Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I sort of do that mentally,” Pip said.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to hear how to calculate the probability of a six-hit rally, given an arbitrary error rate of fifty percent? Or, slightly more interesting, how to calculate our actual combined error rate, given the empirical frequency of four-hit rallies?”

“Sometime I would,” Pip said. “But I should probably get home.”

“Do I suck too much to do this again?”

“No. We had some fun rallies.”

“I should have told you how much I suck.”

“Whatever you didn’t tell me is dwarfed by how much I haven’t told you.”

Jason bent down to unknot Choco’s leash. There was something humble and patient about the dog’s very low-slungness, the drooping of his heavy head. His grin was silly, possibly in a sly way, suggesting awareness of his more general silliness as a dog.

“I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” Jason said. “By breaking up, I mean. It was already in the works. I just didn’t want you to think I’m the kind of guy who, you know. Sees two people at once.”

“I understand,” Pip said. “Loyalty is good.”

“I also don’t want you to think you were the only reason.”

“OK. I won’t think that.”

“Although you were definitely a reason.”

“Got that, too.”

They didn’t speak of it again, not the next time they hit, three days later, nor any of the many times they hit in August and September. Jason was every bit as compulsive about whacking the ball as Pip was, and for a long time the intensity of their mutual concentration, on the court, was an adequate substitute for the kinds of off-court intensity from which she was still shying and for which Jason, his eager personality notwithstanding, was sensitive enough not to pressure her. But she liked him a lot and loved Choco. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. In hindsight, now that she’d read Tom’s memoir and knew the historical depth of her mother’s concern for animals, she was surprised that her mother had never had a pet. She guessed that she herself had been that pet. There was also her mother’s strange cosmology of animals, a simplified trinity consisting of birds (whose beady eyes frightened her), cats (which represented the Feminine but to which she was totally allergic), and dogs (which embodied the Masculine and therefore, whatever their charms, could not be allowed to disturb her cabin with their pushy male-principle energies). Pip was in any case so dog-starved that she would have fallen for one far less excellent than Choco. Choco was weird , very unneedy as dogs went, a kind of Zen dog, all about his lemons and sly acknowledgment of his ridiculousness.

Hitting two or three times a week, she and Jason got better — enough better to be depressed or enraged when they were suddenly worse again. They never played games, only rallied, working together to keep the ball in play. Week by week, the light began to change, their shadows at the baseline stretching, the autumn-scented dusk arriving earlier. It was the driest and least foggy season of the year in Oakland, but she minded it less now that it meant consistently ideal tennis conditions. All over the state, reservoirs and wells were going dry, the taste and clarity of tap water worsening, farmers suffering, Northern Californians conserving while Orange County set new records for monthly consumption, but none of this mattered for the hour and a half that she was on the court with Jason.

Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack , rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball’s inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough.

In near-darkness afterward, outside the fence, she put her arms around Jason and her face to his chest. Choco stood by patiently, his mouth open, smiling.

“OK,” she said, “OK.”

“It’s about time,” he said.

“I’ve got some things I have to tell you.”

* * *

The rain came three weeks later. Nothing made Pip more homesick for the San Lorenzo Valley than what passed for rain in the East Bay. Rain in Oakland was ordinary, seldom very heavy, always liable to yield to clear sky between the chaotic tentacles of Pacific storm cloud. Only up in the cloud-trapping Santa Cruz Mountains could the rain continue for days without a break, never less than moderately heavy and often coming down an inch per hour, all night, all day, the river rising to lap at the undersides of bridges, Highway 9 covered with sheets of muddy runoff and fallen boughs, power lines down everywhere, PG&E trucks flashing their lights in the torrential midday twilight. That was real rain. Back in the pre-drought years, six feet of it had fallen every winter.

“I might need to go home to Felton for a while,” Pip said to Jason one evening while they were walking, under umbrellas, down the hill from the St. Agnes Home. She’d been visiting Ramón at the home every month or so, even though things had changed between them. He was wholly Marie’s adoptee now, not Stephen’s at all. He had new friends, including a “girlfriend,” and he took very seriously the janitorial duties he’d learned to perform. Pip had wanted Jason to meet him before she drifted out of his life altogether.

“How long is a while?” Jason said.

“I don’t know. Weeks maybe. Longer than I have days off for. I have a feeling my mom’s going to be difficult. I may have to quit my job.”

“Can I come down and see you?”

“No, I’ll come up. It’s a five-hundred-square-foot cabin. Plus I’m worried you’ll run for your life when you meet my mom. You’ll think I’ve been concealing the fact that I’m like her.”

“Everybody’s embarrassed by their parents.”

“But I have actual reason to be.”

Pip was Jason’s newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. If she wanted something more, like visiting Ramón with her, he agreed to it enthusiastically. He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do. She’d watched him rapidly eat four generic vanilla-cream cookies and then stop and marvel at a fifth, holding it in front of his eyes and saying, “These are fantastic. ”

If she became a rich person — and she could already feel herself becoming one; was sensing the mentally deformative weight of the word heir —Jason would be the last boy who’d liked her when she was still nobody. He did admit that her interning with Andreas Wolf had “confirmed” his assessment of her intelligence, but he swore it hadn’t had anything to do with his breakup. “It was just you,” he said. “You behind the counter at Peet’s.” She trusted Jason in a way that might well prove to be unique, but she didn’t want him to know this. She was aware of how easily she could blow things with him, and she was even more aware, thanks to Tom’s memoir, of the hazards of love. She felt herself wanting to bury herself in Jason, to pour her trust into him, even though she had evidence that self-burial and crazy trust levels could result in toxicity. She was therefore allowing herself to be heedless in sex only. This was probably hazardous, too, but she couldn’t help it.