Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“That would be great.”

On her way out to get beer, she looked for Dreyfuss and found him sitting on his bed with his face in his hands. His situation was legitimately dire. He’d managed to revive his old mortgage, but tech-driven market pressure had pushed the value of his property up by thirty percent or more in the year Pip had been away. This had triggered a new round of shenanigans with his modified mortgage payments. He’d been given differing figures for these payments and had naturally chosen the lowest one, provided by a bank employee who then disappeared and who the bank claimed to have no record of, despite his having taken down her name and location. But without Marie’s paychecks and Ramón’s disability checks, he couldn’t pay even the lowest figure every month. All he had going for him legally was his meticulous litany of the bank’s noxious and probably felonious behavior. Pip had tried to read this litany, but it was nearly 300,000 words long.

“Hey, listen,” she said, crouching at his feet. “I have a friend who’s a lawyer for a tech company. She might know some firms that do pro bono work. Do you want me to ask her?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Dreyfuss said. “But I’ve witnessed the effect that my case has on pro bono lawyers. At first there’s an agreeable atmosphere of bonhomie, of this-is-an-injustice-and-we-will-definitely-fix-it, of why-didn’t-you-come-to-us-sooner. A week later, they have their hands and faces pressed to the window. They’re screaming, Let me out of here! I suppose — oh, never mind.”

“What?”

“It occurred to me that if we could find a mentally ill lawyer, an already premedicated individual … It’s a silly thought. Forget I mentioned it.”

“It’s actually not a bad idea.”

“No. Better to pray that Judge Costa falls down a flight of stairs between now and a week from Tuesday. Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer, Pip?”

“Not really.”

“Try to,” Dreyfuss said.

* * *

The following Sunday, Jason was among the customers waiting when she unlocked the front door of Peet’s. Knowing that he had a girlfriend, Pip resisted overinterpreting his early arrival, but he did seem to have hoped to talk to her. Lingering at the counter, he updated her on the progress of his new statistics textbook and the presentations he’d been giving to professors who refused to believe that a method could be so simple and intuitive. “They say, ‘OK, the geometry works in that one special case.’ So I show them other examples. I ask them to give me their own incredibly complicated examples. The method always works , and they still won’t believe it. It’s like their entire careers are invested in statistics being an impossibly nonintuitive subject.”

“That’s what I always heard,” Pip said. “Do Not Take This Course.”

“And what about you? You didn’t tell me what you were doing in Bolivia.”

“Oh, well. I was interning with the Sunlight Project. You know — Andreas Wolf.”

It was amusing to see Jason’s eyes widen. The deification of Andreas was in full swing now, with candlelight memorials in Berlin and Austin, in Prague and Melbourne, and online memorial sites stretching to terabytes with messages of gratitude and sorrow; it was like the Aaron Swartz phenomenon, only a hundred times larger.

“Are you kidding me?” Jason said.

“Um, no. I was there. Not when he died — I left at the end of January.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I know — weird, right?”

“Did you actually spend time with him?”

“Sure. Everyone there did. He was always around.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Don’t say that too many times or you’ll make me feel bad.”

“That’s not what I meant. I know you’re really smart. I just didn’t know you were interested in Web stuff.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t. Then I was. Then I wasn’t again.”

Although it would have disappointed her, by showing Jason to be as starstruck as most of the world seemed to be, she expected him not to let the subject drop. But he did. He asked her what her plans were now. She confessed that she couldn’t see much farther than going home after work and whacking a tennis ball. He said he’d recently taken up tennis himself. He remarked that they should hit together sometime, but it was a vague remark, deflated by the known fact of his having a girlfriend, and he retreated to his favored table with his Sunday Times .

Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it. She realized, with additional regret, that he was probably the sweetest good-looking boy who’d ever shown strong interest in her. She felt chagrined that she’d failed to appreciate this when it might have mattered. She hoped that he was feeling some additional regret of his own, now that he knew that Andreas Wolf had esteemed her.

After a long hiatus, she was back on Facebook. It was a way of letting her old friends know she was in town without actually having to see them, but her main motive was defensive. Among her Facebook friends was her mother’s neighbor Linda, who reassured her that nothing much had changed in her mother’s life, and who seemed happy to convey Pip’s substanceless greetings to her. It was Pip’s hope that Linda might show her Facebook page to her mother or at least report on what was on it — i.e., almost nothing. Pip was living in her old house in Oakland and working at Peet’s, end of story. She wanted to spare her mother the torment of imagining her still in Denver, reunited with her father. Linda was gabbiness itself and could be counted on.

After her shift ended, and after she’d whacked the ball and showered and walked to the BART station, she couldn’t resist checking out Jason on Facebook. His capacity for enthusiasm was everywhere in evidence. But of course what she wanted to know was how pretty his girlfriend was. The news on that score was mixed. The girlfriend had a great face and a scarily hipster look and a scarily French name, Sandrine, but she appeared to be a full foot shorter than Jason; they looked awkward together. With a shudder of revulsion at herself, and at Facebook, Pip turned off her device.

She was on her way to a Peruvian restaurant in Bernal Heights, maximally inconvenient to her, because Colleen apparently had foodie tendencies and wanted to try it. This after Colleen had twice bailed out of earlier dates at the last minute, pleading overwork. If her intention was to keep punishing Pip and make her feel small, it was working well.

The season of gray was on Bernal Heights. Shouting techies in their twenties filled the restaurant. Colleen was at a small table awkwardly situated by a wait station; she’d left Pip the chair that was in the waiters’ way. Pip was struck by the unnecessary makeup Colleen was wearing and by the obvious priciness of her silk jacket and jewelry. She remembered that Colleen’s stated ambition was to do boring, safe things.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “It’s quite the schlep from Oakland.”

“I ordered some small plates,” Colleen said. “I have to go back to the office later.”

Already it was clear to Pip that Colleen had been a summer-camp friend, not a real friend, and that she shouldn’t have kept sending her emails. But she had no one else to talk to about Andreas, and so she ordered a sangria and talked. She led with the big picture — that he’d killed a man in Germany and had brought her to Los Volcanes in some insane attempt at a cover-up — so that Colleen might see that what had happened at the Hotel Cortez wasn’t personal.

“I think he was really sick,” Pip said in conclusion. “Sicker than anybody knew.”