Jonathan Franzen - Purity

She thought before she answered. She didn’t really want to be his personal disliker — she could see what a tiring and alienating job it would be. She’d come to Bolivia willing to admire the Project; it was mainly the chokingly high admiration levels of the other interns that made her hostile. And yet her hostility did help her stand out from the crowd. It could be a way to gratify her own miserable little ego and be liked by him.

“There was this place,” she said. “This dairy called Moonglow Dairy, near where I lived when I was growing up. I guess it was a real dairy, because they had a lot of cows, but their real money didn’t come from selling milk. It came from selling high-quality manure to organic farmers. It was a shit factory pretending to be a milk factory.”

Andreas smiled. “I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

“Well, you say you’re about citizen journalism. You’re supposedly in the business of leaks. But isn’t your real business—”

“Cow manure?”

“I was going to say fame and adulation. The product is you.”

In the tropics, there was a specific minute in the morning when the sun’s warmth stopped being pleasant and turned fierce. But this minute hadn’t arrived yet. The perspiration popping out on Andreas’s face had come from something else.

“Annagret was right,” he said. “You really are the person I wanted here. You have courage and integrity.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Not true.”

“Not to Colleen?”

“Yes, all right.” He nodded slowly, his eyes on the ground. “Maybe to Colleen. Does that make it easier for you to believe me?”

“No. It makes me want to go pack my suitcase. Colleen is totally unhappy.”

“She’s been here too long. It’s time for her to move on.”

“And now you need a new Colleen? To exploit and string along? Is that the idea?”

“I feel bad for her. But I didn’t do anything to her. She wants something I’ve always been very clear about not being able to give her.”

“That’s not how she tells it.”

He raised his eyes and looked at her. “Pip,” he said. “Why don’t you like me?”

“It’s a fair question.”

“Is it because of Colleen?”

“No.” She could feel her self-control slipping away. “I think I’m just generally hostile these days, especially with men. It’s a problem I’m having. Couldn’t you tell from my emails?”

“Tone is hard to judge in emails.”

“I was fairly happy here until last night. And now suddenly it’s like I’m back in all the shit I tried to run away from. I’m still an angry person with poor impulse control. I’m sure it’s great what you’re doing for the wallabies and parrots — right on, Sunlight Project. But I’m thinking I should go and pack my suitcase.”

She stood up to leave before she had a full-on outburst.

“I can’t stop you,” Andreas said. “All I can do is offer you the truth. Will you sit down again and let me tell you the truth?”

“Unless the truth is very long, I might stay standing up.”

“Sit down,” he said in a much different voice.

She sat down. She was unused to being commanded. She had to admit that it was kind of a relief.

“Here are two true things about fame,” he said. “One is that it’s very lonely. The other is that the people around you constantly project themselves onto you. This is part of why it’s so lonely. It’s as if you’re not even there as a person. You’re merely an object that people project their idealism onto, or their anger, or what have you. And of course you can’t complain, can’t even talk about it, because you’re the one who wanted to be famous. If you try to talk about it anyway, some angry young woman in Oakland, California, will accuse you of self-pity.”

“I was just calling it like I saw it.”

“Everything conspires to make the famous person ever more alone.”

She was disappointed that his truth had to do with him, not her. “What about Toni Field?” she said. “Do you feel lonely with her? Isn’t that why famous people marry each other? To have someone to talk to about the terrible pain of being famous?”

“Toni’s an actress. Sleeping with her is a mutually flattering transaction.”

“Wow. Does she know that’s how you think about it?”

“We both know the terms of the transaction. Those have been the terms for me with everyone since Annagret. Things were different with Annagret because I was nobody when I met her. It’s the reason I trust her. It’s the reason I trusted her when she told me we should invite you here.”

“I didn’t trust her at all.”

“I know. But she saw something special in you. Not just talent but something else.”

“What does that even mean ? The more you try to tell me the truth, the weirder this gets.”

“I’m simply asking you to give me a chance. I want you to keep being yourself. Don’t project. Try to see me as a person trying to run a business, not some famous older man you’re angry with. Take advantage of the opportunity. Give Willow a chance to teach you some research skills.”

“I’m really questioning this Willow idea.”

Andreas took her hands in his and looked into her eyes. She didn’t dare do anything with her hands except leave them completely limp. His eyes were beautifully blue. Even subtracting the vision-distorting effects of his charisma, he was a good-looking man.

“Do you want some more truth?” he said.

She looked aside. “I don’t know.”

“The truth is that Willow will be extremely nice to you if I tell her to be. Not fake nice. Genuinely nice. All I have to do is press a button.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Pip said, pulling her hands away.

“What am I supposed to do? Pretend it’s not true? Deny my own power? She projects like crazy onto me. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Whoa.”

“You came here for truth, didn’t you? I think you’re strong enough to hear it undiluted.”

“Whoa.”

“Anyway,” he said, standing up. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

The sun had turned fierce. Pip fell over onto her side as if pushed by the force of its heat, her head swimming. She felt as if, for a moment, she’d had her skull opened up and her brains given a vigorous stir with a wooden spoon. She was still a long way from submitting to him, a long way from being his for the taking, but for a moment he’d been deep enough inside her head that she could feel how it could happen — how Willow might change her feelings like an octopus changing color, just because he told her to, and how Colleen could be trapped in a scene she hated by a wish for a thing she knew she’d never get from a person she thought was an asshole. For a moment, an appalling divide had opened up in Pip. On one side was her good sense and skepticism. On the other was a whole-body susceptibility different in category from any she’d experienced. Even at the height of her preoccupation with Stephen, she hadn’t wanted to be his object ; hadn’t fantasized about submitting and obeying . But these were the terms of the susceptibility that Andreas, his fame and confidence, had revealed in her. She understood better why Annagret had been so contemptuous of Stephen’s weakness.

She forced herself to sit up and open her eyes. Every color around her was both itself and blazing white. In the forest beyond the river, the chainsaw was moaning. How could she have imagined that she had any idea where she was? She had no idea. The place was a cult the more diabolical for pretending not to be one.

She stood up and returned to the barn, appropriated the nearest free tablet, and took it down into the riverside shade. Every second day since her arrival, she’d sent a cheerful email to her mother at her neighbor Linda’s address. Linda had written back a few times, reporting that her mother was “kinda low” but “hangin’ in there.” Pip had concocted the fiction that it was impossible to make phone calls from Los Volcanes — what was the point of being here if she had to call her mother every day? — and she hesitated now before activating TSP’s equivalent of Skype. To break down and call her mother was almost to admit that she couldn’t survive here, that she was already on her way out. But the situation seemed to qualify as urgent. She didn’t like having her brains stirred with a wooden spoon.