Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I’m sorry ,” I said. “As soon as I saw the story, I realized it was cruel. Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of putting a story together, you forget that someone’s going to read it.”

She tossed her dark mane. “So, if I hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t be sorry? What does that mean? You’re sorry you were caught? That’s not sorry. That’s cowardly.”

“We shouldn’t have used those quotes if we couldn’t attribute them.”

“Oh, well, it makes for a fun guessing game,” she said. “Which person thinks I’m a spoiled rich girl, which person thinks I’m a nut job, which person is so sure my art is bad. Of course, it’s maybe not so fun to sit in the same room with the people who said those things, and know they’re still thinking them, and feel them looking at me. To have to sit there with those eyes on me. To be visible like that.”

She still hadn’t lowered her arms from the front of her blouse.

“You’re the one who showed up naked in the dean’s office,” I couldn’t help pointing out.

“Only after they ripped the paper off me.”

“I’m saying you wanted publicity and you got it.”

“Oh, it’s not like I’m surprised. What’s more interesting than a nude female body? What better to sell papers? You proved my point better than I could have proved it myself.”

This was the first of the ten thousand times I had the experience of not quite following Anabel’s logic. Because it was the first time and not the ten thousandth, and because she seemed so ferociously sure of herself — it hurts me to remember the ferocity and assurance she still had then — I assumed the fault was mine.

“We’re a free paper,” I said lamely. “We don’t worry about selling.”

“ Actions have consequences ,” she said. “There’s a high road and a low road, and you took the low road. You’re the editor, you put those things in print, and I read them. You hurt me and you’re going to have to live with it. I want you never to forget it, the same way I’m never going to forget what you printed. You didn’t even have the decency to return my phone call! You think because you’re male and I’m female, you can get away with it.” She paused, and I saw a pair of tiny tears dissolving her mascara. “You may not think so,” she said more softly, “but I’m here to tell you you’re a jerk .”

Her looks and her superior age gave the accusation a particular sting. In truth, though, I was already primed to doubt my goodness. One Easter, when I was in seventh grade, the younger of my older sisters, Cynthia, had come home from college transformed into a hippie, with octagonal wireframes and a biblically bearded boyfriend. The two of them took a friendly clinical interest in me as one of the first new men of tomorrow. Cynthia asked me about my air rifle: Did I like to shoot and kill my enemies with it? Did I like to blow their heads off? How did I think it felt to have your head blown off? Like a game?

The boyfriend asked me about the butterfly collection I halfheartedly kept in an attempt to please my father: Did I like butterflies? Really? Then why did I murder them?

Cynthia asked me what my ambitions for life were: I wanted to be a reporter or a photojournalist? That was cool. But what about being a nurse? What about being a first-grade teacher? Those jobs were for girls? Why only for girls?

The boyfriend asked me if I ever thought about trying out to be a cheerleader: It wasn’t allowed? Why not? Why couldn’t a boy be a cheerleader? Couldn’t boys jump, too? Couldn’t boys cheer?

Together, the two of them made me feel like a stodgy old man. This seemed mean of them, but I also had the guilty sense that there was something wrong with me. One afternoon, a few years later, I came home late from school to a rodent emergency in the attic, my belongings spread across the floor of my bedroom, my closet door open, my father’s legs visible on a stepladder. I allowed myself to hope that he’d somehow overlooked the worn copy of Oui magazine that I’d shoplifted from the back of a used-book store and hidden in the closet, but after dinner he came to my room and asked me what I thought it was like to be the women in a pornographic magazine.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully.

“Well, you’re at the age where you’d better start thinking about it.”

Everything about my dad was repelling and embarrassing me that year. His Mission Control eyewear, his petrochemically slicked hair, his wide gunslinger’s stance. He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry. Building another dam why ? Gnawing tree trunks why ? Paddling around with a big grin why , exactly?

“Sex is a great blessing,” he said in his teaching voice. “But what you see in a porno magazine is human misery and degradation. I don’t know where you got the magazine, but simply by owning it you’ve materially participated in the degradation of a fellow human being. Imagine how you’d feel if this were Cynthia, or Ellen—”

“OK, I get it.”

“Do you really? Do you understand that these women are somebody’s sisters? Somebody’s daughters?”

I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone’s degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I’d financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.

A few days later, I stole more magazines. I liked Oui because the girls in it seemed realer — also more European, hence more cultured, intelligent, and soulful — than the ones in Playboy . I imagined deep conversations with them, I imagined them attracted to how compassionately I listened to them, but there was no denying that my interest in them died at the instant of orgasm. I felt as if I was up against a structural unfairness; as if simply being male, excitable by pictures through no choice of my own, placed me ineluctably in the wrong. I meant no harm and yet I harmed.

It got worse. With college looming, I made a bloodless but nonetheless exciting pact to exchange virginities with my senior-prom date, Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, whose romantic sights were set on someone unattainable, and so it happened that, on the last possible weekend of the summer, in an Estes Park cabin belonging to the parents of a mutual friend, at the crucial moment of entry, I accidentally delivered a sharp masculine poke to the very most sensitive and off-limits part of Mary Ellen. She gave a full-throated shriek, recoiling and kicking me away. My attempts to comfort her and apologize only fed her hysteria. She wailed, she thrashed, she hyperventilated, she kept babbling a phrase that I finally deciphered, to my immense relief, as a wish to be taken home to Denver right away.

Mary Ellen’s anally violated shriek was ringing in my ears when I matriculated at Penn. My father had suggested that I choose a smaller college, but Penn had offered me a scholarship and my mother had seduced me with talk of the wealthy, powerful people I would meet at an Ivy League school. In my first three years at Penn, I made not one wealthy friend, but my intimations of male guilt were given a firm theoretical foundation. From lectures both in and out of classrooms, beginning with an orientation-week sex talk delivered by a female senior in bib overalls, I learned that I was even more inescapably implicated in the patriarchy than I’d realized. The upshot was that, in any intimate relationship with a woman, my motives were a priori suspect.