Jonathan Franzen - Purity

She shook her head.

“No, there isn’t anybody?” Tom said. “Or no, he’s not a journalist?”

“Are you trying to ask if I’m available in some other way?”

He crumpled forward and covered his face with his hands. “I deserved that,” he said. “I was actually not asking that, but the question wasn’t straight, either. It’s just a thing with me — I’m kind of a connoisseur of guilt. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

“If you could see my guilt levels, I think you’d find them quite appealingly high.”

The flirtation with which she made this statement made it true. It was appalling, an almost autonomic thing, the way she was warming to the first sweet, funny, successful, unmarried man she’d met since the wave of caustic adjectives (“stale,” “obese,” “exhausting”) had crashed over the big book . But no matter how guilty it made her, she couldn’t help it: she resented Charles for having failed. She resented that she now had to feel like a shallow, success-chasing woman just because she was liking Tom Aberant. If Charles’s book had been glowingly reviewed and short-listed for prizes, she could have continued on her outbound trajectory without feeling guilty. No one would have blamed her. To the contrary, it would have been blameworthy to go back to him — to have fled to Washington while he was suffering and then to swoop back in to enjoy his success. And so she couldn’t help wishing that Charles didn’t exist. In a world where he didn’t exist, she could have said yes to Tom’s extremely attractive job offer.

What she did instead was suggest that she and Tom get together again over drinks. She wore a short black dress to the bar. Later, from her apartment, she sent Tom a long and disclosive email. She delayed calling Charles that night. In her growing sense of guilt about delaying, in the guilt itself , she found the will and motive not to call him at all. (Even though the sufferer of guilt could stop the suffering whenever she chose, simply by doing the right thing, the suffering was still real while it lasted, and self-pity wasn’t picky about the kind of suffering it fed on.) The next day, she didn’t open Tom’s return email but went to work, called Charles three times, and ate a late dinner with a source. At home, she called Charles a fourth time and finally opened Tom’s email. It wasn’t disclosive, but it was invitational. She took a Friday-night train to Manhattan (somehow the guilt that should have followed infidelity not only existed before the infidelity but was hounding her into it) and spent the night at Tom’s apartment. She spent the whole weekend with him, leaving his side only to go to the bathroom to pee or call Charles. Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn’t felt while wrecking Charles’s marriage. This guilt turned out not to have been nonexistent but pre-forwarded, by way of time-and-space warp, to Manhattan in 2004.

She couldn’t have borne it without Tom. She felt safe with Tom. He was both the cause of her guilt and the balm for it, because he understood it and was living it himself. He was only six years older than Leila, younger than his hair loss made him look, but he’d started so early on his marriage that its ending, after twelve years, was in the fairly distant past. His wife, Anabel, had been an artist, a promising young painter and filmmaker, who came from one of the families that owned McCaskill, the biggest food-products company in the world. On paper, she was absurdly rich, but she was estranged from her family and refused on principle to take money from them. By the time Tom escaped from the marriage, her art career was going nowhere, she was in her late thirties, and she still wanted children.

“I was a coward,” he said to Leila. “I should have left her five years earlier.”

“Is it cowardly to stay with a person you love and who needs you?”

“You tell me.”

“Hmm. I’ll get back to you on that.”

“If she’d been thirty-one, she could have put her life together and met somebody else and had her baby. I waited just long enough to make that very difficult.”

“It wouldn’t have helped that she was rich?”

“She was insane about the money. She’d sooner have died than take it from her father.”

“But then that’s her choice. Why should you feel guilty for a choice she’s making?”

“Because I knew she’d make that choice.”

“And did you cheat on her?”

“Not until we’d separated.”

“Then, I’m sorry, but I think I’ve got you beat in the guilt race.”

But there was something else, Tom said. Anabel’s father had always liked him and tried to help him out financially. Tom couldn’t accept any help as long as he stayed with Anabel, but when the father had died, more than a decade after the divorce, he’d left Tom a bequest to the tune of $20 million, and Tom had taken it. It was the seed money for his nonprofit venture.

“And you feel guilty about that?”

“I could have said no.”

“But you’re doing an amazing thing with the money.”

“I’m enjoying money my wife could never take. Not just enjoying it, doing well with it professionally. Increasing my male professional advantage.”

Although Leila appreciated Tom’s company, his guilt seemed a little overwrought to her. She wondered if he might be exaggerating it (and downplaying the sexual hold that Anabel had had on him) for her sake. On her second weekend in New York, she asked him if she could flip through his box of old snapshots. There were pictures of a young man so skinny and boyish and thick-haired she barely recognized him. “You look like a completely different person.”

“I was a completely different person.”

“But, like, not the same DNA, even.”

“That’s how it feels.”

As soon as Leila saw Anabel, she understood Tom’s guilt better. The woman was intense —fiery-eyed, full-chestedly anorexic, Medusa-maned, mostly unsmiling. In the background of the pictures was student housing, slum housing, wintry pre-9/11 New York skyline.

“She does look a little scary,” Leila said.

“Terrifying. I’m having a PTSD thing just looking at these.”

“But you! You were so young and sweet.”

“That’s kind of my marriage in a nutshell.”

“And where is she now?”

“No idea. We didn’t have any friends in common, and we broke off all contact.”

“So maybe she took her money after all. Maybe she owns an island somewhere.”

“Anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

Leila wanted to ask if she could keep one snapshot of Tom, an especially sweet one taken by Anabel on the Staten Island Ferry, but it was too soon to ask for a picture. She closed the box and kissed his turtle mouth. Sex with him was not the drama it had always been with Charles, the pouncing, the bouncing, the screaming of the prey, but she already thought she might prefer this other way. It was quieter, slower, more like a meeting of minds via bodies.

She had a deep sense of rightness with Tom — it was the thing, among many things, that she felt guiltiest about, because it meant that Charles was not right, had never been right. Tom’s reserve, his willingness to leave her be, was soothing to her maritally poked and probed spirit. And he seemed to have the same sense of rightness with her. They were journalists and spoke a common language. But she couldn’t help wondering why a catch like him had never remarried. Before she burned any bridges with Charles, she asked Tom why.

He replied that he hadn’t stayed with any woman for longer than a year since his divorce. According to his ethics, one year was the limit, at least in New York, for any uncommitted relationship; and his bad marriage had made him commitment-shy.