Jonathan Franzen - Purity

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 her 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.”