Purity (59 page)

“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 with 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.”

I don't know why the name Leonard popped into my head, but I said it.

“Leonard?” She peered into the bull's sleepy eyes. “Are you Leonard?” She turned its plushy face toward mine. “Is he Leonard?”

“Yes, I am Leonard,” I said in the Belgian accent of my mother's gastroenterologist.

“You're not an American bull,” Anabel said coyly.

Leonard explained, through me, that he came from a very old aristocratic cow family in Belgium, and that a series of misfortunes had brought him to Thirtieth Street Station in severely straitened circumstances. Leonard turned out to be a terrible snob, appalled by the ugliness of Philadelphia and the tackiness of America, and he was delighted with the prospect of entering Anabel's employ—he could tell she was a kindred spirit.

Anabel was entranced, and I was entranced to be entrancing her. I was also afraid to set Leonard aside, afraid of what came next, and I now see that I couldn't have found a better way to make Anabel feel safe than to play with a stuffed animal in her little girl's room. I'd blundered into being perfect for her. When we finally dismissed Leonard and she pulled me down on top of her, there was a new look in her eyes, the unconcealable and unfakable look of a woman seriously in love. It's not something a man sees every day.

I wish I could remember the sensation of being taken by her, or maybe it's more accurate to say that I wish I could go back to that moment as the person I am now, could be in that state of trembling wonder but also have enough experience to appreciate how it felt to be inside a woman for the first time; to enjoy it, basically. But it wasn't as if I'd enjoyed my first beer or my first cigar, either. The beauty of Anabel naked literally made my eyes hurt, and I was nothing but a thousand worries. If I remember anything from the moment at all, it's the dreamlike sensation of walking into a room where two figures had been for my entire life, two figures who knew each other well and were talking about realistic adult things I knew nothing about, two figures indifferent to my very late arrival. These figures were the things so graphically
down there
, my dick and Anabel's cunt. I was the young and excluded third party, Anabel a distant fourth. But this may have been some actual dream from some other time.

What I do remember clearly is what a full moon did for Anabel, how she came and came. I was too clumsy to manage it in the purely thrusting way I would have liked to, but she showed me different ways. It seemed inconceivable that such a total pleasure machine couldn't come at other times of the month, but later experience seemed to bear this out. She was a nearly silent comer, not a screamer. In the warmer light of dawn, she confessed to me that during her now-ended years of celibacy she'd sometimes waited for her best day and spent the entirety of it in her bedroom, masturbating. The vision of her beautiful, endless, solitary self-pleasuring made me wish I could be her. Since I couldn't, I fucked her for a fourth and last sore time. Then we slept until the afternoon, and I stayed in her apartment for another two days, sustaining myself with buttered toast, not wanting to waste the moon's fullness. When I finally got back to campus, I resigned from the
DP
and let Oswald take over.

*   *   *

My mother had warned me that her face had swollen up from the high doses of prednisone that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had her on, but I was still shocked when I met her at the airport. Her face was a ghastly fat cartoon of itself, a miserable moon of flesh, her cheeks so bloated they pushed her eyes half shut. Her apologies to me were piteous. She said she was
sick
about the state she was in for an
Ivy League graduation
she'd so looked forward to.

I told her not to worry, but I was sick about it, too. No matter how often you remind yourself that a face is just a face, that it has nothing to do with the character of the person within, you're so used to reading people through their faces that it's difficult to be fair to a deformed one. My mother's new face repelled the very sympathy it ought to have elicited from me. She was like a shameful secret of mine, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow in a checkered pants suit, when I walked her across the Green to my Phi Beta Kappa induction. I avoided meeting anyone's eyes, and when I'd deposited her in a seat in College Hall, I had to force myself to walk, not run, away from her.

After the ceremony, in what felt like a straightforward purchase of my freedom from her, I gave her my Phi Beta Kappa key. (She wore it on a fine gold chain for the rest of her life.) I left her in her assigned room in the Superblock to freshen up—the weather was bludgeoningly hot and humid—while Oswald and I set up our dorm rooms for a wine-and-cheese party. I'd conceived of the party as a way to introduce my mother and Anabel in a casual setting. Anabel was dreading it, but my mother had no reason to. She disapproved of Anabel without even having met her, and I'd been too cowardly to tell her that Anabel was coming to the party.

Back in November, I'd imagined that my mother would be pleased that I was officially dating a McCaskill heir. But she'd heard from my sister how Anabel and I had met. Cynthia had been amused by the butcher-paper story, but all my mother could see in it was kookiness, radical feminism, and public nudity. In her weekly dronings to me, she promulgated a new, invidious distinction between
entrepreneurial
wealth and
inherited
wealth. She also rightly suspected that I'd quit the job of executive editor because of Anabel. I explained that I wanted to focus on my reportorial skills—I was writing, with Anabel's blessing, a major piece on scrapple—but my mother could smell our sex acts all the way from Denver. When I went home for Christmas and informed her that I'd not only become a vegetarian but was returning to Philly after only a week, her colon flared up badly again.

Let it not be thought that I didn't know what I was getting into with Anabel, or that I made no effort to escape it. Three days a lunar month we were a pair of junkies who'd scored the cleanest shit ever, but on the other twenty-five I had to contend with her moods, her scenes, her sensitivities, her judgments, her so easily hurt feelings. We seldom actually fought or argued; it was more often a matter of processing, endlessly, what I or someone else had done to make her feel bad. My entire personality reorganized itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach. It's possible to describe this as an emasculation of me, but it was really more like a dissolution of the boundaries of our selves. I learned to feel what she was feeling, she learned to anticipate what I was thinking, and what could be more intense than a love with no secrets?

“A word about the toilet,” she'd said one day, early on.

“I always raise the seat,” I said.

“That's the problem.”

“I thought the problem was guys who think they can aim through the seat.”

“I appreciate that you're not one of them. But there's a spatter.”

“I wipe the rim, too.”

“Not always.”

“OK, room for improvement.”

“But it's not just on the rim. It's on the underside of the rim and on the tile. Little drops.”

“I'll wipe there, too.”

“You can't wipe the whole bathroom every time. And I don't like the smell of old urine.”

“I'm a guy! What am I supposed to do?”

“Sit down?” she suggested shyly.

I knew this wasn't right, couldn't be right. But she was hurt by my silence and became silent herself, in a more grievous way, with a stony look in her eyes, and her hurt mattered more to me than my rightness. I told her I would either be more careful or start sitting down, but she could sense that I was resentful, that my submission was grudging, and there could be no peace in our union unless we
truly agreed about everything
. She began to weep, and I began the long search for the deeper cause of her distress.

“
I
have to sit down,” she said finally. “Why shouldn't
you
sit down? I can't not see where you spatter, and every time I see it I think how unfair it is to be a woman. You can't even see how unfair it is, you have no idea, no idea.”

She proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get her to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up. I made this adjustment to my personality—and a hundred others like it in our early months together—and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn't, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)

She was more lenient of difference in the bedroom. It was certainly an unhappy day when she connected the dots for me and explained that we couldn't have intercourse when only one of us could take satisfaction in it. At my suggestion, after hours of pained discussion and silences, we tried it anyway, and I had to suffer the guilt of her sobbing when I came inside her. I asked if she'd had
no
pleasure, to which she sobbed that the frustration outweighed the pleasure. We had the whole unfairness conversation again, but this time I was able to point out that, by her own admission, she wasn't normal, i.e., that we weren't dealing with a structural gender imbalance. In the end, since she loved me, and was probably afraid of losing me to someone more normal, she agreed to make other arrangements for me. These were a little strange but very creative and, for a while, satisfactory. First I had to take a shower, then we had to converse with Leonard and get his amusing Belgian bull's-eye take on the news of the day, then we undressed, and then she—there's no other way to put it—played with the dick. Sometimes it was a camera slowly panning over her body and then shooting its favorite parts. Sometimes she wrapped it in her cool, silky hair and milked it. Sometimes she nuzzled it until it wet her face, as if it were a shower head. Sometimes she took it in her mouth, her gaze not moving from it to my eyes until the moment she swallowed. She was affectionate to the dick in much the same way she was affectionate to Leonard. She told me it was pretty like I was pretty. She claimed that my semen smelled cleaner than other semen she'd had the misfortune of smelling. But the strangest thing, in hindsight, was that she always made the dick not part of me. She didn't like me to kiss her while she was touching it; she preferred that I not even touch her with my hands until she was finished with it. And always, as I discovered, she was counting. When a full moon came around again, restoring normalcy, she informed me when an orgasm of hers had equalized our tallies for the month. And then everything was OK with us. Then we were one again.