Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  I don’t know why the name Leonard popped into my head, but I said it.

  “Leonard?” She peered into the bull’s sleepy eyes. “Are you Leonard?” She turned its plushy face toward mine. “Is he Leonard?”

  “Yes, I am Leonard,” I said in the Belgian accent of my mother’s gastroenterologist.

  “You’re not an American bull,” Anabel said coyly.

  Leonard explained, through me, that he came from a very old aristocratic cow family in Belgium, and that a series of misfortunes had brought him to Thirtieth Street Station in severely straitened circumstances. Leonard turned out to be a terrible snob, appalled by the ugliness of Philadelphia and the tackiness of America, and he was delighted with the prospect of entering Anabel’s employ—he could tell she was a kindred spirit.

  Anabel was entranced, and I was entranced to be entrancing her. I was also afraid to set Leonard aside, afraid of what came next, and I now see that I couldn’t have found a better way to make Anabel feel safe than to play with a stuffed animal in her little girl’s room. I’d blundered into being perfect for her. When we finally dismissed Leonard and she pulled me down on top of her, there was a new look in her eyes, the unconcealable and unfakable look of a woman seriously in love. It’s not something a man sees every day.

  I wish I could remember the sensation of being taken by her, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I wish I could go back to that moment as the person I am now, could be in that state of trembling wonder but also have enough experience to appreciate how it felt to be inside a woman for the first time; to enjoy it, basically. But it wasn’t as if I’d enjoyed my first beer or my first cigar, either. The beauty of Anabel naked literally made my eyes hurt, and I was nothing but a thousand worries. If I remember anything from the moment at all, it’s the dreamlike sensation of walking into a room where two figures had been for my entire life, two figures who knew each other well and were talking about realistic adult things I knew nothing about, two figures indifferent to my very late arrival. These figures were the things so graphically down there, my dick and Anabel’s cunt. I was the young and excluded third party, Anabel a distant fourth. But this may have been some actual dream from some other time.

  What I do remember clearly is what a full moon did for Anabel, how she came and came. I was too clumsy to manage it in the purely thrusting way I would have liked to, but she showed me different ways. It seemed inconceivable that such a total pleasure machine couldn’t come at other times of the month, but later experience seemed to bear this out. She was a nearly silent comer, not a screamer. In the warmer light of dawn, she confessed to me that during her now-ended years of celibacy she’d sometimes waited for her best day and spent the entirety of it in her bedroom, masturbating. The vision of her beautiful, endless, solitary self-pleasuring made me wish I could be her. Since I couldn’t, I fucked her for a fourth and last sore time. Then we slept until the afternoon, and I stayed in her apartment for another two days, sustaining myself with buttered toast, not wanting to waste the moon’s fullness. When I finally got back to campus, I resigned from the DP and let Oswald take over.

  * * *

  My mother had warned me that her face had swollen up from the high doses of prednisone that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had her on, but I was still shocked when I met her at the airport. Her face was a ghastly fat cartoon of itself, a miserable moon of flesh, her cheeks so bloated they pushed her eyes half shut. Her apologies to me were piteous. She said she was sick about the state she was in for an Ivy League graduation she’d so looked forward to.

  I told her not to worry, but I was sick about it, too. No matter how often you remind yourself that a face is just a face, that it has nothing to do with the character of the person within, you’re so used to reading people through their faces that it’s difficult to be fair to a deformed one. My mother’s new face repelled the very sympathy it ought to have elicited from me. She was like a shameful secret of mine, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow in a checkered pants suit, when I walked her across the Green to my Phi Beta Kappa induction. I avoided meeting anyone’s eyes, and when I’d deposited her in a seat in College Hall, I had to force myself to walk, not run, away from her.

  After the ceremony, in what felt like a straightforward purchase of my freedom from her, I gave her my Phi Beta Kappa key. (She wore it on a fine gold chain for the rest of her life.) I left her in her assigned room in the Superblock to freshen up—the weather was bludgeoningly hot and humid—while Oswald and I set up our dorm rooms for a wine-and-cheese party. I’d conceived of the party as a way to introduce my mother and Anabel in a casual setting. Anabel was dreading it, but my mother had no reason to. She disapproved of Anabel without even having met her, and I’d been too cowardly to tell her that Anabel was coming to the party.

  Back in November, I’d imagined that my mother would be pleased that I was officially dating a McCaskill heir. But she’d heard from my sister how Anabel and I had met. Cynthia had been amused by the butcher-paper story, but all my mother could see in it was kookiness, radical feminism, and public nudity. In her weekly dronings to me, she promulgated a new, invidious distinction between entrepreneurial wealth and inherited wealth. She also rightly suspected that I’d quit the job of executive editor because of Anabel. I explained that I wanted to focus on my reportorial skills—I was writing, with Anabel’s blessing, a major piece on scrapple—but my mother could smell our sex acts all the way from Denver. When I went home for Christmas and informed her that I’d not only become a vegetarian but was returning to Philly after only a week, her colon flared up badly again.

  Let it not be thought that I didn’t know what I was getting into with Anabel, or that I made no effort to escape it. Three days a lunar month we were a pair of junkies who’d scored the cleanest shit ever, but on the other twenty-five I had to contend with her moods, her scenes, her sensitivities, her judgments, her so easily hurt feelings. We seldom actually fought or argued; it was more often a matter of processing, endlessly, what I or someone else had done to make her feel bad. My entire personality reorganized itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach. It’s possible to describe this as an emasculation of me, but it was really more like a dissolution of the boundaries of our selves. I learned to feel what she was feeling, she learned to anticipate what I was thinking, and what could be more intense than a love with no secrets?

  “A word about the toilet,” she’d said one day, early on.

  “I always raise the seat,” I said.

  “That’s the problem.”

  “I thought the problem was guys who think they can aim through the seat.”

  “I appreciate that you’re not one of them. But there’s a spatter.”

  “I wipe the rim, too.”

  “Not always.”

  “OK, room for improvement.”

  “But it’s not just on the rim. It’s on the underside of the rim and on the tile. Little drops.”

  “I’ll wipe there, too.”

  “You can’t wipe the whole bathroom every time. And I don’t like the smell of old urine.”

  “I’m a guy! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Sit down?” she suggested shyly.

  I knew this wasn’t right, couldn’t be right. But she was hurt by my silence and became silent herself, in a more grievous way, with a stony look in her eyes, and her hurt mattered more to me than my rightness. I told her I would either be more careful or start sitting down, but she could sense that I was resentful, that my submission was grudging, and there could be no peace in our union unless we truly agreed about everything. She began to weep, and I began the long search for the deeper cause of her distress.

  “I have to sit down,” she said finally. “Why shouldn’t you sit down? I can’t not see where you spatter, and every time I see it I think how unfair it is to be a woman. You can’t even see how unfair it is, you have no idea, no idea.”

  She proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get he
r to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up. I made this adjustment to my personality—and a hundred others like it in our early months together—and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn’t, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)

  She was more lenient of difference in the bedroom. It was certainly an unhappy day when she connected the dots for me and explained that we couldn’t have intercourse when only one of us could take satisfaction in it. At my suggestion, after hours of pained discussion and silences, we tried it anyway, and I had to suffer the guilt of her sobbing when I came inside her. I asked if she’d had no pleasure, to which she sobbed that the frustration outweighed the pleasure. We had the whole unfairness conversation again, but this time I was able to point out that, by her own admission, she wasn’t normal, i.e., that we weren’t dealing with a structural gender imbalance. In the end, since she loved me, and was probably afraid of losing me to someone more normal, she agreed to make other arrangements for me. These were a little strange but very creative and, for a while, satisfactory. First I had to take a shower, then we had to converse with Leonard and get his amusing Belgian bull’s-eye take on the news of the day, then we undressed, and then she—there’s no other way to put it—played with the dick. Sometimes it was a camera slowly panning over her body and then shooting its favorite parts. Sometimes she wrapped it in her cool, silky hair and milked it. Sometimes she nuzzled it until it wet her face, as if it were a shower head. Sometimes she took it in her mouth, her gaze not moving from it to my eyes until the moment she swallowed. She was affectionate to the dick in much the same way she was affectionate to Leonard. She told me it was pretty like I was pretty. She claimed that my semen smelled cleaner than other semen she’d had the misfortune of smelling. But the strangest thing, in hindsight, was that she always made the dick not part of me. She didn’t like me to kiss her while she was touching it; she preferred that I not even touch her with my hands until she was finished with it. And always, as I discovered, she was counting. When a full moon came around again, restoring normalcy, she informed me when an orgasm of hers had equalized our tallies for the month. And then everything was OK with us. Then we were one again.

  Two other crises bear noting. The first was my acceptance by the journalism school at the University of Missouri, an excellent school that my mother had encouraged me to apply to because it was affordable and not so far from Denver. I may have been besotted with Anabel, and I may have turned against my maleness as an impediment to our union of souls, but the male part of me was still there and well aware that she was strange, that I was young, and that a vegetarian diet wasn’t agreeing with my stomach. I imagined regrouping in Missouri, becoming a lean and mean reporter, sampling some other girls before deciding whether to commit to a life with Anabel. I made the mistake of breaking the Missouri news to her on the night before a full moon. I tried to jolly her into her bedroom, but she went silent. Only after hours of sulking and prodding, hours we could have spent in bed, did she lay out my thinking for me in its full male vileness. She didn’t miss a thing. “You’ll be there having your excellent journalist’s life, you’ll be happy not to be with me, and I’ll be here waiting,” she said.

  “You could come with me.”

  “You can see me living in Columbia, Missouri? As your tagalong girl?”

  “You could stay here and work on your project. It’s only two years.”

  “And your magazine?”

  “How am I going to start a magazine with no money and no experience?”

  She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook.

  “This is what I have,” she said, pointing to a figure of some $46,000 in the savings ledger. I watched her write me a check for $23,000 in her elegant artist’s hand. “Do you want to be with me and be ambitious?” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “Or do you want to go to Missouri with all the other hacks?”

  I didn’t point out that checkbook gestures aren’t so meaningful coming from a billionaire’s daughter. Doubting her vow not to accept more money from her father was as grievous a wrong as doubting her seriousness as an artist. She’d already trained me never to do it. She was rabid on the subject.

  “I can’t take your money,” I said.

  “It’s our money,” she said, “and this is the last of it. Everything I have is yours. Use it well, Tom. You can go to school with it if you want to. If you’re going to break my heart, this is the time to do it. Not from Missouri a year from now. Take the money, go home, go to journalism school. Just don’t pretend you’re in this with me.”

  She went and locked herself in her bedroom. I don’t know how many times I had to promise I wasn’t leaving her before she let me in. When she finally did, I tore up the check—“Don’t be a fool, that’s good money!” Leonard cried from the headboard—and seized her body with a new sense of possession, as if becoming more hers had made her more mine.

  My mother was furious about my decision. She saw me starting down the path of indigence my sisters were treading, the path of my father’s stupid idealism, and it did me no good to cite the many famous journalists who hadn’t gone to grad school. She was even more upset, a month later, when I told her I was coming to Denver only for a week that summer. I’d spent all of eight days with her since her hospitalization, and I felt I owed her (and Cynthia) a month at home, but Anabel had been counting on our starting a life together the minute I graduated. She took my proposal of a month apart as a catastrophic betrayal of everything we’d planned together. When I suggested that she join me in Denver, she stared at me as if I, not she, were the insane one. Why I didn’t resolve the crisis by breaking up with her is hard to fathom. My brain was apparently already so wired into hers that even though I knew she was being unreasonable and heartless, I didn’t care. All drugs are an escape from the self, and throwing myself away for Anabel, doing something obviously wrong to make her feel better, and then reaping the ecstasy of her renewed enthusiasm for me, was my drug. My mother cried when I told her my travel plans, but only Anabel’s tears could change my mind.

  Anger with the two of us was broadcast in my mother’s swollen face at the graduation party. There was no safe way to explain to my friends and their normal-looking parents that she didn’t always look like this. Everyone was sweating mightily by the time Anabel arrived, wearing a drop-dead sky-blue cocktail dress and accompanied by Nola. They went straight to the wine, and it was a while before I could pry my mother away from Oswald’s parents and lead her to the corner where Anabel was sitting in Nola’s little cloud of disaffection. I made the introduction, and Anabel, stiff with shyness, rose and took my mother’s hand.

  “Mrs. Aberant,” she bravely said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

  My poor disfigured pants-suited mother, confronting the vision of that sky-blue cocktail dress: Anabel could never forgive her for what she did, but eventually I could. Something resembling a condescending smile appeared on her bloated face. She released Anabel’s hand and looked down at Nola, who was dressed in punky black. “And you are…?”

  “The depressive friend,” Nola said. “Pay me no mind.”

  Anabel had wanted to make a good impression on my mother; she just needed a modicum of coaxing out of her shyness. None was forthcoming. My mother turned away and told me she wanted to change her clothes before dinner.

  “You need to talk to Anabel,” I said.

  “Maybe another time.”

  “Mom. Please.”

  Anabel had sat down again, her eyes wide with injured disbelief.

  “I’m sorry I’m not at my best,” my mother said.

  “She came all the way over here to meet you. You can’t just walk away.”

  I was appealing to her sense of propriety, but she was too sweaty and miserable to heed it. I gestured to Anabel to join us, but she ign
ored me. I followed my mother out into the hallway.

  “Just tell me how to get back to my room,” she said. “You stay at your nice party. I’m so happy to have met Mr. and Mrs. Hackett. They’re fine, interesting, responsible people.”

  “Anabel is extremely important to me,” I said, trembling.

  “Yes, I can see she’s quite pretty. But so much older than you.”

  “She’s two years older.”

  “She looks so much older, sweetie.”

  Half blind with hatred and shame, I led my mother outside and over to her room. By the time I got back to the party, Anabel and Nola were gone—a relief, since I was hardly in a mood to defend my mother. At dinner with the Hacketts, my mother’s face was an unreferred-to elephantine presence, and I refused to say a word to her directly. Afterward, in the humid shade of the Locust Walk, I informed her that I couldn’t spend the evening with her, because Anabel’s thesis project was being screened at Tyler at nine thirty. I’d dreaded telling her this, but now I was glad to.

  “I’m sorry your mother is such an embarrassment,” she said. “This dumb condition of mine is ruining everything.”

  “Mom, you’re not embarrassing me. I just wish you could have talked to Anabel.”

  “I can’t stand having you angry at me. It’s the worst thing in the world for me. Do you want me to come and see her movie with you?”

  “No.”

  “If she means so much to you that you won’t even speak to me at dinner, maybe I should go.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Is her movie immoral? You know I can’t stand nudity or gutter language.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s just not going to make sense to you. It’s about the visual properties of film as a purely expressive medium.”

  “I love a good movie.”

  Both of us must have known she’d loathe Anabel’s work, but I managed to persuade myself to give her a second chance. “Just promise you’ll be nice to her,” I said. “She’s worked all year on this, and artists are sensitive. You have to be really, really nice.”