Purity (82 page)

“I could have saved him.”

“I thought that too, but I was wrong. I had to learn to see it had nothing to do with me. I didn't need to feel guilty about something that had nothing to do with me. It pissed me off, knowing that. I wasn't anything to him. I couldn't have saved him because I didn't matter to him. I realized it's actually much healthier to be angry…”

Samantha went on like this, a fountain of declarative sentences about herself, until the Ativan kicked in and Pip had to lie down. In the morning, alone in Samantha's apartment, she slowly read the rest of Tom's document. She wanted the basic information, but she had to do a lot of skimming and backtracking to obtain it without reading too much about her parents' sex life. It wasn't that she was squeamish about sex per se; the problem, indeed, was that her parents' weirdness about sex was so foreign to her, so old-fashioned, so intolerably sad.

There were plenty of other things in the document to be disturbed by, but by the time she'd reached the end of it she could sense that the biggest problem was the money. Certainly it was interesting to imagine having Tom and Leila as second parents. But she couldn't call up Tom and say “Hey,
Dad
” without admitting that she'd broken her promise and read his document and betrayed him yet again. Realistically, unless her mother spontaneously volunteered his identity, there was going to be no Tom and Leila in her life. And she was willing to live with this, at least for now. But a
billion-dollar
trust fund? How many times had her mother said she loved nothing in the world more than Pip? If nobody and nothing was more important to her, how could she have so much money and still be letting Pip suffer with her student debt and her limited opportunities? Tom's document was a testimonial of frustration with her mother, and she was feeling infected by it. She saw why her mother had been afraid that Tom would take her away and turn her against her. She could feel herself turning against her right now.

She swallowed another Ativan and emailed Colleen once more. This time, in less than an hour, after eight months of silence, she got a reply.

Fooled again. I'd thought there were no more ways for him to hurt me.

The reply had come through a 408 phone number, which Pip immediately called. Colleen turned out to be living in California, across the bay, in Cupertino, and working as chief legal officer for a newish tech company. She didn't hang up on Pip but simply resumed her complaint with the world's crappiness where she'd left off eight months ago.

“His women are all tweeting up a storm,” she said. “Toni Field says he was the most honest human being to ever walk the earth—in other words, ‘
I
got to fuck him, nyah, nyah, nyah.' Sheila Taber says the Hegelian spirit of world history was alive in him—in other words, ‘I fucked him before Toni did, and for longer.' You might want to get tweeting yourself. Stake your claim to the sainted hero.”

“I didn't fuck him.”

“Sorry, I forgot. Your broken tooth.”

“Don't be mean to me. I'm really upset about this. I need to talk to someone who gets it.”

“I'm afraid I'm pretty much a flaming ball of hurt and anger at the moment.”

“Maybe you should stop reading tweets.”

“I'm flying to Shenzhen tomorrow, that should help. The Chinese never understood what all the fuss was about, God bless them.”

“Can we get together when you're back?”

“I think you've always had the wrong idea about me. It kind of hurts, but it's also sweet. We can get together if you want.”

Pip knew she should call her mother and tell her she was back in Oakland. She now saw why her mother had been suspicious of her motives in going to Denver: one glance at the DI website, on her neighbor Linda's computer, would have revealed her ex-husband's head shot and weekly commentary at the top of the page. It must have tortured her to think of Pip there with him. It explained her silences and recalcitrance since then: she believed that Pip had found her father and was lying about it. If nothing else, Pip wanted to reassure her that she hadn't lied about
that
. But she didn't see how she could do it without revealing what she'd learned in the meantime and how she'd learned it. Her mother would die of shame, might literally die of being too
visible
, if she knew what Pip had read about her. Pip could simply keep lying, of course; keep pretending that her job in Denver had just been a job. But the thought of having to lie forever, and never mention the money, and deprive herself of Tom and Leila, and generally indulge her mother's phobias and irrational prohibitions, made her angry. Although Andreas obviously wasn't the most honest person who'd ever walked the earth, she thought her mother might be the most difficult. Pip didn't know what to do about her, and so, for a while, she'd done Ativan.

Whacking a tennis ball was her poor-man's Ativan. The Sunday sun had sunk behind the elevated freeway in a sky still fogless. California had been in a drought emergency for months, but only now, after the solstice (she'd sent her mother a not-birthday card saying nothing more than “Love always, Pip”), was the weather feeling properly droughty. If the fog had come back, she might have felt safe to stop whacking and go inside, but it hadn't. She tried working on her backhand, sent two balls over the arboreal backstop and into the next yard, and reverted to her forehand. Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a
pock
in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.

When she finally went inside, all sweaty, Garth and Erik were at the kitchen table with two quarts of beer that a good Samaritan had bought them on their long walk home after bail had been made.

“Crowdfunding rocks,” Garth said.

“Especially when it's effectively a loan,” Erik said.

“Are they still pressing charges?” Pip said.

“For now,” Garth said. “If Dreyfuss prevails at his hearing, the realtor becomes a trespasser that it was legitimate for us to repel.”

“I don't think he's going to prevail.” Pip picked up one of the half-empty bottles. “May I?” Garth and Erik hesitated just enough that she set down the bottle. “I can go buy some more.”

“That would be great,” Erik said.

“I'll come back with lots and lots.”

“That would be great.”

On her way out to get beer, she looked for Dreyfuss and found him sitting on his bed with his face in his hands. His situation was legitimately dire. He'd managed to revive his old mortgage, but tech-driven market pressure had pushed the value of his property up by thirty percent or more in the year Pip had been away. This had triggered a new round of shenanigans with his modified mortgage payments. He'd been given differing figures for these payments and had naturally chosen the lowest one, provided by a bank employee who then disappeared and who the bank claimed to have no record of, despite his having taken down her name and location. But without Marie's paychecks and Ramón's disability checks, he couldn't pay even the lowest figure every month. All he had going for him legally was his meticulous litany of the bank's noxious and probably felonious behavior. Pip had tried to read this litany, but it was nearly 300,000 words long.

“Hey, listen,” she said, crouching at his feet. “I have a friend who's a lawyer for a tech company. She might know some firms that do pro bono work. Do you want me to ask her?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Dreyfuss said. “But I've witnessed the effect that my case has on pro bono lawyers. At first there's an agreeable atmosphere of bonhomie, of this-is-an-injustice-and-we-will-definitely-fix-it, of why-didn't-you-come-to-us-sooner. A week later, they have their hands and faces pressed to the window. They're screaming,
Let me out of here!
I suppose—oh, never mind.”

“What?”

“It occurred to me that if we could find a mentally ill lawyer, an already premedicated individual … It's a silly thought. Forget I mentioned it.”

“It's actually not a bad idea.”

“No. Better to pray that Judge Costa falls down a flight of stairs between now and a week from Tuesday. Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer, Pip?”

“Not really.”

“Try to,” Dreyfuss said.

*   *   *

The following Sunday, Jason was among the customers waiting when she unlocked the front door of Peet's. Knowing that he had a girlfriend, Pip resisted overinterpreting his early arrival, but he did seem to have hoped to talk to her. Lingering at the counter, he updated her on the progress of his new statistics textbook and the presentations he'd been giving to professors who refused to believe that a method could be so simple and intuitive. “They say, ‘OK, the geometry works in that one special case.' So I show them other examples. I ask them to give me their own incredibly complicated examples. The method
always works
, and they still won't believe it. It's like their entire careers are invested in statistics being an impossibly nonintuitive subject.”

“That's what I always heard,” Pip said. “Do Not Take This Course.”

“And what about you? You didn't tell me what you were doing in Bolivia.”

“Oh, well. I was interning with the Sunlight Project. You know—Andreas Wolf.”

It was amusing to see Jason's eyes widen. The deification of Andreas was in full swing now, with candlelight memorials in Berlin and Austin, in Prague and Melbourne, and online memorial sites stretching to terabytes with messages of gratitude and sorrow; it was like the Aaron Swartz phenomenon, only a hundred times larger.

“Are you kidding me?” Jason said.

“Um, no. I was there. Not when he died—I left at the end of January.”

“That's incredible.”

“I know—weird, right?”

“Did you actually spend time with him?”

“Sure. Everyone there did. He was always around.”

“That's incredible.”

“Don't say that too many times or you'll make me feel bad.”

“That's not what I meant. I know you're really smart. I just didn't know you were interested in Web stuff.”

“Yeah, I wasn't. Then I was. Then I wasn't again.”

Although it would have disappointed her, by showing Jason to be as starstruck as most of the world seemed to be, she expected him not to let the subject drop. But he did. He asked her what her plans were now. She confessed that she couldn't see much farther than going home after work and whacking a tennis ball. He said he'd recently taken up tennis himself. He remarked that they should hit together sometime, but it was a vague remark, deflated by the known fact of his having a girlfriend, and he retreated to his favored table with his Sunday
Times
.

Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it. She realized, with additional regret, that he was probably the sweetest good-looking boy who'd ever shown strong interest in her. She felt chagrined that she'd failed to appreciate this when it might have mattered. She hoped that he was feeling some additional regret of his own, now that he knew that Andreas Wolf had esteemed her.

After a long hiatus, she was back on Facebook. It was a way of letting her old friends know she was in town without actually having to see them, but her main motive was defensive. Among her Facebook friends was her mother's neighbor Linda, who reassured her that nothing much had changed in her mother's life, and who seemed happy to convey Pip's substanceless greetings to her. It was Pip's hope that Linda might show her Facebook page to her mother or at least report on what was on it—i.e., almost nothing. Pip was living in her old house in Oakland and working at Peet's, end of story. She wanted to spare her mother the torment of imagining her still in Denver, reunited with her father. Linda was gabbiness itself and could be counted on.

After her shift ended, and after she'd whacked the ball and showered and walked to the BART station, she couldn't resist checking out Jason on Facebook. His capacity for enthusiasm was everywhere in evidence. But of course what she wanted to know was how pretty his girlfriend was. The news on that score was mixed. The girlfriend had a great face and a scarily hipster look and a scarily French name, Sandrine, but she appeared to be a full foot shorter than Jason; they looked awkward together. With a shudder of revulsion at herself, and at Facebook, Pip turned off her device.

She was on her way to a Peruvian restaurant in Bernal Heights, maximally inconvenient to her, because Colleen apparently had foodie tendencies and wanted to try it. This after Colleen had twice bailed out of earlier dates at the last minute, pleading overwork. If her intention was to keep punishing Pip and make her feel small, it was working well.

The season of gray was on Bernal Heights. Shouting techies in their twenties filled the restaurant. Colleen was at a small table awkwardly situated by a wait station; she'd left Pip the chair that was in the waiters' way. Pip was struck by the unnecessary makeup Colleen was wearing and by the obvious priciness of her silk jacket and jewelry. She remembered that Colleen's stated ambition was to do boring, safe things.

“Sorry I'm late,” she said. “It's quite the schlep from Oakland.”

“I ordered some small plates,” Colleen said. “I have to go back to the office later.”

Already it was clear to Pip that Colleen had been a summer-camp friend, not a real friend, and that she shouldn't have kept sending her emails. But she had no one else to talk to about Andreas, and so she ordered a sangria and talked. She led with the big picture—that he'd killed a man in Germany and had brought her to Los Volcanes in some insane attempt at a cover-up—so that Colleen might see that what had happened at the Hotel Cortez wasn't personal.