Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“We’ve had no contact of any kind since May.”

“But, see, if she doesn’t send that letter, nobody looks for her. My impression is she’s not exactly Miss Congeniality. It could have been years before anybody noticed she was missing.”

“At the risk of sounding self-important, I think she wrote the letter as a message to me.”

“How’s that work? Why not just write you a letter? Did she write you a letter?”

“No. She’s trying to prove that she’s capable of not having any contact with me.”

“Kind of an extreme way of going about that.”

“Well, she’s extreme. It’s also possible she was trying to protect me, in case someone like you came looking for her.”

“Bingo.” DeMars snapped his fingers. “I was hoping you’d be the one to say that. Because that’s my problem with the letter. Painful divorce, irreconcilable differences, and yet here she is, going out of her way to protect you? I don’t see it. Your typical angry ex, she’d like nothing better than to have people wondering if you’d offed her.”

“That’s not Anabel. Her whole thing is being morally irreproachable.”

“What about you? Any friends in Texas?”

“Not to speak of.”

“You’ll show me your address book and phone bills.”

“I will. But you’d do her a kindness if you stopped looking for her.”

“She’s not the person paying me.”

DeMars wanted more from me — wanted contact information for every person Anabel had ever known — and I worried that I made myself suspicious by refusing to provide it. But there was an air of due diligence, of nose-holding, in his questioning of me. He seemed already to have concluded that Anabel was nutty and a pain in the ass, and that the entire case was nothing more than family nonsense. He called me a couple of times to follow up, and then I never heard from him again; never learned if he’d succeeded in locating her. I hoped for her sake that he hadn’t, because I really did think that her letter to David was a message to me. I may have left the marriage before she did, but she was determined to one-up me and be the really radical leaver. I hated her for the hatred implicit in this, but I still felt guilty about leaving her, and it eased my guilt, a tiny bit, to imagine her succeeding in something, if only in disappearing. I’d escaped the marriage but the moral victory was hers.

I didn’t hear from David again until 2002, a year before he died. This time the intermediary was a lawyer, writing to inform me that I’d been named the sole trustee of an inter vivos trust that David had created in Anabel’s name. I dialed the number on the letter and learned that she was still missing, eleven years after her disappearance, and that David intended her to have one-quarter of his estate anyway, in the hope that she’d eventually show up and claim it.

“I don’t want to be the trustee,” I said.

“Well, now,” the lawyer said with a lovely Kansan twang. “You might want to hear the terms first.”

“Nope.”

“You’re gonna make my life harder if you don’t, so please just hear me out. The trust consists entirely of McCaskill stock. Seventy percent of that is illiquid, the other thirty percent can be offered by way of the company’s ESOP program but doesn’t have to be. Just going by book value, you’re looking at nearly a billion dollars. Five-year average dividend comes in at four point two percent, which the company is nominally committed to increasing. Based on that simple average alone, you’ve got about forty-two million annually in cash dividends. Trustee’s fee shall be one point five percent of that. So we’re talking, what, three-quarters of a million a year for the trustee, probably a million soon enough. Since the stock either can’t be sold or doesn’t have to be, the trustee’s responsibilities are nugatory. Nothing more than ordinary shareholder responsibilities. To put it plainly, Mr. Aberant, you get a million a year for doing nothing.”

My salary then, as the managing editor at Newsday , was less than a quarter of that. I was still making mortgage payments on the Gramercy Park one-bedroom that I’d bought after landing my first editing job at Esquire and had held on to through my years at the Times magazine and at the Times . If I’d still believed that a journal of opinion called The Complicater could change the world — if I hadn’t instead come to feel that covering daily news responsibly was a worthier and more embattled cause — I could have funded a fine quarterly with a million a year. But David had been right: I was trying to out-Anabel Anabel. Trying to stay clean in case she ever happened to find out what I’d been doing since I left her. Trying to prove her wrong about me. I repeated to the lawyer in Wichita that I wanted nothing to do with the trust.

I never quite figured David out. He was fabulously good at making money, and he really did love Anabel, for many of the same reasons I did, but the cruelty and the vengeance in giving her a billion unwanted dollars, and in naming the person she most hated as trustee, were unmistakable. I couldn’t decide whether he intended to keep punishing her from beyond the grave, or whether he nurtured the sentimental hope that she might one day return and claim her birthright. Maybe it was both. I do know that money was the language he spoke and thought in. A year after I’d heard from his lawyer, he died and left me twenty million dollars, free and clear, “for the establishment of a quality national newsmagazine.” The bequest seemed to have more to do with rewarding me than with punishing Anabel — so, at least, I chose to construe it — and this time I didn’t say no.

About Anabel the obituaries of David reported only that her address and occupation were unknown, but press coverage of the Laird family continued to be findable if you were curious and did a little looking. Anabel’s three brothers had blossomed into larger-scale failures. The oldest, Bucky, was briefly in the news for trying and failing to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves and move them to Wichita. The middle one, Dennis, dropped $15 million on a Republican primary Senate campaign that he still managed to lose by double digits. The youngest, Danny, the former drug addict, had gone to work on Wall Street and shown a knack for joining firms on the brink of going down in flames. Three years after David’s death, presumably using the money he’d inherited, he partnered into a hedge fund that soon went down in flames. Around the same time, I happened to meet Bucky Laird at a leadership-conference boondoggle in California. We chatted a little, and he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that he and his brothers had always assumed I’d murdered Anabel and got away with it. When I denied it, he seemed neither to believe me nor particularly to care.

I’ve never stopped wondering where Anabel is and whether she’s alive. I know that if she is alive she takes satisfaction in my being unaware of it — a satisfaction great enough, I suspect, to keep her living even if she has no other reason to. I remain convinced that I’ll see her again someday, even if I never see her again. She’s eternal in me. Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity. I couldn’t go on and have children with anyone else, because I’d prevented her from having them. I couldn’t settle down with anyone significantly younger than me without proving that my wish to do this was the reason that I’d dumped her. She’d also left me with a lifelong allergy to unrealistic women, an allergy that tended to compound itself, since the minute I detected a hint of fantasy in a woman and had my reaction to it, I rendered any hopes she had for me unrealistic. I wanted nothing to do with anyone like Anabel, and even when I found someone truly unlike her, a woman with whom it’s an inexpressible blessing to share a life, Anabel’s sadness and her moral absolutism continued to color my nighttime dreams. Her act of disappearance and negation becomes more significant and wounding, not less, with every year that passes without a sign of her existence. She may have been weaker than me, but she managed to outplay me. She moved on while I stayed stuck. I have to hand it to her: I feel checkmated.