Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Pip’s heart began to race, in part because this had not, in fact, occurred to her before, and the prospect was frightening, but mainly because she sensed that a real seduction was kicking into gear now, a seduction to which all of Annagret’s touchings had merely been a prelude. She took her hand away and hugged herself nervously.

“I thought the Project was about corporate and national security secrets.”

“Yes, of course. But the Project has many resources.”

“So I could just, like, write to them and ask for the information?”

Annagret shook her head. “It isn’t a private detection agency.”

“But if I actually went and did an internship.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, that’s interesting.”

“Something to think about, ja?”

“Ja-ah,” Pip said.

“ You’re traveling in a foreign country ,” Annagret read, “ and one night the police come to your hotel room and arrest you as a spy, even though you haven’t been spying. They take you to the police station. They say that you may make one call that they will listen to both sides of. They warn you that anyone you call will also be under suspicion of spying. Whom do you call? ”

“Stephen,” Pip said.

There was a flicker of disappointment in Annagret’s face. “This Stephen? The Stephen here?”

“Yes, what’s wrong with that?”

“Forgive me, but I thought you would say your mother. You’ve mentioned her in every other answer so far. She’s the only person you trust.”

“But that’s only trust in a deep way,” Pip said. “She’d go insane with worry, and she doesn’t know anything about how the world works, and so she wouldn’t know who to call to help me. Stephen would know exactly who to call.”

“To me he seems a bit weak.”

“What?”

“He seems weak. He’s married to that angry, controlly person.”

“Yes, I know, his marriage is unfortunate — believe me, I know.”

“You have feelings for him!” Annagret said with dismay.

“Yes, I do, so what?”

“Well, you didn’t tell me. We’re telling each other everything, on the sofa, and you didn’t tell me this.”

“You didn’t tell me you used to sleep with Andreas Wolf!”

“Andreas is a public person. I have to be careful. And that’s many years ago now.”

“You talk about him like you’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

“Pip, please,” Annagret said, seizing her hands. “Let’s not fight. I didn’t know you had feelings for Stephen. I’m sorry.”

But the wound the word weak had inflicted was hurting Pip more now, not less, and she was aghast to realize how much personal data she’d already surrendered to a woman so confident of her beauty that she could fill her face with metal and chop her hair (so it looked) with lawn clippers. Pip, who had no grounds for such confidence, snatched her hands away and stood up and noisily dropped her cereal bowl in the sink. “I’m going upstairs now—”

“No, we still have six questions—”

“Because I’m obviously not going to South America, and I don’t trust you one bit, not the tiniest bit, and so why don’t you and your masturbating boyfriend go down to L.A. and squat in somebody else’s house and give your questionnaire to somebody who’s into somebody stronger than Stephen. I don’t want you in our house anymore, and neither does anybody else. If you had any respect for me, you would have seen I didn’t even want to be here now.”

“Pip, please, wait, I’m really, really sorry.” Annagret did seem genuinely distressed. “We don’t have to do any more questions—”

“I thought it was a form we had to follow. Had to, had to. God, I’m stupid.”

“No, you’re really smart. I think you’re fantastic. I think only maybe your life revolves too much about men, a little bit, right now.”

Pip stared in amazement at this fresh insult.

“Maybe you want a female friend who’s something older but used to be so much like you.”

“You were never like me,” Pip said.

“No, I was. Sit down, please, ja? Talk with me.”

Annagret’s voice was so silky and commanding, and her insult had cast such humiliating light on Jason’s presence in Pip’s bedroom, that Pip almost obeyed her and sat down. But when she was gripped by her distrust of people it became physically unbearable to stay with them. She fled down the hallway, hearing the scrape of a chair behind her, the sound of her name being called.

On the second-floor landing, she paused to seethe. Stephen was weak? She thought about men too much? That is so nice. That really makes me feel good about myself .

Behind Stephen’s door, the marital fighting had stopped. Pip very quietly moved closer to it, away from the sound of basketball downstairs, and listened. Before long, there came a creak of a bedspring, and then an unmistakable whimpering sigh, and she understood that Annagret was right, that Stephen was weak, he was weak; and yet there was nothing wrong with a husband and a wife having sex. Hearing it and picturing it and being excluded from it filled Pip with a desolation that she had only one means of assuaging.

She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, as if shaving five seconds off her ascent could make up for half an hour’s absence. Outside her door, she composed her face into an expression of sheepish apology. It was a face she’d used a thousand times on her mother, to reliably good effect. She opened the door and peeked in, wearing the look.

The lights were on and Jason was in his clothes again, sitting on the edge of the bed, texting intently.

“Psst,” Pip said. “Are you horribly mad at me?”

He shook his head. “It’s just I told my sister I’d be home by eleven.”

The word sister dispelled much of the apology from Pip’s face, but Jason wasn’t looking at her anyway. She went in and sat down by him and touched him. “It’s not eleven yet, is it?”

“It’s eleven twenty.”

She put her head on his shoulder and her hands around his arm. She could feel his muscles working as he texted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t explain what happened. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”

“You don’t have to explain. I kind of knew it anyway.”

“Knew what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“No, what, though? What did you know?”

He stopped texting and stared at the floor. “It’s not like I’m so normal myself. But relatively speaking—”

“I want to make normal love with you. Can’t we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you’ll be home a little late.”

“Listen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”

“It’s what I call myself.”

“Somehow it doesn’t seem like I’m talking to you when I use it. I don’t know … ‘Pip.’ ‘Pip.’ It doesn’t sound … I don’t know…”

The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn’t resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.

“OK,” she said. “So you don’t like my name. What else don’t you like about me?”

“Oh, come on. You’re the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”

“Right. While your sister was waiting for you.”

Speaking the word sister again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of whoosh inside her head.

“Seriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don’t like about me, since we’re obviously never going to fuck, since I’m not normal enough, although what’s so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”