Purity (55 page)

“‘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.

I learned some of this and many other things in the thrilling two hours we spoke that night. Though I didn't feel myself to be an interesting person, I did have listening skills. The more I listened, the more her voice softened toward me. And then we uncovered an odd coincidence.

She'd grown up in Wichita, in a stately house on College Hill. She belonged to the fourth generation of one of the two families that wholly owned the agribusiness conglomerate McCaskill, the country's second-largest privately held corporation. Her father had inherited a five percent share of it, married a fourth-generation McCaskill, and gone to work for the company. As a girl, Anabel said, she'd been very close to her father. When the time came to send her away to Rosemary Hall, which her mother had attended before its merger with Choate, she said she didn't want to go. But her mother was insistent, her father uncharacteristically unwilling to indulge her, and so she arrived in Connecticut at the age of thirteen.

“For the longest time, I had everything turned around exactly wrong in my mind,” she told me. “I thought my mother was terrible and my father was wonderful. He's extremely smart and seductive. He knows how to have his way with people. And when he started betraying my mother, after I went away to school, and when my mother started drinking after breakfast, I realized that she'd been trying to protect me by sending me away. She never admitted it to me, but I know that's what it was. He was killing her, and she didn't want him to kill me, too. I was so unjust to her. And then he killed her. My poor mother.”

“Your father killed your mother?”

“You have to understand the way McCaskill works. They're obsessed with keeping the business in the family, so nobody on the outside can know what they're doing. It's all about secrets and family control. When a Laird marries a McCaskill, it has to be forever, because they're obsessed with family solidarity. So after I went away to school and my father started cheating on my mother, there really wasn't anything for her to do but drink. That's the McCaskill way. That and drugs and dangerous hobbies like piloting helicopters. You'd be surprised how much of my extended family is strung out on something. At least one of my brothers is strung out as we speak. You either go to work for the company and increase the family riches—which is what
they
call the McCaskill way—or else you kill yourself with hedonism, because there's no reality principle to hold you back. It's not like anybody in the family needs to make a living.”

I asked what had happened to her mother.

“She drowned,” Anabel said. “In our pool. My father was out of town—no fingerprints.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A little over two years ago. In June. It was a nice warm night. Her blood alcohol would have knocked a horse down. She passed out in the shallow end.”

I said I was very sorry, and then I told her that my dad had died in the same month as her mother. He'd retired only two weeks earlier, after counting the years to his sixty-fifth birthday, never speaking of “retirement,” only of “retirement from teaching,” because he still had so much energy. He was looking forward to reconstructing his caddis-fly collection and finally getting his PhD, to learning Russian and Chinese, to hosting foreign-exchange students, to buying an RV that met my mother's requirements for outdoor comfort. But the first thing he did was volunteer for a two-month zoological mission to the Philippines. He wanted to scratch his old itch for exotic travel while I was still young enough to be spending summers at home, so that my mother wouldn't be alone. When I drove him to the Denver airport, he told me that he knew my mother could be difficult but, if I ever felt impatient with her, I had to remember that she'd had a rough childhood and wasn't in the best of health. His speech was loving and the last I ever heard from him. A day later, he was in a small plane that hit the side of a mountain. A four-paragraph story in the
Times
.

“What day did this happen?”

“It was June nineteenth in the Philippines. June eighteenth in Denver.”

Anabel's voice became hushed. “This is extremely weird,” she said. “My mother died on the same day. We were both half orphaned on the exact same day.”

It now seems to me somehow crucial that the day was arguably
not
the same—her mother had died on the nineteenth. And until that Friday night I'd never been a superstitious person. My father had waged a personal war against the overvaluation of coincidence; he had a classroom riff, sometimes repeated at home, in which he “proved” that chewing Juicy Fruit gum causes hair to be blond, by way of illustrating proper scientific inference. But when Anabel spoke those words, after an hour and a half in which my world had been shrinking to the size of her voice in my ear—and here again it seems crucial that we had our first real conversation on the phone, which distills a person into words passing directly into the brain—I shivered as if my fate were overtaking me. How could the coincidence not be significant? The interesting person who'd pronounced me a jerk not six hours earlier had now been confiding in me, in her lovely voice, for an hour and a half. It felt incredible, magical. After the shiver had passed, I had an erection.

“What do you think it means?” Anabel said.

“I don't know. Maybe nothing. That's what my dad would say. Although—”

“It's very weird,” she said. “I wasn't even planning on going to your office today. I was coming back from the Barnes Collection, which is a different story, why anybody still thinks Renoir
père
needs to be looked at, but there is such a person at Tyler and I have the misfortune of being in his lecture class, not having taken it last year when everyone else did. I'd imagined that an exception might be made, but, safe to say, nobody's in a mood to make exceptions for me now. But I was on the platform at Thirtieth Street, and I got so upset thinking about what you'd done to me that I let my train go by. And that seemed like a sign that I should go and find you. Because I missed the train. I've never gotten so involved in a thought I've missed a train.”

“That does seem like a sign,” I said, at the urging of my erection.

“
Who are you?
” she said. “Why did this happen?”

In the state her voice had put me in, I didn't consider these questions nutty, but I was spooked by their seriousness. “I am an American, Denver-born,” I said. And added, pompously, “Saul Bellow.”

“Saul Bellow is from Denver?”

“No, Chicago. You asked me who I am.”

“I didn't ask who
Saul Bellow
is.”

“He won the Pulitzer Prize,” I said, “and that's what I want to do.” I was trying to seem a tiny bit interesting to her, but instead I sounded idiotic to myself.

“You want to be a novelist?” Anabel said.

“Journalist.”

“So I don't have to worry about you taking my story and putting it in a novel.”

“Not going to happen.”

“It's my story. My material. It's what my art comes out of.”

“Of course it is.”

“But journalists betray people for a living. Your little reporter betrayed me. I thought he was interested in what I was trying to express.”

“That's not the only kind of journalist.”

“I'm trying to figure out whether I should be hanging up now. Whether these are
bad
signs. Betrayal and death, those are bad signs, aren't they? I think I should be hanging up on you. I'm remembering that you hurt me.”

But of course she couldn't hang up.

“Anabel, please,” I said. It was the first time I'd spoken her name. “I want to see you again.”

I saw her again, but not before going to Lucy's house for weak coffee and some sort of brown Betty with oatmeal in it. Lucy's house was overwarm and reeked, to me, of fucking like bunnies. “You shouldn't feel bad about the article,” she told me. “I only called you to warn you a righteous tornado was heading your way. Anabel needs to read Nietzsche and get over her thing about good and evil. The only philosopher she ever talks about is Kierkegaard. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this OK?'”

“I still feel bad,” I said.

“She called me yesterday to talk about you. Apparently you had some sort of marathon conversation?” Lucy helped herself to more brown Betty. She wasn't fat, but she was getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs. “She asked me if you're Good, capital G, which I took to mean she might want you in her pants. You certainly need to be in someone's pants, but I'm not sure that hers are the right ones. I know what I'm talking about. I was head over heels for her myself, our senior year at Choate. All the teachers were in awe of her, and she always had funds and got these crazy-strong buds they've started growing hydroponically. She had trouble relating to people, but not when she was stoned. She'd get massively stoned at parties, sort of dangerously stoned, and then have sex with somebody, and then get up at six in the morning and write college-level papers. I wanted to sleep with her myself, but she'd sworn off sex by the time we roomed together. Now she's given up pot, too. She's become Saint Anabel. I still love her, and I felt bad about the article, but it was really her fault for talking to your reporter. She sets herself up for these things.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Not for the longest time,” Lucy said. “I asked her how often she masturbates, and she acted all appalled with me for asking. As if she hadn't been one of the wildest girls in the history of Choate. But I think she's sort of messed up sexually from that. She was too young and she also got VD. It's unfortunate, but the upshot is I don't think she's a great candidate for you.”

I was still processing this information when Lucy took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, away from its towers of crusty cookware, and up to the room she shared with her boyfriend, Bob. The bed was unmade, the floor strewn with clothes. “I have a new plan,” she said. She pressed her forehead into mine and propelled me backward onto the bed. “We can start slowly and see how this goes. What do you think?”

“What about Bob?”

“That's my problem, not yours.”

Just a week earlier, I might have been down with the plan. But now that Anabel was in the picture, I felt disappointed by the idea that sex, which had assumed such fearsome proportions in my mind, was supposed to be as natural and homey as eating brown Betty. There was also no escaping the conclusion that Lucy was trying to keep me away from Anabel. She was all but saying so. We necked on her paisley sheets for no more than ten minutes before I excused myself.

“This is fun, though, don't you think?” Lucy said. “We should have thought of this months ago.”

“Definitely fun,” I said. To be polite, I added that I looked forward to the next time.

How different my Sunday afternoon with Anabel was. We met at the art museum under a cold gray sky. Anabel came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions. I'd asked for instruction in art, and she swept through the galleries impatiently, issuing blanket dismissals—“snore,” “wrong idea,” “religion blah blah blah,” “meat and more meat”—until we came to Thomas Eakins. Here she stopped and visibly relaxed.

“This is the guy,” she said. “This is the only male painter I trust. I guess I also don't mind Corot and his cows. He gets the sadness of being a cow. And Modigliani, too, but that's only because I used to have a crush on his work and wished he could have painted me. All the rest of them, I swear to you, are telling lies about women. Even when they're not painting women, even when they're painting a landscape: it's lies about women. Even Modigliani, I don't know why I forgive him, I shouldn't. I guess because he's Modigliani. It's probably good I never met him. Later on, I can show you all the women painters in this collection—oh, wait.” She snorted. “There are no women painters. This entire collection is an illustration of what happens without women on the scene to keep men honest. Except for this guy here. God, he's honest.”