Purity (63 page)

I heard her close the bedroom door behind her. Our marriage, four hours old, couldn't have been going worse, and I felt entirely to blame. I hated my novella for having done this to her. And yet I'd been happy working on it, had been markedly less depressed in the six weeks since I'd abandoned
her
plan for me,
The Complicater
. I sat for an hour at the kitchen table, in a deepening cold fog of depression, and waited to see if Anabel might come out of the bedroom. She didn't. Instead I began to hear the sharp gasps of her unsuccessfully resisting tears. Full of pity for her, I went into the bedroom and found it dark. She was crumpled up on the bare floor by the windows.

“What have I done?” I cried.

Her answer came out slowly, in fragments punctuated by my apologies and her tears: I'd lied to her. I'd kept secrets from her. Both of our wedding presents were about
me
. I'd broken my promises to her. I'd promised that she was the artist and I was the critic. I'd promised that I wouldn't steal her story, but she could tell from one paragraph that I'd stolen it. I'd promised that we wouldn't compete, and I was competing with her. I'd deceived her and ruined our wedding day …

Each reproach landed like acid on my brain. I'd heard it said that there is no pain worse than mental torture, and now I believed it. Even the worst of our premarital scenes had been nothing like this; it had always been fundamentally OK me dealing with temperamental Anabel. Now I was experiencing her psychic pain directly as my own. The heaven of soul-merging was a hell. Clutching my head, I ran away from her and threw myself on the living-room sofa and lay there for some hours, experiencing mental torture, while Anabel did the same in the bedroom. I kept thinking, this is our wedding night, this is our wedding night.

It must have been two in the morning before I worked up enough hatred of my novella to stand up and start burning it, page by page, on the kitchen stove. Anabel eventually smelled the smoke and came staggering in, very pale, and watched me in silence until the last page was burned and I burst into tears.

She was immediately all over me, full of comfort, desperate with love. How I craved that love! How we both craved it! Better than the best drug after the agony of withdrawal from it: the smell of her teary face, the soft avidity of her mouth, the warm solidity of her body, the naked fact of her. It was almost as if we'd deliberately manufactured unspeakable pain to achieve this level of wedding-night bliss.

Without being aware of it, however, I'd made a second terrible mistake, which came to light at our party, two nights later. The party was already uncomfortably weighted against the distaff, because Nola had failed to show up (she'd moved to New York, in part to get over her feelings for Anabel) and one of Anabel's Brown friends had bailed at the last minute, while Cynthia and five of my Penn friends and three of my Denver friends had come from near and far. But Oswald had brought good mix tapes and seemed to be developing a brother's-best-friend thing for Cynthia, which was fun to watch happening, and Anabel had drunk enough to be enjoying my other friends' stories about me, rather than feeling threatened by them, and I was proud of how beautiful she looked in her strapless party dress.

I was clearing the floor for dancing when our buzzer rang. Anabel, hoping it was Nola, ran to the intercom in the kitchen. I couldn't hear her over the party noise, but she came back pale with fury. She beckoned me into the bedroom with a jerk of her head and shut the door behind us.

“How could you?” she said.

“What?”

“It's my
father
.”

“Oh no.”

“The only way he could have known is if you told him. You!” Her face twisted up. “I can't believe this is happening to me!”

It was true: David, in a recent phone call, had coaxed out of me the date of our party, so that he could send us, he said, a very small wedding present. I'd emphasized that the party was for friends, not family.

“I specifically told him he wasn't invited,” I said.

“My God, Tom, how could you be so stupid? Haven't you learned
anything
about him?”

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But can we just try to make the best of it?”

“No! The party is over. I'm pulling the plug. This is my worst nightmare.”

“Did you let him in?”

“I had to! But I'm not leaving this room until he's gone.”

“Let me deal with it.”

“Oh right, good luck with that.”

Out in the living room, David had set down a load of small presents and a jeroboam of Mumm and was jovially introducing himself to our guests. His face lit up further at the sight of me. “There he is! The groom! Congratulations! You're looking very dashing, Tom, as well you should.” He gave me a crushing handshake. “I meant to be here two hours ago, we had a problem with the plane. Where's my little girl?”

I tried to answer coldly, but my tone was simply factual. “She doesn't want you here.”

“Doesn't want her only parent at her wedding party?” David looked around the room, appealing to our silent guests. The stereo was playing “Remote Control.” “She's my favorite person in the world. How could I miss her wedding party?”

“I really think it's better if you go.”

David stepped around me and rapped on the bedroom door. “Anabel, honey? Come out and join us before the wine gets warm.”

To my surprise, the door opened immediately. Anabel drew her head back and spat in David's face. The door slammed shut again.

Everybody saw it, nobody said a word. “Remote Control” continued to play while David wiped spit from his eyes. When he lowered his hand, he looked a decade older. He smiled at me weakly. “Enjoy the years,” he said, “until she does the same to you.”

*   *   *

Her long months of preliminary reading done, Anabel went to work on her ambitious project. It was a film about the body. She couldn't get over how strange it is that a person can live for fifty or seventy or ninety years and die without having made the most basic acquaintance with the body that is the sum of her existence: that there are so many places on the body—certainly places on the head and back that she can't directly see, but even places on her arms and legs and torso—to which, in all those years, she won't have paid as much attention as a butcher pays to cuts of beef.

The surface area of her own body was about sixteen thousand square centimeters, and her plan was to inscribe a grid of 32-square-centimeter “cuts” on it with a fine-tipped black marker. Except on her feet and face and fingers, these “cuts” would be simple 57 × 57 millimeter squares. All five hundred of them would appear in her film. She intended to take a full week to acquaint herself with each one—to neither slight nor privilege any one 32-cm
2
part of her body; to be able to say, when she died, that she'd truly known all that could be seen of it—and she'd assigned herself the daunting task of doing something fresh and compelling with every cut. The differences might be purely filmic, but more often they'd involve images relating to the thoughts and memories that a particular cut inspired. In this respect, the project was closer to performance art than to film. If she could stick to her schedule, the performance would last ten years, the creative challenge steadily increasing. She didn't know how long the final film would be, but she was aiming for twenty-nine and a half hours, an hour for each day of the lunar month. Her larger ambition was to reclaim possession of her body, cut by cut, from the world of men and meat. After ten years, she'd own herself entirely.

I loved the idea, and she loved me for loving it. One hot July afternoon, she let me be the one to make the first black mark on her body, a grid encompassing two of her left toes, whose surface area it had taken her half a day to determine accurately; she'd left ink dots that I connected. “Now you have to leave me alone with it,” she said.

“I want to know every inch of you myself.”

“I'll always come back to you,” she said gravely. “In ten years I'll be all yours.”

I kissed the toes and left her alone with them. What was ten years?

If she could have worked faster, and if artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin hadn't risen to prominence, and if video art hadn't suddenly all but extirpated experimental film, and if she hadn't been paralyzed by jealousy of my smaller but completable journalism projects, it's conceivable that her film would have come to something. But a year went by and she was still on her left ankle. I now see that she must have quickly become bored with the surface of her body—there's a reason we go through life without paying much attention to it—but to her it felt as if the world were out to thwart her.

Naturally, I bore the brunt of this. A wrong word at the breakfast table or a distracting smell from something I was cooking (“Smell is hell,” she liked to say) could ruin a workday. Even a capsule newspaper review of a “competitor” could shut her down for a week. With her tacit permission, I took to vetting
The New Yorker
and the arts section of the
Times
and tearing out potentially upsetting items before she could read them. I also answered our phone, paid our bills, and did our taxes. When we moved into a larger space, I soundproofed the windows of her project room, and when, six months later, she decided that Philadelphia was depressing her and retarding my career, I went to New York and found us our apartment in East Harlem. There, too, I soundproofed her room. And none of this resentfully, all of it true-believingly, because she was the hedgehog and I was the fox. But it was more than that: as with the toilet seat, I was making amends for a structural unfairness. It
hurt
her that I had practical skills, and because it hurt her it hurt me, too.

My greatest capacity was for earning money. I was so hungry for advancement and had so much time on my hands (seven days a week, Anabel closeted herself with her 16 mm Beaulieu) that I broke in rather easily at
Philadelphia
magazine. I could have become a news editor there, or later at the
Voice
, but I didn't want an office job, because some mornings, before closeting herself, Anabel needed to spend several hours discussing an incorrect look I'd given her or a disturbing news item that had slipped past my censoring, and I had to be available for that. So I worked from home and became a skilled reporter. Since I wasn't competing with Anabel creatively, she encouraged me to be ambitious and gave me good notes on everything I wrote. In return, I covered our rent and utilities and food. For film stock and processing, she burned through her remaining savings and then started selling off the jewelry she'd been given by her father and inherited from her mother. I was shocked to learn how much the jewelry was worth, and a tiny bit resentful, but it wasn't as if I'd entered our marriage with any jewelry of my own.

Need I mention that our sex life went straight downhill? Our problem wasn't typical marital boredom. It was partly that she spent all day deeply contemplating her body and just wanted to read a book or watch TV in her free time, but mostly that our souls were merged. It's hard to feel as if you
are
someone and at the same time
want
her. By the mid-eighties, our only halfway decent sex was of the homecoming variety, after one of my reporting trips or my annual summer visit to Denver; for a few hours, we were unlike enough to reconnect. In the years after that, when she was starving herself and exercising three hours a day, she simply stopped having her periods. Then there was never a good time of month for her, then we put Leonard in a shoe box and didn't take him out again, then all we did was talk and talk, like a two-person emotional bureaucracy. The smallest of questions (“Why did you wait ten minutes to tell me your good news instead of telling me immediately?”) triggered a full formal investigation, with every response filed in triplicate and the review period extended and re-extended while the archives were searched.

And we were isolated. To get dressed up and mingle with other sexual beings might have helpfully separated us. But Anabel became ever shyer and less sure of herself, ever more ashamed to speak of a project that she and I believed was genius but no one else could see; and inevitably, since our only friends were
my
friends, she felt slighted by their greater interest in me. I started meeting them alone for lunch or early drinks. I told absolutely no one about my home life. It would have been a betrayal of Anabel, and I was ashamed of the strangeness of my marriage and, worse, of how I sounded when I answered a friend's polite question about her and her work. I sounded like a person making excuses for her, a person who couldn't see that his spouse wasn't actually the genius he was convinced she was. I was still convinced, but, oddly, I didn't sound convincing.

Even David, who hadn't stopped calling me, seemed to have lost interest in Anabel. His three sons were continuing to enact every known cliché of rich-kid misbehavior, and his daughter had spat in his face. I was his most plausible remaining object of paternal pride. He never failed to offer me funding, connections, a good job at McCaskill, sometimes all three. Under his leadership, McCaskill was expanding its Asian operations, trading in Peruvian fish meal and German flaxseed oil, diversifying into financial services and fertilizer, widening the river of meat, pouring beef and eggs into the gullet of McDonald's and turkey into the maw of Denny's. By my calculation, David's stake in the company was approaching three billion dollars.

And then suddenly I was in my thirties. I had dozens of professional friends but nobody to talk to about Anabel except our building's super, Ruben, who doubled as the manager of an underground lottery that was operated by our building's owner and pegged to the Dominican Lotería Nacional. The building was kept safe by the constant presence of Ruben and his runners—a toothless alcoholic nicknamed Low Boy, a couple of retired hookers. Ruben was courtly with Anabel and respectful of the man who'd married her; he called me Lucky. Anabel's other fan was her new friend, Suzanne, whom she'd met at an improv class that I'd implored her to take after she'd been stymied with her project for an entire fall. She'd finally filmed her way to the top of her left leg and couldn't bring herself to inscribe a “cut” near her genitals. Her food intake had dwindled to coffee with soy milk in the morning and a small dinner in the evening. During the day she was often disabled by “bloatation” and stomach cramps, but she became frantic if anything (i.e., too many hours of discussion with me) impeded her 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. exercise regime, which involved workout tapes by Jane Fonda, runs in Central Park, and a secondhand rowing machine that now dominated her work space.