Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The following Saturday night, Lucy and Bob threw a Halloween party at their house. Oswald and I put on suits and dark glasses and earphones and went as Secret Service agents. Bob’s many friends, people who’d been living within a mile of their alma mater for nearly a decade, people for whom it was a political statement to invest their energies in absurdities and trivialities, had come in ungainly conceptual costumes (“I am the Excluded Middle,” a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door) and were filling the place with reefer smoke. Bob himself was wearing moose antlers, signifying Bullwinkle, with Lucy as his sidekick, Rocky. She’d blackened her nose, covered the rest of her face with brown greasepaint, and dressed in brown stretch pajamas with a tail of real animal fur attached above her butt. She scampered over to Oswald and me and offered to let us touch her tail.

“Must we?” Oswald said.

“I’m Rocky the Flying Squirrel!”

She seemed possibly stoned. I was already embarrassed to be there with Oswald, who had no patience with counterculture zaniness. I scanned the living room for younger, edgier faces and was surprised to see Anabel, standing alone in a corner, her arms crossed firmly. Her costume was no costume — jeans and a jean jacket.

Lucy could see where I was looking. “You know what her costume is? ‘Ordinary person.’ Get it? She can only pretend to be ordinary.”

“That’s Anabel Laird,” I explained to Oswald.

“Hard to recognize without the butcher paper.”

Anabel caught sight of me and widened her eyes in her hanged-person way. It was interesting to see her in denim — it really did look like a costume on her.

“I should go talk to her,” I said.

“No, she needs to try to mingle,” Lucy said. “This happened at our Bastille Day party, too. People can tell she’s worth talking to, they’re coming up to me and asking who she is, but they’re afraid to go near her. I don’t know why she bothers coming to parties where she doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her.”

“She’s shy,” I said.

“That’s one word for it.”

Anabel, seeing that we were talking about her, turned her back on us.

“Take us to your beer,” Oswald said.

I was following him to the kitchen when Lucy grabbed my hand and said she had something to show me. We went upstairs to her bedroom. In the harsh light of its ceiling fixture, she looked like Lucy but also like a small animal. I asked what she wanted me to see.

“My tail.” She turned around and wagged the fur at me. “Don’t you want to touch my tail?”

Who doesn’t enjoy touching fur? I stroked her tail, and she backed into me, grinding her butt against my thighs, dislodging the tail. This was sort of hot and sort of not. She brought my hands up to her breasts, which were lolling free under the pajamas, and declared, “I’m the little squirrel that loves to fuck!”

“Wow, OK,” I said. “But aren’t you also, like, hosting a party?”

She turned herself around in my arms, took off my shades, and pressed her face to mine. Her greasepaint had a strong crayon smell. “Has anybody ever lost their virginity to a squirrel?”

“Hard to know,” I said.

“Would it even count?”

She put her tongue in my mouth and then led me to the bed. Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal, and I was feeling strangely unconcerned about Anabel; I intuited that being pounced on by someone else might even advance my cause with her. But when Lucy got around to drawing my hand under the waistband of her pajamas, saying, “Feel what a furry little animal I am,” I couldn’t help seeing her silliness through the appalled eyes of Oswald, whose personality made me think of Anabel’s, her judgments, her hanged-person eyes, which made me pull my hand away. I stood up and put my shades back on. “I’m sorry,” I said.

Lucy was too programmatic about sex to betray, or possibly even to feel, any hurt. “That’s OK,” she said. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”

I could smell the greasepaint on my face; I must have looked like I’d been eating shit. When I went to the bathroom to clean myself up, I discovered a large brown smudge on the collar of my dress shirt, the only good one I owned.

Downstairs the music was King Crimson, a favorite of Bob’s. Anabel was nowhere to be seen. Oswald was near the front door with the Excluded Middle, who was holding a rubber-banded bundle of pamphlets.

“Our friend here has published a chapbook of poetry,” Oswald explained to me.

“Poetry should be free,” the Excluded Middle said, handing me a chapbook. “This is my gift to you.”

“Read the first one for Tom,” Oswald urged him. “I love the joie de vivre.”

“ My bare soles squoosh the black spring muck ,” the Excluded Middle recited. “ The earth is my WHOOPEE CUSHION! ”

“There you have it,” Oswald said. “A miracle of poetic compression.”

“Did you see Anabel?” I said. “Anabel Laird?”

“She just walked out.”

“Wearing a jean jacket?”

“The very one.”

I hurried out to the street. When I got to the corner of Market Street, I saw Anabel at the next corner, waiting for the light. I could feel that she’d become, in the space of half an hour, the person in the world it mattered most to me to catch sight of. She must have heard my running footsteps, but she didn’t look at me, even when I reached her side.

“How could you leave?” I said, breathing hard. “We hadn’t talked yet.”

She angled her face away from mine. “What makes you so sure I wanted to talk to you?”

“I was attacked by a rabid squirrel. I’m sorry.”

“You can still go back,” Anabel said. “She seems very determined to take you. I’m guessing you’re the problem she and the Handyman are having? I saw him in those ridiculous antlers and I thought: that is more perfect than he even knows.”

“Can we go somewhere?” I said.

“I’m going home.”

“Right. OK.”

“I can’t stop you from taking the same train, though. If you follow me to my door and ask politely, I might let you sit in my kitchen.”

“Why did you come to the party?” I said. “You knew you’d hate it.”

“Do you want me to say it was because I thought you’d be there?”

“Was that the reason?”

She smiled, still not looking at me. “I’m not going to draw your conclusions for you.”

Her apartment was on the top floor of a well-maintained old house, not a student place, and her kitchen was a vision of cleanliness. She took her shoes off at the door and asked me to do the same. In a rustic white pottery bowl on the table were three perfect apples, on the windowsill two volumes of The Vegetarian Epicure , on the stove a gleaming copper-clad skillet. There was also, on the largest wall, a poster from a butcher shop, a diagram of a cow segmented and labeled as cuts of beef. I studied it, learning where the brisket and the chuck were, while Anabel left the kitchen and came back with an expensive-looking bottle.

“Here we have Château Montrose,” she said. “The same vintage as my birth year. My father sent me a whole case for my birthday, which I’d be doing him a favor if I said was no worse than insensitive and symbolically grotesque, given how my mother died. I suspect his actual motives were more sinister. But I won’t drink alone, for obvious reasons, and Nola is the only person who ever comes here, and she can’t drink red wine with the medication she’s on, so I still have ten bottles. It’s your lucky night.”

“What happened to the other two?”