Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I could hear Anabel showering in the bathroom. There being nowhere to sit in the living room, I went and sat down on her bed. Outside, the sky seemed to have taken on the black solidity of a hillside you could walk right up. All the books on the nightstand were self-help and spirituality, titles Anabel would have sneered at just a few years earlier. I felt very sorry for her.

She came out of the bathroom naked, her hair in a towel. “The shower’s nice,” she said. “You should take one, too.”

“I’ll wait until I get back tonight.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to lock you in the bathroom.” She moved close to me, her pubic hair commanding my field of vision. “If you like me,” she said, “you’ll take a shower.”

I didn’t like her, not anymore, but I still hadn’t found a way to say so. “Do you have any form of contraception that you haven’t destroyed with a pocket knife?”

“First take a shower, and then I’ll tell you if I do.”

There was a blast of thunder directly over the house.

“You said you had something to show me,” I said. “That’s the only reason I came inside.”

“But now it’s raining and there’s lightning.”

“Being struck by lightning doesn’t sound too bad to me right now.”

“It’s your choice,” she said. “Take a shower or be struck by lightning.”

A middle was being excluded, and the middle was reality. I took a shower, listening to the thunder, and put my clothes back on. When I returned to the bedroom, Anabel was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her old Japanese silk robe, which she’d disarranged with poignantly transparent seductive intent, a breast hanging halfway out. Beside her was a shoe box.

“Look who I found,” she said.

She opened the box and took out Leonard. It was five or six years since I’d last seen him. Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.

“Come say hi to him,” Anabel said, smiling at me with love.

“Hello.”

She picked up the bull and looked into his face. “Do you want to say hello to Tom?”

I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.

Anabel frowned at Leonard with coy reproach. “Why aren’t you saying hello?” She looked up at me. “Why isn’t he talking?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leonard, say something.”

“He doesn’t talk anymore.”

“He must be angry that you’re not with us anymore. I think he wants you to come home.” She cuddled the bull. “I wish you’d say something to me.”

Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don’t think I’d ever hated her more than I did for exposing herself to the shame of my refusing to speak in Leonard’s voice.

“I’m seeing your father tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s not Leonard’s voice,” she said, frightened.

“No. It’s my voice. Put that thing away.”

She set the toy aside. Then she picked it up again. Then she set it down again. Her fear and indecision were terrible to see. Or maybe it was my own power that was terrible.

“I don’t want to know about it,” she said. “Can you please just spare me?”

I’d intended to spare her, but I hated her too much now. “He’s bringing me a check,” I said.

She moaned and fell over as if I’d hit her. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“A large check,” I said.

“Shut up! For God’s sake! I try to be nice to you and you spit in my face!”

“He’s giving me money to start a magazine.”

She sat up again, her eyes blazing now. “You’re a jerk ,” she said. “That’s what you are. A jerk! You always were and you always will be!”

I’d thought that nothing could be worse than the sight of her being hurt and shamed by me. But in fact I hated her even more for hating me.

“Maybe twelve years is enough years of being made to feel that way,” I said.

“It’s not what you feel, it’s what you are . You’re a jerk, Tom. You’re a fucking asshole journalistic jerk. You ruined my life and now you’re spitting on me, you’re spitting on me.”

“You’re the one who did the spitting, as you may recall.”

To her credit, her honesty and morality were still functioning. She said, more quietly, “You’re right. I was young and he ruined our wedding party, but you’re right, I did literally spit on someone.” She shook her head. “And now you’re making me pay for it. Both of you. Now the men are doing the spitting, because I was weak. I was always weak. I’m weak now. I failed. But the person I spat on had everything , while you’re spitting on somebody when she’s down. There’s a difference there.”

“One obvious difference being that I’m not actually spitting,” I said coldly.

“I’m so far down, Tom. How can you do this to me?”

“I keep looking for a way to make you never call me again. I keep thinking I’ve found it, but then, no, the fucking phone rings.”

“Well, you finally may have found it. Taking his money may do it for you. I’m thinking you’ll never hear from me again. There was still one thing in my life that you hadn’t perverted or stolen or destroyed. Now there’s nothing. I’m totally alone with nothing. Job well done.”

“I hate you,” I said. “I hate you even more than I love you. And that’s saying something.”

After a moment, her face turned red and she began to cry piteously, like a little girl, and it didn’t matter that I hated her, I couldn’t stand to see her in such pain. I sat down on the bed and held her. The rain had gone away, leaving behind a blue-gray curtain of cloud that looked almost wintry. I thought of winter as I held her, grew bored with holding her. The winter of no Anabel in my life.

As if sensing it, she began to kiss me. We’d always relied on pain to heighten the pleasure that followed it, and it seemed to me we’d reached the limit of the psychic pain we could inflict. When she lay back and opened her robe, I looked at her breasts and hated their beauty so intensely that I squeezed a nipple and twisted it hard.

She screamed and hit me in the face. I was murderously aroused and hardly felt it. She hit me again, on the ear, and glared at me. “Are you going to hit me back?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.”

“No, I don’t want that.”

I’d never spoken so violently to her. We’d reached the end of the road of our feminist marriage. “You wrecked the condoms,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Give me a baby. Leave me with something.”

“No way.”

“I think it could happen tonight. I have a sense about these things.”

“I think I’d sooner kill myself than sign on for that.”

“You hate me.”

“I hate you.”

She was still in love with me. I could see it in her eyes, the love and the pure inconsolable disappointment of a child. I had all the power, and so she did the only thing still available to her to stab me in the heart, which was to roll over submissively and raise the skirt of her robe and say, “All right, then. Do it.”

I did it, and not once but three times before I escaped from the house the next morning. After each assault, she went straight to the bathroom. My state of mind was that of the crack addict crawling on the floor, looking for crumbs. I wasn’t raping Anabel, but I might as well have been. Pleasure was low on the list of what either of us was after. I was after what she’d been after with her film, a final and complete exhaustion of the subject of the body. What she was after, it seemed to me, was the sealing of her moral victimhood.