Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “It was terrible. But yes. She did. Her mother had married a very evil person. I have to live with what I did, but part of me doesn’t regret it.”

  “And if the story comes out, that’s the end of Mr. Clean.”

  “It destroys the Project, yes.”

  “And the Project is you. You’re the product.”

  “So you say.”

  Something in Pip’s chest spasmed, almost retched. “I don’t like you,” she said involuntarily. She was having an outburst with no advance warning. She scrambled out of the booth, reached back into it for her knapsack, and ran to the door of the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk. Was she sick to her stomach? Yes, she was. She dropped to her knees beneath a streetlight and spat up a dark rope of liquid.

  She was still on her hands and knees when Andreas crouched beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. For a while he didn’t say anything, just gently massaged her shoulders.

  “We should get some food in you,” he said finally. “I think it would help.”

  She nodded. She was at his mercy—it wasn’t like there was anywhere else she could go. And the way he was rubbing her shoulders was undeniably tender. No man old enough to be her father had ever touched her like that. She allowed herself to be led back to the booth, where he ordered her an omelet and french fries.

  After she’d eaten part of the omelet, she started drinking again, really putting it away. In the haziness that ensued, there were the actual words he spoke, many more words about his crime, about Annagret, about East Germany, about the Internet, about his mother and his father, about honesty and dishonesty, about his breakup with Toni Field, and then there was the deeper nonverbal language of intention and symbol which constituted the wooden spoon. The working over her brain was getting now was far more prolonged and thorough than the first one. Each of the two languages, the verbal and the nonverbal, kept distracting her from the other, and she was in any case increasingly drunk, and so it was hard to follow what was being said in either language. But when a second bottle of wine had been emptied, and Andreas had paid the waiter, and they’d walked back to the Hotel Cortez, where Pedro was waiting with the Land Cruiser, she found that it didn’t matter whether or not she liked Andreas.

  “You’ll be home by midnight,” he was saying. “You can make up whatever story you like. A broken tooth, emergency dental work—whatever you like. Colleen will still be your friend.”

  Pedro was holding open the door of the Land Cruiser.

  “Wait,” Pip said. “Can I go to my room and lie down first? Just for an hour. My head’s a little spinny.”

  Andreas looked at his watch. It was clear that he wished she would leave now.

  “Just for an hour,” she said. “I don’t want to be sick on the highway.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “One hour.”

  As soon as she was in her room, she felt sick again and threw up. Then she drank a Coke from the minibar and felt much better. But instead of going downstairs, she sat on the bed and waited for some time to pass. Making Andreas impatient seemed to her the only form of resistance available, the only way to assert herself against the spoon. But was resisting what she even wanted? The longer she waited, the more erotic the suspense felt. The mere fact of waiting in a hotel room implied sex—what else was a hotel room for?

  When the phone rang, she ignored it. It rang fifteen times before it stopped. A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Pip stood up and opened it, afraid it would be Pedro, but it was Andreas. He was pale, tight-lipped, furious.

  “You’ve been here an hour and a half,” he said. “You didn’t hear the phone ring?”

  “Come in for a second.”

  He looked up and down the hallway and came in. “I need to be able to trust you,” he said, locking the door. “This is not a good start.”

  “Maybe you just won’t be able to trust me.”

  “That’s not acceptable.”

  “I have poor impulse control. This is a known fact about me. You knew what you were getting into.”

  Still pale, still angry, he moved toward her, backing her into the corner behind the TV. He grasped her arms. Her skin felt alive to his, but she didn’t dare be the one to make the move.

  “What are you going to do?” she said. “Strangle me?”

  He could have found this funny, but he didn’t. “What do you want?” he said.

  “What does every girl want from you?”

  This did seem to amuse him. He let go of her arms and smiled wistfully. “They want to tell me their secrets.”

  “Really. I find that hard to relate to, not having any myself.”

  “You’re an open book.”

  “Pretty much.”

  He walked away and sat down on the bed. “You know,” he said, “it’s difficult to trust a person with no secrets.”

  “I find it hard to trust people, period.”

  “I’m not happy that Pedro knows I’m up here with you. But now that I’m here, we’re not leaving until I know I can trust you.”

  “Then we could be here quite a while.”

  “Do you want to hear my theory of secrets?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives.”

  “OK.”

  “There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. Am I making any sense?”

  “Sort of,” Pip said. “But it’s a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people’s secrets for a living.”

  “Were you not listening in the restaurant? I got trapped into this job. I hate the Internet as much as I hated my motherland.”

  “I guess you did say that.”

  “Were you not even listening to yourself? I’m not doing this job because I still believe in it. It’s all about me now. It’s my identity.”

  He made a gesture of self-disgust.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Pip said. “I already told you my secret. I told you my real name.”

  “Your name is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I also went through a shoplifting phase in middle school. I had quite a masturbation thing going when I was ten.”

  “Didn’t everyone?”

  “OK, so there’s nothing. I’m boring and ordinary. Like I said, you knew what you were getting into.”

  Suddenly, without her quite knowing how he’d traversed the distance between them, he was pressing her into the corner again. He had his mouth to her ear and his hand wedged between her legs. There was a weird suspenseful moment of adjustment. She couldn’t breathe, but she could hear him breathing heavily. Then his hand moved up to her belly and down again into her jeans and underpants.

  “What about this,” he murmured in her ear. “Is this not a private thing of yours?”

  “Fairly private, yes,” she said, heart pounding.

  “This is the reason I trust you?”

  She couldn’t believe what was happening. He was putting a fingertip inside her, and her body wasn’t exactly saying no to it.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe.”

  “Do I have your permission for this?”

  “Um…”

 
; “Just tell me what you want.”

  She didn’t know what to say, but she probably should have said something, because, in the absence of a response, he was unzipping her jeans with his free hand.

  “I know I was asking for it,” she whispered. “But…”

  He drew his head back. There was an avid gleam in his eyes. “But what?”

  “Well,” she said, squirming a little, “isn’t it kind of customary to kiss a person before you stick your finger in her?”

  “That’s what you want? A kiss?”

  “Well, I guess, between the two things, right at this moment, yes.”

  He brought his hands up to her face and cupped her cheeks. She could smell her own private scent as well as his male body smell, a European smell, not unpleasant. She closed her eyes to receive his kiss. But when it came, she didn’t respond to it. Somehow it wasn’t what she wanted. Her eyes opened and found his looking into them.

  “You have to believe this wasn’t why I brought you here,” he said.

  “Are you sure it’s what you want even now?”

  “In strict honesty? Not as much as I want to kiss a different part of you.”

  “Whoa.”

  “I think you’d like it. And then you could leave, and I could trust you.”

  “Is this the way you always are with women? Was this how things went with Toni Field?”

  He shook his head. “I told you. I’m not myself in transactions like that. I’m showing my true self to you because I want us to trust each other.”

  “OK, but, I’m sorry—how does this make you trust me?”

  “You said it yourself. If Colleen finds out about this, she won’t forgive you. None of the interns will. I want you to have a secret that only I know.”

  She frowned, trying to understand the logic.

  “Will you give me that secret?” He put his hands on her cheeks again. “Come lie down with me.”

  “Maybe it’s better if I just go back.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to go to your room. You’re the one who made me come up here.”

  “You’re right. I did.”

  “So come lie down. The person I honestly am is a person who wants his tongue in you. Will you let me do that? Please let me do that.”

  Why did she follow him to the bed? To be brave. To submit to the fact of the hotel room. To have her revenge on the indifferent men she’d left behind in Oakland. To do the very thing her mother had been afraid would happen. To punish Colleen for caring more about Andreas than about her. To be the person who’d come to South America and landed the famous, powerful man. She had any number of dubious reasons, and for a while, on the bed, as he slowed down the action, kissing her eyes and stroking her hair, kissing her neck, unbuttoning her shirt, helping her out of her bra, touching her breasts with his gaze and his hands and his mouth, tenderly easing down her jeans, even more tenderly peeling off her underpants, her reasons were all in harmony. She could feel his hands trembling on her hips, feel his own excitement, and this was something—it was a lot. He seemed honestly to want her private thing. It was really this knowledge, more than the negocitos he was expertly transacting with his mouth, that caused her to come with such violent alacrity.

  But after it was over, the sensation of not liking him returned. She felt embarrassed and dirty. He was kissing her cheeks and her neck, thanking her. She knew what the polite thing to do was, and she could tell, from his unabated urgency, that he wanted it. Not to deliver would be selfish and perverse of her. But she couldn’t help it: she didn’t feel like fucking what she didn’t like.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, gently pushing him away.

  “Don’t be sorry.” He pursued her and climbed onto her, moving his clothed legs between her bare ones. “You’re remarkable. You’re everything I could have hoped for.”

  “No, that was definitely great. That felt really nice. I don’t think I’ve ever come so fast or so hard. It was like, wowee-zowee.”

  “Oh God,” he said, shutting his eyes. He took her head in his hands and humped her a little with the hardness in his pants. “God, Pip. God.”

  “But, um.” Again she tried to push him away. “Maybe I should go back now. You said I could go back after you did that.”

  “Pedro and I worked out a story about a broken truck axle. We have hours if you want them.”

  “I’m trying to be honest. Isn’t that the point here?”

  He must have tried to hide the look that appeared on his face then, because it was gone again immediately, replaced by that smile of his. For a moment, though, she’d seen that he was crazy. As if in a bad dream, a dream in which some guilty fact is forgotten and then suddenly remembered, it occurred to her that he had actually once murdered someone; that this was real.

  “It’s fine,” he said with that smile.

  “It’s not that I didn’t like the way you made me feel.”

  “Truly, it’s fine.” Without kissing her, without even looking at her, he got up and went to the door. He straightened his shirt and hitched up his pants.

  “Please don’t be angry with me.”

  “I’m the opposite of angry,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m mad for you. Quite unexpectedly mad for you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  In the Land Cruiser, to salvage some shred of dignity, she told Pedro that El Ingeniero had needed help with his negocios. Pedro, in reply, seemed to say that El Ingeniero’s work was very complicated and beyond his understanding, but that he didn’t have to understand it to be a good overseer at Los Volcanes.

  When they got home, long after midnight, a light was still burning in Colleen’s room. Deciding that lies were better told fresh than stale, Pip went straight up the stairs to the room. Colleen was in bed with a workbook and a pencil.

  “You’re up late,” Pip said.

  “Studying for the Vermont bar. I’ve had this book for a year. Tonight seemed like a good night to finally open it. How was Santa Cruz?”

  “I wasn’t in Santa Cruz.”

  “Right.”

  “I lost a big filling at breakfast. Pedro had to take me to the dentist. And then he hit a speed bump too hard and broke an axle. I spent like six hours sitting outside a garage.”

  Colleen carefully made a mark in the workbook with her pencil. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “There isn’t a rompemuelles within two hundred miles that Pedro doesn’t know.”

  “He was talking to me. He didn’t see it.”

  “Just get the fuck out of my room, all right?”

  “Colleen.”

  “It’s not personal. You’re not the person I’m hating. I knew this would happen sometime. I’m just sorry it was you. There was a lot to like about you.”

  “I like you so much, too.”

  “I said get out of here.”

  “You’re being crazy!”

  Finally Colleen looked up from the workbook. “Really? You want to lie to me? You want to prolong this?”

  Pip’s eyes filled. “I’m sorry.”

  Colleen turned a page in her book and made a show of reading. Pip stood for a while longer in the doorway, but Colleen was right. There was nothing else to say.

  In the morning, instead of taking a hike, Pip went to breakfast with the others. Colleen wasn’t there, but Pedro was. He’d already told the story of his and Pip’s ill-fated trip to the dentist. If Willow and the others were suspicious, they didn’t show it. Pip was sick with general dread and specific guilt about Colleen, but to everyone else it was just another day of Sunlight.

  Colleen left two days later. She’d been discreet about her reasons, saying only that it was time to move on, and once she was safely gone the other girls were frankly patronizing about her depression and her lovesickness for Andreas; their consensus was that her departure was a much-needed step toward restoring her self-esteem. Which, in a way, it was. But Pip inwardly burned with loyalty to her, and with guilt.


  When Andreas returned, he gave Colleen’s job as business manager to the Swede, Anders. But since no one imagined that Anders was specially dear to Andreas, Colleen’s position at the top of the pecking order went to the person whom everybody knew Andreas particularly liked, the person whose presence at Los Volcanes was known to be more extraordinary than their own. Now it was Pip beside whom Andreas sat down for dinner, Pip whose table filled up first. To her vast amusement, tiny Flor was suddenly eager to be her friend. Flor even asked to join her on a hike, to experience for herself the smells that Pip had raved about, and once Flor had hiked with her the other girls vied for the same privilege.

  The less than healthy satisfaction Pip took in being socially central for once in her life was linked in her mind to the memory of Andreas’s tongue and how explosively her body had responded to it. Even the dirtiness she’d felt afterward was agreeable in hindsight, in a wicked sort of way. She imagined an arrangement whereby she continued to receive the favor from time to time, and he could trust her, and she could have her dirty pleasure. He’d implied it himself: he was one of those cunnilingus guys. Surely some mutually satisfactory arrangement could be worked out.

  But the weeks went by, August becoming September, and though Pip was now a full-fledged researcher, handling simpler assignments on her own and devoting her free time to laborious searches of databases for the name Penelope Tyler, Andreas still avoided talking to her one-on-one the way he did with Willow and many of the others. She understood that she was supposed to be spying for him, and that they should never be seen having hushed conspiratorial talks. But the spying thing seemed ridiculous to her—the only vibe she ever got off anyone was overpowering sincerity—and she began to feel that she was being punished by him; that she’d hurt him and shamed him by refusing to have sex with him. His unfailingly warm and affectionate manner with her meant nothing; she knew very well that he was a master dissembler; he’d all but said it himself, and his incessant talk of trust and honesty only proved it. Underneath, she became convinced, he was angry with her and regretted having trusted her.

  And so, day by day, seduced by tongue and popularity, she formed the resolve to give him everything he wanted the next time they were alone. Quite unexpectedly mad for you: that still had to be operable, didn’t it? She wasn’t mad for him, but she was curious, sexually botherated, and increasingly resolute. She began looking for opportunities to accost him in private. Someone always seemed to follow him out of the barn to the tech building; Pedro or Teresa always seemed to be within earshot when he was alone in the main building. But one afternoon, toward the end of September, she looked out a window and saw him sitting by himself in a far corner of the goat pasture, facing the forest.