Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“And your magazine?”

“How am I going to start a magazine with no money and no experience?”

She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook.

“This is what I have,” she said, pointing to a figure of some $46,000 in the savings ledger. I watched her write me a check for $23,000 in her elegant artist’s hand. “Do you want to be with me and be ambitious?” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “Or do you want to go to Missouri with all the other hacks?”

I didn’t point out that checkbook gestures aren’t so meaningful coming from a billionaire’s daughter. Doubting her vow not to accept more money from her father was as grievous a wrong as doubting her seriousness as an artist. She’d already trained me never to do it. She was rabid on the subject.

“I can’t take your money,” I said.

“It’s our money,” she said, “and this is the last of it. Everything I have is yours. Use it well, Tom. You can go to school with it if you want to. If you’re going to break my heart, this is the time to do it. Not from Missouri a year from now. Take the money, go home, go to journalism school. Just don’t pretend you’re in this with me.”

She went and locked herself in her bedroom. I don’t know how many times I had to promise I wasn’t leaving her before she let me in. When she finally did, I tore up the check—“Don’t be a fool, that’s good money!” Leonard cried from the headboard — and seized her body with a new sense of possession, as if becoming more hers had made her more mine.

My mother was furious about my decision. She saw me starting down the path of indigence my sisters were treading, the path of my father’s stupid idealism, and it did me no good to cite the many famous journalists who hadn’t gone to grad school. She was even more upset, a month later, when I told her I was coming to Denver only for a week that summer. I’d spent all of eight days with her since her hospitalization, and I felt I owed her (and Cynthia) a month at home, but Anabel had been counting on our starting a life together the minute I graduated. She took my proposal of a month apart as a catastrophic betrayal of everything we’d planned together. When I suggested that she join me in Denver, she stared at me as if I, not she, were the insane one. Why I didn’t resolve the crisis by breaking up with her is hard to fathom. My brain was apparently already so wired into hers that even though I knew she was being unreasonable and heartless, I didn’t care. All drugs are an escape from the self, and throwing myself away for Anabel, doing something obviously wrong to make her feel better, and then reaping the ecstasy of her renewed enthusiasm for me, was my drug. My mother cried when I told her my travel plans, but only Anabel’s tears could change my mind.

Anger with the two of us was broadcast in my mother’s swollen face at the graduation party. There was no safe way to explain to my friends and their normal-looking parents that she didn’t always look like this. Everyone was sweating mightily by the time Anabel arrived, wearing a drop-dead sky-blue cocktail dress and accompanied by Nola. They went straight to the wine, and it was a while before I could pry my mother away from Oswald’s parents and lead her to the corner where Anabel was sitting in Nola’s little cloud of disaffection. I made the introduction, and Anabel, stiff with shyness, rose and took my mother’s hand.

“Mrs. Aberant,” she bravely said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

My poor disfigured pants-suited mother, confronting the vision of that sky-blue cocktail dress: Anabel could never forgive her for what she did, but eventually I could. Something resembling a condescending smile appeared on her bloated face. She released Anabel’s hand and looked down at Nola, who was dressed in punky black. “And you are…?”

“The depressive friend,” Nola said. “Pay me no mind.”

Anabel had wanted to make a good impression on my mother; she just needed a modicum of coaxing out of her shyness. None was forthcoming. My mother turned away and told me she wanted to change her clothes before dinner.

“You need to talk to Anabel,” I said.

“Maybe another time.”

“ Mom . Please.”

Anabel had sat down again, her eyes wide with injured disbelief.

“I’m sorry I’m not at my best,” my mother said.

“She came all the way over here to meet you. You can’t just walk away.”

I was appealing to her sense of propriety, but she was too sweaty and miserable to heed it. I gestured to Anabel to join us, but she ignored me. I followed my mother out into the hallway.

“Just tell me how to get back to my room,” she said. “You stay at your nice party. I’m so happy to have met Mr. and Mrs. Hackett. They’re fine, interesting, responsible people.”

“Anabel is extremely important to me,” I said, trembling.

“Yes, I can see she’s quite pretty. But so much older than you.”

“She’s two years older.”

“She looks so much older, sweetie.”

Half blind with hatred and shame, I led my mother outside and over to her room. By the time I got back to the party, Anabel and Nola were gone — a relief, since I was hardly in a mood to defend my mother. At dinner with the Hacketts, my mother’s face was an unreferred-to elephantine presence, and I refused to say a word to her directly. Afterward, in the humid shade of the Locust Walk, I informed her that I couldn’t spend the evening with her, because Anabel’s thesis project was being screened at Tyler at nine thirty. I’d dreaded telling her this, but now I was glad to.

“I’m sorry your mother is such an embarrassment,” she said. “This dumb condition of mine is ruining everything.”

“Mom, you’re not embarrassing me. I just wish you could have talked to Anabel.”

“I can’t stand having you angry at me. It’s the worst thing in the world for me. Do you want me to come and see her movie with you?”

“No.”

“If she means so much to you that you won’t even speak to me at dinner, maybe I should go.”

“No.”

“Why not? Is her movie immoral? You know I can’t stand nudity or gutter language.”

“No,” I said, “it’s just not going to make sense to you. It’s about the visual properties of film as a purely expressive medium.”

“I love a good movie.”

Both of us must have known she’d loathe Anabel’s work, but I managed to persuade myself to give her a second chance. “Just promise you’ll be nice to her,” I said. “She’s worked all year on this, and artists are sensitive. You have to be really, really nice.”

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.