Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Not that intimate relationships turned out to be a problem. Apparently, only to girls less than five feet tall did I not look heinously young. One of them, a fellow staffer on the DP during my second year, started giving me significant looks, tilting her head to one side, and finally passed me a note in which she alluded to the “danger” of getting “badly hurt” by me. I obliged her by making out with her in the middle of the Green one night, partly out of guilt for not being more interested in having sex with her — for being such an objectifying male that I couldn’t see past her shortness — and partly with the vile male motive of finally having sex with someone, but I was unable to oblige her with the avowals that she then, with tilted head, solicited, and so I ended up guiltily hurting her with nothing to show for it. She went so far as to quit the paper.

I took refuge in beer, the pool tables in Houston Hall, and the DP . As working journalists in a student body doing frivolous student things, my friends and I achieved levels of self-importance that I wouldn’t encounter again until I met people from the New York Times . We had nougat cores of innocence, of course, but we’d all bragged about our high-school sexual exploits and it never occurred to me that, since I had lied, my friends might also have lied. The one person who saw through me was Lucy Hill. She’d been a scholarship student at Choate Rosemary Hall and had waitressed for two years before starting at Penn. She had a boyfriend who was nearly thirty, a self-taught hippie carpenter who looked a lot like D. H. Lawrence, her favorite writer. Lucy’s friendly clinical interest in me was more explicit and forgiving than my sister Cynthia’s. When I confessed to her what I’d done to Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, she laughed and said that Mary Ellen had shrieked because I was giving her the kind of intercourse she couldn’t admit she wanted. Lucy was now intent on finding me somebody with whom to fuck like bunnies . I didn’t love the sound of fuck like bunnies , and I vaguely resented the condescension implicit in Lucy’s project, but I had no one else to talk to about sex, and so I kept going to her off-campus house for weak coffee and mushy Moosewood Cookbook desserts.

Neither Anabel nor I knew it when she left my office, after pronouncing her judgment on my character, but I was exactly the guy she wanted. Outside my window, the sun had gone down in its sudden October way, and I sat in the twilight and suffered shame. I was prepared to believe I was a jerk, and yet it rankled to have been called one by an older and very attractive (and rich, can’t forget rich, it was there from the beginning) woman who’d made a special trip across the Schuylkill to denounce me. I didn’t know what to do. Calling Lucy would simply invite further reproach. I couldn’t get you’re a jerk out of my head. The mental picture of Anabel’s nude body in butcher paper also gave me no rest.

Stopping only briefly at the dining hall to eat two chicken cutlets and a slice of cake, I returned to my dorm room and dialed Anabel’s number, which I’d copied onto the palm of my hand. I counted ten rings on her phone before I hung up. When Oswald came back after dinner, he found me sitting in the dark.

“Mr. Tom, he brooding,” he said. “Something has ‘got his goat.’ Something is ‘stuck in his craw.’” He referenced, not for the first time, a Get Smart episode about an East Asian evildoer named the Claw: “ Not ‘the Craw’! The CRAW! ”

I wanted to tell Oswald that he’d fucked up and exposed me to humiliation, but he was in such high spirits, so completely unaware of having fucked up, that I couldn’t bring myself to ruin his evening. Instead, I vented my hatred of the author of the article.

“He’s very like a little sharp-toothed mink,” Oswald concurred. “If there were any justice in the universe, he wouldn’t write such clean copy.”

“The blind quotes about Laird were really mean. I’m wondering if we should print some sort of apology.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Oswald said. “You’ve got to stand by your reporter, even if he is a little beady-eyed mink.”

Oswald and I had come up together on the DP , tearing apart each other’s prose. Neither of us ever fell into a mood so bleak that the other couldn’t talk him out of it, and Oswald soon had me laughing with his impression of the Broncos’ backup quarterback Norris Weese (Oswald was a Nebraskan and a fellow Broncos fan) and his savage quotation of classmates dumber and more popular than us. Oswald’s gift for ressentiment was redeemed by his Eeyore-like self-esteem levels. His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet. Out of respect for my own drought, still ongoing, he rarely mentioned her to me, but when he left me alone again I knew that he was going to her, and I fell back into a pit of remorse.

Around ten o’clock I managed to reach Anabel on the phone.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m feeling really bad about not protecting you better. I want to try to make it up to you.”

“The damage is done, Tom. You already made your choice.”

“But I’m not the person you think I am.”

“Who do you think I think you are?”

“A bad person.”

“I’m only going by the evidence,” she said with a hint of playfulness, a possible softening of her judgment.

“Do you want me to resign? Would you believe me then?”

“You don’t have to do that for me. You can just try to be a better editor in the future.”

“I will. I will.”

“All right, then,” she said. “I don’t forgive you, but I do appreciate your returning my call.”

This was where the conversation ought to have ended, but Anabel, even back then, had a specific lack of resolve when it came to hanging up a telephone, and I didn’t want to hang up without having been forgiven. For some seconds, neither of us spoke. As the silence lengthened it began, for me at least, to pulse with possibility. I strained to hear the sound of Anabel’s breath.

“Do you ever show your art?” I said when the silence had become unbearable. “I’d be interested in seeing your films.”

“‘Come up to my room and see my etchings.’ Is that why you called me back?” Again the playful lilt. “Maybe you want to come over and see my art right now.”

“Seriously?”

“Give it some thought and decide if you think I’m serious.”

“Right.”

“My art doesn’t hang on a wall.”

“Right.”

“And no one goes in my bedroom but me.”

She said this as if it were a prohibition, not a circumstance.

“You seem like an interesting person,” I said. “I’m sorry we hurt you.”

“I should be used to it by now,” she said. “It seems to be what people do.”

Again the conversation might have ended. But there was a factor in play which never would have occurred to me: Anabel was lonely. She still had one friend at Tyler, a lesbian named Nola who’d been her confederate in the butcher-paper incident, but the pressure of Nola’s prospectless crush on her made her difficult to take in high doses. All the other students, according to Anabel, had turned against her. They had reason to resent the special status she’d wangled as a filmmaker at a school that didn’t have a film program, but the real problem was her personality. People were attracted to her looks and wicked tongue and to the real-seeming possibility that she was an artistic genius; she had a way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness. The instructor who’d encouraged her to make films had also later propositioned her, which (a) was piggish, (b) was apparently not unusual, and (c) destroyed her faith in his assessment of her talent. She’d been on the institutional warpath ever since. This had clinched her pariah status, since, according to her, the other students cared only about professorial validation, the professorial nod, the professorial referral to a gallery.