’t attribute them.”

  “Oh, well, it makes for a fun guessing game,” she said. “Which person thinks I’m a spoiled rich girl, which person thinks I’m a nut job, which person is so sure my art is bad. Of course, it’s maybe not so fun to sit in the same room with the people who said those things, and know they’re still thinking them, and feel them looking at me. To have to sit there with those eyes on me. To be visible like that.”

  She still hadn’t lowered her arms from the front of her blouse.

  “You’re the one who showed up naked in the dean’s office,” I couldn’t help pointing out.

  “Only after they ripped the paper off me.”

  “I’m saying you wanted publicity and you got it.”

  “Oh, it’s not like I’m surprised. What’s more interesting than a nude female body? What better to sell papers? You proved my point better than I could have proved it myself.”

  This was the first of the ten thousand times I had the experience of not quite following Anabel’s logic. Because it was the first time and not the ten thousandth, and because she seemed so ferociously sure of herself—it hurts me to remember the ferocity and assurance she still had then—I assumed the fault was mine.

  “We’re a free paper,” I said lamely. “We don’t worry about selling.”

  “Actions have consequences,” she said. “There’s a high road and a low road, and you took the low road. You’re the editor, you put those things in print, and I read them. You hurt me and you’re going to have to live with it. I want you never to forget it, the same way I’m never going to forget what you printed. You didn’t even have the decency to return my phone call! You think because you’re male and I’m female, you can get away with it.” She paused, and I saw a pair of tiny tears dissolving her mascara. “You may not think so,” she said more softly, “but I’m here to tell you you’re a jerk.”

  Her looks and her superior age gave the accusation a particular sting. In truth, though, I was already primed to doubt my goodness. One Easter, when I was in seventh grade, the younger of my older sisters, Cynthia, had come home from college transformed into a hippie, with octagonal wireframes and a biblically bearded boyfriend. The two of them took a friendly clinical interest in me as one of the first new men of tomorrow. Cynthia asked me about my air rifle: Did I like to shoot and kill my enemies with it? Did I like to blow their heads off? How did I think it felt to have your head blown off? Like a game?

  The boyfriend asked me about the butterfly collection I halfheartedly kept in an attempt to please my father: Did I like butterflies? Really? Then why did I murder them?

  Cynthia asked me what my ambitions for life were: I wanted to be a reporter or a photojournalist? That was cool. But what about being a nurse? What about being a first-grade teacher? Those jobs were for girls? Why only for girls?

  The boyfriend asked me if I ever thought about trying out to be a cheerleader: It wasn’t allowed? Why not? Why couldn’t a boy be a cheerleader? Couldn’t boys jump, too? Couldn’t boys cheer?

  Together, the two of them made me feel like a stodgy old man. This seemed mean of them, but I also had the guilty sense that there was something wrong with me. One afternoon, a few years later, I came home late from school to a rodent emergency in the attic, my belongings spread across the floor of my bedroom, my closet door open, my father’s legs visible on a stepladder. I allowed myself to hope that he’d somehow overlooked the worn copy of Oui magazine that I’d shoplifted from the back of a used-book store and hidden in the closet, but after dinner he came to my room and asked me what I thought it was like to be the women in a pornographic magazine.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, you’re at the age where you’d better start thinking about it.”

  Everything about my dad was repelling and embarrassing me that year. His Mission Control eyewear, his petrochemically slicked hair, his wide gunslinger’s stance. He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry. Building another dam why? Gnawing tree trunks why? Paddling around with a big grin why, exactly?

  “Sex is a great blessing,” he said in his teaching voice. “But what you see in a porno magazine is human misery and degradation. I don’t know where you got the magazine, but simply by owning it you’ve materially participated in the degradation of a fellow human being. Imagine how you’d feel if this were Cynthia, or Ellen—”

  “OK, I get it.”

  “Do you really? Do you understand that these women are somebody’s sisters? Somebody’s daughters?”

  I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone’s degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I’d financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.

  A few days later, I stole more magazines. I liked Oui because the girls in it seemed realer—also more European, hence more cultured, intelligent, and soulful—than the ones in Playboy. I imagined deep conversations with them, I imagined them attracted to how compassionately I listened to them, but there was no denying that my interest in them died at the instant of orgasm. I felt as if I was up against a structural unfairness; as if simply being male, excitable by pictures through no choice of my own, placed me ineluctably in the wrong. I meant no harm and yet I harmed.

  It got worse. With college looming, I made a bloodless but nonetheless exciting pact to exchange virginities with my senior-prom date, Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, whose romantic sights were set on someone unattainable, and so it happened that, on the last possible weekend of the summer, in an Estes Park cabin belonging to the parents of a mutual friend, at the crucial moment of entry, I accidentally delivered a sharp masculine poke to the very most sensitive and off-limits part of Mary Ellen. She gave a full-throated shriek, recoiling and kicking me away. My attempts to comfort her and apologize only fed her hysteria. She wailed, she thrashed, she hyperventilated, she kept babbling a phrase that I finally deciphered, to my immense relief, as a wish to be taken home to Denver right away.

  Mary Ellen’s anally violated shriek was ringing in my ears when I matriculated at Penn. My father had suggested that I choose a smaller college, but Penn had offered me a scholarship and my mother had seduced me with talk of the wealthy, powerful people I would meet at an Ivy League school. In my first three years at Penn, I made not one wealthy friend, but my intimations of male guilt were given a firm theoretical foundation. From lectures both in and out of classrooms, beginning with an orientation-week sex talk delivered by a female senior in bib overalls, I learned that I was even more inescapably implicated in the patriarchy than I’d realized. The upshot was that, in any intimate relationship with a woman, my motives were a priori suspect.

  Not that intimate relationships turned out to be a problem. Apparently, only to girls less than five feet tall did I not look heinously young. One of them, a fellow staffer on the DP during my second year, started giving me significant looks, tilting her head to one side, and finally passed me a note in which she alluded to the “danger” of getting “badly hurt” by me. I obliged her by making out with her in the middle of the Green one night, partly out of guilt for not being more interested in having sex with her—for being such an objectifying male that I couldn’t see past her shortness—and partly with the vile male motive of finally having sex with someone, but I was unable to oblige her with the avowals that she then, with tilted head, solicited, and so I ended up guiltily hurting her with nothing to show for it. She went so far as to quit the paper.

  I took refuge in beer, the pool tab
les in Houston Hall, and the DP. As working journalists in a student body doing frivolous student things, my friends and I achieved levels of self-importance that I wouldn’t encounter again until I met people from the New York Times. We had nougat cores of innocence, of course, but we’d all bragged about our high-school sexual exploits and it never occurred to me that, since I had lied, my friends might also have lied. The one person who saw through me was Lucy Hill. She’d been a scholarship student at Choate Rosemary Hall and had waitressed for two years before starting at Penn. She had a boyfriend who was nearly thirty, a self-taught hippie carpenter who looked a lot like D. H. Lawrence, her favorite writer. Lucy’s friendly clinical interest in me was more explicit and forgiving than my sister Cynthia’s. When I confessed to her what I’d done to Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, she laughed and said that Mary Ellen had shrieked because I was giving her the kind of intercourse she couldn’t admit she wanted. Lucy was now intent on finding me somebody with whom to fuck like bunnies. I didn’t love the sound of fuck like bunnies, and I vaguely resented the condescension implicit in Lucy’s project, but I had no one else to talk to about sex, and so I kept going to her off-campus house for weak coffee and mushy Moosewood Cookbook desserts.

  Neither Anabel nor I knew it when she left my office, after pronouncing her judgment on my character, but I was exactly the guy she wanted. Outside my window, the sun had gone down in its sudden October way, and I sat in the twilight and suffered shame. I was prepared to believe I was a jerk, and yet it rankled to have been called one by an older and very attractive (and rich, can’t forget rich, it was there from the beginning) woman who’d made a special trip across the Schuylkill to denounce me. I didn’t know what to do. Calling Lucy would simply invite further reproach. I couldn’t get you’re a jerk out of my head. The mental picture of Anabel’s nude body in butcher paper also gave me no rest.

  Stopping only briefly at the dining hall to eat two chicken cutlets and a slice of cake, I returned to my dorm room and dialed Anabel’s number, which I’d copied onto the palm of my hand. I counted ten rings on her phone before I hung up. When Oswald came back after dinner, he found me sitting in the dark.

  “Mr. Tom, he brooding,” he said. “Something has ‘got his goat.’ Something is ‘stuck in his craw.’” He referenced, not for the first time, a Get Smart episode about an East Asian evildoer named the Claw: “Not ‘the Craw’! The CRAW!”

  I wanted to tell Oswald that he’d fucked up and exposed me to humiliation, but he was in such high spirits, so completely unaware of having fucked up, that I couldn’t bring myself to ruin his evening. Instead, I vented my hatred of the author of the article.

  “He’s very like a little sharp-toothed mink,” Oswald concurred. “If there were any justice in the universe, he wouldn’t write such clean copy.”

  “The blind quotes about Laird were really mean. I’m wondering if we should print some sort of apology.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” Oswald said. “You’ve got to stand by your reporter, even if he is a little beady-eyed mink.”

  Oswald and I had come up together on the DP, tearing apart each other’s prose. Neither of us ever fell into a mood so bleak that the other couldn’t talk him out of it, and Oswald soon had me laughing with his impression of the Broncos’ backup quarterback Norris Weese (Oswald was a Nebraskan and a fellow Broncos fan) and his savage quotation of classmates dumber and more popular than us. Oswald’s gift for ressentiment was redeemed by his Eeyore-like self-esteem levels. His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet. Out of respect for my own drought, still ongoing, he rarely mentioned her to me, but when he left me alone again I knew that he was going to her, and I fell back into a pit of remorse.

  Around ten o’clock I managed to reach Anabel on the phone.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m feeling really bad about not protecting you better. I want to try to make it up to you.”

  “The damage is done, Tom. You already made your choice.”

  “But I’m not the person you think I am.”

  “Who do you think I think you are?”

  “A bad person.”

  “I’m only going by the evidence,” she said with a hint of playfulness, a possible softening of her judgment.

  “Do you want me to resign? Would you believe me then?”

  “You don’t have to do that for me. You can just try to be a better editor in the future.”

  “I will. I will.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “I don’t forgive you, but I do appreciate your returning my call.”

  This was where the conversation ought to have ended, but Anabel, even back then, had a specific lack of resolve when it came to hanging up a telephone, and I didn’t want to hang up without having been forgiven. For some seconds, neither of us spoke. As the silence lengthened it began, for me at least, to pulse with possibility. I strained to hear the sound of Anabel’s breath.

  “Do you ever show your art?” I said when the silence had become unbearable. “I’d be interested in seeing your films.”

  “‘Come up to my room and see my etchings.’ Is that why you called me back?” Again the playful lilt. “Maybe you want to come over and see my art right now.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Give it some thought and decide if you think I’m serious.”

  “Right.”

  “My art doesn’t hang on a wall.”

  “Right.”

  “And no one goes in my bedroom but me.”

  She said this as if it were a prohibition, not a circumstance.

  “You seem like an interesting person,” I said. “I’m sorry we hurt you.”

  “I should be used to it by now,” she said. “It seems to be what people do.”

  Again the conversation might have ended. But there was a factor in play which never would have occurred to me: Anabel was lonely. She still had one friend at Tyler, a lesbian named Nola who’d been her confederate in the butcher-paper incident, but the pressure of Nola’s prospectless crush on her made her difficult to take in high doses. All the other students, according to Anabel, had turned against her. They had reason to resent the special status she’d wangled as a filmmaker at a school that didn’t have a film program, but the real problem was her personality. People were attracted to her looks and wicked tongue and to the real-seeming possibility that she was an artistic genius; she had a way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness. The instructor who’d encouraged her to make films had also later propositioned her, which (a) was piggish, (b) was apparently not unusual, and (c) destroyed her faith in his assessment of her talent. She’d been on the institutional warpath ever since. This had clinched her pariah status, since, according to her, the other students cared only about professorial validation, the professorial nod, the professorial referral to a gallery.

  I learned some of this and many other things in the thrilling two hours we spoke that night. Though I didn’t feel myself to be an interesting person, I did have listening skills. The more I listened, the more her voice softened toward me. And then we uncovered an odd coincidence.

  She’d grown up in Wichita, in a stately house on College Hill. She belonged to the fourth generation of one of the two families that wholly owned the agribusiness conglomerate McCaskill, the country’s second-largest privately held corporation. Her father had inherited a five percent share of it, married a fourth-generation McCaskill, and gone to work for the company. As a girl, Anabel said, she’d been very close to her father. When the time came to send her away to Rosemary Hall, which her mother had attended before its merger with Choate, she said she didn’t want to go. But her mother was insistent, her father uncharacteristically unwilling to indulge her, and so she arrived in
Connecticut at the age of thirteen.

  “For the longest time, I had everything turned around exactly wrong in my mind,” she told me. “I thought my mother was terrible and my father was wonderful. He’s extremely smart and seductive. He knows how to have his way with people. And when he started betraying my mother, after I went away to school, and when my mother started drinking after breakfast, I realized that she’d been trying to protect me by sending me away. She never admitted it to me, but I know that’s what it was. He was killing her, and she didn’t want him to kill me, too. I was so unjust to her. And then he killed her. My poor mother.”

  “Your father killed your mother?”

  “You have to understand the way McCaskill works. They’re obsessed with keeping the business in the family, so nobody on the outside can know what they’re doing. It’s all about secrets and family control. When a Laird marries a McCaskill, it has to be forever, because they’re obsessed with family solidarity. So after I went away to school and my father started cheating on my mother, there really wasn’t anything for her to do but drink. That’s the McCaskill way. That and drugs and dangerous hobbies like piloting helicopters. You’d be surprised how much of my extended family is strung out on something. At least one of my brothers is strung out as we speak. You either go to work for the company and increase the family riches—which is what they call the McCaskill way—or else you kill yourself with hedonism, because there’s no reality principle to hold you back. It’s not like anybody in the family needs to make a living.”

  I asked what had happened to her mother.

  “She drowned,” Anabel said. “In our pool. My father was out of town—no fingerprints.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A little over two years ago. In June. It was a nice warm night. Her blood alcohol would have knocked a horse down. She passed out in the shallow end.”

  I said I was very sorry, and then I told her that my dad had died in the same month as her mother. He’d retired only two weeks earlier, after counting the years to his sixty-fifth birthday, never speaking of “retirement,” only of “retirement from teaching,” because he still had so much energy. He was looking forward to reconstructing his caddis-fly collection and finally getting his PhD, to learning Russian and Chinese, to hosting foreign-exchange students, to buying an RV that met my mother’s requirements for outdoor comfort. But the first thing he did was volunteer for a two-month zoological mission to the Philippines. He wanted to scratch his old itch for exotic travel while I was still young enough to be spending summers at home, so that my mother wouldn’t be alone. When I drove him to the Denver airport, he told me that he knew my mother could be difficult but, if I ever felt impatient with her, I had to remember that she’d had a rough childhood and wasn’t in the best of health. His speech was loving and the last I ever heard from him. A day later, he was in a small plane that hit the side of a mountain. A four-paragraph story in the Times.