Purity (60 page)

Two other crises bear noting. The first was my acceptance by the journalism school at the University of Missouri, an excellent school that my mother had encouraged me to apply to because it was affordable and not so far from Denver. I may have been besotted with Anabel, and I may have turned against my maleness as an impediment to our union of souls, but the male part of me was still there and well aware that she was strange, that I was young, and that a vegetarian diet wasn't agreeing with my stomach. I imagined regrouping in Missouri, becoming a lean and mean reporter, sampling some other girls before deciding whether to commit to a life with Anabel. I made the mistake of breaking the Missouri news to her on the night before a full moon. I tried to jolly her into her bedroom, but she went silent. Only after hours of sulking and prodding, hours we could have spent in bed, did she lay out my thinking for me in its full male vileness. She didn't miss a thing. “You'll be there having your excellent journalist's life, you'll be
happy
not to be with me, and I'll be here waiting,” she said.

“You could come with me.”

“You can see me living in Columbia, Missouri? As your tagalong girl?”

“You could stay here and work on your project. It's only two years.”

“And your magazine?”

“How am I going to start a magazine with no money and no experience?”

She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook.

“This is what I have,” she said, pointing to a figure of some $46,000 in the savings ledger. I watched her write me a check for $23,000 in her elegant artist's hand. “Do you want to be with me and be ambitious?” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “Or do you want to go to Missouri with all the other hacks?”

I didn't point out that checkbook gestures aren't so meaningful coming from a billionaire's daughter. Doubting her vow not to accept more money from her father was as grievous a wrong as doubting her seriousness as an artist. She'd already trained me never to do it. She was rabid on the subject.

“I can't take your money,” I said.

“It's
our
money,” she said, “and this is the last of it. Everything I have is yours. Use it well, Tom. You can go to school with it if you want to. If you're going to break my heart, this is the time to do it. Not from Missouri a year from now. Take the money, go home, go to journalism school. Just don't pretend you're in this with me.”

She went and locked herself in her bedroom. I don't know how many times I had to promise I wasn't leaving her before she let me in. When she finally did, I tore up the check—“Don't be a fool, that's good money!” Leonard cried from the headboard—and seized her body with a new sense of possession, as if becoming more hers had made her more mine.

My mother was furious about my decision. She saw me starting down the path of indigence my sisters were treading, the path of my father's stupid idealism, and it did me no good to cite the many famous journalists who hadn't gone to grad school. She was even more upset, a month later, when I told her I was coming to Denver only for a week that summer. I'd spent all of eight days with her since her hospitalization, and I felt I owed her (and Cynthia) a month at home, but Anabel had been counting on our starting a life together the minute I graduated. She took my proposal of a month apart as a catastrophic betrayal of everything we'd planned together. When I suggested that she join me in Denver, she stared at me as if I, not she, were the insane one. Why I didn't resolve the crisis by breaking up with her is hard to fathom. My brain was apparently already so wired into hers that even though I knew she was being unreasonable and heartless, I didn't care. All drugs are an escape from the self, and throwing myself away for Anabel, doing something
obviously wrong
to make her feel better, and then reaping the ecstasy of her renewed enthusiasm for me, was my drug. My mother cried when I told her my travel plans, but only Anabel's tears could change my mind.

Anger with the two of us was broadcast in my mother's swollen face at the graduation party. There was no safe way to explain to my friends and their normal-looking parents that she didn't always look like this. Everyone was sweating mightily by the time Anabel arrived, wearing a drop-dead sky-blue cocktail dress and accompanied by Nola. They went straight to the wine, and it was a while before I could pry my mother away from Oswald's parents and lead her to the corner where Anabel was sitting in Nola's little cloud of disaffection. I made the introduction, and Anabel, stiff with shyness, rose and took my mother's hand.

“Mrs. Aberant,” she bravely said. “I'm so glad to finally meet you.”

My poor disfigured pants-suited mother, confronting the vision of that sky-blue cocktail dress: Anabel could never forgive her for what she did, but eventually I could. Something resembling a condescending smile appeared on her bloated face. She released Anabel's hand and looked down at Nola, who was dressed in punky black. “And you are…?”

“The depressive friend,” Nola said. “Pay me no mind.”

Anabel had wanted to make a good impression on my mother; she just needed a modicum of coaxing out of her shyness. None was forthcoming. My mother turned away and told me she wanted to change her clothes before dinner.

“You need to talk to Anabel,” I said.

“Maybe another time.”

“
Mom
. Please.”

Anabel had sat down again, her eyes wide with injured disbelief.

“I'm sorry I'm not at my best,” my mother said.

“She came all the way over here to meet you. You can't just walk away.”

I was appealing to her sense of propriety, but she was too sweaty and miserable to heed it. I gestured to Anabel to join us, but she ignored me. I followed my mother out into the hallway.

“Just tell me how to get back to my room,” she said. “You stay at your nice party. I'm so happy to have met Mr. and Mrs. Hackett. They're fine, interesting, responsible people.”

“Anabel is extremely important to me,” I said, trembling.

“Yes, I can see she's quite pretty. But so much older than you.”

“She's
two years
older.”

“She looks so much older, sweetie.”

Half blind with hatred and shame, I led my mother outside and over to her room. By the time I got back to the party, Anabel and Nola were gone—a relief, since I was hardly in a mood to defend my mother. At dinner with the Hacketts, my mother's face was an unreferred-to elephantine presence, and I refused to say a word to her directly. Afterward, in the humid shade of the Locust Walk, I informed her that I couldn't spend the evening with her, because Anabel's thesis project was being screened at Tyler at nine thirty. I'd dreaded telling her this, but now I was glad to.

“I'm sorry your mother is such an embarrassment,” she said. “This dumb condition of mine is ruining everything.”

“Mom, you're not embarrassing me. I just wish you could have talked to Anabel.”

“I can't stand having you angry at me. It's the worst thing in the world for me. Do you want me to come and see her movie with you?”

“No.”

“If she means so much to you that you won't even speak to me at dinner, maybe I should go.”

“No.”

“Why not? Is her movie immoral? You know I can't stand nudity or gutter language.”

“No,” I said, “it's just not going to make sense to you. It's about the visual properties of film as a purely expressive medium.”

“I love a good movie.”

Both of us must have known she'd loathe Anabel's work, but I managed to persuade myself to give her a second chance. “Just promise you'll be nice to her,” I said. “She's worked all year on this, and artists are sensitive. You have to be really, really nice.”

Anabel's project was titled, at my suggestion, “A River of Meat.” She'd wanted to call it “Unfinished #8,” because in her view the film wasn't quite finished, because she never quite finished anything, because she got bored and moved on to the next artistic challenge. I told her that only she would know that her film wasn't finished. She'd obtained two short 16 mm film clips, one of a cow being bolt-gunned in the head in a slaughterhouse, the other of Miss Kansas being crowned Miss America 1966, and she'd labored for the better part of a year to reprint and hand-doctor and intercut the two clips. Her favorite filmmakers were Agnès Varda and Robert Bresson, but her project owed more to the hypnotic musical tapestries of Steve Reich. She alternated a single frame with its negative one to one, one to two, two to one, two to two, and so on, and she introduced other rhythmic variations by reversing the frames, rotating them by ninety degrees, running them backward, and hand-coloring the frames with red ink. The resulting twenty-four-minute film was radically repellent, a full-scale assault on the visual cortex, but you could also see genius in it if you looked at it right.

My mother's all-time favorite movie was
Doctor Zhivago
. During the last minutes of the screening, I could hear her muttering angrily. When the lights came up, she hurried to the door.

“I'll just wait outside,” she said when I caught up with her.

“You need to say something nice to Anabel first.”

“What can I say? That is the most horrible, disgusting thing I've seen in my entire life.”

“A little nicer than that would be good.”

“If that's art, then there is something wrong with art.”

A wave of anger came over me.

“You know what?” I said. “Just tell her that. Tell her you hated it.”

“I'm not the only person who would hate it.”

“Mom, it's fine. She's not going to be surprised.”

“Do
you
think it's art?”

“Definitely. I think it's amazing.”

Down at the front of the screening room, Anabel was standing with Nola, not looking at us, some terrible scene with me no doubt brewing inside her. The few students and professors in the audience had fled for their lives. My mother spoke to me in a low voice.

“I don't even recognize you, Tom, you've changed so much in the last six months. I'm very disturbed by what's happened to you. I'm disturbed by a person who would make a movie like that. I'm disturbed that she's the reason you suddenly quit the fine job you worked so hard to get, and you're not pursuing your graduate studies.”

I, for my part, was disturbed by my mother's steroidal ugliness. My life was lovely Anabel, and I could only hate the bloat-faced, slit-eyed person who questioned it. My love and my hatred felt indistinguishable; each seemed to follow logically from the other. But I was still a dutiful son, and I would have taken my mother back to Penn if Anabel hadn't come stalking up the aisle.

“That was great,” I said to her. “It's amazing to see it on the big screen.”

She was glaring at my mother. “What did
you
think?”

“I don't know what to say,” my mother said, frightened.

Anabel, her shyness now dispelled by moral outrage, laughed at her and turned to me. “Are you coming with us?”

“I should probably take my mom home.”

Anabel flared her long nostrils.

“I can meet you later,” I said. “I don't want her taking the train by herself.”

“And she couldn't possibly take a cab.”

“I've got like eight dollars on me.”

“She has no money?”

“She didn't bring her purse. She has this idea about Philly.”

“Right. All those scary black people.”

It was wrong to be talking about my mother as if she weren't there, but she'd wronged Anabel first. Anabel stalked back down the aisle, opened her knapsack, and returned with a pair of twenty-dollar bills. What do they say at NA meetings? The thing you promise yourself you'll never go so low as to do for drugs is the very thing you end up doing? I would have said that it was bad in eight different ways to take money from Anabel and hand it to my mother, but that's what I did. Then I called a cab and waited with her in silence in front of President's Hall.

“I've had some rough days,” she said after a while. “But I think this has been the worst day of my life.”

The moon above us, in the Philly haze, was a dissolving beige lozenge. My response to its fullness was Pavlovian, a quickening of the pulse that was hard to distinguish, in the moment, from my fear of my mother's pain and from the thrilling cruelty of what I was doing to her. My chest felt too tight for me to say anything, even that I was sorry.

*   *   *

I met Anabel's father later that summer. For two months, she and I had played house with some of her remaining forty thousand dollars, sleeping until noon, breakfasting on toast, trolling thrift stores to improve my wardrobe, escaping the heat at double features at the Ritz, and perfecting our wok skills. On my birthday, we made a plan to become more serious about our work. I began to write a manifesto for
The Complicater
while she embarked on the year of reading she needed to do for her grand film project. She went to the Free Library every weekday afternoon, because we'd decided it was healthy to be apart for some hours and she didn't want to wait for me at home like a housewife.

David Laird called on one of those afternoons. I had to explain to him that Anabel had a boyfriend and that I was that person.

“
Interesting
,” David said. “I'm going to tell you a little secret: I'm glad to hear a male voice. I was afraid the wind was blowing in the direction of that mentally-ill dyke friend of hers, just to spite me.”

“I don't think that was ever in the cards,” I said.

“Are you black?” he said. “Handicapped? Criminal? Drug addict?”

“Ah, no.”

“
Interesting
. I'll tell you another secret: I like you already. I take it you're in love with my daughter?”