Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “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.

  She continued to feel blessed on subsequent evenings, on the back veranda, as she learned more about Colleen’s crap childhood. The farm in Vermont was something between collective and cult, the land owned by her father, who fashioned himself as a cross between Henry David Thoreau, a many-wived biblical patriarch, and the psychologist Wilhelm Reich. His ongoing self-actualization took the form of leaving the farm in Colleen’s mother’s hands for months at a time, returning with younger women who helped him channel his orgone energy into the farm’s rocky soil, to make it more fecund, and randomly knocking up Colleen’s mother. Colleen was homeschooled until she turned sixteen and ran away, first to Boston and then to Hamburg, in Germany, where she worked as an au pair. Then she attended Wellesley on a full scholarship and graduated when she was still just twenty-two. The irony of her position now, performing a role similar to her mother’s at a patriarchal place, wasn’t lost on her. She seemed almost to revel in the crappiness of it.

  Pip, for her part, felt she was finally finding a friend who could understand her own strange childhood. She was attracted to Colleen’s cigarette-smelling darkness, and now she didn’t have to worry about where she sat at dinner, because Colleen saved the place next to hers. She could tell that Colleen liked her sarcasm, and she played it up for her. Colleen invited her to her room, which was sweet and low-ceilinged, to dish and drink beer and watch TV shows streamed over the private fiber-optic line that Andreas had obtained in a deal to upgrade Bolivian army comms. If Colleen had been a boy, Pip would have slept with him. As it was, she was going to bed long after midnight, waking up late and somewhat hungover, and blowing off her morning hikes.

  Then one night, after returning from a hike so long that she’d done the last part of it by feel in the dark, she went to the dining room and saw that her usual place beside Colleen had been taken by Andreas Wolf. Her heart jumped at the sight of him. He was listening seriously to another woman at the table, listening and nodding, and Pip immediately got what Annagret’s boyfriend had meant about his charisma. It was partly a matter of his still-boyish German good looks, but there was an ineffable something else, a glow of charged fame particles, or a self-confidence so calm and mighty it altered the geometry of the dining room, drawing every sight line to itself. No wonder Colleen didn’t care whether he was an asshole. Pip wanted to keep looking at him herself.

  Colleen was slouched low in her chair, her face averted from Andreas, and was tapping a finger on the table, her food untouched. Pip was hurt that she hadn’t saved the place to her other side for her. She took the only available seat, beside her roommate Flor. A bowl of beef stew was being handed around the table, along with the usual yuca and potatoes and onion and tomatoes. Pip had basically thrown in the towel on vegetarianism. At least the beef in Bolivia was grass-fed.

  “So Dear Leader is back,” she said.

  “Why do you call him that?” Flor said sharply. “This isn’t North Korea.”

  “She does it because Colleen does it,” a person named Willow said.

  Pip felt slapped in the face. “It’s good to see we’re evolved past eighth grade.”

  “You can bet Colleen would never say ‘Dear Leader’ to his face,” Willow said.

  “I bet you’d be wrong,” Pip said. “I bet he’d just lau
gh. I was insulting in my emails, and it wasn’t like my invitation was retracted.”

  Flor did some private, not-nice eye-widening, and Pip saw that she wasn’t doing herself any favors by continuing to mention her email correspondence with Andreas.

  “Why even stay here if you’re just going to be negative?” Willow said.

  “What does it say about this place that a little bit of humor is so threatening?”

  “It’s not threatening. It’s boring. 30 Rock already did North Korea. The laughs have been had.”

  Never having seen 30 Rock, Pip was rejoinderless and squished. All through dinner, fame and charisma rays from the direction of Andreas warmed the back of her neck. She knew she ought to hurry and go back to her room, to return Colleen’s snub and not appear needy, but she also wanted to meet Andreas, and so she lingered at the table, eating two lime-flavored custards, after the others had left. Behind her, Andreas and Colleen were speaking German. This finally made her feel so excluded and irrelevant that she pushed away from her table and headed for the door.

  “Pip Tyler,” Andreas said.

  She turned back. Colleen was looking aside again, tapping her finger, but Andreas’s blue eyes were on her. “Come sit down with us,” he said. “We haven’t met.”

  “I’ll be on the veranda,” Colleen said, standing up.

  “No, stay with us,” Andreas said.

  “Need to smoke.”

  Colleen left the room without a glance at Pip. Andreas beckoned to her. “Will you have an espresso with me?”

  “I didn’t even know there was espresso here.”

  “All you have to do is ask. Teresa!”

  Pedro’s wife, Teresa, stuck her head out of the kitchen, and Andreas raised two fingers. Pip sat down in the chair farthest from him at his table. The nerve she’d had in writing emails to him was so far gone that she didn’t even want to shake his hand. She just hunched her shoulders and waited to be spoken to.

  “Colleen tells me you’ve been enjoying yourself here.”

  She nodded.

  “Did I not tell you it’s the most beautiful place?”

  “No, you definitely told me.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. Making the Argentinean capital look like nineteen-seventies East Berlin—they needed a lot of advice.”

  “It’s cool that they’re making a movie about you.”

  “Very strange but, yes, very cool. Also very dull. You stand around for ten hours waiting for twenty minutes of action, and even then you don’t see it directly. You’re at the back of a crowd in a trailer, trying to see a monitor.”

  “Still and all,” Pip said.

  “Still and all, intensely gratifying to the ego.”

  “I’m guessing it’s in pretty good shape, your ego.”

  “No complaints.”

  Pedro’s wife came out with two espressos, and Andreas told her in Spanish that she was looking very well. Teresa, normally the picture of long-suffering, appeared inordinately grateful for the compliment, and Pip caught a glimpse of how the world must seem to Andreas: like one of those stadium crowds where every person had a colored board that they could flip in concert with everyone else and form messages. The message he was forever getting was that he was special and great. He walked into the stadium, and suddenly the sea of random bodies became the words WE LOVE YOU, MAN. Pip felt a prickle of resentment.

  “So what’s Toni Field like?” she said.

  “Lovely. Talented.”

  “She’s playing your mom, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your mom as hot as Toni Field?”

  Andreas smiled. “I knew I was going to like you.”

  Pip was trying to stay mindful of asshole, of stringing along. “What’s that mean?”

  “You ask good questions. You’re more angry than careful.”

  She didn’t know what to say to this.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “We’ll do your entry interview in the morning.” He drained his espresso cup. “Unless you feel you’ve had your vacation and just want to go home.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. Come to the barn in the morning.”

  When he was gone, Pip went out to the veranda and sat down by Colleen, who was staring at the dark river. The night was warm, and so many frogs were chirping that the wall of their sound was seamless.

  “So the cat’s back,” Pip said. “Does this mean the mice don’t get to play anymore?”

  Colleen lit her second cigarette and didn’t answer.

  “Is it just me,” Pip said, “or are you giving me a weird vibe?”

  “I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “Have you ever seen a man ballroom-dancing with a woman who’s passed out? I feel like that woman. He moves my arms, he leads me around the floor. My head’s flopping like a rag doll’s, but I’m doing the usual dance moves. Like everything’s OK. Good old Colleen, still running the show.”

  “I thought you might be mad at me for something.”

  “No. Pure self-absorption.”

  This was some consolation to Pip, but not much. She’d alienated all the undark girls by getting closer to Colleen, but Colleen was too dark to get very close to. In little more than two weeks, she’d managed to replicate her social situation in Oakland.

  “I thought we could be friends,” she said.

  “I’m not worth it.”

  “You’re the only person here I like.”

  “That feeling is fairly mutual,” Colleen said. “But you know what I’m going to do, one of these days, when they least expect it? I’m going to go back to the States and work for a big law firm and marry some dull guy and have kids with him. That’s the future I’m postponing.”

  “Don’t you have to go to law school first?”

  “I have a law degree from Yale.”

  “Criminy.”

  “I keep hanging on here, hoping there’s some more interesting existence for me. But there isn’t. It’s only a matter of time before I go and do the gutless thing. The boring thing.”

  “A great job and a family doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

  “You should do something better with the guts you’ve got.”

  “I don’t usually think of myself as having guts.”

  “People with guts seldom do.”

  They listened to the frogs for a while.

  “Can I keep sitting here with you?” Pip said.

  “Criminy. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say criminy.” Colleen lifted a hand, hesitated, and then patted Pip’s hand. “You can keep sitting here.”

  In the morning, after an early hike, Pip went looking for Andreas. The tech building, where the boys worked, was powered by a special generator situated in a soundproofing bunker and fueled by a natural gas line, courtesy of the Bolivian government, that branched off a ten-inch pipeline that ran along the ridge. The barn and the other buildings were powered by micro hydroelectric and a field of solar panels halfway up the access road. Andreas was much admired for declining to have a private office. He underscored that the Project was a collective, not a top-down organization, by working on a laptop in the barn’s loft, where there were sofas and a kitchenette that anyone could use. Pip picked her way through the panoply of female beauty on the main floor, all the girls mousing and clicking, many of them in pajama bottoms that they would wear all day, and climbed the stairs to the loft.

  Andreas was in conference with further girls in pajama bottoms. “Ten minutes,” he said to Pip. “Feel free to join us.”

  “No, I’ll wait outside.”

  Scraps of morning cloud and mist were shredding themselves on the sandstone pinnacles, the sun gaining the upper hand; the world here seemed created afresh every day. Pip sat on the grass and watched a bird with a long forked tail follow the goats, eating flies. It would do this all day; its job and its place in the world were secure. Pedro, crossing the lawn with a chainsaw and one of his sons, gave Pip a friendly wave. He seemed similarly s
ecure.

  Andreas came outside and sat down by her. He was wearing good narrow jeans and a close-fitting polo shirt that emphasized the flatness of his belly. “Nice morning,” he said.

  “Yah,” Pip said. “The sunlight feels especially disinfectant today.”

  “Ha.”

  “You know, I’ve always hated the word paradise. I thought it was just stupid born-again-speak for dead. But now I’m having to rethink that, a little bit. Like that bird there—”

  “Our fork-tailed flycatcher.”

  “It seems perfectly contented. I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter. Does that make any sense?”

  “A lot of sense.”

  “So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.”

  “I’m glad you like it here,” Andreas said. “Did Colleen get your automatic wire transfers sorted out?”

  “Yes, thank you for that. Bankruptcy is being staved off as we speak.”

  “So let’s talk about what you might do for us.”

  “Besides being the resident dogperson? I already told you what I really want. I want to find out who my father is, or at least what my mother’s real name is.”

  Andreas smiled. “I see how that helps you. But how does it help the Project?”

  “No, I know,” Pip said. “I know I have to work.”

  “Do you want to be a researcher? There’s a lot you could learn from Willow. She’s fantastic at finding things.”

  “Willow doesn’t like me. Actually, nobody here much likes me, except Colleen.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Apparently I’m too sarcastic. I wrinkle my nose at the Kool-Aid. I also talk about smell too much.”

  “Nobody here has ill intentions. Every person here is extraordinary in some way.”

  “You know, that’s the first actually creepy thing you’ve said to me.”