Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I took them to Lucy on Bastille Day. She’s one of my oldest friends, I wanted to bring her something nice. But she was too grateful, if you know what I mean. One or two references to my amazing generosity would have been enough. After that it became a hostile comment on my privilege. Not just my privilege — me personally. I have to say, I know you’re still friends with her, but I’m at the point where she’s literally turning my stomach.”

“Me too, a little bit,” I said.

“Are you aware that you have squirrel on your collar?”

“She took some fending off.”

“You’ll notice I didn’t ask why you were at the party.”

“Look where I am now,” I said. “I’m here, not there.”

“Undeniably.”

We clinked glasses, and I wished her a belated happy birthday. This led to our comparing birth dates. Hers turned out to be April eighth. Mine is August fourth.

The symmetry of 4/8 and 8/4 had a powerful effect on Anabel. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at me as if I were an apparition. “Did you just make that up? Is your birthday really August fourth?”

The signs meant more to her than they did to me. For her they were a way for us to be about more than just chemistry, to be something in the stars, while for me they served mainly to confirm the chemistry of my feelings for her. When the wine had warmed her up and she took off her jean jacket, I saw my fate not in calendrical coincidence but in the thinness of her upper arms, in what they did to my heart.

Under the influence of wine and mystical sign, she set about improving me that night. To be with her, I’d need better ambitions. When she learned that I was applying to journalism school, she said, “And then what? You go to city council meetings in Topeka for five years?”

“It’s an honorable tradition.”

“But is that what you want? What do you want ?”

“I want to be famous and powerful. But you have to pay your dues first.”

“What if you could start your own magazine? What would you do with it?”

I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I’d grown up in, my father’s blind progressivism, my mother’s faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other’s politics.

“I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations,” Anabel said darkly.

“But the alternative doesn’t work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It’s like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house.”

“I know what you mean. I had to be an artist for the same reason. But that’s why I can’t see you wasting five years in Topeka or wherever. If you already know you want to serve the truth, you should serve it. Start a magazine like nobody else’s. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time.”

“ The Complicater .”

“That’s good! You should remember that. I’m serious.”

In the glow of her approval, it seemed almost possible that I could start a magazine called The Complicater . And would she be talking about my future if she didn’t think she might be a part of it? The thought of this future, the love it would imply, led me to the thought of reaching across the table and touching her hand. I was just about to do it when she stood up.

“I have a project, too.” She went over to the diagram of the beef cuts. “This is my project.”

“I was wondering why a vegetarian had a cow poster in her kitchen.”

“I don’t have it all figured out yet. And it’s going to take me fifteen years to complete. But if I can do it, it’s going to be like your magazine: like nothing the world has ever known.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Let’s see if I ever see you again first.”

I stood up and joined her by the diagram. “Do I have to stop eating beef?”

She turned to me in surprise. “Yes, now that you mention it. That would be a requirement.”

“And what sort of thing would you give up?”

“A lot ,” she said, retreating to the table. “I’ve gotten good at being alone. This kitchen smells the way I want it to smell. I have a problem with smells, I smell things that nobody else can. I’m smelling greasepaint on you right now. It’s nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it’s quiet. It wasn’t easy to become a person who’s OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there , and now some part of me is wishing I hadn’t gone out tonight. Some part of me wants you not to be here. But it’s like you were fated to be here.” She took a breath and looked me directly in the eye. “I waited at that corner for you, Tom. I looked at my watch, and I said I’m waiting five minutes. And you came in four. Four eight, eight four.”

My heart began to pound. I was becoming a sign, I was losing my self, and although I was obviously excited to learn that Anabel had waited for me, the surge of blood in my groin might have been the erection they say men get at the moment of being executed. That was how it felt.

I went to her and dropped to my knees. No less powerful than my desire for her was my wish, now on the verge of being granted, to be the person she allowed into her private world — to mean something in the story she was telling herself. When she put her hands on my shoulders and knelt down in front of me I experienced the gravity of what it meant to her to do this, and was excited even more for her sake than for mine. I looked into her eyes.

She said, “This is our fourth encounter, you know.”

“If you count the phone call.”

“Are you going to kiss me?”

“I’m afraid to,” I said.

“I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of us.”

I brought my face closer to hers.

“You break it, you pay for it,” she whispered.

I could have kissed her all night. I did kiss her all night. How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth. And there were pauses, certainly. There was gazing into each other’s eyes, there was pleasurable discussion of when exactly we’d become inevitable. There was the bounty of her hair, the pure Anabel smell of her skin, the little gap in her front teeth, the physical outskirts with which I needed to acquaint myself before proceeding deeper. There were new apologies and small confessions. There was her sudden, mad, amusing licking of the linoleum to prove to me how clean Anabel Laird kept a kitchen floor. Later there was a move to the sofa in her living room. There was the closed door of the bedroom that nobody but Anabel entered. But mostly we just kissed until dawn exposed us to our raw-eyed selves.

Anabel sat up and reassembled her composure like a cat after an awkward leap. “You need to go now,” she said.

“Of course.”

“I can’t let you in all at once. You can apparently go straight from Lucy to me without skipping a beat, but I’m out of practice.”

“I wouldn’t call myself practiced.”

She nodded seriously.

“I have something to confess and something to ask you,” she said. “I need you to know that Lucy told me things about you. I wanted to scream at her, Shut up! shut up! But she told me you’re a virgin.”

How I hated that word. It sounded outmoded and obscene and accurate.

“Well, so here’s my confession: it matters to me. It’s why I waited for you at the corner. I mean, I waited because I wanted to see you. But also because I thought you might be a person I could start over with. Do you even understand how clean you are?”