Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Anabel stayed ahead of me, her corduroy butt directly in my line of sight. She led me along deer trails, long-legged like a deer herself, skirting anything that looked like poison ivy. She was no longer life-threateningly malnourished the way she’d been in the years leading up to our separation, but she was still thin. Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

We were coming down a spongy rust-brown hillside of pine needle when I saw that she’d unbuttoned her shirt. Its little tails fluttered at her sides. She didn’t turn back but started running down the hill. How oppressively hot the woods were, compared to the road! I followed my ex-wife into a small clearing by a lake that appeared to have dried up, though not before drowning all the trees that had once stood in the basin. It was a forest of big gray sticks, the same metallic color as the sky. A silvery heron lifted itself into the air.

“Here,” Anabel said. There was moss and rock and bare dirt underfoot. She shrugged off her shirt and turned around and showed herself to me. Her areolae were too big and outrageously red-red to bear looking at. It was as if her skin were a cream-colored silk into which the blood from matching punctures had seeped extensively. I averted my eyes.

“I’m trying to become less shy with you,” she said.

“Seems to be going pretty well today.”

“So look at me.”

“All right.”

Her blush was highlighting the long, thin line of scar tissue on her forehead — a vestige of the same childhood horse-riding accident that had cost her most of her two front teeth, which had been capped expensively, if not altogether imperceptibly. Between these two teeth was a gap that to me had always been a sexy thing. Her little come-hither gap. The continual suggestion of a tongue.

She shook her breasts at me and shuddered with shyness and turned away, embracing the trunk of a beech tree. “Look, I’m a tree hugger,” she said.

This was the point at which we were supposed to reverse course and scamper back down to the unitary trunk of the logic tree, all the yes-no branchings converging in assent: yes yes yes. I took off my clothes and discovered that although we were divorced I’d packed six condoms in my little knapsack.

Anabel, lying prone on moss and dirt, offering herself like an original Lenape woman, told me these weren’t necessary.

“How so not necessary?”

“Just not,” she said.

“To be discussed later,” I said, tearing open a package.

I was still so thin in 1991 that I didn’t really have a body at all. What I had was more like an armature of coat-hanger wire with a few key sensory parts attached to it — a lot of head, a fair amount of hands, an erection either tyrannical or absent, and nothing else. I was like a thing drawn by Joan Miró. I was all idea. Six times now, this weird contraption had hauled itself out to the scenic Delaware Water Gap region to be part of some bad idea that Anabel and I now jointly had about ourselves. It wasn’t snuggly, it wasn’t nice. It was her lying down on something hard or squalid and the coat-hanger-wire contraption jumping on furiously.

I asked if I was hurting her.

“Not … damaging me.… … as far as I can tell…”

She said this with an ironic twinkle. There was a football-size rock near her head. I wondered if she’d deliberately lain down by this rock to suggest a thing that she was still too shy with me to ask for. I wondered if the idea was for me to pick up the rock and smash her skull with it.

“How about now?” I said, thrusting hard.

“Now damage possible.”

All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we’d had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and compulsive sex we’d had to get divorced. It was a way of raging against the giant nothing that arguing had ever done to save us. It was the one argument that each of us could lose with honor. But then it was over and there was nothing again.

Anabel was lying facedown on the rocks and dirt, quietly sobbing, while I sorted out the topology of pants legs and underwear. I knew better than to ask why she was crying. We’d be here until nightfall if I did that. Much better to start hiking again and actually cover some ground while we had the conversation about why I hadn’t asked her why she was crying.

She stood up to put her shirt on. “So,” she said. “Now you’ve had your treat, and you can go back to the city.”

“Please don’t try to tell me you didn’t want that yourself.”

“But it was the only thing you wanted,” she said. “And so now you can go back. Unless you want to do it again right now and then go back.”

Slapping a mosquito on my forearm, I looked at my watch and couldn’t read what it plainly said.

“Tell me why we never had children,” Anabel said. “I don’t remember what your explanation was.”

I felt suddenly light-headed. Even by Anabel standards, her broaching of the subject of children seemed an exorbitantly high price for me to pay for a few minutes of sex. She was also presenting the bill brutally soon.

“Do you remember?” she said. “Because I don’t remember any real discussion.”

“So let’s have a five-hour discussion about it right now,” I said. “This would be a great time and a great place.”

“You said, ‘To be discussed later.’ And now it’s later.”

I killed another mosquito. “I’m suddenly getting bit.”

“I’ve been getting bitten the whole time.”

“I didn’t realize you meant that kind of discussion.”

“What did you think I meant?”

I touched the plump knotted rubber in my pants pocket. “I don’t know. Some possible-other-partners, epidemiological type of thing.”

“Safe to say I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Lot of mosquitoes here,” I said. “We should move.”

“Do you even know where we are? Can you find your way back?”

“No.”

“So I guess you need me after all. If you want to catch your bus.”

Strict vigilance was needed to avoid getting lost in the logic tree, but Anabel’s heat, the heat of her back and of our liquid interfacing, and the scent of the Mane ‘n Tail shampoo in her hair, which was always faint but never entirely absent, had dulled my thinking. I’d eaten the opium of Anabel, with predictable consequences. I said, somewhat desperately, “Look, I already know there’s no way you’re letting me catch that bus.”

“Letting you. Ha.”

“Not you,” I said, “I meant us . There’s no way we’re letting me catch the bus.”

But the mistake had been made. She kicked her feet into her sneakers. “We’ll go right back and wait,” she said. “Just to spare me a tiny bit of your hatred for once in my life. So for once I don’t have to be blamed for making you miss your bus.”

Anabel refused to see that there was simply something broken about us, broken beyond repair and beyond assignment of blame. During our previous binge, we’d talked for nine hours nonstop, pausing only for bathroom breaks. I’d thought I’d finally succeeded in showing her that the only way out of our misery was to renounce each other and never communicate again; that nine-hour conversations were themselves the sickness that they were purportedly trying to cure. This was the version of us that she’d called me this morning to reject. But what was her version? Impossible to say. She was so morally sure of herself, moment by moment, that I perpetually had the feeling that we were getting somewhere; only afterward could I see that we’d been moving in a large, empty circle. For all her intelligence and sensitivity, she not only wasn’t making sense but was unable to recognize that she wasn’t, and it was terrible to see this in a person to whom I’d been so profoundly devoted and had made a vow of lifelong care. And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn’t keep working with her.