Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I can’t face him. I’ve been out here since she left.”

  “He’s just been sitting in there without your saying anything to him?”

  “She only left like half an hour ago. He’s going to be upset if he sees me crying. I thought you could sort of prepare him, and then I could talk to him reasonably.”

  Pip here recalled Annagret’s fateful word weak; but it didn’t make her want Stephen any less. It made her want to forget about Ramón and stay out here and keep touching, because being weak might mean being unable to resist.

  “Will you talk to me, too, later on?” she said. “Just me? I really need to talk to you.”

  “Of course. This doesn’t change anything, we’ll still have the house. Dreyfuss is a bulldog. Don’t worry about that.”

  Although it was obvious to Pip’s body that, in fact, everything had changed, her intelligence could forgive Stephen for being unable to see this so soon after being dumped by his wife of fifteen years. Heart still thudding, she stood up and took her bike inside. Dreyfuss was sitting by himself in the living room, dwarfing a scavenged six-legged office chair and mousing at the house computer.

  “Where’s Ramón?” Pip said.

  “In his room.”

  “I guess I don’t even have to ask you if you know what’s going on.”

  “I don’t meddle in family affairs,” Dreyfuss said coolly. Like a six-legged spider, he rotated his bulk in Pip’s direction. “I have, however, been checking facts. The St. Agnes Home is a fully state-accredited and well-reviewed thirty-six-bed facility, opened in 1984. The director, Vincent Olivieri, is a forty-seven-year-old widower with three sons in their late teens and early twenties; he holds an MSW from San Francisco State. Archbishop Evans has visited the home on at least two occasions. Would you care to see a picture of Evans and Olivieri on the front steps of the home?”

  “Dreyfuss, do you feel anything about this?”

  He looked at Pip steadily. “I feel that Ramón will be getting more than adequate care. I will miss his friendly presence but not his video games or his very limited conversational range. It may take some time, but Marie will likely be able to get her marriage annulled—I’ve identified several precedents in the archdiocese. I confess to some concern about house finances in the absence of her paychecks. Stephen tells me we need a new roof. As much as you seem to enjoy helping him with house maintenance, I have trouble imagining the two of you in a roofing capacity.”

  By Dreyfuss standards this was a very feeling speech. Pip went up to Ramón’s room and found him lying on his tangled bedsheets, his face to a wall covered with Bay Area sports posters. The combination of his strong smell and the smiling star athletes was so poignant that her eyes filled.

  “Ramón, sweetie?”

  “Hi Pip,” he said, not moving at all.

  She sat down on his bed and touched his fat arm. “Stephen said you wanted to see me. Do you want to turn around and see me?”

  “I want us to be famlee,” he said, not moving.

  “We’re still family,” she said. “None of us is going anywhere.”

  “I’m going somewhere. Marie said. I’m going to the home where she works. It’s a different famlee but I like our famlee. Don’ you like our famlee, Pip?”

  “I do like it, very much.”

  “Marie can go but I wanna stay with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss, just like before.”

  “But we’ll all still see you, and now you can make some new friends, too.”

  “I don’ wan’ new frens. I wan’ my old frens, just like before.”

  “You like Marie, though. And she’ll be there every day, you’ll never be alone. It’ll be sort of the same and sort of new—it’ll be nice.”

  She sounded to herself just like she did when she was lying on the phone at work.

  “Marie don’ do things with me like you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss do,” Ramón said. “She’s too busy. I don’ see why I have to go with her an’ not stay here.”

  “Well, she takes care of you in a different way. She earns money, and we all benefit from that. She loves you just as much Stephen does, and anyway she’s your mother now. A person has to stay with their mother.”

  “But I like it here, like famlee. Wha’s gonna happen to us, Pip?”

  She was already imagining what would happen to them: how much more time she’d have alone with Stephen. The best part of living here, even more than discovering her capacity for charity, had been that she got to be around him every day. Having grown up with a mother so unworldly that she couldn’t even hang a picture on a wall, because it would have entailed buying a hammer to drive the nail, Pip had arrived on Thirty-Third Street with a hunger to learn practical skills. And Stephen had taught her these skills. He’d shown her how to spackle, how to caulk, how to operate a power saw, how to glaze a window, how to rewire a scavenged lamp, how to take apart her bicycle, and he’d been so patient with her, so generous, that she (or at least her body) had had a feeling of being groomed to be a worthier mate for him than Marie, whose domestic skills were strictly of the kitchen. He took her dumpster-diving, demonstrating how to jump right in and toss things around, digging for the good stuff, and sometimes she even did this by herself now, when she saw a promising dumpster, and exulted with him when she brought home something usable. It was a thing they had together. She could be more like him than Marie was, and thus, in time, more liked. This promise made the ache of her desire more bearable.

  By the time she and Ramón had had a good cry together, and he’d refused to go downstairs with her, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, two of Stephen’s young friends from Occupy had arrived with quarts of low-end beer. She found the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking not about Marie but about wage/price feedback loops. She preheated the oven for the frozen pizzas that were Dreyfuss’s contribution to communal cooking, and it occurred to her that she would probably get stuck with more cooking now that Marie was gone. She considered the problem of communal labor while Stephen and his friends, Garth and Erik, imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

  “I have a question, though,” Pip said as she tore up the head of romaine lettuce that Dreyfuss considered a salad in itself. “If one person is getting paid forty thousand dollars a year to be a consumer, and another person is getting forty thousand to change bedpans in a nursing home, isn’t the person changing bedpans going to kind of resent the person doing nothing?”

  “The service worker would have to be paid more,” Garth said.

  “A lot more,” Pip said.

  “In a fair world,” Erik said, “those nursing-home workers would be the ones driving the Mercedeses.”

  “Yeah, but even then,” Pip said, “I’d rather just ride a bike and not have to change bedpans.”

  “Yeah, but if you wanted a Mercedes and changing bedpans was the way to get it?”

  “No, Pip’s right,” Stephen said, which gave her a modest thrill. “The way you’d have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the retirement age, so you’d always have full employment for everybody under thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody over that age.”

  “Kind of sucks to be young in that world,” Pip said. “Not that it doesn’t already suck in this world.”

  “I’d be up for it,” Garth said, “if I knew that starting at thirty-five I’d have the rest of my life to myself.”<
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  “And then, if you could get the retirement age down to thirty-two,” Stephen said, “you could make it illegal to have kids before you retire. That would help with the population problem.”

  “Yeah,” Garth said, “but when the population goes down, the retirement age necessarily goes up, because you still need service workers.”

  Pip took her phone out onto the back porch. She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was. While the light faded in the west, she replied, dutifully, to some texts from her remaining friends and then dutifully left a message for her mother, expressing hope that her eyelid was better. Her own body was still under the impression that something big was about to happen to it. Her heart went dunk, dunk, dunk as she watched the sky above the freeway turn from orange to indigo.

  Dreyfuss was serving pizza when she went back inside, and the talk had turned to Andreas Wolf, the famous bringer of sunlight. She poured herself a large glass of beer.

  “Was it a leak, or did they hack in?” Erik said.

  “They never say,” Garth said. “It could be that somebody just leaked them the passwords or the keys. That’s part of Wolf’s M.O.—protect the source.”

  “He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.”

  “At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.”

  “But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole brand now: purity.”

  The word purity made Pip shudder.

  “This definitely helps us,” Stephen said. “There’s a bunch of East Bay properties in the document dump. This is exactly the kind of shit we’ve been trying to document from the outside. We need to reach out to all the East Bay homeowners in the leak and get them on our side, do a rally with them or something.”

  Pip turned to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He ate with such pleasureless speed that food just disappeared from his plate without his seeming to touch it. “The Sunlight Project,” he said, “released thirty thousand internal emails from its undisclosed tropical location on Saturday night. Most of the emails are from the Bank of Relentless Pursuit, which is, interestingly, as you know, my own bank. Although my own case is nowhere mentioned in the emails, I believe it falls short of pathological to imagine that the German spies might have tried to do us a favor, having nosed out the identity of my bank. In any event, the emails are highly damning. Relentless Pursuit is still engaged in a pattern of misrepresentation, deceit, bullying, stonewalling, and the attempted theft of equity from homeowners in temporary distress. In toto, it casts a devastatingly unflattering light on the federal government’s settlement with the banks.”

  “The Germans weren’t spying, Dreyfuss,” Stephen said. “I told Annagret about your bank.”

  “What?” Pip said sharply. “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did you tell Annagret? Are you guys still in touch?”

  “Of course we are.”

  She searched Stephen’s beer-flushed face for evidence of guilt. She didn’t see any, but her jealousy discounted this and moved right on to imagining that, with Marie out of the picture, Annagret would dump her boyfriend and move to Oakland and take Stephen and drive Pip out of the house.

  “It’s an amazing leak,” Stephen said to her. “It’s all there—how to work out a re-fi with the homeowner and then go nonresponsive, and then ‘lose’ the paperwork, and initiate foreclosure proceedings. They even name the numbers. Anybody with more than two consecutive missed or partial payments and seventy-five thousand in net equity gets the treatment. And quite a bit of it is right here in the East Bay. It’s an incredible gift to us. I’m pretty sure Annagret made it happen.”

  Too agitated to eat, Pip drank down her beer and poured more. In the past four months, she’d received at least twenty emails from Annagret, all of which she’d marked as Read without reading. She wasn’t much of a Facebook user, in part because she felt bludgeoned by happier people’s photographs and in part because personal social-media use was frowned upon at work, but in order to keep using it at all she’d had to reject Annagret’s overture of friendship, so as not to be bombarded with messages there as well. Her memory of Annagret was tangled up with the memory of Jason, and it made her feel strangely dirty, as if she’d been not robed but fully naked when she did the questionnaire and had then inflicted her dirtiness on Jason; as if she’d had some very wrong sort of personal intercourse with Annagret, the sort a person had bad dreams about. And now it was connected with the word purity, which to her was the most shameful word in the language, because it was her given name. It made her ashamed of her own driver’s license, the PURITY TYLER beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture. The name had accomplished the opposite of what her mother had intended by giving it to her. As if to escape the weight of it, she’d made herself a dirty girl in high school, and she was still a dirty girl, desiring someone’s husband … She kept drinking beer until she felt dulled enough to excuse herself and take some pizza to Ramón.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, his face to the wall.

  “Sweetie, you have to eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry. Where’s Stephen?”

  “He has friends over. He’ll be up soon.”

  “I wanna stay here with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss.”

  Pip bit her lip and went back down to the kitchen.

  “You guys need to go now,” she said to Garth and Erik. “Stephen needs to talk to Ramón.”

  “I’ll go up soon,” he said.

  The plain fear in his face made her angry. “He’s your son,” she said. “He’s not going to eat until you talk to him.”

  “All right,” he said with a little-boy irritation that he normally directed at Marie.

  Pip watched him go and wondered if she and he were going to skip right over the bliss part to the bitchy-relationship part. Having broken up the party, she sat and finished off the beer. She could feel an outburst coming on, and she knew she ought to go to bed, but her heart was beating too hard. Eventually her desire and anger and jealousy and distrust coalesced into a single beery grievance: Stephen had forgotten that he’d promised to have a private talk with her tonight. He stayed in touch with Annagret but he abandoned Pip. She heard his bedroom door close upstairs, and while she waited to hear it open again she silently repeated her grievance, rewording and rewording it, trying to strengthen it to bear the weight of her feeling of abandonment; but it couldn’t bear the weight. She went upstairs anyway and knocked on Stephen’s door.

  He was sitting on the marital bed reading a book with a red title, something political.

  “You’re reading a book?” she said.

  “It’s better than thinking about things I have no control over.”

  She shut the door and sat down on a corner of the bed. “A person wouldn’t have guessed anything unusual had even happened today, the way you were talking with Garth and Erik.”

  “What are they going to do about it? I still have my work. I still have my friends.”

  “And me. You still have me.”

  Stephen looked aside nervously. “Yeah.”

  “Did you forget you’d said you’d talk to me?”

  “Yeah, I did. I’m sorry.”

  She tried to deepen and slow her breathing.

  “What?” he said.

  “You know what.”

  “No, I don’t know what.”

  “You promised you were going to talk to me.”

  “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  Her grievance was as puny and useless as she’d feared. There was no point in airing it a third time.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” she said.

  “You and me?�
� He closed his book. “Nothing. We’ll find a couple of new housemates, preferably female, so you don’t have to be the only one.”

  “So nothing changes. Everything the same.”

  “Why would anything change?”

  She paused, listening to her heart. “You know, a year ago, when we were having those coffees, I had the impression that you liked me.”

  “I do like you. A lot.”

  “But you made it sound like you were hardly even married.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, well, it turns out I was right about that.”

  “No, but back then,” she said. “Back then you made it sound that way. Why did you do that to me?”

  “I didn’t do anything to you. We were having coffee.”

  She looked at him beseechingly, searching his eyes, asking them if he really was so clueless or was just pretending to be clueless for some cruel reason. It killed her that she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Her breaths came harder, followed by tears. Not sad tears—upset tears, accusing tears.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She kept looking into his eyes, and finally he seemed to get it.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”

  “Why not.”

  “Pip, come on. No.”

  “How could you not see,” she said with a gasp, “how much I want you?”

  “No, no, no.”

  “I thought we were just waiting. And now it’s happened. It finally happened.”

  “God, Pip, no.”

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Of course I like you. But not like that. Truly, I’m sorry, not like that. I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “Oh, come on! It’s fifteen years! It’s nothing!”