Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  Her living room was an academic version of Dreyfuss’s, her art and her books and even her furniture steeped in leftism. Pip sat down by a cabinet with Latino peasants depicted in bright primitive paint. Cynthia took an armchair whose cushions bore the imprint of her body’s ample contours. “So, you’re my niece,” she said.

  “You’re my aunt.”

  “And why are you here and not at my brother’s?”

  Pip drank her wine and told her story. When she was done, Cynthia poured her more wine and said, “I always thought Tom had a novel in him.”

  “He says it in the memoir,” Pip said. “He wanted to be a novelist, but my mom wouldn’t let him.”

  Her aunt’s expression hardened. “She was all about not letting.”

  “Did you not like her?”

  “No, I did like her, at first. I wanted us to have a relationship. But she was somehow not approachable.”

  “She’s the same way now. She’s really shy underneath.”

  “I didn’t like how she treated my stepmother. But Clelia was a person of strong judgments herself, and so I cut your mother some slack. But then … this is probably in the memoir…”

  “The spitting thing?”

  “I was there in the room, I saw it happen. Tom explained it to me afterward, and I sort of understood—I’m no friend of agribusiness and bare-knuckled capital. But I couldn’t help thinking that Tom had made a mistake. I thought, ‘This woman is nuts.’ And then for years I hardly saw him and I never saw her—I was raising my own daughter. But even from afar I had the sense that he was in a toxic relationship. He was so loyal to her, I could never get anything out of him while they were together. Even afterward, he wouldn’t really speak ill of her. I thought he should be way angrier than he was. But eventually things worked out well for him. He’s outstanding at what he does, and Leila—well, you know. Everybody loves Leila. He should have been married to her all along.”

  “Right. Everyone can see she’s more wonderful than my mom.”

  “She is pretty great. I don’t see why you’re talking to me and not her.”

  “She seemed to think I wanted to take Tom away from her.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. They seem to be more of a unit than ever these days.” Cynthia refilled her own glass. “But here you are. Tell me why again?”

  “Because I don’t know what to do.”

  “You want my advice.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You might not like it.”

  “Give it to me anyway.”

  “I think you should be really, really angry.”

  Pip nodded. “It’s hard, though. I feel like I betrayed Tom by reading his memoir, and now I’m betraying my mother by going to Wichita and knowing things behind her back.”

  “That’s nonsense, if you’ll pardon me.”

  “How is it nonsense?”

  “I got very mad at Tom when he told me about you. You lived in his house for however long, for weeks, and he knew you were his daughter and didn’t tell you. Don’t you think you had a right to that information?”

  “I guess he was respecting my mom’s privacy.”

  “Really? Is that not the most infuriating bullshit? Why should he protect her? Why should he defer to his ex-wife at your expense? She got herself pregnant without telling him. She never told him that she had you. She used him—she used you—to continue some never-ending fight she had with him. He could have had a daughter, you could have had a father, but she ‘wouldn’t let him.’ On what planet does he owe her anything?”

  “That’s a helpful insight.”

  “On what planet do you owe her anything? From what Tom tells me, you spent your entire childhood below the poverty line. Your mother made you for her own selfish purposes—”

  “No, that’s harsh,” Pip said. “Weren’t you a single mom, too?”

  “Not by choice. Gretchen’s father knew about her, and she knew about him. They have a relationship now. And I did everything I could for Gretchen. I quit organizing and went back to school because of her, so she didn’t have to suffer from my personal choices. What personal choice did your mother ever give up for you?”

  Tears came to Pip’s eyes. “She loved me.”

  “I’m sure. I’m sure she did. But by your own account, she doesn’t have anyone else in her life. She created you to be what no one else can be for her. I’m angry at the selfishness of that. I’m angry that she’s the kind of ‘feminist’ who gives feminism a bad name. I feel like going over to Tom’s right this minute and slapping him in the face. For enabling her fantasies. She had real gifts—it’s such a waste. I don’t see why you’re not out of your mind with rage.”

  “I can’t explain it. She’s a really lost person.”

  “Well, fine. I can’t make you be angry if you’re not. But do me a favor and try to keep one thought in mind: you don’t owe these people anything. They owe you, big-time. It’s your turn to call the shots now. If they give you any resistance, you’re within your rights to nuke them.”

  Pip nodded, but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

  Cynthia made them a simple dinner, opened a second bottle, and talked about the world as she saw it: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, the calculated demolition of faith in government, the worldwide abdication of responsibility for climate change, the disappointments of Obama. She oscillated between anger and despair, and Pip both did and didn’t share her anger. Certainly it seemed unfair that she’d been stuck with a shitty world of her parents’ making. They’d put her in an impossible position personally, and they belonged to the generation that had done nothing about nuclear weapons and less than nothing about global warming; it wasn’t her fault. And yet it was oddly comforting to know that even if she could identify the ethically correct thing to do with a billion dollars, and proceeded to do it, she could never alter the world’s shitty course. She thought of her mother’s spiritual Endeavor, her striving merely to be mindful. For better or worse, she was her mother’s daughter.

  She kept thinking about her mother after she went to bed, in Gretchen’s bedroom. What Cynthia couldn’t know was how she’d made her mother smile. The pure, spontaneous love in that smile, every time she’d caught sight of Pip. And the shyness of it, the visible worry that Pip might not love her as much as she loved Pip. Her mother had a childlike heart. From reading the memoir, Pip suspected that she’d never stopped loving Tom, even to this day. Oh, the heartbreak of that scene with the stuffed toy bull: Pip knew exactly the nuttily, childishly hopeful look that her mother must have had on her face. There had been stuffed animals on her own childhood bed, a small menagerie of them, and she and her mother had played with them for hours on end, giving them voices, inventing moral crises to resolve. The little child and the big child, the one whose hair was going gray, the one whose shy sidelong glances the little one sometimes caught. Her mother had needed to give love and receive it. This was why she’d had Pip. Was that so monstrous? Wasn’t it more like miraculously resourceful?

  * * *

  On Sunday, Jason again was waiting when she unlocked the door of Peet’s. He loitered at the counter, ignoring Navi’s unfriendly looks, until Pip could speak to him.

  “So stop me if I’m being too intrusive,” she said. “But can I ask why you aren’t with your girlfriend on a Sunday morning?”

  “She’s a late riser,” Jason said. “Like, afternoon late. She stays up online until four in the morning.”

  “Do you guys live together?”

  “It’s not that kind of thing.”

  “But it’s the kind of thing where it’s OK to play tennis with a girl you used to date.”

  “Totally. I’m allowed to have friends.”

  “Jason. Listen.” Pip lowe
red her voice. “Even if your girlfriend’s OK with our being friends, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  He seemed innocently puzzled. “You don’t even want to hit with me? I’m not as good as a brick wall. But I’m getting better.”

  “If you didn’t have a girlfriend, I’d be happy to hit with you. But you do, so.”

  “You’re telling me I have to break up with my girlfriend before you’ll hit with me? It’s a pretty substantial upfront investment for just hitting a tennis ball.”

  “The city’s full of people you could hit with for no investment. I don’t know why you’re suddenly so interested in hitting with me. Why I suddenly stopped being the abnormal girl who does scary things.”

  He blushed. “Because I’ve had two weeks to sit and watch you behind the counter?”

  “Hmm.”

  “No, you’re right, you’re right,” he said, holding his hands up. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  She felt a little sick, seeing him back away from her, his implied compliment echoing in her ears. But she was even sicker of betraying people.

  When she got home from work, under a mercilessly clear sky, she found that she had no appetite for whacking the ball. It was like the spaghetti with eggplant in Tom’s memoir: all at once, her satisfaction was exhausted. She both wished that she could hit with an actual person, a kind person, with Jason, and was relieved that she couldn’t. Another lesson of Tom’s memoir was that there ought to be a law against boy-girl relationships before the age of thirty.

  The TV was on in the living room, but Dreyfuss was absorbed in typing on the computer. “I’m filing a complaint of judicial misconduct,” he explained to Pip. “There’s a clear pattern of bias in Judge Costa’s decisions. I’ve examined more than three hundred relevant cases, and I believe the evidence can safely be described as compelling.”

  “Dreyfuss,” Pip said gently. “You can stop doing that.”

  “I’ve amassed a wealth of new information about Costa since Tuesday. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy, and yet—”

  “Don’t use it at all. It’s a worrisome word, coming from you.”

  “Some conspiracies are real, Pip. You’ve seen that yourself.”

  She pulled up a chair next to him. “I should have told you this sooner,” she said. “Somebody is buying the house. Somebody I know. Somebody who’s going to let us keep living here.”

  An actual emotion, worry or sadness, flickered in Dreyfuss’s face. “I own this house,” he said. “I have equity in this house. I bought it with my departed mother’s money. I’m not letting go of it.”

  “The bank took it before the market rebounded. You lost it and you’re not getting it back. I did the only thing I could think to do.”

  Dreyfuss narrowed his eyes. “You have money?”

  “No. But someday I will. When I do, you can have the house back as a present from me. Can you trust me? Everything will be OK if you trust me. I promise.”

  He seemed to recede into himself, into a more familiar absence of affect. “Bitter experience,” he said, “has forced on me a policy of never trusting anyone. You, for example. You’ve always struck me as a responsible and generous person, and yet who really knows what’s in your head? Still less what will be in your head in the future?”

  “Believe me, I know how hard it is.”

  He turned back to the computer. “I’m filing my complaint.”

  “Dreyfuss,” she said. “You don’t have any choice but to trust me. It’s either that or wind up on the street.”

  “There will be further legal actions.”

  “Fine, but in the meantime let’s work out a rent we all can pay.”

  “I fear estoppel of the fraud claim,” Dreyfuss said, typing. “To pay the supposed owner rent concedes the legitimacy of the sale.”

  “So give the money to me. I’ll write the checks. You don’t have to concede anything. You can—”

  She stopped. A tear had rolled down Dreyfuss’s cheek.

  * * *

  Evening sunlight was in the trees of Mosswood Park when Pip coasted up to the tennis courts on her bike. Standing next to Jason was an absurdly proportioned brown dog, huge-headed, low-slung, extremely long. It was smiling as if proud of the nest of ratty tennis balls at its feet. Jason caught sight of Pip and waved to her needlessly, goofily. The dog swished its bushy and cumbersome tail.

  “This is your dog?”

  “As of last week,” Jason said. “I inherited him from my sister. She’s going to Japan for two years.”

  “What’s his name?

  “Choco. Like his color, chocolate.”

  The dog presented Pip with a drooly, dirty tennis ball and pushed his head between her bare knees. End to end, there was a whole lot of Choco.

  “I wasn’t sure I could handle having a dog,” Jason said, “but he’s got this thing for chewing lemons. He walks around with them in his mouth, sort of half bitten, lots of slobber. He looks like he’s wearing this big idiotic yellow smile. My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.”

  “The acid can’t be good for his teeth.”

  “My sister had a lemon tree behind her apartment. I’m putting him on a reduced-citrus diet. As you can see, he still has his teeth.”

  “Excellent dog.”

  “And a champ at finding tennis balls.”

  “Next best thing to lemons.”

  “Right?”

  Four nights earlier, Jason had sent Pip a one-line message on Facebook: check out my relationship status. This she had duly done and mostly been dismayed by. The last thing she wanted was to be in any way responsible for a breakup. Among other things, it seemed to oblige her to be worth breaking up for: to be available. And yet, of course, she’d literally asked for it. Of all the ways she could have said no to hitting a tennis ball, she’d chosen to make an issue of Jason’s girlfriend. Not only could no one else be trusted—she herself couldn’t be trusted! She’d wrapped herself in relationship ethics when her real motive was to take Jason away from Sandrine. And sleep with him herself? She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she’d done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable. She’d written back:

  Obviously saying this WAY too late, but … I’m going through a lot of stuff of my own right now and I can’t really promise you anything but returning balls hit to my forehand. Should have been MUCH clearer about this on Sunday. I apologize (again, again, again). Please don’t feel you have to follow through and hit with me.

  To which Jason had replied, very quickly, just hitting works for me.

  As soon as they were on a court, she discovered that he was bad at tennis, even worse than she was. He tried to crush every shot, sometimes missing the ball altogether, more often sending it into the net or over her head, and his good shots were unreturnable bullets. After ten minutes, she called a time-out. Choco, leashed to the outside of the fence, stood up hopefully.

  “I’m no tennis pro,” she said, “but I think you’re swinging too hard.”

  “It feels fantastic when I connect.”

  “I know. But we’re trying to hit together.”

  His face clouded. “I suck at this, don’t I.”

  “That’s why we’re practicing.”

  He swung less hard after that, and the hitting was somewhat more satisfactory, but their longest rally in an hour was six hits. “I blame the brick wall,” Jason said as they walked off the court. “I’m realizing I should have drawn a line representing the top of the net. And maybe a higher line to represent the baseline.”

  “I sort of do that mentally,” Pip said.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to hear how to calculate the probability of a six-hit rally, given an arbitrary error rate of fifty percent? Or, slightly more interesting, how to calculate our actual combined error rate, given the empiri
cal frequency of four-hit rallies?”

  “Sometime I would,” Pip said. “But I should probably get home.”

  “Do I suck too much to do this again?”

  “No. We had some fun rallies.”

  “I should have told you how much I suck.”

  “Whatever you didn’t tell me is dwarfed by how much I haven’t told you.”

  Jason bent down to unknot Choco’s leash. There was something humble and patient about the dog’s very low-slungness, the drooping of his heavy head. His grin was silly, possibly in a sly way, suggesting awareness of his more general silliness as a dog.

  “I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” Jason said. “By breaking up, I mean. It was already in the works. I just didn’t want you to think I’m the kind of guy who, you know. Sees two people at once.”

  “I understand,” Pip said. “Loyalty is good.”

  “I also don’t want you to think you were the only reason.”

  “OK. I won’t think that.”

  “Although you were definitely a reason.”

  “Got that, too.”

  They didn’t speak of it again, not the next time they hit, three days later, nor any of the many times they hit in August and September. Jason was every bit as compulsive about whacking the ball as Pip was, and for a long time the intensity of their mutual concentration, on the court, was an adequate substitute for the kinds of off-court intensity from which she was still shying and for which Jason, his eager personality notwithstanding, was sensitive enough not to pressure her. But she liked him a lot and loved Choco. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. In hindsight, now that she’d read Tom’s memoir and knew the historical depth of her mother’s concern for animals, she was surprised that her mother had never had a pet. She guessed that she herself had been that pet. There was also her mother’s strange cosmology of animals, a simplified trinity consisting of birds (whose beady eyes frightened her), cats (which represented the Feminine but to which she was totally allergic), and dogs (which embodied the Masculine and therefore, whatever their charms, could not be allowed to disturb her cabin with their pushy male-principle energies). Pip was in any case so dog-starved that she would have fallen for one far less excellent than Choco. Choco was weird, very unneedy as dogs went, a kind of Zen dog, all about his lemons and sly acknowledgment of his ridiculousness.