Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The frosty bus ejected me at a nowhere little intersection in the woods. For a split second my eyeballs fogged up in the humidity. A kind of atmospheric curfew had been imposed by the heat — everything felt close and lush. Greenhouse. I saw Anabel step out of some trees where she’d been hiding. She was smiling broadly and, all things considered, inappropriately. My face did something grotesque and inappropriate in reply.

“‘Hello, Tom.’”

“‘Hello, Anabel.’”

Her extraordinary mane of dark hair, whose intricate care and increasingly frequent colorings probably occupied her more than any activity except sleeping and meditating, was all the thicker and more splendid in the steam of summer. Between the top of her beltless corduroys and the bottom of a tight plaid short-sleeved shirt was a strip of naked belly that could have been a thirteen-year-old’s. She was thirty-six. I was two months short of thirty-four.

“You’re allowed to come closer to me,” she said at the moment I was about to come closer.

“Or not,” she added, at the moment I was deciding not to.

Bus fumes lingered in the buggy road cut.

“We’re sort of perfectly out of sync here,” I said.

“Are we?” she said. “Or is it just you? I don’t feel out of sync.”

I wanted to point out that, by definition, a person couldn’t be in sync with a person who was out of sync with her; but there was a logic tree to consider. Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point, since the job of retracing the steps would itself result in utterances to which I would inevitably produce a certain percentage of complicating responses; and so I’d learned to be exceedingly careful about what I said in our first moments together.

“I should tell you right now,” I said, “that I absolutely have to catch the last bus back into the city tonight. It’s a really early bus, like eight o’clock.”

Anabel’s face became sad. “I won’t stop you.”

In the minute I’d been off the bus, the sky had steadily grown less gray. Sweat was popping out all over me, as if somebody had turned on a broiler.

“You always think I’m trying to detain you,” Anabel said. “First I bring you out here when you don’t want to come here. Then I make you stay here when you want to be gone. You’re the one who’s always coming and going, but somehow you have the idea that I’m the one pulling the strings. Which, if you feel powerless, just imagine how I feel.”

“I wanted to get it said,” I said carefully. “I had to say it sometime, and if I’d said it later, it might have seemed like I’d been trying to hide it from you.”

She tossed her mane with displeasure. “Because of course it would disappoint me. Of course it would break my heart if you had to catch the eight eleven bus. You’re standing there wondering: What is the best moment to convey this heartbreaking news to your clinging, suffocating, former whatever-I-am?”

“Well, as you’re kind of demonstrating right now,” I pointed out, “both approaches carry their own risk.”

“I don’t know why you think I’m your enemy.”

Cars were approaching on the main road. I moved up the smaller road toward Anabel, and she asked me if I’d thought she would be disappointed that I wasn’t spending the night.

“Possibly, a little bit,” I said. “But only because you’d mentioned that you didn’t have anything planned all day tomorrow.”

“When do I ever have anything planned?”

“Well, exactly. And that’s why the fact that you went so far as to mention it—”

“Instantly became translated in your mind into the threat of recrimination if you decided not to spend tomorrow with me, too.”

I inhaled. “There’s an element of truth to that.”

“Well, good,” she said. “And I’m suddenly not sure I want to see you at all, so.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “although I wish you’d told me that before you’d invited me out here and I’d spent half a day on buses.”

“I didn’t invite you. I accepted your offer to come out. There’s a big difference there. Especially when you show up so full of animosity, and the first thing out of your mouth is how soon you have to leave. The first thing out of your mouth.”

“Anabel.”

“ You rode the bus all day. I sat here waiting for you. Who has it worse? Who’s more pathetic?”

It was humiliating to do the logic tree with her. Humiliating how ready I was to contest the pettiest point, humiliating to still be doing it after having done it so infernally much in the previous twelve years. It was like beholding my addiction to a substance that had long since ceased to give me the slightest kick of pleasure. Which was why our meetings now had to take place in the strictest secrecy. Anywhere else but deep in the woods, we would have been too ashamed of ourselves.

“Can we just hike?” I said, shouldering my knapsack.

“Yes! Do you think I want to stand here talking like this?”

The little road ran near the boundary of Stokes State Forest. We’d had a wet spring, and the plant kingdom of the ditches and the successional meadows and the stonier-sloped woods was fantastically green. Obscene amounts of pollen were in the air, the trees burdened with the bright dust of their own fertility, the swollenness of their leaves. We squeezed through the jaws of a rusty gate and went down an old dirt road so badly washed out that it was more like a creek bed. Weeds liable to repent of their exuberance very soon — weeds already bigger than they ever ought to have been, weeds on steroids, weeds about to lean and buckle and be ugly — shouldered in so high on both sides that we had to walk single file.

“I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask you why you ‘have to’ go back tonight,” Anabel said.

“Not really, no.”

“It would be just too painful for me to hear you have a brunch date with Winona Ryder.”

My presumptive interest in dating much younger pretty girls, now that I was divorced, had become a leitmotif of Anabel’s. But my actual date the next day was for dinner, not brunch, and was not with a girl but with Anabel’s father, whom she loathed and hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Despite our well-demonstrated pattern of recidivism, I’d allowed myself to believe that I really wouldn’t ever hear from her again, and that I could see her father without fear of being castigated for it.

“Isn’t that what the girlies like to do now?” Anabel said. “Meet for ‘brunch’? I do believe there’s no more sickening word in the English language. The mingled smells of quiche lorraine and sausage grease.”

“I have to go back because I need to get some sleep, not having had any last night.”

“Oh, right. I woke you up. I still need to be punished for that.”

I managed not to respond. I was starting to remember chunks of binge that I’d blacked out from my previous visit, but it felt less like remembering than reliving. Past and future mingled in the land of Tom and Anabel. The New Jersey sky was a low-hanging steambath of churning flocculence, darkening and then yellowly brightening in random places that gave no clue about the sun’s actual location or, thus, about what time it was or where east and west might be. My disorientation deepened when Anabel led me up into woods once haunted by the Lenape tribe. It was simultaneously five and one and seven and last month and tomorrow afternoon.