Jonathan Franzen - Purity

She opened it with a puzzled frown. “What is this?”

“The first half of a novella. I wanted to surprise you.”

She took out the manuscript, read some of the first page, and then simply stared at it without reading; and I saw that I’d made a terrible mistake.

“You’re writing fiction,” she said dully.

“I want to be with you in everything,” I said. “I don’t want to be a journalist, I want to be with you. Partners—”

I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.

“I think I need to be alone now,” she said.

“The novella is a tribute to you. To the two of us.”

She stood up and headed toward the bedroom. “I really just need to be alone right now.”

I heard her close the bedroom door behind her. Our marriage, four hours old, couldn’t have been going worse, and I felt entirely to blame. I hated my novella for having done this to her. And yet I’d been happy working on it, had been markedly less depressed in the six weeks since I’d abandoned her plan for me, The Complicater . I sat for an hour at the kitchen table, in a deepening cold fog of depression, and waited to see if Anabel might come out of the bedroom. She didn’t. Instead I began to hear the sharp gasps of her unsuccessfully resisting tears. Full of pity for her, I went into the bedroom and found it dark. She was crumpled up on the bare floor by the windows.

“What have I done?” I cried.

Her answer came out slowly, in fragments punctuated by my apologies and her tears: I’d lied to her. I’d kept secrets from her. Both of our wedding presents were about me . I’d broken my promises to her. I’d promised that she was the artist and I was the critic. I’d promised that I wouldn’t steal her story, but she could tell from one paragraph that I’d stolen it. I’d promised that we wouldn’t compete, and I was competing with her. I’d deceived her and ruined our wedding day …

Each reproach landed like acid on my brain. I’d heard it said that there is no pain worse than mental torture, and now I believed it. Even the worst of our premarital scenes had been nothing like this; it had always been fundamentally OK me dealing with temperamental Anabel. Now I was experiencing her psychic pain directly as my own. The heaven of soul-merging was a hell. Clutching my head, I ran away from her and threw myself on the living-room sofa and lay there for some hours, experiencing mental torture, while Anabel did the same in the bedroom. I kept thinking, this is our wedding night, this is our wedding night.

It must have been two in the morning before I worked up enough hatred of my novella to stand up and start burning it, page by page, on the kitchen stove. Anabel eventually smelled the smoke and came staggering in, very pale, and watched me in silence until the last page was burned and I burst into tears.

She was immediately all over me, full of comfort, desperate with love. How I craved that love! How we both craved it! Better than the best drug after the agony of withdrawal from it: the smell of her teary face, the soft avidity of her mouth, the warm solidity of her body, the naked fact of her. It was almost as if we’d deliberately manufactured unspeakable pain to achieve this level of wedding-night bliss.

Without being aware of it, however, I’d made a second terrible mistake, which came to light at our party, two nights later. The party was already uncomfortably weighted against the distaff, because Nola had failed to show up (she’d moved to New York, in part to get over her feelings for Anabel) and one of Anabel’s Brown friends had bailed at the last minute, while Cynthia and five of my Penn friends and three of my Denver friends had come from near and far. But Oswald had brought good mix tapes and seemed to be developing a brother’s-best-friend thing for Cynthia, which was fun to watch happening, and Anabel had drunk enough to be enjoying my other friends’ stories about me, rather than feeling threatened by them, and I was proud of how beautiful she looked in her strapless party dress.

I was clearing the floor for dancing when our buzzer rang. Anabel, hoping it was Nola, ran to the intercom in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear her over the party noise, but she came back pale with fury. She beckoned me into the bedroom with a jerk of her head and shut the door behind us.

“How could you?” she said.

“What?”

“It’s my father .”

“Oh no.”

“The only way he could have known is if you told him. You!” Her face twisted up. “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”

It was true: David, in a recent phone call, had coaxed out of me the date of our party, so that he could send us, he said, a very small wedding present. I’d emphasized that the party was for friends, not family.

“I specifically told him he wasn’t invited,” I said.

“My God, Tom, how could you be so stupid? Haven’t you learned anything about him?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But can we just try to make the best of it?”

“No! The party is over. I’m pulling the plug. This is my worst nightmare.”

“Did you let him in?”

“I had to! But I’m not leaving this room until he’s gone.”

“Let me deal with it.”

“Oh right, good luck with that.”

Out in the living room, David had set down a load of small presents and a jeroboam of Mumm and was jovially introducing himself to our guests. His face lit up further at the sight of me. “There he is! The groom! Congratulations! You’re looking very dashing, Tom, as well you should.” He gave me a crushing handshake. “I meant to be here two hours ago, we had a problem with the plane. Where’s my little girl?”

I tried to answer coldly, but my tone was simply factual. “She doesn’t want you here.”

“Doesn’t want her only parent at her wedding party?” David looked around the room, appealing to our silent guests. The stereo was playing “Remote Control.” “She’s my favorite person in the world. How could I miss her wedding party?”

“I really think it’s better if you go.”

David stepped around me and rapped on the bedroom door. “Anabel, honey? Come out and join us before the wine gets warm.”

To my surprise, the door opened immediately. Anabel drew her head back and spat in David’s face. The door slammed shut again.

Everybody saw it, nobody said a word. “Remote Control” continued to play while David wiped spit from his eyes. When he lowered his hand, he looked a decade older. He smiled at me weakly. “Enjoy the years,” he said, “until she does the same to you.”

* * *

Her long months of preliminary reading done, Anabel went to work on her ambitious project. It was a film about the body. She couldn’t get over how strange it is that a person can live for fifty or seventy or ninety years and die without having made the most basic acquaintance with the body that is the sum of her existence: that there are so many places on the body — certainly places on the head and back that she can’t directly see, but even places on her arms and legs and torso — to which, in all those years, she won’t have paid as much attention as a butcher pays to cuts of beef.

The surface area of her own body was about sixteen thousand square centimeters, and her plan was to inscribe a grid of 32-square-centimeter “cuts” on it with a fine-tipped black marker. Except on her feet and face and fingers, these “cuts” would be simple 57 × 57 millimeter squares. All five hundred of them would appear in her film. She intended to take a full week to acquaint herself with each one — to neither slight nor privilege any one 32-cm2 part of her body; to be able to say, when she died, that she’d truly known all that could be seen of it — and she’d assigned herself the daunting task of doing something fresh and compelling with every cut. The differences might be purely filmic, but more often they’d involve images relating to the thoughts and memories that a particular cut inspired. In this respect, the project was closer to performance art than to film. If she could stick to her schedule, the performance would last ten years, the creative challenge steadily increasing. She didn’t know how long the final film would be, but she was aiming for twenty-nine and a half hours, an hour for each day of the lunar month. Her larger ambition was to reclaim possession of her body, cut by cut, from the world of men and meat. After ten years, she’d own herself entirely.