Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “What day did this happen?”

  “It was June nineteenth in the Philippines. June eighteenth in Denver.”

  Anabel’s voice became hushed. “This is extremely weird,” she said. “My mother died on the same day. We were both half orphaned on the exact same day.”

  It now seems to me somehow crucial that the day was arguably not the same—her mother had died on the nineteenth. And until that Friday night I’d never been a superstitious person. My father had waged a personal war against the overvaluation of coincidence; he had a classroom riff, sometimes repeated at home, in which he “proved” that chewing Juicy Fruit gum causes hair to be blond, by way of illustrating proper scientific inference. But when Anabel spoke those words, after an hour and a half in which my world had been shrinking to the size of her voice in my ear—and here again it seems crucial that we had our first real conversation on the phone, which distills a person into words passing directly into the brain—I shivered as if my fate were overtaking me. How could the coincidence not be significant? The interesting person who’d pronounced me a jerk not six hours earlier had now been confiding in me, in her lovely voice, for an hour and a half. It felt incredible, magical. After the shiver had passed, I had an erection.

  “What do you think it means?” Anabel said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. That’s what my dad would say. Although—”

  “It’s very weird,” she said. “I wasn’t even planning on going to your office today. I was coming back from the Barnes Collection, which is a different story, why anybody still thinks Renoir père needs to be looked at, but there is such a person at Tyler and I have the misfortune of being in his lecture class, not having taken it last year when everyone else did. I’d imagined that an exception might be made, but, safe to say, nobody’s in a mood to make exceptions for me now. But I was on the platform at Thirtieth Street, and I got so upset thinking about what you’d done to me that I let my train go by. And that seemed like a sign that I should go and find you. Because I missed the train. I’ve never gotten so involved in a thought I’ve missed a train.”

  “That does seem like a sign,” I said, at the urging of my erection.

  “Who are you?” she said. “Why did this happen?”

  In the state her voice had put me in, I didn’t consider these questions nutty, but I was spooked by their seriousness. “I am an American, Denver-born,” I said. And added, pompously, “Saul Bellow.”

  “Saul Bellow is from Denver?”

  “No, Chicago. You asked me who I am.”

  “I didn’t ask who Saul Bellow is.”

  “He won the Pulitzer Prize,” I said, “and that’s what I want to do.” I was trying to seem a tiny bit interesting to her, but instead I sounded idiotic to myself.

  “You want to be a novelist?” Anabel said.

  “Journalist.”

  “So I don’t have to worry about you taking my story and putting it in a novel.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “It’s my story. My material. It’s what my art comes out of.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “But journalists betray people for a living. Your little reporter betrayed me. I thought he was interested in what I was trying to express.”

  “That’s not the only kind of journalist.”

  “I’m trying to figure out whether I should be hanging up now. Whether these are bad signs. Betrayal and death, those are bad signs, aren’t they? I think I should be hanging up on you. I’m remembering that you hurt me.”

  But of course she couldn’t hang up.

  “Anabel, please,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken her name. “I want to see you again.”

  I saw her again, but not before going to Lucy’s house for weak coffee and some sort of brown Betty with oatmeal in it. Lucy’s house was overwarm and reeked, to me, of fucking like bunnies. “You shouldn’t feel bad about the article,” she told me. “I only called you to warn you a righteous tornado was heading your way. Anabel needs to read Nietzsche and get over her thing about good and evil. The only philosopher she ever talks about is Kierkegaard. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this OK?’”

  “I still feel bad,” I said.

  “She called me yesterday to talk about you. Apparently you had some sort of marathon conversation?” Lucy helped herself to more brown Betty. She wasn’t fat, but she was getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs. “She asked me if you’re Good, capital G, which I took to mean she might want you in her pants. You certainly need to be in someone’s pants, but I’m not sure that hers are the right ones. I know what I’m talking about. I was head over heels for her myself, our senior year at Choate. All the teachers were in awe of her, and she always had funds and got these crazy-strong buds they’ve started growing hydroponically. She had trouble relating to people, but not when she was stoned. She’d get massively stoned at parties, sort of dangerously stoned, and then have sex with somebody, and then get up at six in the morning and write college-level papers. I wanted to sleep with her myself, but she’d sworn off sex by the time we roomed together. Now she’s given up pot, too. She’s become Saint Anabel. I still love her, and I felt bad about the article, but it was really her fault for talking to your reporter. She sets herself up for these things.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “Not for the longest time,” Lucy said. “I asked her how often she masturbates, and she acted all appalled with me for asking. As if she hadn’t been one of the wildest girls in the history of Choate. But I think she’s sort of messed up sexually from that. She was too young and she also got VD. It’s unfortunate, but the upshot is I don’t think she’s a great candidate for you.”

  I was still processing this information when Lucy took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, away from its towers of crusty cookware, and up to the room she shared with her boyfriend, Bob. The bed was unmade, the floor strewn with clothes. “I have a new plan,” she said. She pressed her forehead into mine and propelled me backward onto the bed. “We can start slowly and see how this goes. What do you think?”

  “What about Bob?”

  “That’s my problem, not yours.”

  Just a week earlier, I might have been down with the plan. But now that Anabel was in the picture, I felt disappointed by the idea that sex, which had assumed such fearsome proportions in my mind, was supposed to be as natural and homey as eating brown Betty. There was also no escaping the conclusion that Lucy was trying to keep me away from Anabel. She was all but saying so. We necked on her paisley sheets for no more than ten minutes before I excused myself.

  “This is fun, though, don’t you think?” Lucy said. “We should have thought of this months ago.”

  “Definitely fun,” I said. To be polite, I added that I looked forward to the next time.

  How different my Sunday afternoon with Anabel was. We met at the art museum under a cold gray sky. Anabel came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions. I’d asked for instruction in art, and she swept through the galleries impatiently, issuing blanket dismissals—“snore,” “wrong idea,” “religion blah blah blah,” “meat and more meat”—until we came to Thomas Eakins. Here she stopped and visibly relaxed.

  “This is the guy,” she said. “This is the only male painter I trust. I guess I also don’t mind Corot and his cows. He gets the sadness of being a cow. And Modigliani, too, but that’s only because I used to have a crush on his work and wished he could have painted me. All the rest of them, I swear to you, are telling lies about women. Even when they’re not painting women, even when they’re painting a landscape: it’s lies about women. Even Modigliani, I don’t know why I forgive him, I shouldn’t. I guess because he’s Modigliani. It’s probably good I never met him. Later on, I can show you all the women painters in this collection—oh, wait.” She snorted. “There are no women painters. This entire collection is an illustr
ation of what happens without women on the scene to keep men honest. Except for this guy here. God, he’s honest.”

  I took it as a heartening sign that she liked at least one male painter; that she could make an exception. She was a terrible art-history instructor, but if you were going to look at only one artist in that museum, Eakins wasn’t a bad choice. She pointed out the geometry of rower and oar and scull and wake, and how honest Eakins was about the atmospherics of the lower Delaware valley. But the main thing for her was Eakins’s bodies. “People have been depicting the human body for thousands of years,” she said. “You’d think we would have gotten really good at it by now. But it turns out to be the hardest thing in the world to do right. To see it the way it really is. This guy not only saw it, he got it down in paint. Somehow, with everybody else, even photographers, or actually especially with photographers, some idea gets in the way. But not with Eakins.” She turned to me. “You’re a Thomas also, or just plain Tom?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Am I allowed to say I’m glad I don’t have your last name?”

  “Anabel Aberant.”

  She thought about this. “Actually, Anabel Aberrant might not be so bad. Kind of my entire story in two words.”

  “You’re allowed to pronounce it any way you want.”

  As if to dispel any coded allusion to future marriage, she said, “You really are bizarrely young-looking. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “I think it was a character thing with Eakins. I think to paint this honestly, you have to have a good character. He may have had sexual issues, but his heart was pure. People are always saying Vincent had a pure heart, but I don’t believe it. His brain was full of spiders.”

  I was beginning to feel like the flavorless kid brother of someone Anabel was doing a favor by seeing me. That she’d called Lucy to ask about me, or that she might be trying to impress me, was hard to credit. As we made our way back outside, I remarked that she and Lucy were very different.

  “She has a really fine mind,” Anabel said. “She was the only person at Choate whose ambition I could recognize. She was going to make documentaries and change the face of American cinema. And now her ambition is to make babies with Handyman Bob. I’d be surprised if he has a single good chromosome left after all the psychedelics he’s done.”

  “I think she and Bob may be having trouble.”

  “Well, I hope they hurry up with that.”

  Snowflakes, the first of the season, were slanting across the museum steps. In Denver a day like this would have delivered six to twelve inches, but in Philadelphia I’d learned to expect a turn to rain. As we proceeded down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the most desolate of Philly’s many soul-oppressing avenues, I asked Anabel why she didn’t have a car.

  “You mean, where’s my Porsche?” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it. Nobody ever taught me how to drive. And I might as well tell you, in case you have the wrong idea about me, that I’m in the process of weaning myself from the family teat. My father’s paying for my last semester, but that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Daughters don’t inherit?”

  She ignored this small temerity. “The money is already ruining my brothers. I’m not going to let it ruin me. But that’s not even the reason. The reason is the money has blood on it. I can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. That’s what McCaskill is, a river of meat. They trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river. You probably had McCaskill meat for breakfast today.”

  “They have a thing called scrapple here. It’s said to be made out of organs and eyeballs.”

  “That’s the McCaskill way, use everything.”

  “I think scrapple is more Pennsylvania Dutch.”

  “Have you ever been to a pig factory? Chicken farm? Stockyard? Slaughterhouse?”

  “I’ve smelled them from afar.”

  “It’s a river of meat. I’m making my thesis film about it.”

  “I’d like to see this film.”

  “It’s unwatchable. Everybody hates it, except Nola, who’s vegan. Nola thinks I’m a genius.”

  “Remind me what vegan is?”

  “No animal products of any kind. I know I need to go that way myself, but I basically live on toast and butter, so it’s not easy.”

  Everything she said fascinated me. We seemed to be heading toward the train station, and I was afraid that we’d part ways without my having fascinated her at all.

  “I can assign a story on scrapple,” I said. “Investigate where it comes from, what it’s made of, how the animals are treated. I could write it myself. Everybody complains about scrapple, nobody knows what it is. That’s the definition of a good story.”

  Anabel frowned. “It’s sort of my idea, though. Not yours.”

  “I’m trying to make amends here.”

  “First I’d need to find out whether McCaskill makes scrapple.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch. I was the one who brought it up, anyway.”

  She stopped on the sidewalk and faced me full-on. “Is this what we’re going to do? Are we going to compete? Because I’m not sure I need that.”

  I was happy that she spoke of us as something potentially ongoing; distressed that we might be something she didn’t need. Somehow, already, the decision was hers to make. My interest in her had quietly been assumed.

  “You’re the artist,” I said. “I’m just the journalist.”

  Her eyes searched my face. “You’re very pretty,” she said, not kindly. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

  “Fine,” I said, smarting. “Thank you for showing me Thomas Eakins.”

  “I’m sorry.” She pressed a gloved hand to her eyes. “Don’t be hurt. I just suddenly have a bad headache and need to go home.”

  When I got back to campus, I thought of calling her to see how she was feeling, but the word pretty was still rankling, and our date had been so unlike what I’d hoped for, so much not the dreamlike continuation of our phone call, that the needle of my sexual compass was swinging back toward Lucy and her plan. My mother had lately taken to warning me not to make the mistake she’d made and fall too hard for a person at too tender an age—to think of my career first, by which she meant that I should first make money and then choose the most expensive house, etc.—and I certainly felt safe from falling too hard for Lucy.

  In my Sunday-night call to Denver, I mentioned that I’d been to the art museum with one of the heirs of the McCaskill fortune. This was weak of me, but I felt I’d disappointed my mother by failing to make the right sort of Ivy League friends. I seldom had news that cheered her.

  “Did you like her?” my mother asked.

  “I did, actually.”

  “Your father’s friend Jerry Knox spent his entire career with McCaskill. They’re well known for having the highest ethical principles. Only in America can you find a company like that…”

  I settled in for another lecture. Since my father died, my mother had become a droner, as if to fill the hole in her life with verbiage. She’d also frosted her hair a yellowish gray to make herself look older, more like a widow, but she was still only forty-four and I hoped she would remarry, this time choosing somebody rich and politically right of center, after the expiration of whatever she deemed a proper interval of bereavement. Not that she’d done much actual grieving. She’d used the interval instead to be angry at my father and the pointless way he’d died. It had fallen to me and my sisters to be devastated by the plane crash. I’d already begun to take a kinder view of my father when it happened, and when I arrived at the high-school auditorium for his memorial service and saw the overflow crowd of colleagues and former students, I felt proud to be the son of a man who never met a person he didn’t want to like. My sisters both gave eulogies whose effusion seemed pointed at his widow, who sat next to me and chewed her lip and stared straight ahead. She was still dry-eyed when the service ended
. “He was a very good man,” she said.

  I’d since spent three increasingly unbearable summers with her. The highest-paying job I could find was at the Atkinson’s Drugs branch where she herself worked. I stayed out late every evening with my friends and returned home after midnight to foul smells in our bathroom. My mother’s colon was unhappy not only with me but with my sisters. Cynthia had dropped out of grad school to become a labor organizer in California’s Central Valley; Ellen was living in Kentucky with a gray-bearded banjo player and teaching remedial English. Both of them seemed happy, but all my mother could see, and drone about, was the waste of their abilities.

  I owed my drugstore job to Dick Atkinson, the owner of the chain. During my second summer with my mother, her bowel’s irritation was aggravated by Dick’s courtship of her. Dick was a nice guy and a staunch Republican, and I felt that my mother, who’d always admired his entrepreneurship, could do a lot worse. But Dick was twice divorced, and she, who had stuck it out with my father, disapproved of discarding spouses and wanted no part in it. Dick considered this ridiculous and believed that he could wear her down. By the end of the summer, she’d worked herself into such a state that her gastroenterologist had to put her on prednisone. A few months later, she’d quit her job at the pharmacy. She was now working, at what I suspected were slave wages, for the congressional campaign of Arne Holcombe, a developer of downtown Denver office space. When I’d gone home for a third summer with her, I’d found her health improved but her idealization of Arne Holcombe so over the top, so incessantly and droningly expressed, that I worried for her sanity.