Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  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.

  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 comi
ng 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.

  “Here’s what’s fucked up,” I said as we climbed out of the ruined basin and up to a less buggy height. “Just speaking for myself. A month goes by, and I’m feeling so freakish and depressed and ashamed, because of the last time we got together, that I can barely show my face to another human being. And so I have to come out here, and once I’m here it’s practically biological that I’m going to end up staying thirty-six hours, and raising all sort of false hopes and expectations—”

 
Anabel spun around. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  “Do you want me to kill you?”

  She shook her head emphatically, no, no, she didn’t want to be killed.

  “Then don’t call me.”

  “I wasn’t strong enough.”

  “Don’t get me out here again. Don’t do this to me.”

  “I wasn’t strong enough! For God’s sake! Do you have to rub my face in how weak I am?” And she walked in a small circle with her hands bent into claws near her face, which looked as if a swarm of hornets had somehow got inside her head and were stinging her brain.

  “Have pity on me,” she said.

  I seized her and kissed her, my Anabel. She was snotty and teary and hot-breathed and dear. Also quite seriously disturbed and all but unemployable. I kissed her to try to make the pain stop, but in no time I also had my hands down the back of her corduroys. Her hips were so narrow that I could take her pants down without unbuttoning them. We’d been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took out my Swiss Army knife, I thought she might be thinking of it, too. But instead she was stabbing the five remaining condoms dead.