Purity (11 page)

“No, just fun. Just teasing around. You're so funny when you're hostile.” He seemed pleased with his explanation, pleased with his own good nature, not to mention his good looks. “You could have California's Most Hostile Employee of the Year Award.”

“So it was never going to be anything but flirting.”

“Of course not. I'm happily married, this is an office, there are rules.”

“So in other words I'm nothing to you except your worst employee.”

“We can talk about a new position for you in the morning.”

She saw that all she'd done by confronting him was ruin the long-running game with him, the game that had made her work here halfway bearable. Earlier in the day, she'd thought she couldn't feel more alone than she already did, but now she saw that she could.

“This is going to sound crazy,” she said, with a catch in her throat. “But could you possibly ask your wife to go to the game tonight? Could you possibly take me to dinner and give me some advice?”

“Ordinarily, yes. But my wife has other plans. I'm already late. Why don't you go home and come back in the morning?”

She shook her head. “I really, really, really need a friend right now.”

“I'm so sorry. But I can't help you.”

“Clearly.”

“I don't know what happened to you, but maybe you should go home and see your mother for a few days. Come back on Monday and we'll talk.”

Igor's phone rang, and while he took the call she sat with her head bowed, envying the wife to whom he was apologizing for being late. When he was finished, she could feel him hesitating behind her shoulder, as if weighing whether to lay a hand on it. He apparently decided against it.

When he was gone, she returned to her cubicle and typed out a letter of resignation. She checked her texts and emails, but there was nothing from either Stephen or Andreas Wolf, and so she dialed her mother's number and left a message, telling her that she was coming to Felton a day early.

THURSDAY

The Oakland bus station was a mile-and-a-half walk from her friend Samantha's apartment. By the time Pip got there, wearing her knapsack and carrying, in a roller-skate box that she'd borrowed from Samantha, the vegan olallieberry cake that she'd spent the morning making, she needed to pee. The door to the ladies' room was blocked, however, by a cornrowed girl her own age, an addict and/or prostitute and/or crazy person, who shook her head emphatically when Pip tried to get past her.

“Can't I quickly pee?”

“You just gonna have to wait.”

“Like, how long, though?”

“Long as it takes.”

“Takes for what? I won't look at anything. I just want to pee.”

“What's in the box?” the girl demanded. “Those skates?”

Pip boarded the Santa Cruz bus with a full bladder. It went without saying that the bathroom at the back was out of order. Apparently it was not enough that her entire life was in crisis: all the way to San Jose, if not to Santa Cruz, she would have to worry about wetting herself.

Control pee
, she told herself.
Control-P
. As a teenager, when she was living in Felton and going to school in Santa Cruz, all her friends had owned Apple computers, but the laptop her mother had bought her was a cheap, generic PC from OfficeMax, and what she'd typed on it, when she needed to print, was Control-P. Printing, like peeing, was evidently a thing you
needed
to do. “I need to print,” the people at Renewable Solutions were always saying. This exact, strange phrase:
I need to print. Need to P. Need to control pee
 … The thought struck her as good; she prided herself on having thoughts like this; and yet it went around in circles without leading anywhere. At the end of the day (people at Renewable Solutions were always saying “at the end of the day”), she still needed to pee.

When the freeway momentarily rose out of the industrial East Bay bottomlands in which it wallowed, she could see fog piling up behind the mountains across the bay. There would be fog over the hill tonight, and she hoped that if she had to wet her pants she could wait and do it under its merciful cover. To get her mind off her bladder, she stuffed her ears with Aretha Franklin—at least she could finally stop trying to like Stephen's hard-core boy rock—and reread her latest exchanges with Andreas Wolf.

He'd emailed back to her the night before, while she was knocked out with Samantha's Ativan on Samantha's couch.

The secret of your name is safe with me. But you know public figures must be especially careful. Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person, not only because you can't trust anyone but, still worse, you must always be considering how important you are, how newsworthy, and this divides you from yourself and poisons your soul. It sucks to be well-known, Pip. And yet everyone wants to be well-known, it's what the whole world is made of now, this wanting to be well-known.

If I told you, when I was seven years old my mother showed me her genitals, what would you do with this information?

Reading this message in the morning, and immediately doubting that Wolf had actually entrusted her with a shameful secret, she'd searched
andreas wolf mother genitals seven years old
and found only seven quality matches, all random. Among them was “72 Interesting Facts About Adolf Hitler.” She wrote back:

I would say holy shit and keep it to myself. Because I think you might be overdoing the self-pitying famous-person thing. Maybe you've forgotten how it sucks to have nobody be interested in you and not have any power. People will believe you if you expose my secret. But if I expose yours, they'll just say I fabricated your email for some sick reason, because I'm a girl. We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

Afternoons in Bolivia must have been Wolf's time for emailing, because his reply came back quickly, the security of umpteen extra servers notwithstanding.

I'm sorry that I sounded self-pitying—I was trying to sound tragic!

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

I hope you'll come down and join us. You might find out you have more kinds of power than you think you do.

This reply discouraged her. Already the agreeable flirtation was slipping into German abstraction. While the cake layers were baking, she replied:

Mr. Appropriately Named Wolf!

No doubt due to my psychology, the messed-up state of which many people in my life can now attest to, I'm feeling more like the smaller animal that accepts its nature and just wants to be eaten. All I can picture about your Project is lots of better-adjusted people happily realizing their potential. Unless you have a spare $130000 lying around, so I can pay off my student loans, and unless you feel like writing to my (single, isolated, depressed) mother and convincing her to do without me indefinitely, I'm afraid I won't be finding out about these amazing other powers of mine.

Sincerely, Pip

The email had stunk of self-pity, but she'd sent it anyway, and then mentally replayed her latest rejections by men while she frosted the cake with puttylike vegan icing and packed her knapsack for the trip to Felton.

Because of heavy traffic, the bus didn't stop long enough in San Jose for her to get off. Bladder ache radiated throughout her abdomen as the bus proceeded up Route 17 and over the Santa Cruz Mountains. Around Scotts Valley, the dear fog appeared, and suddenly the season was different, the hour less determinate. Most evenings in June, a great paw of Pacific fog reached into Santa Cruz, over the wooden roller coaster, along the stagnant San Lorenzo, up through the wide streets where surfers lived, and into the redwoods on the hills. By morning the ocean's outward breath condensed in dew so heavy that it ran in gutters. And this was one Santa Cruz, this ghostly gray late-rising place. When the ocean inhaled again, midmorning, it left behind the other Santa Cruz, the optimistic one, the sunny one; but the great paw lurked offshore all day. Toward sunset, like a depression following euphoria, it rolled back in and muted human sound, closed down vistas, made everything very local, and seemed to amplify the barking of the sea lions on the underpinnings of the pier. You could hear them from miles away, their
arp, arp, arp
a homing call to family members still out diving in the fog.

By the time the bus pulled off Front Street and into the station, the streetlights had come on, tricked by atmospherics. Pip hobbled to the station's ladies' room and into an unoccupied stall, dropped her knapsack on the dirty floor, put the cake box on top of it, and yanked down her jeans. While various muscles were unclenching, her device beeped with an incoming message.

The internship lasts three months, with an option for renewal. Your stipend should cover your loan payments. And maybe it would do your mother good to be without you a little while.

I'm sorry you're feeling bad and powerless. Sometimes a change of scene can help with that.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

She was scrutinizing the last paragraph, trying to discern a veiled threat or promise in it, when her knapsack made a small comment, a kind of dry sigh. It was slumping under the weight of the cake box. Before she could stem the flow of her pee and lunge for the box, it fell to the floor and opened itself, dumping the cake facedown onto tiles smeared with condensed fog and cigarette ash and the droppings and boot residues of girl buskers and panhandlers. Some olallieberries went rolling.

“Oh, that is so nice of you,” she said to the ruined cake. “That is so special of you.”

Weeping at her ineffectiveness, she conveyed the uncontaminated chunks of cake into the box and then worked for so long to wipe the icing from the floor with paper towels, as if it were smeary albino shit, as if anybody but her actually cared about cleanliness, that she nearly missed the bus to Felton.

A fellow rider, a dirty girl with blond dreads, turned around and asked her, “You going up to 'Pico?”

“Just to the bottom of the road,” Pip said.

“I'd never been up there till three months ago,” the girl said. “There's nothing else quite like it! There's two boys there that let me sleep on their couch if I have sex with them. I don't mind that at all. Everything's different in 'Pico. Do you ever go up there?”

It happened that Pip had lost her virginity in Lompico. Maybe there really was nothing else quite like it.

“It sounds like you've got a good thing going,” she said politely.

“'Pico's the best,” the girl agreed. “They have to truck in their water on this property, because of the elevation. They don't have to deal with the suburban scum, which is great. They give me food and everything. There's nothing else quite like it!”

The girl seemed perfectly contented with her life, while to Pip it seemed to be raining ashes in the bus. She forced a smile and put in her earbuds.

Felton was still fog-free, the air at the bus stop still scented with sunbaked redwood litter, but the sun had dropped behind a ridge, and Pip's childhood bird friends, the brown towhees and the spotted ones, were hopping on the shadowed lane as she walked up it. As soon as she could see the cabin, its door flew open and her mother came running out to meet her, crying “Oh, oh!” She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene. And yet, as always, Pip couldn't help returning her mother's hug. The body that her mother was at odds with felt precious to her. Its warmth, its softness; its mortality. It had a faint but distinctive skin smell that took Pip back to the many years when she and her mother had shared a bed. She would have liked to bury her face in her mother's chest and stand there and take comfort, but she rarely came home without finding her mother in the middle of some thought that she was bursting to express.

“I just had the nicest conversation about you with Sonya Dawson at the store,” her mother said. “She was remembering how sweet you were to all the kindergarteners when you were in third grade. Do you remember that? She said she still has the Christmas cards you made her twins. I'd completely forgotten you made cards for
all
the kindergarteners. Sonya said, that whole year, whenever anybody asked the twins what their favorite anything was, they answered ‘Pip!' Their favorite dessert—‘Pip!' Their favorite color—‘Pip!' You were their favorite everything! Such a loving little girl, so good to the smaller kids. Do you remember Sonya's twins?”

“Vaguely,” Pip said, walking toward the cabin.

“They adored you. Revered you. The entire kindergarten did. I was so proud when Sonya reminded me.”

“How unfortunate that I couldn't remain eight years old.”

“Everyone always said you were a special girl,” her mother said, pursuing her. “All the teachers said so. Even the other parents said so. There was just some kind of special magic loving-kindness about you. It makes me so happy to remember.”