Purity (50 page)

“If you want to come out and go for a hike with me,” she said, “that would be very nice. I would like that. But you have to say it's what
you
want.”

“But I didn't call you,” I said.

“But you were the one who brought up getting together. So just be honest with me now.”

“Is this something you want?”

“Not unless you want it and you say so like a human being.”

“But that perfectly mirrors my own sentiments. So.”

“Look, I
called
,” she said. “You could at least—”

“What could I do?”

“Do you think I'm going to
harm
you if you let your defenses down for one tiny half second? I mean, what do you think I'm going to do? Make you my slave? Force you to be married to me again? It's a hike, for God's sake, it's just a hike!”

Simply to avoid the two-hour version of this conversation—wherein Party A tried to prove that Party B had made the fatal statement that prolonged the conversation in the first place, and Party B challenged Party A's version of events, and this, in turn, there being no actual transcript, compelled Party A to reconstruct from memory the conversation's overture and Party B to offer a reconstruction that differed from Party A's in certain crucial respects, which then necessitated a time-devouring joint effort to collate and reconcile the two reconstructions—I agreed to go out to New Jersey and take a hike.

Anabel was cleansing her spirit on land that belonged to the parents of her younger friend and only fan, Suzanne. One of my first actions after requesting a divorce was to sleep with Suzanne. She'd asked me out to dinner as a kind of ambassador for Anabel, intending to talk me into reconsidering the divorce, but she was so worn out from listening to Anabel's complaints about me and about the New York art world, in nightly two-hour phone calls, that I ended up talking her into betraying Anabel. I must have been trying to make Anabel want a divorce as much as I did, but things hadn't worked out that way. She'd terminated her friendship with Suzanne and accused me of refusing to rest until I'd stolen or polluted every last thing she had. But the upshot, according to her curious moral calculus, was that both Suzanne and I owed her. I continued to take Anabel's calls and get together with her, and Suzanne allowed her to keep living on the New Jersey property, which Suzanne's parents, who'd relocated to New Mexico, were trying to sell at an unrealistic price.

The frosty bus ejected me at a nowhere little intersection in the woods. For a split second my eyeballs fogged up in the humidity. A kind of atmospheric curfew had been imposed by the heat—everything felt close and lush. Greenhouse. I saw Anabel step out of some trees where she'd been hiding. She was smiling broadly and, all things considered, inappropriately. My face did something grotesque and inappropriate in reply.

“‘Hello, Tom.'”

“‘Hello, Anabel.'”

Her extraordinary mane of dark hair, whose intricate care and increasingly frequent colorings probably occupied her more than any activity except sleeping and meditating, was all the thicker and more splendid in the steam of summer. Between the top of her beltless corduroys and the bottom of a tight plaid short-sleeved shirt was a strip of naked belly that could have been a thirteen-year-old's. She was thirty-six. I was two months short of thirty-four.

“You're allowed to come closer to me,” she said at the moment I was about to come closer.

“Or not,” she added, at the moment I was deciding not to.

Bus fumes lingered in the buggy road cut.

“We're sort of perfectly out of sync here,” I said.

“Are we?” she said. “Or is it just you? I don't feel out of sync.”

I wanted to point out that, by definition, a person couldn't be in sync with a person who was out of sync with her; but there was a logic tree to consider. Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point, since the job of retracing the steps would itself result in utterances to which I would inevitably produce a certain percentage of complicating responses; and so I'd learned to be exceedingly careful about what I said in our first moments together.

“I should tell you right now,” I said, “that I absolutely have to catch the last bus back into the city tonight. It's a really early bus, like eight o'clock.”

Anabel's face became sad. “I won't stop you.”

In the minute I'd been off the bus, the sky had steadily grown less gray. Sweat was popping out all over me, as if somebody had turned on a broiler.

“You always think I'm trying to detain you,” Anabel said. “First I bring you out here when you don't want to come here. Then I make you stay here when you want to be gone. You're the one who's always coming and going, but somehow you have the idea that I'm the one pulling the strings. Which, if
you
feel powerless, just imagine how I feel.”

“I wanted to get it said,” I said carefully. “I had to say it sometime, and if I'd said it later, it might have seemed like I'd been trying to hide it from you.”

She tossed her mane with displeasure. “Because of course it would disappoint me. Of course it would break my heart if you had to catch the eight eleven bus. You're standing there wondering: What is the best moment to convey this heartbreaking news to your clinging, suffocating, former whatever-I-am?”

“Well, as you're kind of demonstrating right now,” I pointed out, “both approaches carry their own risk.”

“I don't know why you think I'm your enemy.”

Cars were approaching on the main road. I moved up the smaller road toward Anabel, and she asked me if I'd thought she would be
disappointed
that I wasn't spending the night.

“Possibly, a little bit,” I said. “But only because you'd mentioned that you didn't have anything planned all day tomorrow.”

“When do I ever have anything planned?”

“Well, exactly. And that's why the fact that you went so far as to mention it—”

“Instantly became translated in your mind into the threat of recrimination if you decided not to spend tomorrow with me, too.”

I inhaled. “There's an element of truth to that.”

“Well, good,” she said. “And I'm suddenly not sure I want to see you at all, so.”

“That's fine,” I said, “although I wish you'd told me that before you'd invited me out here and I'd spent half a day on buses.”

“I didn't invite you. I accepted your offer to come out. There's a big difference there. Especially when you show up so full of animosity, and the first thing out of your mouth is how soon you have to leave. The first thing out of your mouth.”

“Anabel.”

“
You
rode the bus all day.
I
sat here waiting for you. Who has it worse? Who's more pathetic?”

It was humiliating to do the logic tree with her. Humiliating how ready I was to contest the pettiest point, humiliating to still be doing it after having done it so infernally much in the previous twelve years. It was like beholding my addiction to a substance that had long since ceased to give me the slightest kick of pleasure. Which was why our meetings now had to take place in the strictest secrecy. Anywhere else but deep in the woods, we would have been too ashamed of ourselves.

“Can we just hike?” I said, shouldering my knapsack.

“Yes! Do you think I want to stand here talking like this?”

The little road ran near the boundary of Stokes State Forest. We'd had a wet spring, and the plant kingdom of the ditches and the successional meadows and the stonier-sloped woods was fantastically green. Obscene amounts of pollen were in the air, the trees burdened with the bright dust of their own fertility, the swollenness of their leaves. We squeezed through the jaws of a rusty gate and went down an old dirt road so badly washed out that it was more like a creek bed. Weeds liable to repent of their exuberance very soon—weeds already bigger than they ever ought to have been, weeds on steroids, weeds about to lean and buckle and be ugly—shouldered in so high on both sides that we had to walk single file.

“I don't suppose I'm allowed to ask you why you ‘have to' go back tonight,” Anabel said.

“Not really, no.”

“It would be just too painful for me to hear you have a brunch date with Winona Ryder.”

My presumptive interest in dating much younger pretty girls, now that I was divorced, had become a leitmotif of Anabel's. But my actual date the next day was for dinner, not brunch, and was not with a girl but with Anabel's father, whom she loathed and hadn't seen in more than a decade. Despite our well-demonstrated pattern of recidivism, I'd allowed myself to believe that I really wouldn't ever hear from her again, and that I could see her father without fear of being castigated for it.

“Isn't that what the girlies like to do now?” Anabel said. “Meet for ‘brunch'? I do believe there's no more sickening word in the English language. The mingled smells of quiche lorraine and sausage grease.”

“I have to go back because I need to get some sleep, not having had any last night.”

“Oh, right. I woke you up. I still need to be punished for that.”

I managed not to respond. I was starting to remember chunks of binge that I'd blacked out from my previous visit, but it felt less like remembering than reliving. Past and future mingled in the land of Tom and Anabel. The New Jersey sky was a low-hanging steambath of churning flocculence, darkening and then yellowly brightening in random places that gave no clue about the sun's actual location or, thus, about what time it was or where east and west might be. My disorientation deepened when Anabel led me up into woods once haunted by the Lenape tribe. It was simultaneously five and one and seven and last month and tomorrow afternoon.

Anabel stayed ahead of me, her corduroy butt directly in my line of sight. She led me along deer trails, long-legged like a deer herself, skirting anything that looked like poison ivy. She was no longer life-threateningly malnourished the way she'd been in the years leading up to our separation, but she was still thin. Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

We were coming down a spongy rust-brown hillside of pine needle when I saw that she'd unbuttoned her shirt. Its little tails fluttered at her sides. She didn't turn back but started running down the hill. How oppressively hot the woods were, compared to the road! I followed my ex-wife into a small clearing by a lake that appeared to have dried up, though not before drowning all the trees that had once stood in the basin. It was a forest of big gray sticks, the same metallic color as the sky. A silvery heron lifted itself into the air.

“Here,” Anabel said. There was moss and rock and bare dirt underfoot. She shrugged off her shirt and turned around and showed herself to me. Her areolae were too big and outrageously red-red to bear looking at. It was as if her skin were a cream-colored silk into which the blood from matching punctures had seeped extensively. I averted my eyes.

“I'm trying to become less shy with you,” she said.

“Seems to be going pretty well today.”

“So look at me.”

“All right.”

Her blush was highlighting the long, thin line of scar tissue on her forehead—a vestige of the same childhood horse-riding accident that had cost her most of her two front teeth, which had been capped expensively, if not altogether imperceptibly. Between these two teeth was a gap that to me had always been a sexy thing. Her little come-hither gap. The continual suggestion of a tongue.

She shook her breasts at me and shuddered with shyness and turned away, embracing the trunk of a beech tree. “Look, I'm a tree hugger,” she said.

This was the point at which we were supposed to reverse course and scamper back down to the unitary trunk of the logic tree, all the yes-no branchings converging in assent: yes yes yes. I took off my clothes and discovered that although we were divorced I'd packed six condoms in my little knapsack.

Anabel, lying prone on moss and dirt, offering herself like an original Lenape woman, told me these weren't necessary.

“How so not necessary?”

“Just not,” she said.

“To be discussed later,” I said, tearing open a package.

I was still so thin in 1991 that I didn't really have a body at all. What I had was more like an armature of coat-hanger wire with a few key sensory parts attached to it—a lot of head, a fair amount of hands, an erection either tyrannical or absent, and nothing else. I was like a thing drawn by Joan Miró. I was all idea. Six times now, this weird contraption had hauled itself out to the scenic Delaware Water Gap region to be part of some bad idea that Anabel and I now jointly had about ourselves. It wasn't snuggly, it wasn't nice. It was her lying down on something hard or squalid and the coat-hanger-wire contraption jumping on furiously.

I asked if I was hurting her.

“Not …
damaging
me.… … as far as I can tell…”

She said this with an ironic twinkle. There was a football-size rock near her head. I wondered if she'd deliberately lain down by this rock to suggest a thing that she was still too shy with me to ask for. I wondered if the idea was for me to pick up the rock and smash her skull with it.

“How about now?” I said, thrusting hard.

“Now damage possible.”

All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we'd had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and compulsive sex we'd had to get divorced. It was a way of raging against the giant nothing that arguing had ever done to save us. It was the one argument that each of us could lose with honor. But then it was over and there was nothing again.