Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I loved the idea, and she loved me for loving it. One hot July afternoon, she let me be the one to make the first black mark on her body, a grid encompassing two of her left toes, whose surface area it had taken her half a day to determine accurately; she’d left ink dots that I connected. “Now you have to leave me alone with it,” she said.

“I want to know every inch of you myself.”

“I’ll always come back to you,” she said gravely. “In ten years I’ll be all yours.”

I kissed the toes and left her alone with them. What was ten years?

If she could have worked faster, and if artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin hadn’t risen to prominence, and if video art hadn’t suddenly all but extirpated experimental film, and if she hadn’t been paralyzed by jealousy of my smaller but completable journalism projects, it’s conceivable that her film would have come to something. But a year went by and she was still on her left ankle. I now see that she must have quickly become bored with the surface of her body — there’s a reason we go through life without paying much attention to it — but to her it felt as if the world were out to thwart her.

Naturally, I bore the brunt of this. A wrong word at the breakfast table or a distracting smell from something I was cooking (“Smell is hell,” she liked to say) could ruin a workday. Even a capsule newspaper review of a “competitor” could shut her down for a week. With her tacit permission, I took to vetting The New Yorker and the arts section of the Times and tearing out potentially upsetting items before she could read them. I also answered our phone, paid our bills, and did our taxes. When we moved into a larger space, I soundproofed the windows of her project room, and when, six months later, she decided that Philadelphia was depressing her and retarding my career, I went to New York and found us our apartment in East Harlem. There, too, I soundproofed her room. And none of this resentfully, all of it true-believingly, because she was the hedgehog and I was the fox. But it was more than that: as with the toilet seat, I was making amends for a structural unfairness. It hurt her that I had practical skills, and because it hurt her it hurt me, too.

My greatest capacity was for earning money. I was so hungry for advancement and had so much time on my hands (seven days a week, Anabel closeted herself with her 16 mm Beaulieu) that I broke in rather easily at Philadelphia magazine. I could have become a news editor there, or later at the Voice , but I didn’t want an office job, because some mornings, before closeting herself, Anabel needed to spend several hours discussing an incorrect look I’d given her or a disturbing news item that had slipped past my censoring, and I had to be available for that. So I worked from home and became a skilled reporter. Since I wasn’t competing with Anabel creatively, she encouraged me to be ambitious and gave me good notes on everything I wrote. In return, I covered our rent and utilities and food. For film stock and processing, she burned through her remaining savings and then started selling off the jewelry she’d been given by her father and inherited from her mother. I was shocked to learn how much the jewelry was worth, and a tiny bit resentful, but it wasn’t as if I’d entered our marriage with any jewelry of my own.

Need I mention that our sex life went straight downhill? Our problem wasn’t typical marital boredom. It was partly that she spent all day deeply contemplating her body and just wanted to read a book or watch TV in her free time, but mostly that our souls were merged. It’s hard to feel as if you are someone and at the same time want her. By the mid-eighties, our only halfway decent sex was of the homecoming variety, after one of my reporting trips or my annual summer visit to Denver; for a few hours, we were unlike enough to reconnect. In the years after that, when she was starving herself and exercising three hours a day, she simply stopped having her periods. Then there was never a good time of month for her, then we put Leonard in a shoe box and didn’t take him out again, then all we did was talk and talk, like a two-person emotional bureaucracy. The smallest of questions (“Why did you wait ten minutes to tell me your good news instead of telling me immediately?”) triggered a full formal investigation, with every response filed in triplicate and the review period extended and re-extended while the archives were searched.

And we were isolated. To get dressed up and mingle with other sexual beings might have helpfully separated us. But Anabel became ever shyer and less sure of herself, ever more ashamed to speak of a project that she and I believed was genius but no one else could see; and inevitably, since our only friends were my friends, she felt slighted by their greater interest in me. I started meeting them alone for lunch or early drinks. I told absolutely no one about my home life. It would have been a betrayal of Anabel, and I was ashamed of the strangeness of my marriage and, worse, of how I sounded when I answered a friend’s polite question about her and her work. I sounded like a person making excuses for her, a person who couldn’t see that his spouse wasn’t actually the genius he was convinced she was. I was still convinced, but, oddly, I didn’t sound convincing.

Even David, who hadn’t stopped calling me, seemed to have lost interest in Anabel. His three sons were continuing to enact every known cliché of rich-kid misbehavior, and his daughter had spat in his face. I was his most plausible remaining object of paternal pride. He never failed to offer me funding, connections, a good job at McCaskill, sometimes all three. Under his leadership, McCaskill was expanding its Asian operations, trading in Peruvian fish meal and German flaxseed oil, diversifying into financial services and fertilizer, widening the river of meat, pouring beef and eggs into the gullet of McDonald’s and turkey into the maw of Denny’s. By my calculation, David’s stake in the company was approaching three billion dollars.

And then suddenly I was in my thirties. I had dozens of professional friends but nobody to talk to about Anabel except our building’s super, Ruben, who doubled as the manager of an underground lottery that was operated by our building’s owner and pegged to the Dominican Lotería Nacional. The building was kept safe by the constant presence of Ruben and his runners — a toothless alcoholic nicknamed Low Boy, a couple of retired hookers. Ruben was courtly with Anabel and respectful of the man who’d married her; he called me Lucky. Anabel’s other fan was her new friend, Suzanne, whom she’d met at an improv class that I’d implored her to take after she’d been stymied with her project for an entire fall. She’d finally filmed her way to the top of her left leg and couldn’t bring herself to inscribe a “cut” near her genitals. Her food intake had dwindled to coffee with soy milk in the morning and a small dinner in the evening. During the day she was often disabled by “bloatation” and stomach cramps, but she became frantic if anything (i.e., too many hours of discussion with me) impeded her 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. exercise regime, which involved workout tapes by Jane Fonda, runs in Central Park, and a secondhand rowing machine that now dominated her work space.

She had as much body fat as a Shaker chair, her periods were a thing of the past, and whole seasons came and went in which the closest I came to fucking her was Ruben’s imagination, but this didn’t stop us from discussing a potential baby. She wanted to have a family with me, but first she had to finish her project, reclaim her body, and achieve a success to match or exceed my own; otherwise she’d be stuck at home with diapers while I had my splendid male career. I didn’t see how we could wait for her to finish — she hadn’t even looked at much of her hundred hours of raw footage, let alone begun to edit it, and at the rate she was proceeding she’d still be filming at seventy — but I couldn’t point this out without stoking her panic. All I could do was try to calm her, so that she could get on with the contemplation and filming of her genitals.