Jonathan Franzen - Purity

My underpants were sticky from hours of steady seepage, but Anabel was right: my dick and I were barely on speaking terms. The stickiness, like the dick itself, was a male embarrassment and seemed to have little to do with the tenderness I felt toward her.

“But that’s not my question,” she said. “My question is what did Lucy tell you about me.”

“She told me”—I chose my words carefully—“that you’d had some bad experiences in high school and hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time.”

Anabel gave a little shriek. “ God I hate her! Why did I stay friends with this person?”

“I don’t care what you did at Choate. I won’t talk about you again with her.”

“I hate her! She’s a gutter with no grate. She has to drag everything down to her level. I know her. I know exactly what she told you.” Anabel squeezed her eyes shut, pushing out mascara tears. “You have to go now, OK? I need to be in my room.”

“I’ll go, but I don’t understand.”

“I want us to be different. I want us to be like nothing else.” She opened her eyes and smiled at me timidly. “It’s really OK if you don’t want to. You’re just a very nice person, Denver-born. I’d understand if you didn’t want any of this.”

My communication lines with my dick were maybe not so very bad, because my response was to pull her face into mine, force her swollen lips into my sore ones. I can’t help thinking that if we’d done the sensible thing and gone ahead and fucked there, on the floor, we might have had a happy life together. But everything in the moment argued against it — my inexperience, my suspicion of my motives, Anabel’s strange notions of purity, her wish to be left alone, my wish not to harm her. We separated, breathing hard, and glared at each other.

“I want it,” I said.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said.

“I won’t hurt you.”

Back on campus, I slept away the morning and went to the dining hall just in time to get food. I found Oswald at the table we preferred, and he greeted me with headlines.

“ Aberant to Friend: Enjoy the Party. ”

“Really sorry about that.”

“ Apologetic Aberant Cites Secret Laird Summit .”

I laughed and said, “ Hackett Found Guilty in Laird Hatchet Job. ”

“You’re blaming me for that?” Oswald batted his eyelashes.

“Not anymore.”

“Please tell me some butcher paper came into play.”

The Monday issue of the DP was light work, because we had all weekend for it. By late afternoon we’d put it to bed and I was able to call Anabel. She’d slept until three and should have had nothing to report, but lovesickness makes the most minor thoughts and doings worthy of narration. We talked for an hour and then discussed whether to get together that night, since I wouldn’t have another free night until Friday.

“So it begins,” she said.

“What does?”

“Your important responsibilities, my waiting. I don’t want to be the person who waits.”

“I’m the one who’ll be waiting until Friday night.”

“You’ll be busy, I’ll be waiting.”

“You don’t have work to do?”

“Yes, but tonight is my one chance to make you wait. I want you to have one little taste of what it’s going to be like for me.”

If the logic had been anyone else’s, I might have become impatient, but I, too, wanted us to be like nothing else. To prolong an essentially semantic disagreement for half an hour, as we proceeded to do, didn’t frustrate me. It led me deeper into her singularity, our soon-to-be joint singularity. It meant keeping her voice in my ear.

When we’d finally compromised by agreeing to meet for drinks in Center City — whence I imagined myself following her home again and this time gaining entry to her bedroom, gaining permission to put my hands on more highly charged parts of her body, maybe even gaining everything I wanted, provided she wanted it as much as I did — I ate a quick dinner and went to my room to read Hegel for an hour. I’d barely sat down when the call came from my sister Cynthia.

“Clelia’s in the hospital,” she said. “They admitted her last night around midnight.”

I was in such an Anabel state that my thought was: we had our first kiss around midnight. It was as if my mother had somehow known. Cynthia explained that my mother had been in the bathroom for four hours with a rising fever, unable to get away from the toilet. She’d finally managed to phone her gastroenterologist, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout, who was old-school enough to make house calls and fond enough of my mother to do it at eleven on a Saturday night. His diagnosis was not just an acute bowel inflammation but a complete nervous breakdown — my mother couldn’t stop deliriously defending Arne Holcombe from some unnamed accusation.

“So I just got off the phone with the campaign manager,” Cynthia said. “Apparently Arne exposed himself to a female staffer.”

“My God,” I said.

“They tried to keep it from Clelia, but somebody told her. She kind of went out of her mind. Twenty-four hours later, she can’t leave the toilet long enough to call for help.”

Cynthia was hoping I could fly to Denver. She had a big vote on unionization coming up on Friday, and Ellen was still furious with my mother for some remark she’d made about banjo players. (Ellen’s position then and ever after was: She’s a bitch to me, and she’s not actually my mother.) Cynthia had never entirely stopped being dubious of me morally, albeit in a friendly way, and she probably already feared (with good reason) that she’d end up stuck with the primary emotional care of her stepmother. I agreed to call the hospital.

First, though, I called Anabel and luckily caught her before she’d left to meet me. I explained the situation and asked if she might come and see me in my dorm instead. Her response was dead silence.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Now you see what I mean about it beginning,” Anabel said.

“But this is an actual emergency.”

“Try to imagine me in your dorm. The eyes on me. The smell of those showers. This is something you can imagine me doing?”

“My mom is in the hospital!”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said more kindly. “I’m just sick about the timing. It’s like everything is some sort of sign with us. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m disappointed.”

I consoled her for nearly an hour. I believe this was the first time I ever really spoke ill of my mother; she’d previously been nothing worse than an embarrassment I’d kept to myself. I must have wanted to show Anabel that my loyalties were hers for the taking. And Anabel, though she identified with her own suffering mother, not only said nothing in defense of mine but helped me to sharpen my complaints with her. She groaned when I told her that my mother subscribed to Town & Country , and that she considered paper napkins déclassé and put out cloth ones, with napkin rings, at every meal, and that her idea of a chic department store was Neiman Marcus. “You need to tell her,” Anabel said, “that the people she admires all fly to New York and shop at Bendel’s.” Anabel may have renounced her privilege, but she was still defending it from parvenus. When I recall her snobbery, the innocent cruelty of it, she seems very young to me, and I even younger for feeling intoxicated by it and using it against my mother.

The voice in Denver was hoarse and slurred with sedatives. “Your dumb old mother is in the hospital,” it said. “Doctor Schan … Vyllingerhout took one look at me … ‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’ He’s the most wo’r’ful man, Tom. Lef’ his bridge game for me, plays bridge on Saturday night … They don’t make physissans like that anymore. He doesn’t have to work — sisty-sis years old. A real arissocrat, I think I told you his family … very old family, Belgium. He comes on Saturday night straigh’ from his bridge game to dumb old me. Saturday night he makes a house call. Says I’m going to get better, not giving up until I’m better. Honestly, I’m so discouraged with this dumb old thing … He really is my savior.”