Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

Stephen looked at the window and then at the door, as if weighing escape options.

  “Are you telling me you never felt anything?” she said. “It was all in my head?”

  “You must have misinterpreted.”

  “What?”

  “I never wanted to have kids,” he said. “That’s the whole issue with Marie and me, I didn’t want babies. I kept telling her, ‘What do we need babies for? We have Ramón, we have Pip. We can still be good parents.’ And that’s what you are to me. Like a daughter.”

  She stared at him. “That’s my role? To be like Ramón for you? Would you be even happier if I stank? I have a parent! I don’t need another parent!”

  “Well, actually, it kind of seemed like you did,” Stephen said. “Like a father was exactly what you needed. And I can still do it. You can still stay here.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Stay here? Like this?”

  She stood up and looked around wildly. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she’d been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.

  In a kind of anarchy of involition, she found herself pulling off her sweater, and then taking off her bra, and then dropping to her knees on the bed and pushing herself at Stephen, abusing him with her nakedness. “Do I look like a daughter? Is that what I look like to you?”

  He cowered with his hands over his face. “Stop it.”

  “Look at me.”

  “I’m not going to look at you. You’re the one who’s out of your mind.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Are you too fucking weak to even look at me?” Where were these words coming from? What hidden place? Already a riptide of remorse was swirling around her knees, and already she knew it would be worse than all of her previous remorses combined, and yet there was nothing to be done but see it through, and do what her body wanted, which was to collapse on Stephen. She rubbed her bare chest against his seersucker shirt, pulled his hands from his face and let her hair fall around it; and she could see that she’d really done it this time. He looked terrified.

  “Just be sure, OK?” she said. “Be sure that’s all I am to you.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Four hours after she left the house.”

  “Oh, so four days would make a difference? Or four months? Four years?” She lowered her face toward his. “Touch me!”

  She tried to guide his hands, but he was very strong and pushed her off him easily. He scrambled away from the bed and retreated to the door.

  “You know,” he said, breathing hard, “I don’t really believe in therapy, but I’m thinking you could use it.”

  “As if I could afford it.”

  “Seriously, Pip. This is totally fucked up. Are you even thinking about what I’m feeling?”

  “Last I checked, you were reading—” She picked up his book. “Gramsci.”

  “If you’re pulling shit like this with other people, people who aren’t looking out for you, you’re not doing yourself any favors. I don’t like what it says about your impulse control.”

  “I know. I’m abnormal. It’s like the refrain of my life.”

  “No, you’re great. You’re wonderful, I mean it. But still—seriously.”

  “Are you in love with her?” Pip said.

  He turned back from the door. “What?”

  “Annagret. Is that what this is about? You’re in love with her?”

  “Oh, Pip.” His look of pity and concern was so pure that it almost overcame her distrust; she almost believed she had no reason to be jealous. “She’s in Düsseldorf,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”

  “Riiiiight. But you’re in touch with her.”

  “Try to listen to yourself. Try to see what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not hearing a no.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “Please tell me I’m wrong. Just say I’m wrong.”

  “The person I want is Marie. Don’t you understand that?”

  Pip squeezed her eyes shut, trying to understand it while also refusing to. “But Marie’s with someone else now,” she said. “And you’re in touch with Annagret. You don’t even know you’re in love with her yet, but I think you are. Or you will be soon. She’s the right age for you, right?”

  “I’ve got to get some air. And you need to leave my room.”

  “Just show me,” she said. “Come show me I’m wrong. Just hold my hand for a second. Please. I won’t believe you otherwise.”

  “Then you’re going to have to not believe me.”

  She drew herself into a ball. “I knew it,” she whispered. The pain of jealousy was delicious in comparison to the thought that she was simply being crazy. But the thought was getting stronger.

  “I’m heading out,” Stephen said.

  And he left her lying on his bed.

  TUESDAY

  She texted in sick to work, pleading stomach sickness, which wasn’t totally a lie. Around ten o’clock Marie came knocking on her door, asking her to say good-bye to Ramón, but the slightest movement of Pip’s body reminded her of what she’d done the night before. When Marie came upstairs a second time and ventured to open her door and look in on her, Pip could barely put any voice into the words go away.

  “Are you all right?” Marie said.

  “Please go away. Please shut the door.”

  She heard Marie approaching her and kneeling. “I wanted to say good-bye,” she said.

  Pip kept her eyes shut and said nothing, and the words that Marie then poured down on her were devoid of sense, were just blow after blow on her brain, a torment to be endured until it stopped. When it finally did stop, it was followed by the worse torment of Marie stroking her shoulder. “Won’t you talk to me at all?” she said.

  “Please, please, please, go away,” Pip managed to say.

  Marie’s reluctant departure was yet another nearly unendurable torment, and the sound of the door closing didn’t end it. Nothing could end it. Pip couldn’t leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame. She had half a bar of dark chocolate in her room, and this was all she ate all day, taking one bite and then lying completely still to recover from the reminder that she had a physical self—“so visible, so visible,” as her mother had said. Even to cry would have been a reminder, and so she didn’t cry. She did think that at least nightfall might bring some relief, but it didn’t. The only thing that changed was that she was able to sob at her loss of Stephen, off and on, for many hours.

  WEDNESDAY

  Thirst and hunger woke her up at dawn. With her senses sharpened by the need for stealth, she quickly changed her clothes and packed her knapsack and crept downstairs to the kitchen. Her one imperative was not to encounter Stephen, ideally for the rest of her life, and even though he wasn’t an early riser she didn’t slow down to eat anything but simply grabbed some food at random and stuffed it into her knapsack. Then she drank three glasses of water and made a stop in the bathroom. When she came out, Dreyfuss was standing in the front hallway, wearing his nighttime sweatclothes.

  “Feeling better, I see,” he said.

  “Yeah, I had a stomach thing yesterday.”

  “I thought Wednesdays were one of your late days. And yet here you are at six fifteen.”

  “Right, I have to make up for yesterday.”

  Even the most transparent lies didn’t unsettle Dreyfuss. They merely gave his brain more to process, briefly slowing it down. “Am I correct in assuming that you’ll be moving out now, too?”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “Why.”

  “You obviously know why, since you assumed it, and so why are you asking me? You obviously know everything that happens in this house.”

  He considered this affectlessly. “It may interest you to know that I’ve read through Stephen’
s email and social-media correspondence with the German woman. It’s entirely innocent, if somewhat tediously ideological. I’d hate to think of losing your intelligent company over a matter as small as that.”

  “Wow,” Pip said. “I was about to say I was going to sort of miss you, and now you tell me that not only do you eavesdrop, you read our email.”

  “Just Stephen’s,” Dreyfuss said. “We share the computer, and he never logs out. I believe this constitutes ‘plain sight,’ in legal parlance.”

  “Well, for your information, Annagret is the least of my worries now.”

  “Interestingly, many of her messages to Stephen concern you. She’s evidently very distressed that you don’t want to be friends with her. I find your position eminently reasonable, perhaps even strongly advisable. Yes: advisable. But you might care to know that as far as the German woman is concerned, you are the person of interest in this house. Not our Stephen. Nor, it goes without saying, Ramón or Marie. Nor even, if I examine the facts with rigorous logic, I myself.”

  Pip was putting on her bike helmet. “OK, great,” she said. “Good to know.”

  “There was something not right about those Germans.”

  At an anonymous Starbuck’s on Piedmont Avenue, while consuming scones and a latte, she wrote and then agonized over and finally found the courage to send an email to Stephen, who had no text capability, since phone plans cost money. That Dreyfuss would read the email didn’t much matter to her; it was like knowing that a dog or a computer “knew” things about her.

  I apologize for what I did. Please tell me when you won’t be home this week, so I can get my stuff.

  Sending this message made her loss more real, and she attempted to fantasize about how things might have gone in his bedroom if he’d been unable to resist her, but her imagination instead kept summoning up what had actually happened; and weeping in a public café was a bad idea.

  Two tables over, a white-bearded chai-drinker type was looking at her. When she surprised him by looking back, his eyes dropped down guiltily to his tablet device. Why hadn’t Stephen looked at her like this? Was that so much to ask?

  It seemed like a father was exactly what you needed: of all of Stephen’s cruelties in the bedroom, this had been the worst. And yet there was clearly something wrong with her, and clearly the more appropriate object of her anger was her missing father. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the chai drinker. When he looked at her again, she gave him a phony grimace, a mean smile, to which he responded with a courtly nod and then angled his body away from her.

  She texted her friend Samantha and asked if she could crash with her. Of her remaining friends, Samantha was the most self-involved and thus the least likely to ask embarrassing questions. Samantha was also a cook, with equipment in her kitchen, and Pip hadn’t forgotten that she owed her mother a not-birthday cake on Friday.

  She still had three hours to kill before her late workday started. This would have been a low-risk time to leave a message for her mother, since her mother was always too deep in her Endeavor in the early morning to pick up the phone, but Pip couldn’t do it. She watched the people lining up for pastries and coffee drinks, nice racially diverse Oakland people freshly showered and able to afford a daily bought breakfast. Oh, to have a job you liked, a mate you trusted, a child who loved you, a purpose in life. And it occurred to her that a purpose in life was what Annagret had offered her. Annagret had wanted her. Annagret had wanted her. She was ashamed to recall how crazily she’d latched on to the idea that there was anything between Annagret and Stephen. It must have been the beer she’d drunk.

  She picked up her device and assembled all the emails that Annagret had sent her in the past four months. The earliest was headed please forgive me. As she read the message, savoring its pleading tone and its compliments to her intelligence and character, Pip found herself obeying the subject header and forgiving Annagret, with an alacrity that was perhaps itself a bit crazy. And yet maybe not so crazy, because Annagret not only liked her but had been right—right about Stephen, about men, about everything. And had not given up on her; had sent her twenty emails, the most recent just a week ago. Nobody else in her life would have been that persistent.

  She opened a message headed wonderful news, from two months ago.

  Dearest Pip, I know you must be still angry with me and maybe not even reading my emails, but I must tell you some very good news: You are APPROVED for an internship with the Sunlight Project! I hope you will take advantage of this superfun and awarding opportunity. I’m still thinking all the time of what you said about the private information you wanted—well this is your chance for that. TSP will pay your room and meals in the most interesting part of the world, in addition a small monthly stipendium, and often it can lend assistance with money for your air travel. You can read the attached letter and factsheet for more details. I only want you to know that I gave you the HIGHEST recommendation with every sincerity. And it looks like Andreas and the others still trust my determinations!;) I’m very excited for you and hope you will consider. I’m only sorry, if you go, I won’t be there with you. But maybe, if you’re still angry with me, this will make you more interested to go?;) With hugs, Annagret

  PS: here is Andreas’s email: ahw@sonnenlicht.org You can write to him personally with questions.

  Reading this, Pip felt obscurely disappointed. It was like a questionnaire with no wrong answers: if an internship was this easy to get, how much could it be worth? And no sooner had she started to change her mind about Annagret than Annagret tried to fob her off on yet another man, albeit a rather famous and cherissmetic man. Peevishly, and without stopping to think, she put a fingertip on Wolf’s email address and fired off a message to him:

  Dear Andreas Wolf, what’s your deal? A person named Annagret who I hardly know tells me I can be a paid intern with your project. Is this like a sex opportunity for you, or what? Do you guys have a keg of Kool-Aid? The whole thing frankly sounds deeply creepy to me. I don’t care very much about the work you’re doing down there, in the jungle or whatever, but Annagret doesn’t seem to think it even matters if I do. Which really makes me wonder. Yours, Pip Tyler, Oakland, California, USA

  As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.

  By way of penance, she opened a search engine and did some belated research on Wolf and his project. Given the multitude of haters on the Internet, it was impressive how few hostile comments about Wolf she was able to find if she disregarded the carpings of die-hard Julian Assange defenders and the statements of governments and corporations with an obvious self-interest in calling Wolf a criminal. Otherwise, in terms of universal admiration, he was right up there with Aung San Suu Kyi and Bruce Springsteen; a search of his name plus the word purity yielded a quarter million matches.

  Wolf’s motto, and his project’s battle cry, was Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Born in East Germany in 1960, he’d distinguished himself in the 1980s as a daring and sensational critic of the Communist regime. After the Berlin Wall came down, he’d led the crusade to preserve the enormous East German secret-police archives and open them to the public; here again he was hated only by former police informants whose post-reunification reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their pasts to sunlight. Wolf had founded the Sunlight Project in 2000, focusing first on assorted German malfeasances but soon broadening his scope to social injustice and toxic secrets worldwide. Several hundred thousand Web images showed him to be a very good-looking man, but he’d apparently never married or had children. He’d fled prosecution in Germany in 2006 and Europe generally in 2010, receiving asylum first in Belize and more recently in Bolivia, whose populist president, Evo Morales, was a fan. The only thing Wolf kept secret was the identity of his major financial backers (thereby prompting a terabyte or two of heated online chatter
about his “inconsistency”), and the only even vaguely unseemly thing about him was the intensity of his rivalry with Assange. Wolf had tauntingly denigrated Assange’s methods and personal life, while Assange had contented himself with pretending that Wolf did not exist. Wolf liked to contrast WikiLeaks—in his words, “a neutral and unfiltered platform”—with the work of his more “purpose-driven” Sunlight Project, and to make a moral distinction between his benign and openly admitted motive in protecting his backers’ privacy and the malignant concealed motives of the parties whose secrets he exposed.

  Pip was struck by how many of the exposures had to do with the oppression of women: not just big issues like rape as a war crime and wage inequalities as a deliberate policy but stuff as small as the luridly sexist emails of a bank manager in Tennessee. Rare was the interview or press release in which Wolf’s militant feminism went unmentioned. She understood better how Annagret could prefer the company of women and still admire Wolf.

  The high seriousness and sheer volume of the online information about Wolf deepened her remorse about the email she’d sent him. He: authentic risk-taking hero and friend of presidents. She: snarky little twerp. Not until she was about to leave for work could she bring herself to check for new messages. And here they were already, Stephen and Wolf, one after the other.

  Apology accepted, incident on its way to being forgotten. There’s no reason for you to move out. You’re a great housemate, and we’ll have Ramon three evenings a week—Marie and I worked it out yesterday. S.

  A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn’t crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who’d rejected you, than compassionate forbearance? Her anger momentarily chased away her remorse and shame. She wanted the “incident” to be remembered! She wanted his complete attention! She fired back:

  With all this forgetting, I guess you forgot my question too: when will you not be home?

  Despite having got up four hours early, she was now on the verge of being late to work, but while her blood was up and her remorse was at bay she went ahead and read Wolf’s message.