Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Having spent the previous ten months shaping my personality to fit with hers, sanding away the most prominent points of friction, I was mostly blissful in her presence that fall. We were developing our routines, our shared opinions, our private vocabulary, our store of phrases that had been funny on first utterance and seemed scarcely less funny on the hundredth, and every word and every belonging of hers was colored by the sex I’d had with her and no one else. When I was alone in the apartment, though, I felt depressed. Anabel had limitless money but intended never to take any of it, I was mad for her body but could have it only three days a month, I liked her dad but had to pretend I didn’t, her dad had fabulous connections but I wasn’t allowed to use them, I had a supposedly ambitious project but no chance of making it happen, and whenever my mother dared to question what I was doing — I continued to call her every Sunday night — I took it as a criticism of Anabel and angrily changed the subject.

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date. Anabel was so convincing that I believed in our plan. My only fear was that she’d realize I wasn’t as interesting as she was and leave me. She was the amazing thing that had happened to me, and I intended to support her and defend her from a world that didn’t understand her, and so, on the anniversary of Lucy’s Halloween party, I withdrew the last $350 from my old savings account and bought a ring with a pitiful little phonograph-stylus diamond. By the time Anabel came home from the library, I’d tied the ring to Leonard’s neck with a white ribbon and left him standing in the center of our bed.

“Leonard and I have something for you,” I said.

“Aha, you’ve been out,” she said. “I thought I smelled city on you.”

I led her into the bedroom.

“Leonard, what do you have for me?” She picked him up and saw the ring. “Oh, Tom.”

“I am not, of course, a beast of burden,” Leonard said. “I am an ornament of society, not a common toiler. But when he requested that I be your ring bearer, I could hardly refuse.”

“Oh, Tom.” She set Leonard on the nightstand and put her arms around my neck and looked into my eyes. Her own were lustrous with tears and ardor.

“It’s our first anniversary,” I said.

“Oh, my darling. I knew you’d remember, but I also wasn’t sure you would.”

“Will you marry me?”

“A thousand times!”

We tumbled onto the bed. It wasn’t the right time of month, but she said it didn’t matter. I thought that maybe now that we were going to be married she might get past her problem, and I think she thought so too, but it wasn’t to be. She said she was happy anyway. She lay on her back with our little bull between her breasts and untied the ribbon.

“I’m sorry the diamond is so small,” I said.

“It’s perfect,” she said, putting the ring on. “You picked it out for me, and so it’s perfect.”

“I can’t believe I get to be married to you.”

“No, I’m the lucky one. I know I’m not an easy person.”

“I love your difficulty.”

“Oh, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect!” She kissed me all over my face, and we made love again. The ring on her finger had magical powers. I was fucking my betrothed , there was a new dimension to the joy of it, an immeasurably deeper chasm into which to throw my self, and no end to the falling. Even when I finished, I kept falling. Anabel cried softly — with pure happiness, she said. What I now see is a pair of kids who’d been snorting the powder for a year, losing their connections to reality one by one and becoming (at least in my case) depressed about it. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein? But in the moment all I was aware of was the rush the ring brought. While it lasted, I gathered my courage and asked Anabel to come with me to Denver for Christmas, announce our engagement, and give my mother another chance. To my delight, Anabel not only didn’t resist but smothered me with kisses, saying she’d do anything for me now, anything, anything.

In her own way, she tried. She was prepared to like my mother if my mother would appreciate her. She even bought her own separate Christmas presents for her — a volume of Simone de Beauvoir, some fruit-scented soaps, a lovely old brass pepper mill — and when we got to Denver she was good about offering to help my mother in the kitchen. But my mother, still traumatized by “A River of Meat,” declined the offers. She seemed determined to play the role of martyred working mom — she’d gone back to her job at the pharmacy, Dick Atkinson having married someone else — to Anabel’s indolent rich girl. She also, though I’d been explaining it to her for months, refused to grasp that Anabel had become a vegan and I a vegetarian. For our first dinner, I caught her making baked whitefish for me and macaroni and cheese for Anabel.

“No flesh for me, no animal products for Anabel,” I reminded her.

She was still somewhat moonfaced, but we were getting used to it. “It’s nice fish,” she said, “not meat.”

“It’s dead animal. And cheese is an animal product.”

“Then what is ‘vegan’? Does she eat bread ?”

“The macaroni is fine, the problem is the cheese part.”

“So, she can just eat the macaroni. I’ll cut away the crust.”

Fortunately my sister Cynthia was there, too. After I’d introduced her to Anabel, she’d pulled me aside and whispered, “Tom, she’s beautiful , she’s wonderful .” Cynthia took up the defense of our dietary restrictions, and when I announced our engagement, at the dinner table, she ran to the kitchen for a bottle of pink champagne that my mother had bought in expectation of an Arne Holcombe victory. My mother herself simply stared at her plate and said, “You’re very young to be doing this.”

Anabel evenly asked her how old she’d been when she got married.

“I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.”

“We’re not you,” Anabel said.

“That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.”

“Mom, be happy,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Anabel’s fantastic, this is great news.”

“You don’t need my blessing,” my mother said. “All I can give you is my opinion.”

“Noted,” Anabel said.

Somehow we got through the holiday on civil terms. I slept in the basement so that Anabel could have her own bedroom. We assented to this maintenance of propriety to keep the peace, but every night, in the basement, as if to show my mother who was boss, Anabel gave me a blow job. This was probably the all-time peak of her carnality with me, the only time I remember her getting down on her knees. My mother was less than fifteen feet away from us, as the gamma ray flies; we could hear her footsteps, the toilet flushing, even the sounds of her bowel. After Cynthia left, Oswald came over from Nebraska for two nights, and my mother was so pointedly affectionate to him that Anabel remarked to me, “She’d rather you were marrying Oswald.”

On our last day, alone with my mother, we made our favorite stir-fry for dinner, and she began to drone on about money. She could understand our living on Anabel’s assets and doing something socially beneficial, she said, and she could understand our finding responsible jobs and supporting ourselves, but she could not understand our living in voluntary poverty and pursuing unrealistic dreams.

“We still have some savings,” I said. “If we run out, we’ll get jobs.”