Jonathan Franzen - Purity

It happened again. Again, for a second, for less than a second, before he could turn his face away, she saw a wholly different person, a crazy person.

“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said, face averted.

“Thank you.”

He stood up and walked away from her. “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve never felt so off balance in my life. You make me feel smaller, in a good way. I’m supposed to be the great teller of truth, and you keep cutting me down. I hate it, but I love it. I love you.” He turned back to her and said it again. “I love you.”

She blushed. “Thank you.”

“That’s it?” he said wildly. “ Thank you? Who made you this way? Where did you come from?”

“The San Lorenzo Valley. It’s quite the humble, democratic place.”

He strode back over to her and yanked her to her feet. “You’re driving me crazy!”

“All is not so well inside my own head, either.”

“So what are we? How do we do this? What is the way we’re going to be together?”

“I don’t know.”

“ Take off your fucking clothes —does that work?”

“It has some promise.”

“So do it. Slowly. I want to watch you. Take your panties off last.”

“OK. I can do that.”

She liked taking orders from him. Liked it more than anything else about him. But as she did as she’d been told, unbuttoning one button of her shirt, and then a second button, she wasn’t sure that she liked that she liked it. She wished she could unhear what Stephen had said to her, in his bedroom, about needing a father. A dread began to build in her as she undid a fourth button, and then the last. She beheld an emotional vista in which she was angry at her missing father, at all older men, and provoked and punished this father-aged man, drove him wild, induced him to offer himself as the person missing from her life; and her body responded to the offer; but it was icky to respond to him that way. She let her bra fall to the floor.

“My God you’re beautiful,” he said, staring.

“I think you mean I’m young.”

“No. The inside of you is even more beautiful than the outside.”

“Keep talking,” she said. “It’s helping.”

When she was finally fully naked, he dropped to his knees and pressed his face to her crotch. “You shaved for me,” he murmured gratefully.

“Who said it was for you?” she said with a faltering laugh. Being so liked by him, she was liking herself quite a lot, but it deepened her sense of dread to hear herself continuing to provoke him, and to feel the effect her provocation had. His hands were trembling on her butt. He was kissing her, inhaling her, and she could feel how it would all happen again, the same as last time, except that this time she would have to submit to the whole deal; there would be no going back on her word.

All at once, at the prospect of being fucked by him, she experienced a different kind of climax. The lack of friction with which she’d arrived at this moment, the speed and directness with which he’d arranged an assignation with her, the ease with which he’d got her standing naked in a hotel room, combined with a complex of misgivings— father, killer, spoon-wielder, fugitive, crazy person —to produce a simple thought: she didn’t want to be his woman.

In the sober light of this thought, what they were doing seemed ridiculous.

“Um,” she said, stepping away from him. “I think I need a small time-out.”

He slumped. “Now what.”

“No, seriously, I’ve been looking forward to this for a month and a half. I’ve been touching myself every night, thinking about it. Imagining I’m you. But now — I don’t know. I’m wondering if touching myself might be enough.”

He slumped further. She picked up her bra and put it on. She put on her jeans, not bothering with the underpants, which were still right in front of him.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“So what would you like to do instead?” His voice was strained with self-control. “Visit the picturesque town center?”

“Honestly I hadn’t thought past going to bed with you.”

“It’s still an option.”

“Maybe if you order me to. I like it when you give orders. I think I may have a slave personality.”

“That’s not an order I can give. I don’t want it if you don’t want it. You said you wanted it.”

“I know.”

He sighed heavily. “What changed your mind?”

“It just suddenly didn’t feel right to me.”

“Am I too old for you?”

“God, no. I like your age. If anything, maybe a little too much. Plus you’ve got that ageless German male thing going. You’ve got those blue eyes.”

He bowed his head. “So you just don’t like who I am.”

She felt terribly sorry. She kneeled by him and petted his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Everybody likes you,” she said. “Millions of people like you.”

“They like a lie. You’re the person I showed my true self to.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She hugged his head to her chest and rocked him a little. Her heart was reengaging with him, and she wondered if a mercy fuck was in the offing. She’d never done one, but she now saw how it happened. An ulterior part of her was further considering that, at some later date, she might take retrospective satisfaction in having fucked the famous outlaw hero, and that this was her chance to do it, and that, conversely, this future self of hers would writhe with remorse if all she’d done was lead him on and chicken out. Chicken out twice .

He had his face between her breasts, his hands down the back of her jeans. The fact that she’d chickened out twice seemed significant. She thought of what her mother had said before she left Felton with her suitcase. “I know you’re very angry with me, pussycat, and you have a right to be. I worry about you in the jungle, on a different continent. I worry about you with Andreas Wolf. But the one thing I never worry about is your good moral sense. You’ve always been a loving person, with a clear sense of right and wrong. I know you better than you know yourself. And that’s what I know about you.” Pip, who could see nothing but the mess her bad behavior made of every relationship in her life, had felt quite sure, in the moment, that her mother knew nothing at all about her. But to have recoiled from Andreas twice , when everything argued for submitting — didn’t this mean something? Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she did have a clear moral sense. She could remember having loved Ramón and even Dreyfuss pureheartedly. What had ruined things in Oakland was her lust for Stephen, her anger at an older man.

She kissed the curly top of Andreas’s head and untangled herself from him. “It’s just not going to happen,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She put on her shirt and went down to the lobby. Her decision seemed irrevocable, not even in her power, and she was prepared to sit in the lobby all day and all night if she had to. But Pedro was back with the Land Cruiser in less than an hour. She couldn’t face sitting in the front with him; her body felt prickly and contaminating. She lay down in the back and waited to be overwhelmed with shame and guilt and second-guessing.

When the feelings came, they were even worse than she’d foreseen. For two days she did little but lie in bed, unresponsive to her roommates’ comings and goings. She’d been flying high, liking herself, as long as she’d been liked by Andreas, but now, having incurred his displeasure, she fell into a pit of displeasure with herself. Even though she’d been the rejecter, not the rejected, the scene in the hotel room had been as bad as the one in Stephen’s bedroom. It played over and over in her head, particularly the moment when she’d been naked and he’d been on his knees.