Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“She has no idea.”

“Exactly. Either that, or she’s a really good liar. Because I started to think about the boyfriend thing, the fact that she lied to us. It made me wonder if she does know who I am.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

Leila thought of the emergency cigarettes that she kept in the freezer. The drink had stunned her. Tom’s news had stunned her.

“This has nothing to do with me,” she said dully. “This is your life, your real life, the life that matters to you. I was always just a sideshow. Even if you didn’t want your real life back, it’s coming to get you. And you don’t have to worry about me — I know how to exit quietly.”

“I would like nothing better than to never see Anabel again.”

She gave a brittle laugh. “It sounds like you’ll be seeing quite a lot of her now.”

“Pip’s a good researcher. It’s possible she managed to figure out who Anabel is, which led her to me. But if she’s good enough to figure that out, she’s good enough to figure out that there’s a billion-dollar trust set up in Anabel’s name.”

“A billion dollars.”

“If Pip knew about it, she wouldn’t be here in Denver. She’d be trying to get her mother to pay off her miserable little student loan. Which tells me that she doesn’t know anything.”

“A billion dollars. Your ex-wife is worth a billion dollars.”

“I’ve told you that.”

“You told me it was a lot . You didn’t say a billion dollars.”

“That’s just a guess, based on McCaskill’s revenues. It was already pushing a billion when her father died.”

Leila was accustomed to feeling slight, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt slighter than she did at this moment.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I know it’s a lot to hear.”

“A lot to hear? You have a child . You have a daughter you didn’t know about for twenty-five years. A daughter who’s living under your own roof now. I’d say, yes, that’s quite a lot for me to hear.”

“This doesn’t have to change anything.”

“It’s already changed everything,” Leila said. “And it’ll be good. You can normalize things with Anabel, have a nice relationship with Pip, stop being haunted. Spend your holidays together. It’ll be great.”

“Please. Leila. I need you to help me think about this. Why did she come to Denver? ”

“I have no idea. Bizarre coincidence.”

“No way.”

“OK, so she knows, and she’s a good liar.”

“You really believe she’s that good?”

She shook her head.

“So she doesn’t know,” Tom said. “And if she doesn’t know … then how the fuck did she end up in our house?”

Leila shook her head again. Whenever the time came to vomit, it wasn’t just the thought of food that sickened her; it was the thought of wanting anything . Nausea the negation of all desire. And so, too, fighting. She was remembering the old desolation and feeling it again now, the conviction that love was impossible, that however deeply they buried their conflict it would never go away. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

But smell had also been heaven. Not outside the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where the waftings of cow shit from adjacent pastures mingled with the smellable inefficiencies of engines banned from California long before Pip was born; not in the Land Cruiser sure-handedly piloted by a taciturn Bolivian, Pedro, through diesel particulates on the city’s ring boulevards; not along the Cochabamba highway, where every half kilometer another brutally effective speed bump gave Pip a chance to smell fruit rotting and things frying and be approached by the sellers of oranges and fried things who’d installed the speed bumps in the first place; not in the swelter of the dusty road that Pedro veered onto after Pip had counted forty-six bumps ( rompemuelles Pedro called them, her first new word in Spanish); not when they reached a ridge and headed down a narrow road as steep as anything in San Francisco, the noontime sun boiling plastic volatiles out of the Land Cruiser’s upholstery and vaporizing gasoline from the spare can in the cargo area; but when the road, after plunging through dry forest and through cooler woods half cleared for coffee plantings, finally bottomed out along a stream leading into a little valley more beautiful than any place Pip could have imagined: then the heaven had commenced. Two scents at once, distinct like layers of cooler and warmer water in a lake — some intensely flowering tropical tree’s perfume, a complex lawn-smell from a pasture that goats were grazing — flooded through her open window. From a cluster of low buildings on the far side of the valley, by a small river, came a trace of sweet fruitwood smoke. The very air had a pleasing fundamental climate smell, something wholly not North American.

The place was called Los Volcanes. There were no volcanoes, but the valley was enclosed by red sandstone pinnacles five hundred meters high or more. The sandstone absorbed water during the rainy season and released it year-round into a river that meandered through a pocket of wet forest, an oasis of jungle in otherwise dry country. Well-maintained trails branched through the forest, and during Pip’s first two weeks at Los Volcanes, while the other Sunlight Project interns and employees did their shadowy work and she had only small menial jobs to do (because Andreas Wolf was away, in Buenos Aires, and she hadn’t yet had the entry interview at which he told new interns what to do), she hiked the trails every morning and again late in the afternoon. To keep herself from dwelling on what she’d left behind in California, the piteous maternal cries of “Purity! Be safe! Pussycat!” that had followed her down the lane when she left for the airport, she immersed herself in smells.

The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a two-dimensional color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional color sphere to represent all the ways in which one color could bleed into another. She hadn’t wanted to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the trail, until she found the mushroom with a roasted-coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk, which reminded her of chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in the woods rang each of these notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the compound were five different flower smells in the neighborhood of daisy, which itself was close to sun-dried goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn’t this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she would end up smelling every smell there was, the way her eyes had already seen every color on the color wheel.