Purity

  Anabel was convinced that I’d been unfaithful to her in Berlin—that this was why I hadn’t called her. To defend myself against this baseless charge, I’d told her more about Andreas than I should have. Not about the murder, not about my having been an accessory after the fact, but enough about his personality and history to explain both why I’d been attracted to him and why I’d run away from him. She’d concluded that he was a jerk who’d brought out the jerk in me, the jerk who’d returned from Berlin and asked for a divorce. But the person I’d actually been a jerk to was Andreas. I’d stood him up for our dinner date, and then I’d waited two months before sending him a stilted letter of apology, reassurance, and “warm wishes.”

  I could hear Anabel showering in the bathroom. There being nowhere to sit in the living room, I went and sat down on her bed. Outside, the sky seemed to have taken on the black solidity of a hillside you could walk right up. All the books on the nightstand were self-help and spirituality, titles Anabel would have sneered at just a few years earlier. I felt very sorry for her.

  She came out of the bathroom naked, her hair in a towel. “The shower’s nice,” she said. “You should take one, too.”

  “I’ll wait until I get back tonight.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to lock you in the bathroom.” She moved close to me, her pubic hair commanding my field of vision. “If you like me,” she said, “you’ll take a shower.”

  I didn’t like her, not anymore, but I still hadn’t found a way to say so. “Do you have any form of contraception that you haven’t destroyed with a pocket knife?”

  “First take a shower, and then I’ll tell you if I do.”

  There was a blast of thunder directly over the house.

  “You said you had something to show me,” I said. “That’s the only reason I came inside.”

  “But now it’s raining and there’s lightning.”

  “Being struck by lightning doesn’t sound too bad to me right now.”

  “It’s your choice,” she said. “Take a shower or be struck by lightning.”

  A middle was being excluded, and the middle was reality. I took a shower, listening to the thunder, and put my clothes back on. When I returned to the bedroom, Anabel was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her old Japanese silk robe, which she’d disarranged with poignantly transparent seductive intent, a breast hanging halfway out. Beside her was a shoe box.

  “Look who I found,” she said.

  She opened the box and took out Leonard. It was five or six years since I’d last seen him. Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.

  “Come say hi to him,” Anabel said, smiling at me with love.

  “Hello.”

  She picked up the bull and looked into his face. “Do you want to say hello to Tom?”

  I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.

  Anabel frowned at Leonard with coy reproach. “Why aren’t you saying hello?” She looked up at me. “Why isn’t he talking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Leonard, say something.”

  “He doesn’t talk anymore.”

  “He must be angry that you’re not with us anymore. I think he wants you to come home.” She cuddled the bull. “I wish you’d say something to me.”

  Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don’t think I’d ever hated her more than I did for exposing herself to the shame of my refusing to speak in Leonard’s voice.

  “I’m seeing your father tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’s not Leonard’s voice,” she said, frightened.

  “No. It’s my voice. Put that thing away.”

  She set the toy aside. Then she picked it up again. Then she set it down again. Her fear and indecision were terrible to see. Or maybe it was my own power that was terrible.

  “I don’t want to know about it,” she said. “Can you please just spare me?”

  I’d intended to spare her, but I hated her too much now. “He’s bringing me a check,” I said.

  She moaned and fell over as if I’d hit her. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “A large check,” I said.

  “Shut up! For God’s sake! I try to be nice to you and you spit in my face!”

  “He’s giving me money to start a magazine.”

  She sat up again, her eyes blazing now. “You’re a jerk,” she said. “That’s what you are. A jerk! You always were and you always will be!”

  I’d thought that nothing could be worse than the sight of her being hurt and shamed by me. But in fact I hated her even more for hating me.

  “Maybe twelve years is enough years of being made to feel that way,” I said.

  “It’s not what you feel, it’s what you are. You’re a jerk, Tom. You’re a fucking asshole journalistic jerk. You ruined my life and now you’re spitting on me, you’re spitting on me.”

  “You’re the one who did the spitting, as you may recall.”

  To her credit, her honesty and morality were still functioning. She said, more quietly, “You’re right. I was young and he ruined our wedding party, but you’re right, I did literally spit on someone.” She shook her head. “And now you’re making me pay for it. Both of you. Now the men are doing the spitting, because I was weak. I was always weak. I’m weak now. I failed. But the person I spat on had everything, while you’re spitting on somebody when she’s down. There’s a difference there.”

  “One obvious difference being that I’m not actually spitting,” I said coldly.

  “I’m so far down, Tom. How can you do this to me?”

  “I keep looking for a way to make you never call me again. I keep thinking I’ve found it, but then, no, the fucking phone rings.”

  “Well, you finally may have found it. Taking his money may do it for you. I’m thinking you’ll never hear from me again. There was still one thing in my life that you hadn’t perverted or stolen or destroyed. Now there’s nothing. I’m totally alone with nothing. Job well done.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “I hate you even more than I love you. And that’s saying something.”

  After a moment, her face turned red and she began to cry piteously, like a little girl, and it didn’t matter that I hated her, I couldn’t stand to see her in such pain. I sat down on the bed and held her. The rain had gone away, leaving behind a blue-gray curtain of cloud that looked almost wintry. I thought of winter as I held her, grew bored with holding her. The winter of no Anabel in my life.

  As if sensing it, she began to kiss me. We’d always relied on pain to heighten the pleasure that followed it, and it seemed to me we’d reached the limit of the psychic pain we could inflict. When she lay back and opened her robe, I looked at her breasts and hated their beauty so intensely that I squeezed a nipple and twisted it hard.

  She screamed and hit me in the face. I was murderously aroused and hardly felt it. She hit me again, on the ear, and glared at me. “Are you going to hit me back?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.”

  “No, I don’t want that.”

  I’d never spoken so violently to her. We’d reached the end of the road of our feminist marriage. “You wrecked the condoms,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Give me a baby. Leave me with something.”

  “No way.”

  “I think it could happen tonight. I have a sense about these things.”

  “I think I’d sooner kill myself than sign on for that.”

  “You hate me.”

  “I hate you.”

  She was still in love with me. I could see it in her eyes, the love and the pure inc
onsolable disappointment of a child. I had all the power, and so she did the only thing still available to her to stab me in the heart, which was to roll over submissively and raise the skirt of her robe and say, “All right, then. Do it.”

  I did it, and not once but three times before I escaped from the house the next morning. After each assault, she went straight to the bathroom. My state of mind was that of the crack addict crawling on the floor, looking for crumbs. I wasn’t raping Anabel, but I might as well have been. Pleasure was low on the list of what either of us was after. I was after what she’d been after with her film, a final and complete exhaustion of the subject of the body. What she was after, it seemed to me, was the sealing of her moral victimhood.

  At dawn, to a chorus of birds, I got up and dressed without washing. Anabel was facedown on the sweaty bed, corpse-still, but I knew she wasn’t sleeping. I loved her terribly, loved her all the more for what I’d done to her. My love was like the engine of a hundred-dollar car that had no business starting up and yet kept starting up. The murder and suicide I imagined weren’t figurative. I would keep going back, and it would be worse each time, until finally we were driven to the violence that released our love to the eternity it belonged to. Standing by the bed, looking down at my ex-wife’s body, I thought it might happen as soon as the next time I saw her. I thought it might even happen now if I said anything to her. So I picked up my knapsack and left the house.

  The full moon was setting in the west, a mere white disk, its light-casting power defeated by the morning. Halfway down the driveway, I entered golden sunlight and saw a bright red bird mating with a yellow female on a dead tree branch. The birds were too busy to mind my approach. The head feathers of the male, sticking straight out, a scarlet Mohawk, seemed to be sweating pure testosterone. Finished with the female, he flew straight at me, kamikaze style, barely missing my head. He landed on a different branch and glared in a blaze of aggression.

  The day was even hotter than the day before, and the air-conditioning on the bus was broken. When I finally got back to 125th Street, the sidewalk was crowded with sweat-gleaming women and children emerging from storefront churches. A stench of rotten cantaloupe was in the air, gastric and cloying, cut with exhaust from a Kennedy Fried Chicken. The pavement was shiny with a blackish vulcanized glaze of chicken grease, sputum, spilled Coke, and trashbag leakage.

  “My man Lucky,” Ruben said to me in my building’s lobby, which was littered with Sunday-morning betting slips. “You look like shit warmed over.”

  My answering machine was showing one new message. I was afraid it was from Anabel, but it was from a woman who sounded Jamaican, asking me to tell Anthony that her husband had died last night and that the funeral would be on Tuesday afternoon at such-and-such church in West Harlem. She repeated that I should tell Anthony that her husband had died. This was it, the only message, a Jamaican woman informing me, in a calm and very tired voice, that her spouse had died.

  I turned on the AC and left a message at the Carlyle for David Laird. Then I fell asleep and dreamed that I was in a many-roomed house where a party was happening. I’d fallen into a deep flirtatious conversation with a young dark-haired woman who seemed to like me, seemed ready to leave the party with me. The only impediment to effortless happiness with her was something I may or may not have said, something that made her think I might be a jerk. To my joy, I was able to tell her that a different man had said it. Andreas Wolf had said it. I knew this for a fact, and she believed me. She was falling in love with me. And just as I was beginning to understand that she must be Annagret, Andreas’s young girl, I realized instead that she was Anabel—a younger, softer Anabel, at once pliant and sportive, instilled with the best kind of knowledge about me, knowledge that felt loving and forgiving—except that she couldn’t possibly be Anabel, because the real Anabel was standing in a doorway, witnessing my flirtation. The dread I felt of her judgment, and of the punishment of interacting with her nuttiness, came directly from life. She looked stricken with betrayal and hurt. Worse yet, the girl had seen her and vanished.

  David returned my call late in the afternoon.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “An eight o’clock table at Gotham? Are you kidding me? Of course you can do it.”

  “I can’t take the money.”

  “What? That is beyond ridiculous. It’s criminally foolish. You can dedicate every one of your issues to sullying the good name of McCaskill, I still want you to have the money. If you’re worried about Anabel, just don’t tell her.”

  “I already told her.”

  “Tom, Tom. You can’t listen to what she says.”

  “I’m not. She’s going to think I took the money, and I’m OK with that. I just don’t want to take it.”

  “Stupidest thing I ever heard. You need to come to the Gotham and be plied with martinis. The check’s burning a hole in my briefcase.”

  “Not gonna do it.”

  “And this change of heart?”

  “I can’t have anything to do with her,” I said. “I appreciate how good you’ve been to—”

  “I’ll be frank with you,” David said. “I’m more than a little disappointed in you. I thought you’d finally quit trying to out-Anabel Anabel, now that you’re divorced. But everything you’re saying to me is bullshit.”

  “Look, I—”

  “Bullshit,” he repeated, and hung up on me.

  The next time I heard from David, four months later, it was through an intermediary, a retired New York City cop who worked as a private detective. His name was DeMars and he showed up at my door one afternoon without warning, having bullied his way past Ruben. He was walrus-mustached and intimidating. He said the simplest thing would be for me to show him my datebook and receipts for the previous four months. “It’s entirely routine,” he said.

  “I don’t see anything routine about it,” I said.

  “You been in Texas recently?”

  “I’m sorry—who are you?”

  “I work for David Laird. I’m especially interested in the last two weeks of August. Best thing for you is if you can show me you weren’t in Texas at any point then.”

  “I’m going to call David right now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Your ex disappeared,” DeMars said. “She sent her dad a letter that appears to be authentic. But we don’t know the circumstances of the letter, and, nothing personal, but you’re the ex. You’re the man we go to.”

  “I haven’t seen her since the end of May.”

  “Easiest for both of us if you can document that.”

  “It’s hard to prove a negative.”

  “Do your best.”

  Having nothing to hide, I handed over my receipts and credit-card statements. When DeMars saw that my August was richly documented—I’d been in Milwaukee with half the journalists in America, reporting on Jeffrey Dahmer for Esquire—he became less obnoxious and showed me copies of a postmarked envelope and the handwritten note it contained.

  To David Laird: I’m not your daughter. You won’t hear from me again. I’m dead to you. Don’t look for me. I won’t be found. Anabel.

  “Postmark is Houston,” DeMars said. “I need you to tell me who she knows in Houston.”

  “No one.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, see, here’s why I’m involved. David says he hasn’t seen her in more than a decade. He’s dead to her anyway, so why the letter? Why now? And why is she in Houston? I thought maybe you could shed some light.”

  “We just went through a bad divorce.”

  “Violent bad? Restraining-order bad?”

  “No, no. Just emotionally painful.”

  DeMars nodded. “OK, so an ordinary divorce. She wants to make a clean break, start a new life, and so on. But the way I read this letter is she’s afraid people are gonna think that someone did away with her. That’s the only reason to write it: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not actually dead.’ But
why would anyone think that in the first place? You see what I mean?”

  Anabel was so impractical and such a recluse that it was hard to imagine her in Houston. But something had clearly changed in her, because she hadn’t called me in four months.

  “We have her in New York on July 22,” DeMars continued, “taking five thousand in cash out of her bank. Same day, she leaves keys, no note, just the keys, at the building of her friend Suzanne. You didn’t see her in New York that day, did you?”

  “We’ve had no contact of any kind since May.”

  “But, see, if she doesn’t send that letter, nobody looks for her. My impression is she’s not exactly Miss Congeniality. It could have been years before anybody noticed she was missing.”

  “At the risk of sounding self-important, I think she wrote the letter as a message to me.”

  “How’s that work? Why not just write you a letter? Did she write you a letter?”

  “No. She’s trying to prove that she’s capable of not having any contact with me.”

  “Kind of an extreme way of going about that.”

  “Well, she’s extreme. It’s also possible she was trying to protect me, in case someone like you came looking for her.”

  “Bingo.” DeMars snapped his fingers. “I was hoping you’d be the one to say that. Because that’s my problem with the letter. Painful divorce, irreconcilable differences, and yet here she is, going out of her way to protect you? I don’t see it. Your typical angry ex, she’d like nothing better than to have people wondering if you’d offed her.”

  “That’s not Anabel. Her whole thing is being morally irreproachable.”

  “What about you? Any friends in Texas?”