Purity

  My communication lines with my dick were maybe not so very bad, because my response was to pull her face into mine, force her swollen lips into my sore ones. I can’t help thinking that if we’d done the sensible thing and gone ahead and fucked there, on the floor, we might have had a happy life together. But everything in the moment argued against it—my inexperience, my suspicion of my motives, Anabel’s strange notions of purity, her wish to be left alone, my wish not to harm her. We separated, breathing hard, and glared at each other.

  “I want it,” I said.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  Back on campus, I slept away the morning and went to the dining hall just in time to get food. I found Oswald at the table we preferred, and he greeted me with headlines.

  “Aberant to Friend: Enjoy the Party.”

  “Really sorry about that.”

  “Apologetic Aberant Cites Secret Laird Summit.”

  I laughed and said, “Hackett Found Guilty in Laird Hatchet Job.”

  “You’re blaming me for that?” Oswald batted his eyelashes.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Please tell me some butcher paper came into play.”

  The Monday issue of the DP was light work, because we had all weekend for it. By late afternoon we’d put it to bed and I was able to call Anabel. She’d slept until three and should have had nothing to report, but lovesickness makes the most minor thoughts and doings worthy of narration. We talked for an hour and then discussed whether to get together that night, since I wouldn’t have another free night until Friday.

  “So it begins,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “Your important responsibilities, my waiting. I don’t want to be the person who waits.”

  “I’m the one who’ll be waiting until Friday night.”

  “You’ll be busy, I’ll be waiting.”

  “You don’t have work to do?”

  “Yes, but tonight is my one chance to make you wait. I want you to have one little taste of what it’s going to be like for me.”

  If the logic had been anyone else’s, I might have become impatient, but I, too, wanted us to be like nothing else. To prolong an essentially semantic disagreement for half an hour, as we proceeded to do, didn’t frustrate me. It led me deeper into her singularity, our soon-to-be joint singularity. It meant keeping her voice in my ear.

  When we’d finally compromised by agreeing to meet for drinks in Center City—whence I imagined myself following her home again and this time gaining entry to her bedroom, gaining permission to put my hands on more highly charged parts of her body, maybe even gaining everything I wanted, provided she wanted it as much as I did—I ate a quick dinner and went to my room to read Hegel for an hour. I’d barely sat down when the call came from my sister Cynthia.

  “Clelia’s in the hospital,” she said. “They admitted her last night around midnight.”

  I was in such an Anabel state that my thought was: we had our first kiss around midnight. It was as if my mother had somehow known. Cynthia explained that my mother had been in the bathroom for four hours with a rising fever, unable to get away from the toilet. She’d finally managed to phone her gastroenterologist, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout, who was old-school enough to make house calls and fond enough of my mother to do it at eleven on a Saturday night. His diagnosis was not just an acute bowel inflammation but a complete nervous breakdown—my mother couldn’t stop deliriously defending Arne Holcombe from some unnamed accusation.

  “So I just got off the phone with the campaign manager,” Cynthia said. “Apparently Arne exposed himself to a female staffer.”

  “My God,” I said.

  “They tried to keep it from Clelia, but somebody told her. She kind of went out of her mind. Twenty-four hours later, she can’t leave the toilet long enough to call for help.”

  Cynthia was hoping I could fly to Denver. She had a big vote on unionization coming up on Friday, and Ellen was still furious with my mother for some remark she’d made about banjo players. (Ellen’s position then and ever after was: She’s a bitch to me, and she’s not actually my mother.) Cynthia had never entirely stopped being dubious of me morally, albeit in a friendly way, and she probably already feared (with good reason) that she’d end up stuck with the primary emotional care of her stepmother. I agreed to call the hospital.

  First, though, I called Anabel and luckily caught her before she’d left to meet me. I explained the situation and asked if she might come and see me in my dorm instead. Her response was dead silence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Now you see what I mean about it beginning,” Anabel said.

  “But this is an actual emergency.”

  “Try to imagine me in your dorm. The eyes on me. The smell of those showers. This is something you can imagine me doing?”

  “My mom is in the hospital!”

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said more kindly. “I’m just sick about the timing. It’s like everything is some sort of sign with us. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m disappointed.”

  I consoled her for nearly an hour. I believe this was the first time I ever really spoke ill of my mother; she’d previously been nothing worse than an embarrassment I’d kept to myself. I must have wanted to show Anabel that my loyalties were hers for the taking. And Anabel, though she identified with her own suffering mother, not only said nothing in defense of mine but helped me to sharpen my complaints with her. She groaned when I told her that my mother subscribed to Town & Country, and that she considered paper napkins déclassé and put out cloth ones, with napkin rings, at every meal, and that her idea of a chic department store was Neiman Marcus. “You need to tell her,” Anabel said, “that the people she admires all fly to New York and shop at Bendel’s.” Anabel may have renounced her privilege, but she was still defending it from parvenus. When I recall her snobbery, the innocent cruelty of it, she seems very young to me, and I even younger for feeling intoxicated by it and using it against my mother.

  The voice in Denver was hoarse and slurred with sedatives. “Your dumb old mother is in the hospital,” it said. “Doctor Schan … Vyllingerhout took one look at me … ‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’ He’s the most wo’r’ful man, Tom. Lef’ his bridge game for me, plays bridge on Saturday night … They don’t make physissans like that anymore. He doesn’t have to work—sisty-sis years old. A real arissocrat, I think I told you his family … very old family, Belgium. He comes on Saturday night straigh’ from his bridge game to dumb old me. Saturday night he makes a house call. Says I’m going to get better, not giving up until I’m better. Honestly, I’m so discouraged with this dumb old thing … He really is my savior.”

  I was encouraged that she seemed already to be moving on from Arne Holcombe to Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. I asked if she wanted me to come and see her.

  “No, sweetie. You’re sweet to offer but you have your magazine. To edit … your newspaper I mean. I’m so proud you’re editor in chief. It will really impress … the law schools.”

  “Journalism schools all the more.”

  “I’m just happy to think of you with your fine, interesting, ambitious friends … all your bright prospects. You don’t have to come and see dumb old me. Rather you not see me this way. Not my best … you can come when I’m better.”

  I’m not proud to have seized on permission granted under sedation not to go and see her. I think she did genuinely want me to have my own life, but this doesn’t lessen the offense of my fear of being around her, my fear of implication in her sickness and recovery, and I ought to have known—did know, but pretended I didn’t—that Cynthia, who was a very good person like our dad, would take up my slack and drive to Denver in her VW minibus after her union vote.

  Not that I gave it much thought. My head was a radio playing Anabel on every station. There was no magazine in the world in whose pages I wouldn’t have pointed to her picture and said: That one. N
o words in the language that stopped my heart like ANABEL CALLED on my office message board. (Never ANNABELLE. She was vain about her name and spelled it for whoever took the message.) We spoke every night and I began to resent the DP for interfering. I stopped eating beef and much of anything else; I was constantly half nauseated. Oswald clucked over me, but I was half nauseated with everything, including my best friend. I only wanted Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel. She was beautiful and smart and serious and funny and stylish and creative and unpredictable and liked me. Oswald delicately called my attention to signs that she might be somewhat crazy, but he also showed me an article in the business section of the Times: McCaskill, still swimming in profits from Soviet grain sales, had an estimated value of $24 billion, and its dynamic president, David M. Laird, was aggressively expanding its operations overseas. I did the math on David—five percent, four heirs—and arrived at a figure of three hundred million dollars for Anabel, and felt even sicker.

  I had to see her three more times before she let me in her bedroom. She was no doubt mindful of the number four, but there was also a peculiar circumstance that I learned of some hours into our third meeting as a couple, after I’d emerged victorious from protracted struggle with fear and feminist self-scrutiny and dared to ease my hand up under the maroon velvet dress she was wearing. When my fingers finally reached her underpants and touched the source of the heat between her legs, she drew breath sharply and said, “Don’t start.”

  My hand retreated immediately. I didn’t want to harm her.

  “No, it’s OK,” she said, kissing me. “I want you to feel me. But only for you, not for me. You don’t want to start with me.”

  I took my hand out of her dress altogether and stroked her hair, to impress on her that I wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t selfish. “Why not?” I said.

  “Because it won’t work. Not tonight.”

  She sat up on her sofa and pressed her knees together with her hands flat between them. She made me promise that, no matter what happened, I would never tell anyone what she had to tell me. Ever since she was thirteen, she said, her periods had been in perfect sync with the phases of the moon. It was a very weird thing: her bleeding invariably began nine days after the moon was full. She said she could be trapped in a cave for years and still know what day of the lunar month it was. But there was something even weirder: ever since she’d had her unhappy disease in high school (this was her phrase, “my unhappy disease”), she could only achieve satisfaction in the three days when the moon was fullest, no matter how hard she tried on other days of the month. “And believe me, I’ve tried,” she said. “There’s nothing but frustration at the end of what you were starting.”

  “It’s a half-moon tonight.”

  She nodded and turned to me with worry in her eyes, what I took to be the endearing worry that she was strange or damaged, or the even more endearing worry that I might be repulsed by her. But I wasn’t repulsed. I was thrilled that she’d confided in me and wanted me enough to worry about repulsing me. I thought I’d never heard of anything more amazing and singular: in perfect sync with the moon!

  She must have felt relieved by how ardently I kissed her and reassured her, because her actual worry had to do with the rather obvious corollary to her confession: if I was committed to complete mutuality, to doing nothing with her that she couldn’t equally join in, I was going to be getting laid three days a month at best. She assumed that I could see this corollary. I didn’t see it. But even if I had, three days a month would have looked pretty great from where I was sitting that night. (Later, indeed, when we were married, it did come to look pretty great, in the rearview mirror.)

  A week later, arriving early at Thirtieth Street for the SEPTA train, I had an impulse to buy something for Anabel in honor of our fourth date. I wandered down to the book-and-magazine store, hoping it might have a copy of Augie March, which Oswald had taught me to consider the finest novel by a living American, but it didn’t. My eye was caught instead by a stuffed animal, a miniature black plush-toy bull with stubby felt horns and sleepy eyes. I bought it and put it in my knapsack. On the train, crossing the Schuylkill, I saw the full moon gilding fair-weather clouds over Germantown. I was already so far gone that the moon seemed to me the personal property of Anabel. Like something I could touch and was about to.

  Anabel, in her kitchen, wearing a stunning black dress, opened another bottle of Château Montrose. “This is the last bottle,” she said. “I gave the other eight to the winos behind the liquor store.”

  Eights and fours, everywhere eights and fours.

  “They must have thought you were their angel,” I said.

  “No, in fact, they hassled me because I didn’t have a corkscrew.”

  I’d expected the night to be magical through and through, but instead we had our first fight. I made a joking offhand allusion to her father’s wealth, and she became upset, because everywhere she went she was hated as the rich girl, and I was not to joke about it, she couldn’t be with me if that was how I thought of her, she hated the money enough without my reminding her of it, she was already knee-deep in the blood of it. After my tenth unavailing apology, I found some backbone and got angry. If she didn’t want to be the rich girl, maybe she should stop wearing a different dress from Bendel’s every time I saw her! She was shocked by my anger. Her deer’s eyes bulged at me. She poured her wine into the sink and then upended the bottle over it. For my information, she hadn’t bought a new dress since her senior year at Brown, but this clearly didn’t matter to me, I clearly had my own idea about her, and I’d dragged my wrong idea into what was supposed to have been a perfect night. Everything was ruined. Everything. And so on. She finally stormed out of the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom.

  Sitting by myself, listening to the sound of her showering, I had the opportunity to replay our fight in my head, and it seemed to me that everything out of my mouth had been the words of a jerk. I was gripped by my old sense of ineluctable male wrongness. My only hope of cleansing was to dissolve my self in Anabel’s. It seemed that black and white to me. Only she could save me from male error. By the time she came out of the bathroom, wearing lovely white flannel pajamas with pale-blue piping, I was shivering and crying.

  “Oh dear,” she said, kneeling at my feet.

  “I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I just love you.”

  I was in wretched earnest, but my dick was eavesdropping in my corduroys and sprang to life. She rested her cheek and damp hair on my knee. “Did I hurt you?”

  “It was my fault.”

  “No, you were right,” she said. “I’m weak. I love my clothes. I’m going to give up everything, but I can’t give up my clothes yet. Please don’t think badly of me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. We just needed to have a fight tonight, that’s all. It was a test we had to go through.”

  “I love your clothes,” I said. “I love how you look in them. I’m so in love with you I’m sick to my stomach.”

  “I can stop wearing them in public,” she said. “I’ll only wear them when I’m with you, and it won’t have to mean anything, because you’ll know it’s only me not being strong enough yet.”

  “I don’t want to be the person who tells you what you can’t do.”

  She kissed my knee gratefully. Then she saw the lump in my pants.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Boys can’t help it. I only wish I could unlearn everything I know about it for you.”

  She then suggested I take a shower, which seemed perfectly reasonable, since she’d taken one herself. After I’d dried myself with one of her luxurious towels, I put all my clothes back on, not wanting to appear presumptuous. When I stepped out of the bathroom, I found the apartment lit only by the moon. Her bedroom door, which had always been shut, was now open the width of one finger.

  I went to it and stopped at the threshold, my ears full of the sound of my heart, which seemed to be pounding wit
h the impossibility of what had happened to me. Nobody went in Anabel’s bedroom, but she’d left the door open for me. For me. My head was so full of significance I thought it might explode, the way the world would have to when it encountered an impossibility. It was as if no one existed, had ever existed, except Anabel and me. I pushed open the door.

  The bedroom was a dream of purity in strong monochrome moonlight. The bed was a high four-poster with a calico quilt under which Anabel was lying on her side. There were sheer curtains on the dormer windows, one Amish rug on the floor, a spindly chair and desk (the latter bare except for the watch and earrings she’d been wearing), and a high antique dresser topped with a lace cloth. Sitting on the dresser were a threadbare teddy bear and an eyeless and equally threadbare toy donkey. On the wall were a pair of unframed paintings, one of a horse from an unsettling close-up perspective, the other of a cow from a similar perspective, both of them unfinished-looking, with bare patches of canvas, which was Anabel’s way as an artist. The spareness of the room felt rural-Kansan, nineteenth-century, especially in the moonlight. The animals reminded me that I hadn’t given Anabel her present.

  “Where are you going?” she called out plaintively when I went to retrieve my knapsack.

  I came back with the little plush bull and sat on the edge of the bed like a father with his girl. “Forgot I had a present for you.”

  She sat up in her pajamas and took the bull. For a moment I thought she was going to hate it; was going to be scary Anabel. But she wasn’t that Anabel in her bedroom. She smiled at the bull and said, “Hello, little one.”

  “It’s OK?”

  “He’s perfect. I haven’t had a new animal since I was ten.” She glanced at her dresser. “The others are too worn out to talk to me anymore.” She stroked the bull. “What’s his name?”

  “Not Ferdinand.”

  “No, not Ferdinand. Only Ferdinand is Ferdinand.”