Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I tasted my first $3,000 wine at Le Bec-Fin. David had handed Anabel the wine list, and she was reading it when the sommelier came by. “Give her a minute while she finds your cheapest bottle,” David said to the sommelier. “In the meantime, Tom and I will have the ’45 Margaux.”

When I sought Anabel’s approval for this, she widened her eyes at me unpleasantly. “Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“It’s a little game she and I play,” David explained. He was a tall, trim, vigorous man with nearly white hair, a distinguished male version of his daughter, much better-looking than your average billionaire. “But here’s an interesting fact for your future reference. At a place like this, the very cheapest bottle on the list is often sensational. Not sure why that is. It’s the mark of a great restaurant, though.”

“I’m not looking for something sensational,” Anabel said. “I’m looking for something I won’t gag on the price of.”

“Nice for you that you’ll probably get both,” David said. He turned to me. “Ordinarily, I’d order that bottle myself. But then she and I couldn’t play our little game. You see what she makes me do?”

“Funny how women are always to blame for what men do to them,” Anabel remarked.

“Has she told you how she broke her teeth?”

“She has.”

“But did she tell you the best part? She got back on the horse. Blood all over her face, her mouth full of broken tooth, and she gets right back on the horse. And she gives that bridle a yank like she’s going to rip its head off. She almost broke its neck. That’s my Anabel.”

“Dad, shut up, please.”

“Honey, I’m speaking well of you to your boyfriend.”

“Then don’t omit the part about my never getting on a horse again. I still feel bad about what I did to that poor beast.”

Given Anabel’s hatred of David, I was surprised by their intimate way together. It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other — you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh. When David mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d remarried, Anabel’s response was “To one person, or several?”

David laughed. “One is all I can afford.”

“You’ll need at least three in case you have to kill a couple more.”

“I married a dipsomaniac,” David explained to me.

“You created an alcoholic,” Anabel said.

“Somehow men are always to blame for what women do to them.”

“Somehow it’s always true. Who’s the lucky lady?”

“Her name’s Fiona. You’ll want to meet her.”

“I won’t want to meet her. I’ll just want to sign over my birthright to her. Just show me the dotted line.”

“Not going to happen,” David said. “Fiona signed what they call a prenuptial agreement. You’re not going to be rid of your birthright that easily.”

“Watch me,” Anabel said.

“You must talk her out of this madness, Tom.”

I was having trouble fitting into their banter. I didn’t want David to think I was too earnest or subservient to Anabel, but I couldn’t be too at ease with him without appearing disloyal to her. “That’s not in my job description,” I said carefully.

“But you do agree it’s madness?”

My eyes met Anabel’s. “No, I don’t,” I said.

“Give it time. You will.”

“No, he won’t,” Anabel said, looking into my eyes. “Tom’s not you. Tom is clean.”

“Ah, yes, the blood on my hands.” David held his hands up for inspection. “Funny, I’m not seeing it tonight.”

“Look more closely,” Anabel said. “I can smell it.”

David seemed disappointed in me when he learned that I didn’t eat meat, and outright annoyed when Anabel ordered nothing but a plate of vegetables, but his foie gras and his veal chop restored his spirits. It may only have been a form of billionaire narcissism, but he demonstrated cover-to-cover familiarity with The New Yorker , spoke knowledgeably of Altman and Truffaut, offered to get us tickets to The Elephant Man in New York, and seemed genuinely interested in my opinions about Bellow. It occurred to me that something tragic had happened in the Laird family — that Anabel and her father ought to have been the best of friends. Was she his bitter enemy, and her brothers three disasters, not because he was a monster but because he was too fabulous? Anabel had never claimed that he wasn’t likable, only that he seduced people with his likability. He told me stories of bad business moves he’d made — the selling of a Brazilian sugar mill a year before it became wildly profitable, his torpedoing of a partnership with Monsanto because he thought he knew more about plant genetics than Monsanto’s head of R&D did — and made fun of his own arrogance. When the conversation turned to my career plans and he offered, first, to get me a job at the Washington Post (“Ben Bradlee’s an old friend of mine”) and then, after I’d declined that offer, to fund the start-up of my contrarian magazine, I had the feeling that he was daring me to be fabulous like him.

Anabel thought otherwise. “He just wants to buy you,” she said on our train ride home. “It’s always the same. I let my guard down a tiny bit, and I loathe myself afterward. He wants to get his fingers into everything I have, the same way McCaskill’s got its fingers into everything the world eats. He won’t rest till he has everything. It’s not enough to be the world’s leading supplier of turkey meat, he has to have Truffaut and Bellow. You flatter his intellectual vanity. He thinks if he can have you, he’ll get me , and then he’ll have everything.”

“Did you hear me saying yes to him?”

“No, but you liked him. If you think he’s going to leave you alone now, think again.”

She was right. Not long after our dinner, I received, by express mail, a package containing four hardcover first editions ( Augie March , H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell), two tickets to The Elephant Man , and a letter from David in which he’d recorded his thoughts on rereading Augie March . He also mentioned that he’d spoken on the phone to Ben Bradlee about me, and he invited me and Anabel to New York for a weekend of theater the following month. When Anabel had finished tearing up the tickets, she pointed out the initials in the lower corner of the letter’s second page. “Don’t flatter yourself too much,” she said. “He dictated it.”

“So what? I can’t believe he went and reread Augie March for me.”

“Oh I can.”

“You’re not tearing up the books, though.”

“No, those you can keep if you can get the blood off them. But if you ever take anything more than token gifts from him, you will destroy me. And I mean destroy me.”

He continued to call me now and then, and I considered not telling Anabel about it, but I was already peeing in the sink and didn’t want to keep more secrets from her. Instead, I reported on his fabulous doings and then concurred in her condemnation of them. But I secretly liked him, secretly loved the loving way he spoke of Anabel, and she — he’d been right about this — secretly enjoyed having fresh doings to condemn.

My manifesto for The Complicater wasn’t going well. It was long on contrarian rhetoric and short on facts. If I really intended to found a new magazine, I ought to have been maintaining my friendships from the DP and cultivating relationships with local freelancers. The Complicater was an obvious nonstarter unless Anabel relented and let David fund it, and so I passed my days in the vague hope that she would relent. Oswald, who’d gone home to Lincoln to pay down his college debt, sent me droll letters to which I couldn’t summon the energy to respond. I would make it my one task for the afternoon to write him a letter, and I wouldn’t manage to write one sentence until five minutes before Anabel came home from the library. I didn’t have anything to report to anybody except that I was besotted with her.