Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Anabel’s project was titled, at my suggestion, “A River of Meat.” She’d wanted to call it “Unfinished #8,” because in her view the film wasn’t quite finished, because she never quite finished anything, because she got bored and moved on to the next artistic challenge. I told her that only she would know that her film wasn’t finished. She’d obtained two short 16 mm film clips, one of a cow being bolt-gunned in the head in a slaughterhouse, the other of Miss Kansas being crowned Miss America 1966, and she’d labored for the better part of a year to reprint and hand-doctor and intercut the two clips. Her favorite filmmakers were Agnès Varda and Robert Bresson, but her project owed more to the hypnotic musical tapestries of Steve Reich. She alternated a single frame with its negative one to one, one to two, two to one, two to two, and so on, and she introduced other rhythmic variations by reversing the frames, rotating them by ninety degrees, running them backward, and hand-coloring the frames with red ink. The resulting twenty-four-minute film was radically repellent, a full-scale assault on the visual cortex, but you could also see genius in it if you looked at it right.

  My mother’s all-time favorite movie was Doctor Zhivago. During the last minutes of the screening, I could hear her muttering angrily. When the lights came up, she hurried to the door.

  “I’ll just wait outside,” she said when I caught up with her.

  “You need to say something nice to Anabel first.”

  “What can I say? That is the most horrible, disgusting thing I’ve seen in my entire life.”

  “A little nicer than that would be good.”

  “If that’s art, then there is something wrong with art.”

  A wave of anger came over me.

  “You know what?” I said. “Just tell her that. Tell her you hated it.”

  “I’m not the only person who would hate it.”

  “Mom, it’s fine. She’s not going to be surprised.”

  “Do you think it’s art?”

  “Definitely. I think it’s amazing.”

  Down at the front of the screening room, Anabel was standing with Nola, not looking at us, some terrible scene with me no doubt brewing inside her. The few students and professors in the audience had fled for their lives. My mother spoke to me in a low voice.

  “I don’t even recognize you, Tom, you’ve changed so much in the last six months. I’m very disturbed by what’s happened to you. I’m disturbed by a person who would make a movie like that. I’m disturbed that she’s the reason you suddenly quit the fine job you worked so hard to get, and you’re not pursuing your graduate studies.”

  I, for my part, was disturbed by my mother’s steroidal ugliness. My life was lovely Anabel, and I could only hate the bloat-faced, slit-eyed person who questioned it. My love and my hatred felt indistinguishable; each seemed to follow logically from the other. But I was still a dutiful son, and I would have taken my mother back to Penn if Anabel hadn’t come stalking up the aisle.

  “That was great,” I said to her. “It’s amazing to see it on the big screen.”

  She was glaring at my mother. “What did you think?”

  “I don’t know what to say,” my mother said, frightened.

  Anabel, her shyness now dispelled by moral outrage, laughed at her and turned to me. “Are you coming with us?”

  “I should probably take my mom home.”

  Anabel flared her long nostrils.

  “I can meet you later,” I said. “I don’t want her taking the train by herself.”

  “And she couldn’t possibly take a cab.”

  “I’ve got like eight dollars on me.”

  “She has no money?”

  “She didn’t bring her purse. She has this idea about Philly.”

  “Right. All those scary black people.”

  It was wrong to be talking about my mother as if she weren’t there, but she’d wronged Anabel first. Anabel stalked back down the aisle, opened her knapsack, and returned with a pair of twenty-dollar bills. What do they say at NA meetings? The thing you promise yourself you’ll never go so low as to do for drugs is the very thing you end up doing? I would have said that it was bad in eight different ways to take money from Anabel and hand it to my mother, but that’s what I did. Then I called a cab and waited with her in silence in front of President’s Hall.

  “I’ve had some rough days,” she said after a while. “But I think this has been the worst day of my life.”

  The moon above us, in the Philly haze, was a dissolving beige lozenge. My response to its fullness was Pavlovian, a quickening of the pulse that was hard to distinguish, in the moment, from my fear of my mother’s pain and from the thrilling cruelty of what I was doing to her. My chest felt too tight for me to say anything, even that I was sorry.

  * * *

  I met Anabel’s father later that summer. For two months, she and I had played house with some of her remaining forty thousand dollars, sleeping until noon, breakfasting on toast, trolling thrift stores to improve my wardrobe, escaping the heat at double features at the Ritz, and perfecting our wok skills. On my birthday, we made a plan to become more serious about our work. I began to write a manifesto for The Complicater while she embarked on the year of reading she needed to do for her grand film project. She went to the Free Library every weekday afternoon, because we’d decided it was healthy to be apart for some hours and she didn’t want to wait for me at home like a housewife.

  David Laird called on one of those afternoons. I had to explain to him that Anabel had a boyfriend and that I was that person.

  “Interesting,” David said. “I’m going to tell you a little secret: I’m glad to hear a male voice. I was afraid the wind was blowing in the direction of that mentally-ill dyke friend of hers, just to spite me.”

  “I don’t think that was ever in the cards,” I said.

  “Are you black?” he said. “Handicapped? Criminal? Drug addict?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Interesting. I’ll tell you another secret: I like you already. I take it you’re in love with my daughter?”

  I hesitated.

  “Of course you are. She’s quite something, isn’t she? To call her a handful is the understatement of a lifetime. They really broke the mold with that one.”

  I could already hear why Anabel hated him.

  “But listen,” he went on, “if she likes you, I like you. Hell, I was even prepared to like the mentally-ill girl, although, praise the Lord, it didn’t come to that. Anabel’d do almost anything to spite me, but she won’t go so far as to cut off her nose, if you know what I mean. I know her, I know that pretty nose of hers. And I want to know the guy she’s living with. What do you say to dinner at Le Bec-Fin next Thursday? The three of us. The reason I called is I’ve got some business over in Wilmington.”

  I said I’d have to ask Anabel.

  “Aw, hell, Tom—it’s Tom, right? You’re going to need to grow some serious gonads if you’re going to live with my girl. She’ll eat you alive if you’re not careful. You just tell her you said you’d have dinner with me. Can you say those words to me? ‘Yes, David, I will have dinner with you’?”

  “I mean, yeah, sure,” I said. “If it’s OK with her.”

  “No, no, no. Those aren’t the words. You and I are having dinner, period, and she can come along if she wants to. Believe me, there’s no way in hell she’s letting the two of us go out alone. That’s why it’s important that you say the words to me. If you’re this afraid of her now, it’ll only get worse later.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” I said. “But if she doesn’t want to see you…”

  “OK. All right. Here’s a different argument. Here’s another secret for you: she does want to see me. It’s been more than a year since she got to spray me in the face with cat piss. That’s what she does. And she doesn’t like to admit it, but she enjoys it. She’s got a lot of cat piss, and there’s only one face she wants to spray. So when she says she doesn’t want to see me, you tell her you’re going to see m
e anyway. It’ll be our little secret that we’re really doing it for her.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s a good argument.”

  David laughed loudly. “Oh, come on, I’m just fooling around. Let’s go and have a great meal at the best place in Philadelphia. I miss my Anabel.”

  Of course she threw a scene when she learned I’d spoken to him. He was a seducer, she said, and when he couldn’t seduce he bullied, and when he couldn’t bully he bought, and although she was on to him and had built up her defenses, she didn’t trust me not to be seduced or bullied or bought. And so on. I’d been offended by much of what he’d said, but I also couldn’t get it out of my head; who else, after all, could I talk to about Anabel? I experimentally grew some gonads and said it was hurtful and insulting not to trust that I loved her, not him. I experimented further and told her I’d given my word to have dinner with him. And, exactly as he’d predicted, she agreed to come along.

  I tasted my first $3,000 wine at Le Bec-Fin. David had handed Anabel the wine list, and she was reading it when the sommelier came by. “Give her a minute while she finds your cheapest bottle,” David said to the sommelier. “In the meantime, Tom and I will have the ’45 Margaux.”

  When I sought Anabel’s approval for this, she widened her eyes at me unpleasantly. “Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a little game she and I play,” David explained. He was a tall, trim, vigorous man with nearly white hair, a distinguished male version of his daughter, much better-looking than your average billionaire. “But here’s an interesting fact for your future reference. At a place like this, the very cheapest bottle on the list is often sensational. Not sure why that is. It’s the mark of a great restaurant, though.”

  “I’m not looking for something sensational,” Anabel said. “I’m looking for something I won’t gag on the price of.”

  “Nice for you that you’ll probably get both,” David said. He turned to me. “Ordinarily, I’d order that bottle myself. But then she and I couldn’t play our little game. You see what she makes me do?”

  “Funny how women are always to blame for what men do to them,” Anabel remarked.

  “Has she told you how she broke her teeth?”

  “She has.”

  “But did she tell you the best part? She got back on the horse. Blood all over her face, her mouth full of broken tooth, and she gets right back on the horse. And she gives that bridle a yank like she’s going to rip its head off. She almost broke its neck. That’s my Anabel.”

  “Dad, shut up, please.”

  “Honey, I’m speaking well of you to your boyfriend.”

  “Then don’t omit the part about my never getting on a horse again. I still feel bad about what I did to that poor beast.”

  Given Anabel’s hatred of David, I was surprised by their intimate way together. It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other—you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh. When David mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d remarried, Anabel’s response was “To one person, or several?”

  David laughed. “One is all I can afford.”

  “You’ll need at least three in case you have to kill a couple more.”

  “I married a dipsomaniac,” David explained to me.

  “You created an alcoholic,” Anabel said.

  “Somehow men are always to blame for what women do to them.”

  “Somehow it’s always true. Who’s the lucky lady?”

  “Her name’s Fiona. You’ll want to meet her.”

  “I won’t want to meet her. I’ll just want to sign over my birthright to her. Just show me the dotted line.”

  “Not going to happen,” David said. “Fiona signed what they call a prenuptial agreement. You’re not going to be rid of your birthright that easily.”

  “Watch me,” Anabel said.

  “You must talk her out of this madness, Tom.”

  I was having trouble fitting into their banter. I didn’t want David to think I was too earnest or subservient to Anabel, but I couldn’t be too at ease with him without appearing disloyal to her. “That’s not in my job description,” I said carefully.

  “But you do agree it’s madness?”

  My eyes met Anabel’s. “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Give it time. You will.”

  “No, he won’t,” Anabel said, looking into my eyes. “Tom’s not you. Tom is clean.”

  “Ah, yes, the blood on my hands.” David held his hands up for inspection. “Funny, I’m not seeing it tonight.”

  “Look more closely,” Anabel said. “I can smell it.”

  David seemed disappointed in me when he learned that I didn’t eat meat, and outright annoyed when Anabel ordered nothing but a plate of vegetables, but his foie gras and his veal chop restored his spirits. It may only have been a form of billionaire narcissism, but he demonstrated cover-to-cover familiarity with The New Yorker, spoke knowledgeably of Altman and Truffaut, offered to get us tickets to The Elephant Man in New York, and seemed genuinely interested in my opinions about Bellow. It occurred to me that something tragic had happened in the Laird family—that Anabel and her father ought to have been the best of friends. Was she his bitter enemy, and her brothers three disasters, not because he was a monster but because he was too fabulous? Anabel had never claimed that he wasn’t likable, only that he seduced people with his likability. He told me stories of bad business moves he’d made—the selling of a Brazilian sugar mill a year before it became wildly profitable, his torpedoing of a partnership with Monsanto because he thought he knew more about plant genetics than Monsanto’s head of R&D did—and made fun of his own arrogance. When the conversation turned to my career plans and he offered, first, to get me a job at the Washington Post (“Ben Bradlee’s an old friend of mine”) and then, after I’d declined that offer, to fund the start-up of my contrarian magazine, I had the feeling that he was daring me to be fabulous like him.

  Anabel thought otherwise. “He just wants to buy you,” she said on our train ride home. “It’s always the same. I let my guard down a tiny bit, and I loathe myself afterward. He wants to get his fingers into everything I have, the same way McCaskill’s got its fingers into everything the world eats. He won’t rest till he has everything. It’s not enough to be the world’s leading supplier of turkey meat, he has to have Truffaut and Bellow. You flatter his intellectual vanity. He thinks if he can have you, he’ll get me, and then he’ll have everything.”

  “Did you hear me saying yes to him?”

  “No, but you liked him. If you think he’s going to leave you alone now, think again.”

  She was right. Not long after our dinner, I received, by express mail, a package containing four hardcover first editions (Augie March, H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell), two tickets to The Elephant Man, and a letter from David in which he’d recorded his thoughts on rereading Augie March. He also mentioned that he’d spoken on the phone to Ben Bradlee about me, and he invited me and Anabel to New York for a weekend of theater the following month. When Anabel had finished tearing up the tickets, she pointed out the initials in the lower corner of the letter’s second page. “Don’t flatter yourself too much,” she said. “He dictated it.”

  “So what? I can’t believe he went and reread Augie March for me.”

  “Oh I can.”

  “You’re not tearing up the books, though.”

  “No, those you can keep if you can get the blood off them. But if you ever take anything more than token gifts from him, you will destroy me. And I mean destroy me.”

  He continued to call me now and then, and I considered not telling Anabel about it, but I was already peeing in the sink and didn’t want to keep more secrets from her. Instead, I reported on his fabulous doings and then concurred in her condemnation of them. But I secretly liked him, secretly loved the loving way he spoke of Anabel, and she—he’d been right about this—secretly enjoyed having fresh doings to condemn.
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br />   My manifesto for The Complicater wasn’t going well. It was long on contrarian rhetoric and short on facts. If I really intended to found a new magazine, I ought to have been maintaining my friendships from the DP and cultivating relationships with local freelancers. The Complicater was an obvious nonstarter unless Anabel relented and let David fund it, and so I passed my days in the vague hope that she would relent. Oswald, who’d gone home to Lincoln to pay down his college debt, sent me droll letters to which I couldn’t summon the energy to respond. I would make it my one task for the afternoon to write him a letter, and I wouldn’t manage to write one sentence until five minutes before Anabel came home from the library. I didn’t have anything to report to anybody except that I was besotted with her.

  Having spent the previous ten months shaping my personality to fit with hers, sanding away the most prominent points of friction, I was mostly blissful in her presence that fall. We were developing our routines, our shared opinions, our private vocabulary, our store of phrases that had been funny on first utterance and seemed scarcely less funny on the hundredth, and every word and every belonging of hers was colored by the sex I’d had with her and no one else. When I was alone in the apartment, though, I felt depressed. Anabel had limitless money but intended never to take any of it, I was mad for her body but could have it only three days a month, I liked her dad but had to pretend I didn’t, her dad had fabulous connections but I wasn’t allowed to use them, I had a supposedly ambitious project but no chance of making it happen, and whenever my mother dared to question what I was doing—I continued to call her every Sunday night—I took it as a criticism of Anabel and angrily changed the subject.

  Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date. Anabel was so convincing that I believed in our plan. My only fear was that she’d realize I wasn’t as interesting as she was and leave me. She was the amazing thing that had happened to me, and I intended to support her and defend her from a world that didn’t understand her, and so, on the anniversary of Lucy’s Halloween party, I withdrew the last $350 from my old savings account and bought a ring with a pitiful little phonograph-stylus diamond. By the time Anabel came home from the library, I’d tied the ring to Leonard’s neck with a white ribbon and left him standing in the center of our bed.