Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Nothing a person does out of love can be wrong.”

“Wrong! Wrong!”

He fled through the front door, past the elevator, and into the stairwell, where he could sob without fear of being discovered by his mother. It was years since there had been a shred of evidence that he was happy with Annagret. Everything about his miserable existence, down to the rawly chafed dick in his underpants at this very moment, argued against them. He couldn’t be any more miserable without her than he already was, and she’d be happier without him, too. But none of this lessened his grief. He’d never experienced grief like this. It seemed as if he really loved her after all.

Grief passed, however. Before he was even home again, he could see his future. He would never again make the mistake of trying to live with a woman. For whatever reason (probably his childhood), he wasn’t suited for it, and the strong thing to do was to accept this. His computer had made a weakling of him. He also had a vague, shameful memory of climbing onto Annagret’s lap and trying to be her baby. Weak! Weak! But now his mother, with her meddling, had given him the pretext he needed to be free of both her and Annagret. A double deus ex machina — the good luck of a man fated to dominate. It was ironic, of course, that the person who’d recalled him to his stronger self and made his weakness visible to him was Katya. Ironic that, although she was a liar, he’d recognized the truth of her description of him. Ironic that he would owe his new freedom to her. But this didn’t make her meddling any less despicable. She’d played herself out of any future with him.

At home, he cleansed his hard drive of downloaded obscenity. His new sense of purpose and sobriety felt well worth the compulsive binge it had cost him to attain it. He washed the dishes in the sink and dried them. He saw that he would soon be bringing other women to wherever he lived, one after another — the repetition of a strong man — and that his new place would have to be clean and orderly, to signify self-mastery.

He was sitting straight-backed at the computer, bringing self-mastery to bear on his email queue, when Annagret came home with some dismal “bio” vegetables in a string bag.

“I’m only here to change clothes,” she said. “We have a protest for the rent strikers.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “But sit down for a minute first.”

She sidled into the living room and perched on the edge of a chair and fixed her eyes on the floor. It seemed to him that she was radiating guilt. Interesting that he hadn’t perceived it sooner. He’d carefully thought through the wording of what he had to say to her, but now that it was time to say it, he hesitated. He still had grief in him, and he wondered if he shouldn’t be saying something very different with his newly regained sense of command: Enough bullshit, enough cuddling. Strip naked for me. We’re going to do things differently now . Conceivably she might welcome it; conceivably it could save them. But more likely she’d refuse, which would hurt him and shame him, and there were, in any case, many other women to whom he could speak like that. Their appeal, too, was perceptible in a way it hadn’t been before.

“We’re not happy together,” he said.

She bowed her head and shifted uncomfortably. “It’s been difficult lately, I know. We haven’t been so close. I know that. But…”

“I know about you and Gisela.”

She blushed intensely, and he felt another surge of compassion for her, but also, for the first time, anger. She’d betrayed him, just as Katya had said. Until this moment, he hadn’t been angry at all.

“Go to her,” he said coldly. “Stay with her. I’ll find another place to live.”

She bowed her head further. “It’s not what you think…”

“I don’t care what it is. It’s just a pretext anyway. We shouldn’t be together.”

“But who told you?”

“People come to me with dirt. It’s my job to know things.”

“Did Katya tell you?”

“Katya? No. It doesn’t matter anyway. Do you honestly like being with me?”

It was a while before she answered. “It used to be better,” she said, “when we felt closer … I think you’re a good person … A great person. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Sometimes I wonder why you wanted to be with me in the first place.”

Hearing this, the Killer in him became alert.

“You were the one who said we had to be together,” she said. “I knew in my heart that it was wrong. I thought there was a way for us to not be so guilty, if we stayed apart, but as soon as we got together it meant we’d been guilty from the beginning.”

“I was in love with you. I made a mistake.”

“I was in love with you, too. But it was never right, was it.”

“No.”

She began to cry. “And now we’ll never get over what we did.”

“Not as long as we stay together.”

“I’m so tired of living with it. I’m sorry I did this new bad thing, it’s not even what you think. I guess I thought, ‘I’m guilty anyway — what does it matter what I do?’”

“It’s good you did it. I wouldn’t have had the guts.”

He wondered if he should go ahead and mention the computer now, make a clean breast of his own transgressions and give her some consoling company in her guilt. But the Killer said no. The Killer had only one objective now: to make sure she never had moral cause to betray him by telling someone else about the killing. Although it pained him to see her crying and apologizing, it was also reassuring. She still suffered from a sense of worthlessness for having wanted Horst, for having been abused, and even as Andreas was pitying her for this he was savoring his coming freedom. The sweet freedom of getting away with everything, of never having to see her dowdy and earnest friends again, of never having to have another discussion.

“We could have spent ten years in prison,” he said. “Instead we spent ten years together. Maybe that was our prison. Maybe we’ve served our sentence. You’re only twenty-eight — you can do whatever you want now.”

“You’re right. It did start to feel like prison. It … Oh! I’m sorry!”

“Things will be better when you’re out of it.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be sorry. Just go. Go to your protest.”

The grief returned when she was gone. He welcomed it, almost luxuriated in it, because it was a real emotion, untainted by doubt about his secret motives. Like the compassion it grew out of, it suggested that there might not, after all, be anything so wrong with him. Maybe, if he took care never to live with another woman, he could succeed in living up to the image other people had of him. Maybe the Killer had been merely a figment, a projection of his embattled but still fundamentally sound moral sense, an artifact of the misfortune that the love of his life was also the person with whom he’d committed a murder. A misfortune, certainly. But maybe it was enough to explain his vile feelings, his rage, his jealousy, his radical doubt, his sick urges. Maybe, with self-mastery, he could put all that behind him now.

After the planes hit New York and Washington, Annagret ran home to make sure he was OK. This was irrational but not unusual that day; there was a sense that with crazy things happening in America they could be happening anywhere, to anyone. But he and Annagret had been growing apart for so long that when the thread of togetherness was snapped they elastically sprang even farther apart, finding themselves with no friends or even any interests in common. All he had left, really, was the sentimental and periodically grief-inducing conviction that she had been the love of his life.