Jonathan Franzen - Purity

For our eighth anniversary, after my first sale of an article to Esquire , I prevailed on Anabel to come to Italy with me. We’d never had a honeymoon, and I thought that Europe might revive us. The trip was touristically successful — we had the Gothic sculpture of Tuscany and the ancient ruins of Sicily to ourselves — but Anabel got hunger headaches every afternoon, and every evening I had to accompany her on three-hour power walks in the dark, our abdomens cramping while we scouted for a restaurant filled with locals, because this was our honeymoon and she needed her one meal of the day to be a great one.

We returned to New York determined to make our own Sicilian-style spaghetti with fried eggplant and tomatoes, a dish so delicious that we wanted to eat it twice a week. Which we did, for several months. And here was the thing: I didn’t get sick of it slowly. I got sick of it suddenly, radically, and permanently while eating a plateful whose first bites I’d enjoyed as much as ever. I set down my fork and said we needed a break from fried eggplant and tomatoes. The dish was perfect and delicious and not to blame. I’d made it poison to me by eating too much of it. And so we took a monthlong break from it, but Anabel still loved it, and one very warm evening in June I came home and smelled her cooking it.

My stomach heaved.

“We overdid it,” I said from the kitchen doorway. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

Symbolism was never lost on Anabel. “I’m not spaghetti with eggplant, Tom.”

“I’m literally going to throw up if I stay here.”

She looked frightened. “All right,” she said. “But will you come back later?”

“I will, but something has to change.”

“I agree. I’ve been having thoughts.”

“Good, I’ll come back later.”

I ran down five flights of stairs and over to the 125th Street station with no plan, no friend good enough to go and confide in, just a need to get away. There was, in those years, a ragged band of funk musicians who busked irregularly on the station’s downtown platform. Always a bass player and guitarist, often a drummer with a trap set that looked rescued from a dumpster, sometimes a singer with gold teeth and a soiled sequined dress. Only the singer ever interacted with their audience, the others seemed wrapped up in painful private histories from which the music was a momentary respite. The guitarist knew how to pitch a groove above the rumble of the trains and not let up on it, no matter how he sweated.

That evening they were a trio. Dollar bills had collected in an open guitar case, and I threw in a bill and retreated up the platform with the respect incumbent on the white in Harlem. I’ve since searched, to no avail, for the song they were playing. Maybe it was their own song, never recorded. It had a simple minor-seventh riff that spoke of beauty amid incurable sadness, and in my recollection they played it for twenty minutes, half an hour, long enough for many local and express trains to come and go. Finally there came a perfect storm of drafts from uptown and downtown, a big humid uric wind that swept the platform and then reversed itself, and reversed itself again, so that the dollar bills came levitating out of the guitar case and drifted up and down the platform like leaves in autumn, tumbling and skidding, while the band played on. It was perfectly beautiful and perfectly sad, and everybody on the platform knew it, nobody bent down to touch the money.

I thought of my suffering Anabel, alone in the apartment. I saw my life and walked back up the stairs.

She was standing right inside our front door as if she’d been expecting me. “Will you help me?” she said immediately. “I know that something has to change, and I can’t do it without you. Will you look at what I’m doing and tell me what I’m not seeing?”

“Just don’t make me eat any more fried eggplant,” I said.

“I’m serious, Tom. I need your help.”

I agreed to help her. We went into her workroom, which had long been off limits to me, and she shyly showed me some impressive film clips. An underexposed black-and-white close-up of a “cut” on her left thigh which she’d hand-doctored to create the impression of dark ocean swells. An imperfectly synched but very funny monologue on kneecaps. A disturbing montage of subway-platform footage intercut with her corpse-white big toe tagged with her name, as if to suggest that she’d thought about jumping in front of a train. I was so warmly encouraging that she opened her notebooks for me.

These had always been strictly private, and it was a measure of her desperation that she let me see them, because they weren’t the elegantly lettered and story-boarded pages I’d imagined. They were a diary of torment. Entry after entry began with a daily to-do list and devolved into increasingly illegible self-diagnoses. Then she’d start a fresh page with a neat chart of film cuts, fill in only the first few squares, and then scribble revisions to them, and then cross out the revisions and scribble new ones in the margins, with lines connecting various thoughts and key points triple-underlined; and then she’d draw a big angry X through the entire thing.

“I know it doesn’t look like it,” she said, “but there are good ideas in here. This looks like it’s crossed out, but it’s not really crossed out, I’m still thinking about it. I have to leave it crossed out because otherwise it puts too much pressure on me. What I really need to do is go through all the notebooks”—there were at least forty of them—“and then try to keep everything in my head and make a clear plan. It’s just that there’s so much . I’m not crazy. I just need some way to organize it that doesn’t put too much pressure on me.”

I believed her. She was smart and had good ideas. But, leafing through those notebooks, I could see that she had no chance of finishing her project. She, who for so long had seemed all-powerful to me, wasn’t strong enough. I felt responsible for having failed to intervene sooner, and now, even though I was sick of the marriage to the point of heaving, I couldn’t leave until I’d helped her out of the stuck place I’d allowed her to fall into. The marriage I’d hoped would lead me out of guilt had led me only deeper in.

And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then — stay in the marriage — was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over. After the night of spaghetti and eggplant, as if she’d seen for the first time that I might leave her, she began to speak of a date, eighteen months in the future, when she and I could set about having a little baby girl (she never imagined a boy). The idea was partly to give herself a goal and deadline for advancing her project above her abdomen, but she was also trying, for my sake, to be more realistic; we couldn’t wait forever to get pregnant. I could see that a baby might be just what we needed, a baby might save us, but I could also see that I was likely to be doing the bulk of the child care as long as her project was unfinished. And so, whenever she brought up the baby question, I changed the subject to her project. Whether I wanted her to hurry up and finish it so that we could share the care of a baby, or whether I just wanted her to be OK enough that I could safely divorce her, I honestly can’t remember. But I do know that I could summon up the sickening smell of fried eggplant simply by thinking of it. If I’d heeded my stomach and cut her loose, she might have had time to find someone else to have her baby with.

“Bold proposal,” I’d said in her workroom, the morning after the spaghetti night. “You increase the size of your ‘cuts’ by a factor of ten. I can help you plan the whole thing, I can draw it out for you so it’s not all in your head. And then you do it in two years and you’re done.”