Purity (68 page)

I walked away from the grave and stayed away until he was throwing dirt on the remains. Then I helped him finish the burial and cover the spot with leaves and dirty snow. By the time we returned to the road, a fog had gathered, brighter in the east where the night was ending. We stowed the shovels in the trunk. After Andreas had slammed down the lid, he let out a falsetto whoop. He jumped up and down and whooped again.

“Jesus, shut up,” I said.

He grasped me by the arms and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Tom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Let's get out of here.”

“You need to understand what this means to me. To have a friend I can trust.”

“If I tell you I understand, can we hit the road?”

His eyes were shining strangely. He leaned into me, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. But it was merely a hug. I returned it, and we stood for a while in awkward embrace. I could feel him breathing, feel the humidity of his sweat escaping from beneath his army jacket. He put a hand on the back of my head, his fingers closing around my hair the way Anabel's might have. Then, abruptly, he broke away from me. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“One minute,” he said.

I watched him run back up the ravine and kick through the brambles. I hadn't liked his whooping, and I liked this additional delay even less. I lost sight of him in the trees, but I could hear sticks snapping, the rustle of his jacket on branches. Then a deep rural silence. And then, faintly but distinctly, the clink of a belt buckle. The sound of a zipper.

To avoid hearing more, I walked up the road in the direction of our tire tracks. I tried to put myself in Andreas's position, tried to imagine the relief and exhilaration he was feeling, but there was simply no squaring his avowed remorse with defiling his victim's final grave.

His business was done in a few minutes. He came running up the road, running and jumping. When he reached my side, he turned in a complete circle with his arms in the air and the middle finger of each hand extended. He whooped again.

“Can we leave?” I said coolly.

“Absolutely! You can drive twice as fast now.”

He seemed not to notice that my mood had changed. In the car, he was manically voluble, bouncing from subject to subject—how it could work for me to live with him and Annagret, how exactly he was going to get me into the archives, and how the two of us could collaborate, him unlocking the forbidden doors, me writing the stories. He urged me to drive faster, to pass trucks on blind curves. He recited old poems of his and explicated them. He recited long passages of Shakespeare in English, banging out the blank-verse rhythm on the dashboard. Every now and then, he paused to whoop again, or to pummel me in the arm with two fists.

When we finally reached his church in Berlin, on Siegfeldstraße, my mouth tasted metallic with exhaustion. He wanted to grab a quick breakfast and go straight to the Citizens' Committee meeting, but I said, truthfully, that I had to lie down.

“Leave it to me, then,” he said.

“OK.”

“I'm never forgetting this, Tom. Never, never, never.”

“Don't mention it.”

I popped the trunk lid and got out of the car. Seeing Andreas take out the shovels in full daylight, I wondered, belatedly, which one of them had been the murder weapon. In my sleep-deprived state, it seemed very bad that I might have used that particular shovel.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “You all right?”

“I'm fine.”

“Get some sleep. Meet me here at seven. We'll have dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

I never saw him again. When I awoke, in my filthy sheets, it was an hour before the rental-car office closed. I returned the car and walked back to my squat in the dark. I still had a hankering to see Andreas's face and hear his voice—I have it even as I write this—but the sadness from which I'd been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright. I lay down on the bed and wept for myself, and for Anabel, and for Andreas, but above all for my mother.

*   *   *

The approach of thunderstorms was making the New Jersey sky three-dimensional, a many-tiered vault of variously shaded cloud, gray and white and hepatic green, when Anabel led me out of the woods and up through a pasture to Suzanne's parents' house. She claimed that she wanted to show me something quickly before taking me back to catch my bus, but I knew that my actually catching the 8:11 bus was as arrant a fantasy as our ever finding a way to live together again, if only because the business of escaping from her, of enforcing my right to leave, was so painful that I shied from it like a brutalized animal. Anything at all was preferable, and there was also the prospect of further sex, which promised minutes of relief from consciousness.

And still I balked at the door of the house. It was a sixties-modern summer place with a mountain view and some apple trees behind it. Anabel went right in, but I hung in the doorway, my stomach suddenly upset like the sky, my heart racing with what I now think was straightforward PTSD.

“Won't you come inside with me?” she said in a tone whose very sweetness was insane.

“I think after all maybe not.”

“Do you realize you left your toothbrush here last time?”

“My dentist keeps me well supplied.”

“The man who ‘forgets' his toothbrush in a woman's house is a man who wants to come back.”

My panic intensified. I looked over my shoulder and saw a fractal of lightning on the next ridge over; I waited for the thunder. When I looked into the house again, Anabel was not in sight. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver's feelings to consider …

I stepped into the house and closed the screen door behind me. With my help, she'd cleared the furniture from the living room, leaving only a mat for her yoga and meditation. She hadn't officially abandoned her film project, it was merely on hold while she sought to regain her calm and centeredness. She was living on the half of my inheritance I'd given her as part of our divorce settlement. After returning from Berlin, I'd needed no more than a day with her to recognize that my homesickness had been grounded in a fantasy. She'd said she wasn't spaghetti with eggplant, but to me she really was. And so I'd built us a new fantasy of divorce as our only hope of reuniting.

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.”