Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“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!”

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.