Purity (7 page)

Outside, the weather was unpleasantly perfect. She felt so beaten-down that she poked along the Mandela Parkway in first gear, going no faster than the jammed traffic above her on the freeway. Across the bay, the sun was still well up in the sky over San Francisco, not dimmed but made gentler by a hint of high ocean mist. Like her mother, Pip was coming to prefer drizzle and heavy fog, for their absence of reproach. As she pedaled up through the sketchy blocks of Thirty-Fourth Street, she shifted into higher gears and avoided eye contact with the drug sellers.

The house where she lived had once belonged to Dreyfuss, who had drawn the down payment from an inheritance with which he'd also opened a used-book store off Piedmont Avenue, following his mother's suicide. His house had mirrored the condition of his mind, for a long time fairly orderly, then more eccentrically cluttered with things like vintage jukeboxes, and finally filled floor to ceiling with papers for his “research” and foodstuffs for a coming “siege.” His bookstore, which people had enjoyed visiting for the experience of talking to someone smarter than themselves (because nobody was smarter than Dreyfuss; he had a photographic memory and could solve high-level chess and logic problems in his head), became a place of putrescent smells and paranoia. He snarled at his customers when he rang up their purchases, and then he started shouting at anybody who walked in the door, and then he took to hurling books at them, which led to visits from the police, which led to an assault, which led to his being involuntarily committed. By the time he was released, on a new cocktail of meds, he'd lost the store, its stock had been liquidated to cover unpaid rent and real or trumped-up damages, and his house was in foreclosure.

Dreyfuss had moved back into the house anyway. He spent his days writing ten-page letters to his bank and its agents and various governmental agencies. In the space of six months, he threatened four different lawsuits and managed to force the bank into a stalemate; it helped that the house was in terrible repair. But apart from his disability payments Dreyfuss had no money, and so he allied himself with the Occupy movement, befriended Stephen, and agreed to share the house with other squatters in exchange for food and upkeep and utilities. At the height of Occupy, the place was a zoo of transients and troublemakers. Eventually, though, Stephen's wife had imposed some order on it. They kept one room for short-term squatters and gave two others to Ramón and his brother, Eduardo, who'd come along with Stephen and his wife from the Catholic Worker house where they'd been living.

Pip had met Stephen at the Disarmament Study Group a few months before Eduardo was struck and killed by a laundry truck. These months were a happy time for her, because she had the distinct impression that Stephen and his wife were estranged. Pip had been instantly attracted to Stephen's intensity, to his extreme-fighter physique and his little-boy mop of hair, and she sensed that other girls in the study group felt the same way. But she was the one bold enough to invite him out for an after-meeting coffee (to be paid for by her, since he didn't believe in money). Given how warmly he said yes, it seemed not unreasonable to assume that they were having a sort-of first date.

Over subsequent coffees, she told him about her undergraduate phobia of nuclear weapons, her wish to do good in the world, and her fear that the study group was as useless as Renewable Solutions. Stephen told her how he'd married his college sweetheart, and how they'd spent their twenties in Catholic Worker houses, living under a vow of poverty, doing the whole Dorothy Day thing, uniting radical politics and religion, and how their paths had then diverged, the wife becoming more religious and less political and Stephen the opposite, the wife opening a bank account and going to work at a group home for the disabled, while Stephen devoted himself to organizing for Occupy and living cash-free. Even though he'd lost his faith and left the Church, his years at the Worker had given him an almost female emotional directness, an exciting propensity for cutting to the heart of things, which Pip had never encountered in a man before, let alone in a man so street-tough. In an access of trust, she spilled out more personal stuff, including the fact that she paid an unsustainably high rent for a share with college friends, and Stephen listened to her so intensely that when he offered her Eduardo's room for zero rent, soon after Eduardo was killed, she took it to mean she had a chance with him.

When she went to the house for her tour and interview, she discovered that Stephen and his wife were not so estranged as not to be still sharing a bed. Also, Stephen hadn't bothered to show up that night; maybe he'd known that the bed situation would be a shocker for Pip? She felt that he'd misled her about the status of his marriage. And yet: Why had he misled her? Wasn't this, in itself, grounds for hope? The wife, Marie, was a red-faced blonde in her late thirties. She conducted the interview while Dreyfuss sat sphinxlike in a corner and Ramón wept about his brother. And either Marie was vain enough not to perceive a threat in Pip, or her Catholic charity was so true-believing that she was genuinely moved by her financial plight. She took to Pip with a mothering kindness which was then and remained ever after a reproach to the stomach-churning jealousy Pip felt toward her.

Except for this jealousy, and for the creepiness of Dreyfuss, which was itself offset by the pleasure of watching his mind work, she'd been happy in the house. The most consistent proof of her human worth was the care she gave Ramón. She'd learned, soon after moving in, that Stephen and Marie had legally adopted him a year before Eduardo's death, so that Eduardo could develop his own life. Although Ramón was no more than a year or two younger than Stephen and Marie, he was now their
son
, which would have seemed utterly insane to Pip had she not so quickly come to love him herself. Helping him with his vocabulary, learning to play the basic video games that he was capable of, on a console that she'd bought for the house as a Christmas present, with money she didn't really have, and making him heavily buttered popcorn, and watching his favorite cartoons with him, she understood the attraction of Christian charity. She might even have tried churchgoing if Stephen hadn't come to hate the Church for its venality and its crimes against women and the planet. Through the marital bedroom door, she heard Marie throwing Stephen's own love of Ramón in his face, shouting at him that he'd let his head poison his heart against the Gospel, that his heart was obviously still full of the Word, that the example of Christ was right there in his loving-kindness to their adopted son.

Even though she never went to church, Pip had been losing her college friends one by one, after texting them one too many times that she couldn't hang with them because she'd promised to play a game with Ramón or take him to a thrift store to buy sneakers. This hampered social planning, but the real problem, she suspected, was that her friends had begun to write her off as a squatter-house weirdo. She was now down to three friends with whom she drank on Saturdays and stayed in textual touch while carefully withholding information; because she really was kind of a squatter-house weirdo. Unlike Stephen and Marie, who came from good middle-class Catholic families, she'd barely even lowered her station in going from her mother's little cabin to Thirty-Third Street, and her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty. She felt more effective at doing her house chores and helping Ramón than at anything else in her life. And yet, to answer Igor's question, she
did
have an ambition, if not a plan for achieving it. Her ambition was not to end up like her mother. And so the fact that she was effective at being a squatter didn't give her much satisfaction; it filled her, more often, with dread.

As she rounded the corner onto Thirty-Third Street, she saw Stephen sitting on their front steps, wearing his little-boy clothes, his secondhand Keds and secondhand seersucker shirt, its short sleeves strained by his large biceps. The subtle evening mist was making shafts of the golden light beneath the nearby freeway viaducts. Stephen's head was bowed.

“Hello, hello,” Pip said cheerily, as she dismounted.

Stephen raised his head and looked at her with reddened eyes. His face was wet.

“What is it?” she said.

“It's over,” he said.

“What's over? What happened?” She let her bike fall to the ground. “Did Dreyfuss lose the house? What happened?”

He smiled wanly. “No, Dreyfuss did not lose the house. Are you kidding? I lost my marriage. Marie's gone. She's moved out.”

His face twisted, and cold fear surged outward from Pip's center; but when it passed below her waist it became a terrible warmth. How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use. She took off her helmet and sat down on the stoop.

“Oh, Stephen, I'm so sorry,” she said. Until this moment, their only hugs had been of hello and good-bye, but her limbs were suddenly so shaky that she had to put her hands on his shoulders, as if to keep her arms from falling off. “This is so sudden.”

He snuffled a bit. “You didn't see it coming?”

“No, no, no.”

“That's right,” he said bitterly, “because how can she remarry? That was always my ace in the hole.”

Pip squeezed him and rubbed his biceps, and there was nothing wrong with this; he needed a comforting friend. But his muscles were testosterone-hardened and warm. And the great impediment was
gone, moved out, gone
.

“You guys have been fighting so much, though,” she suggested. “Almost every night, for months.”

“Not so much lately,” he said. “I actually thought things were getting better. But that was only because…”

He put his face in his hands again.

“Is there somebody else?” Pip said. “Somebody she…”

He rocked in a kind of whole-body nod.

“Oh, God. That's terrible. That's terrible, Stephen.” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “Tell me what I can do for you,” she whispered into the seersucker of his shirt.

“There is one thing,” he said.

“Tell me,” she said, nuzzling the seersucker.

“You can talk to Ramón.”

This brought her out of the unreality of what was happening; made her aware that she had her face in somebody's shirt. She took her arms away and said, “Shit.”

“Exactly.”

“What's going to happen to him?”

“She's got it all figured out,” Stephen said. “She's got the entire rest of her life plotted out like some corporate master plan. She gets custody and I get visitation, as if that was the point of adopting him—visitation. She's been…” He took a deep breath. “She's involved with the director of the home.”

“Oh, Jesus. Perfect.”

“Who is apparently friends with the archbishop, who can get the marriage annulled for her. Perfect, right? They're going to put Ramón in the home and try to give him voc ed, and then she can pop out three quick babies in her spare time. That's the plan, right? And what judge is not going to give full custody to the mother with a full-time paying job at a place for people like Ramón? That's the plan. And you would not believe how righteous she is about every bit of it.”

“I can sort of believe it,” Pip ventured to say.

“And I love the righteousness,” Stephen said, his voice trembling. “She
is
righteous. She really does burn with moral purpose. I just didn't want to have three babies.”

Well, thank God for that, Pip thought.

“So Ramón's still here?” she said.

“She and Vincent are coming back for him in the morning. Apparently they've had the thing planned for weeks now—they were just waiting for a bed to open up.” Stephen shook his head. “I thought Ramón was going to be what saved us. To have a son we both loved, so it wouldn't matter if we disagreed about everything else.”

“Well,” Pip said with some hostility, owing to the obvious persistence of Marie's hold on him, “you're not the first couple whose relationship having a child didn't save. I was probably a child like that myself in fact.”

Stephen turned to her and said, “You're a good friend.”

She took his hand and wove her fingers into his and tried to calibrate the pressure of her squeeze. “I am your good friend,” she agreed. But now that his hand was in direct contact with hers, her body was making clear, with thudding heart and shallow breath, that it expected to have his hands all over it in a matter of days, possibly hours. It was like a big dog straining on the leash of her intelligence. She allowed herself to bump his hand once on her thigh, where she most wanted him to place it at this moment, and then released it. “What did you say to Ramón?”

“I can't face him. I've been out here since she left.”

“He's just been sitting in there without your saying anything to him?”

“She only left like half an hour ago. He's going to be upset if he sees me crying. I thought you could sort of prepare him, and then I could talk to him reasonably.”

Pip here recalled Annagret's fateful word
weak
; but it didn't make her want Stephen any less. It made her want to forget about Ramón and stay out here and keep touching, because being weak might mean being unable to resist.

“Will you talk to me, too, later on?” she said. “Just me? I really need to talk to you.”

“Of course. This doesn't change anything, we'll still have the house. Dreyfuss is a bulldog. Don't worry about that.”

Although it was obvious to Pip's body that, in fact, everything had changed, her intelligence could forgive Stephen for being unable to see this so soon after being dumped by his wife of fifteen years. Heart still thudding, she stood up and took her bike inside. Dreyfuss was sitting by himself in the living room, dwarfing a scavenged six-legged office chair and mousing at the house computer.