Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Totally. I’m allowed to have friends.”

“Jason. Listen.” Pip lowered her voice. “Even if your girlfriend’s OK with our being friends, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He seemed innocently puzzled. “You don’t even want to hit with me? I’m not as good as a brick wall. But I’m getting better.”

“If you didn’t have a girlfriend, I’d be happy to hit with you. But you do, so.”

“You’re telling me I have to break up with my girlfriend before you’ll hit with me? It’s a pretty substantial upfront investment for just hitting a tennis ball.”

“The city’s full of people you could hit with for no investment. I don’t know why you’re suddenly so interested in hitting with me. Why I suddenly stopped being the abnormal girl who does scary things.”

He blushed. “Because I’ve had two weeks to sit and watch you behind the counter?”

“Hmm.”

“No, you’re right, you’re right,” he said, holding his hands up. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

She felt a little sick, seeing him back away from her, his implied compliment echoing in her ears. But she was even sicker of betraying people.

When she got home from work, under a mercilessly clear sky, she found that she had no appetite for whacking the ball. It was like the spaghetti with eggplant in Tom’s memoir: all at once, her satisfaction was exhausted. She both wished that she could hit with an actual person, a kind person, with Jason, and was relieved that she couldn’t. Another lesson of Tom’s memoir was that there ought to be a law against boy-girl relationships before the age of thirty.

The TV was on in the living room, but Dreyfuss was absorbed in typing on the computer. “I’m filing a complaint of judicial misconduct,” he explained to Pip. “There’s a clear pattern of bias in Judge Costa’s decisions. I’ve examined more than three hundred relevant cases, and I believe the evidence can safely be described as compelling.”

“Dreyfuss,” Pip said gently. “You can stop doing that.”

“I’ve amassed a wealth of new information about Costa since Tuesday. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy , and yet—”

“Don’t use it at all. It’s a worrisome word, coming from you.”

“Some conspiracies are real, Pip. You’ve seen that yourself.”

She pulled up a chair next to him. “I should have told you this sooner,” she said. “Somebody is buying the house. Somebody I know. Somebody who’s going to let us keep living here.”

An actual emotion, worry or sadness, flickered in Dreyfuss’s face. “I own this house,” he said. “I have equity in this house. I bought it with my departed mother’s money. I’m not letting go of it.”

“The bank took it before the market rebounded. You lost it and you’re not getting it back. I did the only thing I could think to do.”

Dreyfuss narrowed his eyes. “You have money?”

“No. But someday I will. When I do, you can have the house back as a present from me. Can you trust me? Everything will be OK if you trust me. I promise.”

He seemed to recede into himself, into a more familiar absence of affect. “Bitter experience,” he said, “has forced on me a policy of never trusting anyone. You, for example. You’ve always struck me as a responsible and generous person, and yet who really knows what’s in your head? Still less what will be in your head in the future?”

“Believe me, I know how hard it is.”

He turned back to the computer. “I’m filing my complaint.”

“Dreyfuss,” she said. “You don’t have any choice but to trust me. It’s either that or wind up on the street.”

“There will be further legal actions.”

“Fine, but in the meantime let’s work out a rent we all can pay.”

“I fear estoppel of the fraud claim,” Dreyfuss said, typing. “To pay the supposed owner rent concedes the legitimacy of the sale.”

“So give the money to me. I’ll write the checks. You don’t have to concede anything. You can—”

She stopped. A tear had rolled down Dreyfuss’s cheek.

* * *

Evening sunlight was in the trees of Mosswood Park when Pip coasted up to the tennis courts on her bike. Standing next to Jason was an absurdly proportioned brown dog, huge-headed, low-slung, extremely long. It was smiling as if proud of the nest of ratty tennis balls at its feet. Jason caught sight of Pip and waved to her needlessly, goofily. The dog swished its bushy and cumbersome tail.

“This is your dog?”

“As of last week,” Jason said. “I inherited him from my sister. She’s going to Japan for two years.”

“What’s his name?

“Choco. Like his color, chocolate.”

The dog presented Pip with a drooly, dirty tennis ball and pushed his head between her bare knees. End to end, there was a whole lot of Choco.

“I wasn’t sure I could handle having a dog,” Jason said, “but he’s got this thing for chewing lemons. He walks around with them in his mouth, sort of half bitten, lots of slobber. He looks like he’s wearing this big idiotic yellow smile. My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.”

“The acid can’t be good for his teeth.”

“My sister had a lemon tree behind her apartment. I’m putting him on a reduced-citrus diet. As you can see, he still has his teeth.”

“Excellent dog.”

“And a champ at finding tennis balls.”

“Next best thing to lemons.”

“Right?”

Four nights earlier, Jason had sent Pip a one-line message on Facebook: check out my relationship status. This she had duly done and mostly been dismayed by. The last thing she wanted was to be in any way responsible for a breakup. Among other things, it seemed to oblige her to be worth breaking up for: to be available. And yet, of course, she’d literally asked for it. Of all the ways she could have said no to hitting a tennis ball, she’d chosen to make an issue of Jason’s girlfriend. Not only could no one else be trusted — she herself couldn’t be trusted! She’d wrapped herself in relationship ethics when her real motive was to take Jason away from Sandrine. And sleep with him herself? She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she’d done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him . What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable. She’d written back:

Obviously saying this WAY too late, but … I’m going through a lot of stuff of my own right now and I can’t really promise you anything but returning balls hit to my forehand. Should have been MUCH clearer about this on Sunday. I apologize (again, again, again). Please don’t feel you have to follow through and hit with me.

To which Jason had replied, very quickly, just hitting works for me.

As soon as they were on a court, she discovered that he was bad at tennis, even worse than she was. He tried to crush every shot, sometimes missing the ball altogether, more often sending it into the net or over her head, and his good shots were unreturnable bullets. After ten minutes, she called a time-out. Choco, leashed to the outside of the fence, stood up hopefully.

“I’m no tennis pro,” she said, “but I think you’re swinging too hard.”

“It feels fantastic when I connect.”

“I know. But we’re trying to hit together.”

His face clouded. “I suck at this, don’t I.”

“That’s why we’re practicing.”

He swung less hard after that, and the hitting was somewhat more satisfactory, but their longest rally in an hour was six hits. “I blame the brick wall,” Jason said as they walked off the court. “I’m realizing I should have drawn a line representing the top of the net. And maybe a higher line to represent the baseline.”