Jonathan Franzen - Purity

There was also the matter of the email Willow had sent her recently. It was newsy and surprisingly sentimental and came with a picture attached, a selfie that Willow had taken with Pip outside the barn. The caption could have been “Alpha Girl with Beta Girl.” But Willow had been party to the fabrication of Pip’s journalistic credentials; surely she knew that encrypted texting was the only safe way for anyone at the Project to communicate with her. So why an email? And why the clunky business of sending an attachment? Pip had been doing her best to forget that she’d opened it at home, using Tom’s private Wi-Fi.

All things considered, she was proud of having drunk only four margaritas with the interns tonight. Between her lies and the tensions in the house, it seemed only a matter of time before she found herself jobless and on the street again, her major break squandered. And she knew what she had to do. She had to betray Andreas and tell Tom and Leila everything. But she couldn’t bear to disappoint them.

By saying nothing, she was protecting a killer, a crazy person, a man she didn’t trust. And yet she was reluctant to lose her connection with him. He’d messed with her head, and it brought her an unwholesome pleasure to mess with his head — to be the person in Denver who knew his secrets and had to be worried about. Without his daily presence to remind her of her distrust, his power and his fame and his special interest in her were all the more conducive to sexual fantasy. He scored zeroes in certain important love metrics but was off the charts in others.

She texted him every night at bedtime and didn’t turn off her phone until he’d texted back. She’d come to think it would have been less bad to sleep with him, less of a moral surrender, than to open the email attachment he’d sent her. Why, why, why hadn’t she slept with him when she had her chance? Running away from Bolivia seemed all the more regrettable now that she knew that his fear of Tom was unfounded. Planting spyware was a pointless and truly vile sin that she could have obviated by staying with Andreas and committing a pleasurable sin.

She had to fight the temptation to sext him a picture of her private thing. She was the latest of those women who stayed loyal to him. The alteration of her brain by wooden spoon was apparently ongoing.

It wasn’t hard to conceal the state of her brain from Tom and Leila, but its alteration was the reason she’d flown directly from Bolivia to Denver without stopping to see her mother. Her mother could be scarily perceptive about her state of mind. No sooner had Pip arrived in Denver than she’d been forced to conceal it from her.

“Purity,” her mother had said on the telephone. “When you told me you couldn’t find anything out about your father in Bolivia, were you lying to me?”

“No. I don’t tell lies to you.”

“You didn’t find anything out?”

“No!”

“Then tell me why you had to go to Denver.”

“I want to learn to be a journalist.”

“But why did it have to be Denver? Why that online magazine? Why not someplace closer to home?”

“Mom, this is the time when I need to be on my own for a while. You’re getting older, I’m going to be there for you. Can’t I have a couple of years where I get to be away?”

“Did Andreas Wolf want you to go to that place?”

Pip hesitated. “No,” she said. “They just happened to have an intern position I applied for.”

“It was the only news service in the country accepting applications?”

“You just don’t like it because it’s in a different time zone.”

“Purity. I’m going to ask again: are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes! Why are you asking me?”

“Linda helped me use her computer, and I looked at the website. I wanted to see for myself.”

“And? It’s a great site, right? It’s serious long-form investigative journalism.”

“I have the feeling you’re not telling me things you should be telling me.”

“I’m not! I mean, I’m not not.”

However sensitive to smells her mother was, she had an even keener nose for moral failings. She could smell that Pip was doing something wrong in Denver, and Pip resented her for it. She’d already denied herself Andreas because of something her mother had said. To live up to her mother’s ideal, she’d behaved more worthily than she’d had to, and she felt she deserved credit for it, even though her mother knew nothing about it. She was in no mood to be lectured.

But her mother had been sulking ever since. Not returning phone messages and then, when Pip did reach her, not joyfully ejaculating but making her displeasure known with sighs and silences and monosyllabic answers to Pip’s dutiful questions. Pip had finally gotten angry and stopped calling altogether. She hadn’t even told her mother she’d moved in with Tom and Leila. For a while, living with them, she’d felt vindicated in her belief that she could have been a well-adjusted and effective person if she’d had a pair of parents like these. They’d already done so much to help her that finding her real father had ceased to be a burning priority. But preferring them as parents made her pity her mother, who was alone in Felton and had done her best with the poor resources she had. Pip’s life seemed like a conspiracy to betray every single person in it. And now Tom seemed to have a thing for her, which amounted to yet another betrayal, a betrayal of Leila that Pip hadn’t intended and couldn’t control. It was all making her even more dependent on her nightly textings with Andreas and the self-touching she often did afterward.

Tom was still snoring when she ventured out to the bathroom. From downstairs came a smell of coffee and the faint patter of a keyboard. Pip felt pity for Leila, too. And for Tom, if he was attracted to her. And of course for Andreas, and for Colleen. Apparently pity and betrayal were related.

Back in her bed, she texted Andreas. It was too late at night to expect a reply, and she should have just gone to sleep, but instead she appended further texts.

She was erasing the last message, which she’d typed only as a masturbation aid, when a reply came in from Los Volcanes.

She was surprised. It was four in the morning in Bolivia.

She waited ten minutes, second-guessing herself, for his reply to her temerity. She knew she was behaving badly, trying to keep him interested after having twice rejected him. But right now their texting was the closest thing she had to a sex life. She typed more:

His text was like a sock in the jaw. Her hands jumped away from her device, letting it fall between her legs. Was he jealous of Tom? It seemed important to set the record straight, and so she picked up the device again. She cursed the errors her trembling finger made.