Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I was encouraged that she seemed already to be moving on from Arne Holcombe to Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. I asked if she wanted me to come and see her.

“No, sweetie. You’re sweet to offer but you have your magazine. To edit … your newspaper I mean. I’m so proud you’re editor in chief. It will really impress … the law schools.”

“Journalism schools all the more.”

“I’m just happy to think of you with your fine, interesting, ambitious friends … all your bright prospects. You don’t have to come and see dumb old me. Rather you not see me this way. Not my best … you can come when I’m better.”

I’m not proud to have seized on permission granted under sedation not to go and see her. I think she did genuinely want me to have my own life, but this doesn’t lessen the offense of my fear of being around her, my fear of implication in her sickness and recovery, and I ought to have known — did know, but pretended I didn’t — that Cynthia, who was a very good person like our dad, would take up my slack and drive to Denver in her VW minibus after her union vote.

Not that I gave it much thought. My head was a radio playing Anabel on every station. There was no magazine in the world in whose pages I wouldn’t have pointed to her picture and said: That one. No words in the language that stopped my heart like ANABEL CALLED on my office message board. (Never ANNABELLE. She was vain about her name and spelled it for whoever took the message.) We spoke every night and I began to resent the DP for interfering. I stopped eating beef and much of anything else; I was constantly half nauseated. Oswald clucked over me, but I was half nauseated with everything, including my best friend. I only wanted Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel. She was beautiful and smart and serious and funny and stylish and creative and unpredictable and liked me. Oswald delicately called my attention to signs that she might be somewhat crazy, but he also showed me an article in the business section of the Times : McCaskill, still swimming in profits from Soviet grain sales, had an estimated value of $24 billion, and its dynamic president, David M. Laird, was aggressively expanding its operations overseas. I did the math on David — five percent, four heirs — and arrived at a figure of three hundred million dollars for Anabel, and felt even sicker.

I had to see her three more times before she let me in her bedroom. She was no doubt mindful of the number four, but there was also a peculiar circumstance that I learned of some hours into our third meeting as a couple, after I’d emerged victorious from protracted struggle with fear and feminist self-scrutiny and dared to ease my hand up under the maroon velvet dress she was wearing. When my fingers finally reached her underpants and touched the source of the heat between her legs, she drew breath sharply and said, “Don’t start.”

My hand retreated immediately. I didn’t want to harm her.

“No, it’s OK,” she said, kissing me. “I want you to feel me. But only for you, not for me. You don’t want to start with me.”

I took my hand out of her dress altogether and stroked her hair, to impress on her that I wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t selfish. “Why not?” I said.

“Because it won’t work. Not tonight.”

She sat up on her sofa and pressed her knees together with her hands flat between them. She made me promise that, no matter what happened, I would never tell anyone what she had to tell me. Ever since she was thirteen, she said, her periods had been in perfect sync with the phases of the moon. It was a very weird thing: her bleeding invariably began nine days after the moon was full. She said she could be trapped in a cave for years and still know what day of the lunar month it was. But there was something even weirder: ever since she’d had her unhappy disease in high school (this was her phrase, “my unhappy disease”), she could only achieve satisfaction in the three days when the moon was fullest, no matter how hard she tried on other days of the month. “And believe me, I’ve tried,” she said. “There’s nothing but frustration at the end of what you were starting.”

“It’s a half-moon tonight.”

She nodded and turned to me with worry in her eyes, what I took to be the endearing worry that she was strange or damaged, or the even more endearing worry that I might be repulsed by her. But I wasn’t repulsed. I was thrilled that she’d confided in me and wanted me enough to worry about repulsing me. I thought I’d never heard of anything more amazing and singular: in perfect sync with the moon!

She must have felt relieved by how ardently I kissed her and reassured her, because her actual worry had to do with the rather obvious corollary to her confession: if I was committed to complete mutuality, to doing nothing with her that she couldn’t equally join in, I was going to be getting laid three days a month at best. She assumed that I could see this corollary. I didn’t see it. But even if I had, three days a month would have looked pretty great from where I was sitting that night. (Later, indeed, when we were married, it did come to look pretty great, in the rearview mirror.)

A week later, arriving early at Thirtieth Street for the SEPTA train, I had an impulse to buy something for Anabel in honor of our fourth date. I wandered down to the book-and-magazine store, hoping it might have a copy of Augie March , which Oswald had taught me to consider the finest novel by a living American, but it didn’t. My eye was caught instead by a stuffed animal, a miniature black plush-toy bull with stubby felt horns and sleepy eyes. I bought it and put it in my knapsack. On the train, crossing the Schuylkill, I saw the full moon gilding fair-weather clouds over Germantown. I was already so far gone that the moon seemed to me the personal property of Anabel. Like something I could touch and was about to.

Anabel, in her kitchen, wearing a stunning black dress, opened another bottle of Château Montrose. “This is the last bottle,” she said. “I gave the other eight to the winos behind the liquor store.”

Eights and fours, everywhere eights and fours.

“They must have thought you were their angel,” I said.

“No, in fact, they hassled me because I didn’t have a corkscrew.”

I’d expected the night to be magical through and through, but instead we had our first fight. I made a joking offhand allusion to her father’s wealth, and she became upset, because everywhere she went she was hated as the rich girl, and I was not to joke about it , she couldn’t be with me if that was how I thought of her, she hated the money enough without my reminding her of it, she was already knee-deep in the blood of it. After my tenth unavailing apology, I found some backbone and got angry. If she didn’t want to be the rich girl, maybe she should stop wearing a different dress from Bendel’s every time I saw her! She was shocked by my anger. Her deer’s eyes bulged at me. She poured her wine into the sink and then upended the bottle over it. For my information , she hadn’t bought a new dress since her senior year at Brown, but this clearly didn’t matter to me, I clearly had my own idea about her, and I’d dragged my wrong idea into what was supposed to have been a perfect night. Everything was ruined. Everything . And so on. She finally stormed out of the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom.

Sitting by myself, listening to the sound of her showering, I had the opportunity to replay our fight in my head, and it seemed to me that everything out of my mouth had been the words of a jerk . I was gripped by my old sense of ineluctable male wrongness. My only hope of cleansing was to dissolve my self in Anabel’s. It seemed that black and white to me. Only she could save me from male error. By the time she came out of the bathroom, wearing lovely white flannel pajamas with pale-blue piping, I was shivering and crying.