Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Have you had access to my home computer since then?”

“Me? No! I mean, how could I? Don’t you have passwords?”

“The software records keystrokes.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know there was spyware. I mean, I was worried, but I wasn’t sure.”

“He didn’t send you any passwords?”

“No.”

“So you haven’t seen anything on my hard drive. He hasn’t sent you any documents from it.”

“No! We broke off contact!”

“Why should I believe you? You’ve done nothing but lie to us.”

“You and Leila are my heroes. I would never spy on you. I would never read anything I wasn’t supposed to. I adore you guys.”

“And what if he sent you a document now? What would you do?”

“If I knew it was yours,” she said, “I wouldn’t read it.”

Tom released a long sigh, his shoulders caving inward around the loss of the air that he’d been holding in. Again he was staring at some invisible presence. Pip wondered what document of his could be so explosive that he had to worry about her reading it. She couldn’t imagine that he, of all men, had anything to hide.

My affair with Anabel had begun as soon as our divorce decree came through. In exchange for stipulating that I’d abandoned her—“abandonment” being one of the few grounds for divorce that New York state law recognized, and the one that Anabel felt best captured the wrong she’d suffered — I’d been permitted to reclaim our valuable rent-controlled tenement in East Harlem while Anabel went off to live by herself in the woods of New Jersey. Since there could be no talk of inflicting Manhattan on her, I had to take the bus across 125th Street and the subway up to 168th, followed by a much longer and invariably nauseating bus ride over the Hudson and out through increasingly raw developments to the hills northwest of Netcong.

I’d made this trip twice in February, twice in March, and once in April. On the last Saturday in May, my phone rang around seven in the morning, not long after I’d gone to bed drunk. I answered it only to stop the ringing.

“Oh,” Anabel said. “I thought I was going to get your machine.”

“I’ll hang up and you can leave a message,” I said.

“No, this is only going to be thirty seconds. I swear I will not get drawn in again.”

“Anabel.”

“I just wanted to say that I reject your version of us. I utterly reject it. That’s my message.”

“Couldn’t you have rejected my version by just never calling me again?”

“I’m not getting drawn in,” she said, “but I know the way you operate. You interpret silence as capitulation.”

“You don’t remember me promising I’d never interpret your silence that way. The very last time we spoke.”

“I’m hanging up now,” she said, “but at least be honest, Tom, and admit that your promise was a low trick. A way of having the last word.”

I laid the phone on my mattress, next to my ear and mouth. “Are we at the point yet where I get blamed for this conversation lasting more than thirty seconds? Or do I still have that to look forward to?”

“No, I’m hanging up,” she said. “I wanted to say for the record that you’re completely wrong about us. But that’s all. So. I’m going to hang up.”

“OK, then. Good-bye.”

But she could never hang up, and I could never bear to do it for her.

“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “You did consume my youth and then abandon me, but I know you’re not responsible for my happiness out here, although in fact I’m having a good time and things are going pretty well, unbelievable as it may sound to a person who considers me, quote, ‘unequipped’ to deal with the, quote, ‘real world.’”

“‘Consumed my youth and then abandoned me,’” I quoted back. “But this is not a provocation. You just wanted to leave a thirty-second message.”

“Which I would have done! But you reacted —”

“I reacted, Anabel — do I need to point this out? I reacted to your picking up a telephone and dialing my number.”

“Right, I know, because I’m so needy. Right? I’m so pathetically needy.”

I couldn’t have named one instant of happiness or ease from our previous togetherness binge, four weeks earlier. I emerged from these binges feeling bruised and harrowed, with worrisome bomb craters in my memory but also a vague, sick craving for a do-over.

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to get together? Do you want me to come out? Is that why you called?”

“No! I do not want to get together! I want to hang up the phone if you would please just let me!”

“Usually, in the past, though, when you’ve called,” I said, “you’ve started out saying you didn’t want to get together, and then, after a couple of hours on the phone, it’s come out that you did actually, all along, underneath, want to get together.”

“If you want to come out and see me ,” she said, “you should have the decency to say so in so many words—”

“And by then, of course—”

“Like any polite man who wants to spend time with a woman he respects, instead of making your invitation some sort of icky accusation —”

“By then, of course,” I said, “it’s gotten to be pretty late in the day, which means that by the time we actually do get together, which is what you’ve secretly wanted all along, it’s very late, and when we then, inevitably, go ahead and sleep together—”

“Instead of insidiously twisting things around,” she said. “So that it looks like my neediness rather than yours, my lousy life rather than your own lousy life—”

“Inevitably go ahead and sleep together—”

“I don’t want to sleep with you! I don’t want to see you! That’s not why I called! I called to say a simple thing which—”

“It’s three or four in the morning before we actually get around to the sleeping part of sleeping together, which, with three hours of travel and a workday ahead of me, has tended, in the past, to become kind of a bad scene. Is all I’m trying to remind you.”

“If you want to come out and go for a hike with me,” she said, “that would be very nice. I would like that. But you have to say it’s what you want.”

“But I didn’t call you,” I said.

“But you were the one who brought up getting together. So just be honest with me now.”

“Is this something you want?”

“Not unless you want it and you say so like a human being.”

“But that perfectly mirrors my own sentiments. So.”

“Look, I called ,” she said. “You could at least—”

“What could I do?”

“Do you think I’m going to harm you if you let your defenses down for one tiny half second? I mean, what do you think I’m going to do? Make you my slave? Force you to be married to me again? It’s a hike, for God’s sake, it’s just a hike!”

Simply to avoid the two-hour version of this conversation — wherein Party A tried to prove that Party B had made the fatal statement that prolonged the conversation in the first place, and Party B challenged Party A’s version of events, and this, in turn, there being no actual transcript, compelled Party A to reconstruct from memory the conversation’s overture and Party B to offer a reconstruction that differed from Party A’s in certain crucial respects, which then necessitated a time-devouring joint effort to collate and reconcile the two reconstructions — I agreed to go out to New Jersey and take a hike.

Anabel was cleansing her spirit on land that belonged to the parents of her younger friend and only fan, Suzanne. One of my first actions after requesting a divorce was to sleep with Suzanne. She’d asked me out to dinner as a kind of ambassador for Anabel, intending to talk me into reconsidering the divorce, but she was so worn out from listening to Anabel’s complaints about me and about the New York art world, in nightly two-hour phone calls, that I ended up talking her into betraying Anabel. I must have been trying to make Anabel want a divorce as much as I did, but things hadn’t worked out that way. She’d terminated her friendship with Suzanne and accused me of refusing to rest until I’d stolen or polluted every last thing she had. But the upshot, according to her curious moral calculus, was that both Suzanne and I owed her. I continued to take Anabel’s calls and get together with her, and Suzanne allowed her to keep living on the New Jersey property, which Suzanne’s parents, who’d relocated to New Mexico, were trying to sell at an unrealistic price.