Purity (56 page)

I took it as a heartening sign that she liked at least one male painter; that she could make an exception. She was a terrible art-history instructor, but if you were going to look at only one artist in that museum, Eakins wasn't a bad choice. She pointed out the geometry of rower and oar and scull and wake, and how honest Eakins was about the atmospherics of the lower Delaware valley. But the main thing for her was Eakins's bodies. “People have been depicting the human body for thousands of years,” she said. “You'd think we would have gotten really good at it by now. But it turns out to be the hardest thing in the world to do right. To see it the way it really is. This guy not only saw it, he got it down in paint. Somehow, with everybody else, even photographers, or actually especially with photographers, some
idea
gets in the way. But not with Eakins.” She turned to me. “You're a Thomas also, or just plain Tom?”

“Thomas.”

“Am I allowed to say I'm glad I don't have your last name?”

“Anabel Aberant.”

She thought about this. “Actually, Anabel Ab
err
ant might not be so bad. Kind of my entire story in two words.”

“You're allowed to pronounce it any way you want.”

As if to dispel any coded allusion to future marriage, she said, “You really are bizarrely young-looking. You know that, don't you?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“I think it was a character thing with Eakins. I think to paint this honestly, you have to have a good character. He may have had sexual issues, but his heart was pure. People are always saying Vincent had a pure heart, but I don't believe it. His brain was full of spiders.”

I was beginning to feel like the flavorless kid brother of someone Anabel was doing a favor by seeing me. That she'd called Lucy to ask about me, or that she might be trying to impress me, was hard to credit. As we made our way back outside, I remarked that she and Lucy were very different.

“She has a really fine mind,” Anabel said. “She was the only person at Choate whose ambition I could recognize. She was going to make documentaries and change the face of American cinema. And now her ambition is to make babies with Handyman Bob. I'd be surprised if he has a single good chromosome left after all the psychedelics he's done.”

“I think she and Bob may be having trouble.”

“Well, I hope they hurry up with that.”

Snowflakes, the first of the season, were slanting across the museum steps. In Denver a day like this would have delivered six to twelve inches, but in Philadelphia I'd learned to expect a turn to rain. As we proceeded down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the most desolate of Philly's many soul-oppressing avenues, I asked Anabel why she didn't have a car.

“You mean, where's my Porsche?” she said. “That's what you mean, isn't it. Nobody ever taught me how to drive. And I might as well tell you, in case you have the wrong idea about me, that I'm in the process of weaning myself from the family teat. My father's paying for my last semester, but that'll be the end of it.”

“Daughters don't inherit?”

She ignored this small temerity. “The money is already ruining my brothers. I'm not going to let it ruin me. But that's not even the reason. The reason is the money has blood on it. I can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. That's what McCaskill is, a river of meat. They trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river. You probably had McCaskill meat for breakfast today.”

“They have a thing called scrapple here. It's said to be made out of organs and eyeballs.”

“That's the McCaskill way, use everything.”

“I think scrapple is more Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“Have you ever been to a pig factory? Chicken farm? Stockyard? Slaughterhouse?”

“I've smelled them from afar.”

“It's a river of meat. I'm making my thesis film about it.”

“I'd like to see this film.”

“It's unwatchable. Everybody hates it, except Nola, who's vegan. Nola thinks I'm a genius.”

“Remind me what vegan is?”

“No animal products of any kind. I know I need to go that way myself, but I basically live on toast and butter, so it's not easy.”

Everything she said fascinated me. We seemed to be heading toward the train station, and I was afraid that we'd part ways without my having fascinated her at all.

“I can assign a story on scrapple,” I said. “Investigate where it comes from, what it's made of, how the animals are treated. I could write it myself. Everybody complains about scrapple, nobody knows what it is. That's the definition of a good story.”

Anabel frowned. “It's sort of my idea, though. Not yours.”

“I'm trying to make amends here.”

“First I'd need to find out whether McCaskill makes scrapple.”

“I'm telling you, it's Pennsylvania Dutch. I was the one who brought it up, anyway.”

She stopped on the sidewalk and faced me full-on. “Is this what we're going to do? Are we going to compete? Because I'm not sure I need that.”

I was happy that she spoke of us as something potentially ongoing; distressed that we might be something she didn't need. Somehow, already, the decision was hers to make. My interest in her had quietly been assumed.

“You're the artist,” I said. “I'm just the journalist.”

Her eyes searched my face. “You're very
pretty
,” she said, not kindly. “I'm not sure I trust you.”

“Fine,” I said, smarting. “Thank you for showing me Thomas Eakins.”

“I'm sorry.” She pressed a gloved hand to her eyes. “Don't be hurt. I just suddenly have a bad headache and need to go home.”

When I got back to campus, I thought of calling her to see how she was feeling, but the word
pretty
was still rankling, and our date had been so unlike what I'd hoped for, so much not the dreamlike continuation of our phone call, that the needle of my sexual compass was swinging back toward Lucy and her plan. My mother had lately taken to warning me not to make the mistake she'd made and fall too hard for a person at too tender an age—to think of my career first, by which she meant that I should first make money and
then
choose the most expensive house, etc.—and I certainly felt safe from falling too hard for Lucy.

In my Sunday-night call to Denver, I mentioned that I'd been to the art museum with one of the heirs of the McCaskill fortune. This was weak of me, but I felt I'd disappointed my mother by failing to make the right sort of Ivy League friends. I seldom had news that cheered her.

“Did you like her?” my mother asked.

“I did, actually.”

“Your father's friend Jerry Knox spent his entire career with McCaskill. They're well known for having the highest ethical principles. Only in America can you find a company like that…”

I settled in for another lecture. Since my father died, my mother had become a droner, as if to fill the hole in her life with verbiage. She'd also frosted her hair a yellowish gray to make herself look older, more like a widow, but she was still only forty-four and I hoped she would remarry, this time choosing somebody rich and politically right of center, after the expiration of whatever she deemed a proper interval of bereavement. Not that she'd done much actual grieving. She'd used the interval instead to be angry at my father and the
pointless
way he'd died. It had fallen to me and my sisters to be devastated by the plane crash. I'd already begun to take a kinder view of my father when it happened, and when I arrived at the high-school auditorium for his memorial service and saw the overflow crowd of colleagues and former students, I felt proud to be the son of a man who never met a person he didn't want to like. My sisters both gave eulogies whose effusion seemed pointed at his widow, who sat next to me and chewed her lip and stared straight ahead. She was still dry-eyed when the service ended. “He was a
very good man
,” she said.

I'd since spent three increasingly unbearable summers with her. The highest-paying job I could find was at the Atkinson's Drugs branch where she herself worked. I stayed out late every evening with my friends and returned home after midnight to foul smells in our bathroom. My mother's colon was unhappy not only with me but with my sisters. Cynthia had dropped out of grad school to become a labor organizer in California's Central Valley; Ellen was living in Kentucky with a gray-bearded banjo player and teaching remedial English. Both of them seemed happy, but all my mother could see, and drone about, was the waste of their abilities.

I owed my drugstore job to Dick Atkinson, the owner of the chain. During my second summer with my mother, her bowel's irritation was aggravated by Dick's courtship of her. Dick was a nice guy and a staunch Republican, and I felt that my mother, who'd always admired his entrepreneurship, could do a lot worse. But Dick was twice divorced, and she, who had stuck it out with my father, disapproved of discarding spouses and wanted no part in it. Dick considered this ridiculous and believed that he could wear her down. By the end of the summer, she'd worked herself into such a state that her gastroenterologist had to put her on prednisone. A few months later, she'd quit her job at the pharmacy. She was now working, at what I suspected were slave wages, for the congressional campaign of Arne Holcombe, a developer of downtown Denver office space. When I'd gone home for a third summer with her, I'd found her health improved but her idealization of Arne Holcombe so over the top, so incessantly and droningly expressed, that I worried for her sanity.

“What are the polls showing?” I asked her when she'd exhausted the subject of McCaskill's contributions to the moral fiber of the nation. “Does Arne have a chance?”

“Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen,” she said. “We're still suffering from the aftereffects of a lowlife president who put his lowlife cronies' interests before the public good. What a
gift
that was to the special-interest-pandering Democrats and their sickening, grinning peanut farmer. Why any rational person would think that Arne has anything to do with Watergate, it mystifies me, Tom, it really does. But the other side slanders and slanders and panders and panders. Arne refuses to pander. Why would he pander? Is it really so hard to understand that a person with twenty million dollars and a thriving business only descends into the gutter of Colorado politics if he's animated by civic responsibility?”

“So, that's a no?” I said. “The polls aren't looking good?”

I could never get a straight answer from her anymore. She droned on about Arne's honesty and integrity, Arne's fiercely independent mind, Arne's sensible business-based solution to the problem of stagflation, and I hung up the phone still not knowing what the polls showed.

The following Saturday night, Lucy and Bob threw a Halloween party at their house. Oswald and I put on suits and dark glasses and earphones and went as Secret Service agents. Bob's many friends, people who'd been living within a mile of their alma mater for nearly a decade, people for whom it was a political statement to invest their energies in absurdities and trivialities, had come in ungainly conceptual costumes (“I am the Excluded Middle,” a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door) and were filling the place with reefer smoke. Bob himself was wearing moose antlers, signifying Bullwinkle, with Lucy as his sidekick, Rocky. She'd blackened her nose, covered the rest of her face with brown greasepaint, and dressed in brown stretch pajamas with a tail of real animal fur attached above her butt. She scampered over to Oswald and me and offered to let us touch her tail.

“Must we?” Oswald said.

“I'm Rocky the Flying Squirrel!”

She seemed possibly stoned. I was already embarrassed to be there with Oswald, who had no patience with counterculture zaniness. I scanned the living room for younger, edgier faces and was surprised to see Anabel, standing alone in a corner, her arms crossed firmly. Her costume was no costume—jeans and a jean jacket.

Lucy could see where I was looking. “You know what her costume is? ‘Ordinary person.' Get it? She can only
pretend
to be ordinary.”

“That's Anabel Laird,” I explained to Oswald.

“Hard to recognize without the butcher paper.”

Anabel caught sight of me and widened her eyes in her hanged-person way. It was interesting to see her in denim—it really did look like a costume on her.

“I should go talk to her,” I said.

“No, she needs to try to mingle,” Lucy said. “This happened at our Bastille Day party, too. People can tell she's worth talking to, they're coming up to me and asking who she is, but they're afraid to go near her. I don't know why she bothers coming to parties where she doesn't think anyone's good enough for her.”

“She's shy,” I said.

“That's one word for it.”

Anabel, seeing that we were talking about her, turned her back on us.

“Take us to your beer,” Oswald said.

I was following him to the kitchen when Lucy grabbed my hand and said she had something to show me. We went upstairs to her bedroom. In the harsh light of its ceiling fixture, she looked like Lucy but also like a small animal. I asked what she wanted me to see.

“My tail.” She turned around and wagged the fur at me. “Don't you want to touch my tail?”

Who doesn't enjoy touching fur? I stroked her tail, and she backed into me, grinding her butt against my thighs, dislodging the tail. This was sort of hot and sort of not. She brought my hands up to her breasts, which were lolling free under the pajamas, and declared, “I'm the little squirrel that loves to fuck!”

“Wow, OK,” I said. “But aren't you also, like, hosting a party?”