Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Without reading farther, she lay down on Samantha’s foldout bed. She wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all. She wondered if Tom might conceivably be mistaken about his death. She couldn’t stand his being dead; she missed him unbearably. She pawed at her phone and saw that Denver Independent, not normally known for spot reporting, had already broken the story.

jumped from a height of at least five hundred feet

She turned off the phone and sobbed until upwelling anxiety overwhelmed her grief and she had to go and wake Samantha and beg for Ativan. She told Samantha that Andreas had killed himself. Samantha, who had difficulty making sense of anything that didn’t refer to herself in some way, replied that she’d had a friend in high school who’d hanged himself, and that she hadn’t gotten over it until she’d understood that suicide was the greatest of mysteries.

“It’s not a mystery,” Pip said.

“Yes it is,” Samantha said. “I kept struggling to get over it. I kept thinking I could have prevented it, I could have saved him—”

“I could have saved him.”

“I thought that too, but I was wrong. I had to learn to see it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t need to feel guilty about something that had nothing to do with me. It pissed me off, knowing that. I wasn’t anything to him. I couldn’t have saved him because I didn’t matter to him. I realized it’s actually much healthier to be angry…”

Samantha went on like this, a fountain of declarative sentences about herself, until the Ativan kicked in and Pip had to lie down. In the morning, alone in Samantha’s apartment, she slowly read the rest of Tom’s document. She wanted the basic information, but she had to do a lot of skimming and backtracking to obtain it without reading too much about her parents’ sex life. It wasn’t that she was squeamish about sex per se; the problem, indeed, was that her parents’ weirdness about sex was so foreign to her, so old-fashioned, so intolerably sad.

There were plenty of other things in the document to be disturbed by, but by the time she’d reached the end of it she could sense that the biggest problem was the money. Certainly it was interesting to imagine having Tom and Leila as second parents. But she couldn’t call up Tom and say “Hey, Dad ” without admitting that she’d broken her promise and read his document and betrayed him yet again. Realistically, unless her mother spontaneously volunteered his identity, there was going to be no Tom and Leila in her life. And she was willing to live with this, at least for now. But a billion-dollar trust fund? How many times had her mother said she loved nothing in the world more than Pip? If nobody and nothing was more important to her, how could she have so much money and still be letting Pip suffer with her student debt and her limited opportunities? Tom’s document was a testimonial of frustration with her mother, and she was feeling infected by it. She saw why her mother had been afraid that Tom would take her away and turn her against her. She could feel herself turning against her right now.

She swallowed another Ativan and emailed Colleen once more. This time, in less than an hour, after eight months of silence, she got a reply.

Fooled again. I’d thought there were no more ways for him to hurt me.

The reply had come through a 408 phone number, which Pip immediately called. Colleen turned out to be living in California, across the bay, in Cupertino, and working as chief legal officer for a newish tech company. She didn’t hang up on Pip but simply resumed her complaint with the world’s crappiness where she’d left off eight months ago.

“His women are all tweeting up a storm,” she said. “Toni Field says he was the most honest human being to ever walk the earth — in other words, ‘ I got to fuck him, nyah, nyah, nyah.’ Sheila Taber says the Hegelian spirit of world history was alive in him — in other words, ‘I fucked him before Toni did, and for longer.’ You might want to get tweeting yourself. Stake your claim to the sainted hero.”

“I didn’t fuck him.”

“Sorry, I forgot. Your broken tooth.”

“Don’t be mean to me. I’m really upset about this. I need to talk to someone who gets it.”

“I’m afraid I’m pretty much a flaming ball of hurt and anger at the moment.”

“Maybe you should stop reading tweets.”

“I’m flying to Shenzhen tomorrow, that should help. The Chinese never understood what all the fuss was about, God bless them.”

“Can we get together when you’re back?”

“I think you’ve always had the wrong idea about me. It kind of hurts, but it’s also sweet. We can get together if you want.”

Pip knew she should call her mother and tell her she was back in Oakland. She now saw why her mother had been suspicious of her motives in going to Denver: one glance at the DI website, on her neighbor Linda’s computer, would have revealed her ex-husband’s head shot and weekly commentary at the top of the page. It must have tortured her to think of Pip there with him. It explained her silences and recalcitrance since then: she believed that Pip had found her father and was lying about it. If nothing else, Pip wanted to reassure her that she hadn’t lied about that . But she didn’t see how she could do it without revealing what she’d learned in the meantime and how she’d learned it. Her mother would die of shame, might literally die of being too visible , if she knew what Pip had read about her. Pip could simply keep lying, of course; keep pretending that her job in Denver had just been a job. But the thought of having to lie forever, and never mention the money, and deprive herself of Tom and Leila, and generally indulge her mother’s phobias and irrational prohibitions, made her angry. Although Andreas obviously wasn’t the most honest person who’d ever walked the earth, she thought her mother might be the most difficult. Pip didn’t know what to do about her, and so, for a while, she’d done Ativan.

Whacking a tennis ball was her poor-man’s Ativan. The Sunday sun had sunk behind the elevated freeway in a sky still fogless. California had been in a drought emergency for months, but only now, after the solstice (she’d sent her mother a not-birthday card saying nothing more than “Love always, Pip”), was the weather feeling properly droughty. If the fog had come back, she might have felt safe to stop whacking and go inside, but it hadn’t. She tried working on her backhand, sent two balls over the arboreal backstop and into the next yard, and reverted to her forehand. Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.

When she finally went inside, all sweaty, Garth and Erik were at the kitchen table with two quarts of beer that a good Samaritan had bought them on their long walk home after bail had been made.

“Crowdfunding rocks,” Garth said.

“Especially when it’s effectively a loan,” Erik said.

“Are they still pressing charges?” Pip said.

“For now,” Garth said. “If Dreyfuss prevails at his hearing, the realtor becomes a trespasser that it was legitimate for us to repel.”

“I don’t think he’s going to prevail.” Pip picked up one of the half-empty bottles. “May I?” Garth and Erik hesitated just enough that she set down the bottle. “I can go buy some more.”

“That would be great,” Erik said.

“I’ll come back with lots and lots.”