Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  When the feelings came, they were even worse than she’d foreseen. For two days she did little but lie in bed, unresponsive to her roommates’ comings and goings. She’d been flying high, liking herself, as long as she’d been liked by Andreas, but now, having incurred his displeasure, she fell into a pit of displeasure with herself. Even though she’d been the rejecter, not the rejected, the scene in the hotel room had been as bad as the one in Stephen’s bedroom. It played over and over in her head, particularly the moment when she’d been naked and he’d been on his knees.

  On the third day, when she managed to drag herself to dinner, she found herself unpopular again. She ate with her head down and went back to bed. Nobody was honest with her now. She couldn’t tell if she was being ostracized because she was believed to have seduced Andreas or because he was known to be unhappy with her. Either way, she felt she deserved it. She composed an email epistle to Colleen, a full confession, before she realized that Colleen would only hate her more for it. She cut all but a few sentences:

  You did the right thing, leaving. He really is a weird dude. All I did with him was talk, and that’s all it’s ever going to be. I’m not long for this place myself.

  When Andreas returned, three days later, he was the same as before with her, cordial but distant, which made her feel all the guiltier. She believed that he really had told her a secret he’d told no one else at Los Volcanes—that he really had specially wanted her—and that, behind his smile, he had to be feeling hurt and ashamed. Unable to relive the moment of her decision, she fell to thinking that she’d made a ghastly mistake. What if she’d gone ahead and been his lover? What if she’d learned to be deliriously happy with him? Now his desire was bottled up inside him and she couldn’t enjoy it. She thought of begging him for a third chance, but she was afraid she’d chicken out a third time. She walked around for a week with a lump of near-clinical depression in her throat. She pretended to go for hikes but sat down after the first bend in the trail and wept.

  He discovered her on one of these crying jags. It was late afternoon and getting dark; rain was falling from the outskirts of a thunderhead. He came around the bend in a yellow slicker and rubber boots and saw her with her back against a tree, her arms around her knees, getting soaked.

  “I came looking for you.” He crouched down by her. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”

  “I don’t hike anymore,” she said. “I just come here and cry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I ruined everything.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m never going to betray you,” she blubbered. “You can trust me.”

  “I won’t pretend that I don’t love you. I do love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she blubbered.

  “But here, enough of that.” He took off his slicker, draped it over her, and sat down. “Let’s think about what you want to do now.”

  She wiped her nose with her hand. “Just send me home,” she said. “I had one big opportunity here, and I blew it.”

  “Willow tells me the search for your missing parent isn’t going well.”

  “Sorry, two opportunities. Two things I failed at.”

  “I’m afraid that Annagret and I did you a disservice, telling you we could help. What you’re looking for is pre–digital era, which makes it very hard. I spoke with Chen about you.” Chen was the chief hacker. “I asked if we could do a facial-recognition search with an older picture of your mother. It would take a lot of pirated computing power, and I’m willing to do it for you. But Chen thinks it would be a waste of time.”

  In the clear gray light of her depression, Pip saw that she’d done again what she’d done with Igor at Renewable Solutions—had fallen for an employer’s empty sales pitch.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “Thank you for asking him.”

  “I’ll keep making your student loan payments as long as you’re here. But we should think about your next step. You’re a good writer, and Willow says you’re a very fast learner. You were miserable at your sales job. Have you ever thought about being a journalist?”

  She managed a wan smile. “Isn’t the Project destroying the field of journalism?”

  “Journalism will survive. There’s a lot of nonprofit money going into it now. Somebody as capable as you can find a job if she wants one. I’m thinking that old media might be more suited to you anyway, given how little you like what I’m doing.”

  “I wanted to like it. I’m so sorry I can’t.”

  “Enough of that.” He took her hand and kissed it. “You are what you are. I love what you are. I’m going to miss it.”

  She started crying all over again. From somewhere in the mist came the thundercrack sound of sandstone splitting off the face of a pinnacle, followed by a muffled crash. She’d been on trails where shards of rock had fallen so close to her that she could hear the whistle of their plummeting.

  “Can you order me?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism. Can you do that? I still want you to give me orders…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m such a mess.”

  “I don’t understand you,” he said. “But, yes, if you insist. I can order you to do it.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “So let’s work on that. I have a little present for you, to get you started. Talk to Willow. She’ll show it to you.”

  “You’re being really nice to me.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s something in it for me, too. Do you see what it is?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said.

  He must have given Willow another talking-to that afternoon. After ten days of coolness to Pip, she’d saved her a place at dinner and was eerily friendly to her again. In the evening, in the barn, she showed Pip a set of photographs deleted by a Facebook user but still retrievable, by the likes of Chen, from Facebook’s bowels. On the back of a pickup truck, at somebody’s party in Texas, was what appeared to be an operational nuclear warhead. It couldn’t possibly be a real one, but it looked exactly like the real ones Pip had seen in presentations at her study group in Oakland.

  In the weeks that followed, she tried to teach herself journalism. With the help of a hacker boy, she friended the Facebook user who’d put up the pictures, but this went nowhere. She had no idea how to approach the Air Force or the weapons plant with questions, and, even if she had, she would have been calling without credentials on a Skype-like connection from Bolivia. This gave her new respect for real journalists but was personally discouraging. She might have given up if Andreas hadn’t then connected her with a Bay Area whistle-blower who had information about groundwater contamination at a Richmond landfill. Using the information, and making phone calls to less intimidating local authorities—she wasn’t afraid of cold-calling; she’d developed at least one usable skill at Renewable Solutions—she produced a story that then magically appeared online at the East Bay Express, whose editor was a fan of Andreas. The Express also ran her next piece, “Confessions of an Outreach Associate,” which Willow had helped her with by failing to laugh at it until she’d made it genuinely funny.

  Early in January, after she’d written two further, shorter pieces for the Express, on subjects supplied by the editor and reportable by telephone, Andreas went for a walk with her and suggested that she apply to work as a research intern at an online magazine called Denver Independent. “It specializes in investigative journalism,” he said. “It wins prizes.”

  “Why Denver?” she said.

  “There’s a very good reason why.”

  “East Bay Express seems to like me. I’d rather be closer to my mom.”

  “Are you asking me to order you?”

  It was three months since their morning at the Cortez, and she was still wishing he’d ordered her to go to bed with him.

&n
bsp; “Denver’s just a name to me,” she said. “I don’t know anything about the place. But sure. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

  “What I want?” He looked up at the sky. “I want you to like me. I want you never to leave me. I want to get old with you.”

  “Oh!”

  “I’m sorry. I had to say that once before you left.”

  She wished she could believe him. He seemed to believe himself. But her inability to trust him was in her marrow; in her nerves.

  “Anyway,” she said.

  “Anyway, I’m not asking for much. If you get the job in Denver, which I think you will, I want you to open an attachment I’ll send you when you have an office email account. The editor and publisher is a man named Tom Aberant. All you really have to do is open the attachment. But if you want to keep your ears open, and get a sense of whether Denver Independent is coming after me, I’d be grateful for that, too.”

  “He’s the other person who knows what you did. He’s the journalist.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to be your spy.”

  “Whatever you feel comfortable with. If it’s nothing, so be it. The only thing I ask, besides opening the attachment, is that you not tell anyone that you were down here. You never left California. Telling Aberant you were here is the one thing that could actually harm me. Harm you, too, needless to say.”

  A dark thought occurred to her.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m liking being a journalist. But is this person in Denver the real reason you suggested it?”

  “The real reason? No. But part of the reason? Of course. It’s good for you and good for me. Do you have a problem with that?”

  In the moment, it didn’t seem like much for him to ask. She’d withheld her heart and her body from him, and she remembered, from her experience with Stephen, the ache and desolation of being denied the heart and body you desired. She may not have trusted Andreas, but she had compassion for him, including his paranoia, and if a click of a mouse would suffice to make her less indebted to him, less guilty for hurting him, she was willing to click. She thought it might help close the books on her and him. And so she went to Denver.

  * * *

  When she returned to Tom and Leila’s house, very late, after a night of drinking with the Denver Independent interns, she was surprised to find Leila on the steps outside the kitchen, bundled in a thick fleece jacket, with cigarette smoke in the vicinity.

  “Aha, you caught me,” Leila said.

  “You smoke?”

  “About five a year.” In a white cereal bowl next to Leila were four stubbed butts. She covered the bowl with her hand.

  “What is it like to be so moderate?” Pip said.

  “Oh, it’s just another thing to feel insecure about.” Leila gave a self-disliking laugh. “The interesting people are always immoderate.”

  “Can I sit here with you?”

  “It’s freezing. I was about to go inside.”

  Following Leila into the house, Pip worried that she herself was the cause of Leila’s smoking. She’d sort of fallen in love with Leila, in the same way she had with Colleen in Bolivia, but ever since she’d moved in with her and Tom she’d had the sense that she was causing trouble between them. She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn’t physically attracted to him—he was both older and safe—and Leila, of late, had been all too visibly jealous of one or both of them. Pip knew she should just move somewhere else. But it was hard to let go of the family she’d fallen into.

  In the kitchen, Leila poured the butts and ashes onto a sheet of foil and balled it up. Aided by the four margaritas in her, Pip asked her if she could ask her something.

  “Of course,” Leila said, taking coffee from the refrigerator.

  “Would you rather I find my own place to live? Would that help?”

  For a moment, Leila froze. She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty; lovely in a way to be aspired to. She looked at the coffee can in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had got there. “Of course not,” she said. “Does it seem like I want you to?”

  “Um. Well. Yeah. A little bit.”

  “I’m sorry.” Leila moved briskly to the coffee maker. “You’re probably just picking up on insecurities that have nothing to do with you.”

  “Why are you insecure? I admire you so much.”

  The coffee can fell to the floor.

  “This is what I get for smoking,” Leila said, bending down.

  “Why are you smoking? Why are you making coffee at one thirty in the morning?”

  “Because I know I’m not going to sleep anyway. I might as well work.”

  “Leila,” Pip said plaintively.

  Leila gave her a look worse than annoyed; a fierce look. “What?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Nothing.” Leila composed herself. “Did you get my text from Washington?”

  “Yeah! It sounds like this is bigger than we thought.”

  “Well, that’s all it is. I’m half out of my mind with fear that somebody’s ahead of us on the story.”

  “Is there something I can do to help?”

  “No! Go to bed. It’s late.”

  In the upstairs hallway, Pip could hear Tom snoring off whatever he’d drunk. She sat on the edge of her bed and typed out an email to Colleen, the latest of many, all of them unanswered.

  Yes, me again. I thought of you because I just caught Leila smoking behind the house and it made me miss you. I keep missing you. I know all I do is betray people. But I can’t stop wishing you’d give me another chance. Much love, PT

  Emailing drunk was never a good idea, but she went ahead and hit Send.

  Her problem was that it was true: all she did was betray people. Almost as soon as her email account at Denver Independent had been activated and she’d clicked on the attachment from Andreas, she’d regretted it. The symphony she’d failed to hear in Bolivia had commenced immediately in Denver. Her fellow interns were ordinary young people, not goddesses or prodigies. The reporters and editors were lumpy and sarcastic, the division of labor gender-neutral, the office atmosphere serious and professional but not remotely cool. Though Andreas liked to tell his interns that every hand was raised against the leaker, to stake his claim to the sympathy accorded underdogs, the Project was too cool and famous to be an underdog. The real underdogs were the journalists. Though much was made of Andreas’s personal penury, the purity of his service, it was the ordinary financial stresses of the journalists, their child-support and mortgage payments, the four-dollar sandwiches they ate for lunch, that reminded Pip of her mother and her struggling neighbors in Felton. After six hours she felt more at home at DI than she had in six months at TSP.

  And Leila: lovely in body and soul, motherly in a way that felt sisterly, not suffocating, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose personal life was even stranger than Pip’s. And Tom: earnest about his work but silly in private, indifferent to anyone’s opinion of what he said or how he looked, his manner as reserved and ironic as Andreas’s was invasive and self-important, his commitment to Leila the more obvious for being unspoken. Pip loved them both, and when they asked her to move in with them she felt as if, after a life of constraints and poor decisions and general ineffectiveness, she’d finally caught a major break.

  Which made it all the more disastrously unfortunate that she’d planted spyware on DI’s computer system, pretended to be responsible for finding the warhead pictures that Andreas had given her, and told Tom and Leila a dozen other lies. She’d succeeded in walking back the smaller lies without undue damage or embarrassment, but the biggest lies—and presumably the spyware—remained in place. And now Leila was turning against her, and now Tom, too, was suddenly uncomfortable around her; the two things, taken together, made her afraid that, although she respected Tom too much to have flirted with him or
laid her authority-questioning shtick on him, he might have developed a romantic interest in her. Two nights ago, he’d taken her to the theater, and as if it weren’t unsettling enough to be there as his date, he’d lowered his guard on the drive home and asked her personal questions, had seemed distinctly pale when she said good night to him, and had been avoiding her ever since.

  There was also the matter of the email Willow had sent her recently. It was newsy and surprisingly sentimental and came with a picture attached, a selfie that Willow had taken with Pip outside the barn. The caption could have been “Alpha Girl with Beta Girl.” But Willow had been party to the fabrication of Pip’s journalistic credentials; surely she knew that encrypted texting was the only safe way for anyone at the Project to communicate with her. So why an email? And why the clunky business of sending an attachment? Pip had been doing her best to forget that she’d opened it at home, using Tom’s private Wi-Fi.

  All things considered, she was proud of having drunk only four margaritas with the interns tonight. Between her lies and the tensions in the house, it seemed only a matter of time before she found herself jobless and on the street again, her major break squandered. And she knew what she had to do. She had to betray Andreas and tell Tom and Leila everything. But she couldn’t bear to disappoint them.

  By saying nothing, she was protecting a killer, a crazy person, a man she didn’t trust. And yet she was reluctant to lose her connection with him. He’d messed with her head, and it brought her an unwholesome pleasure to mess with his head—to be the person in Denver who knew his secrets and had to be worried about. Without his daily presence to remind her of her distrust, his power and his fame and his special interest in her were all the more conducive to sexual fantasy. He scored zeroes in certain important love metrics but was off the charts in others.

  She texted him every night at bedtime and didn’t turn off her phone until he’d texted back. She’d come to think it would have been less bad to sleep with him, less of a moral surrender, than to open the email attachment he’d sent her. Why, why, why hadn’t she slept with him when she had her chance? Running away from Bolivia seemed all the more regrettable now that she knew that his fear of Tom was unfounded. Planting spyware was a pointless and truly vile sin that she could have obviated by staying with Andreas and committing a pleasurable sin.