Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Colleen always had two cigarettes after dinner, on the back veranda, where Pip had taken to sitting and listening to the frogs and owls and stridulators, the nocturnal orchestra. Colleen neither said much to her nor seemed to mind her being there. After her second cigarette, she went back inside and spoke to the staff in a Spanish whose fluency made Pip feel envious and discouraged. She didn’t wish she were any of the other women, because it would have meant forsaking irony, but she could see wanting to be Colleen.

One night, between cigarettes, Colleen broke her silence and said, “It’s a crap world, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Pip said. “I was just sitting here thinking it’s amazingly beautiful.”

“Give it time. You’re still in sensory overload.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.”

“It’s all crap.”

“What’s crap about it?”

In the dark, Pip heard the scrape of a lighter, the smoker’s gasp. “Everything,” Colleen said. “We’re a clearinghouse for crap. Nobody leaks good news. All we get is crap news, day after day, crap pouring in. It wears you down.”

“I thought the idea was that sunlight disinfected it.”

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. I’m saying it wears you down. The infinite variety of human badness.”

“Is it possible you’ve been here too long? How long have you been here?”

“Three years. Almost since the beginning. I’ve become the resident depressed person, it’s practically my whole function. Everyone else can look at me and think, Thank God I’m not like her , and feel good about themselves.”

“You could leave.”

“Yeah. I could leave.”

“What’s he like?” Pip said. “Andreas?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Really.”

“I’m saying that purely descriptively. How could he not be? To do a thing like TSP, you have to be an asshole.”

“But you still can’t leave.”

“I’m being strung along. I’m aware of it every minute of the day, that he’s stringing me along. It’s approaching Guinness Book of World Records proportions, my willingness to be strung along. I get to be first among nobodies to him. I have my own room. I even know where the money comes from.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“I get to be the most special of the never-to-be-special. He really knows how to play a person.”

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

“So what brings you here?” Colleen said. “You seem a little challenged in the entitlement department. I mean, compared to the others.”

Pip, grateful to be asked, poured out her story, omitting nothing, not even her recent hideous actions in Stephen’s bedroom in the squatter house.

“So basically,” Colleen summarized, “you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here.”

“I’m looking for my other parent.”

“That should stand you in good stead. Having something besides a hunger for Dear Leader’s love and approval. My advice? Keep your eyes on what you came for.”

Pip laughed.

“What?”

“I was just thinking about Toni Field,” Pip said. “It’s like if they were making a movie about me and I was sleeping with the actor who played my father. Isn’t that a little weird? Sleeping with the person who’s playing his mother?”

“He’s a weird dude. Ours is not to wonder why.”

“I think it would be very weird. But Flor seems to think it’s some outstanding coup.”

“Flor’s like some single-minded carnivore whose meat is fame. She doesn’t need money — her family owns half of Peru. They’re big in minerals. She’s like, ‘Fame? Do I smell fame? Is there fame here? Will you share it with me?’ To her, Andreas hooking up with Toni Field is almost as good as hooking up with Toni Field herself.”

Pip was thrilled to be dishing, even though the mechanism was dismal, her feeling specially confided in by Colleen, who herself was treated specially by Andreas, who was off in Buenos Aires having sex with his virtual mother. To impress Colleen, she said she was going down to the river and swim.

“Now?” Colleen said.

“You want to come with me?”

“Not sure I’m up for being attacked by the hurón .”

“He always runs away when I see him.”

“He’s just trying to lull you into the water at night.”

“I’m going to do it.” Pip stood up. “You sure you don’t want to?”

“I hate dares.”

“I’m not daring you. Just asking.”

Pip waited in suspense for Colleen’s answer. For all her disadvantages in life, she did have the advantage of having swum in the dark a lot, at the swimming hole in the San Lorenzo, in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, on summer nights when the temperature lingered in the eighties and the river hadn’t yet dried out and scummed over. Oddly enough, her mother had often swum with her, perhaps because her body was less visible at night. Pip remembered the surprise of realizing, while her mother floated on her back in her black one-piece bathing suit, that her mother had once been a girl like her.

“OK, fuck it,” Colleen said, standing up. “I’m not going to let you win this.”

The moon had risen above the eastern pinnacle, whitening the lawn and making the darkness under the trees by the river even inkier. To get to the bathing spot, Pip and Colleen crossed the water on a chainsaw-hewn plank that was tethered by a rope to a tree in case of flooding. While she undressed, Pip sneaked glances at Colleen. Her hunched shoulders, her almost cowering posture, suggested a body image more like Pip’s own and less like those of her roommates, who stepped out of the shower with their shoulders thrown back and their heads held high.

Colleen put a toe in the river. “Where did I get the idea this water is warm?”

Pip did what had to be done, which was to run and dive and fully submerge herself. She remembered the feeling of expecting to be bitten by any number of things, at any moment, and the pleasure, then, of not being bitten; the emergence of trust in the dark water. Colleen, still cowering, her moonlit arms folded across her chest, stepped forward and sank slowly to her knees, like an Aztec virgin submitting not very happily to sacrificial death.

“Isn’t it great?” Pip said, paddling about.

“Horrible. Horrible.”

“Put your head all the way under.”

“No fucking way.”

“This has got to be the most beautiful place on earth. I can’t believe I get to be here.”

“That’s because you haven’t met the snake yet.”

“Just dive. Get your head under.”

“I’m not like you, nature girl.”

Pip reared up, feeling all fleshy appendage, and grabbed Colleen by the arm.

“Don’t,” Colleen said. “I mean it.”

“OK,” Pip said, letting go.

“This is what I do, this is who I am. I go in up to my knees and no farther. I get the worst of both worlds.”

Pip clothed herself in water again. “I know the feeling,” she said. “But I’m not having it right now.”

“I don’t see how you’re not afraid of being mauled by the hurón .”

“It’s the upside of having poor impulse control.”

“I’m going to go have another cigarette,” Colleen said, leaving the water. “Just scream with blood-curdling terror if you need me.”

Pip thought Colleen would change her mind, but she didn’t. Left by herself, enveloped by the chirping of frogs and the murmur of flowing water and the smells, the smells, Pip experienced a moment of happiness purer than any she’d ever felt. It had to do with being naked in clean water and far away from everything, in a remote valley in the poorest country in South America, but also with her courage to be alone in the river, as contrasted with Colleen’s neurotic fear. It made her feel grateful to her mother, made her miss her and wish that she could be here, floating near her. The love that was a granite impediment at the center of her life was also an unshakable foundation; she felt blessed.