Читать книгу Purity - Джонатан Франзен, Jonathan Franzen - Страница 11

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.”

Inside the cabin, Pip set down her things and promptly began to cry.

“Pussycat?” her mother said, greatly alarmed.

“I ruined your cake!” Pip said, sobbing like an eight-year-old.

“Oh that doesn’t matter at all.” Her mother enveloped her and rocked her, drawing her face to her breastbone, holding her tight. “I’m so happy that you’re here.”

“I spent all day making it,” Pip choked out. “And then I dropped it on the dirty floor at the bus station. It fell on the floor, Mom. I’m so sorry. I got everything so dirty. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Her mother shushed her, kissed her head, and squeezed her until she’d expelled some of her misery, in the form of tears and snot, and began to feel as if she’d ceded an important advantage by breaking down. She extricated herself and went to the bathroom to clean up.

On the shelves were the faded flannel sheets that she’d slept on as a girl. On the rack was the same tired bath towel that her mother had used for twenty years. The concrete floor of the tiny shower had long ago lost its paint to her mother’s scrubbing. When Pip saw that her mother had lit two candles by the sink for her, as for a romantic date or religious ceremony, she nearly fell apart again.

“I got the smoky lentils and the kale salad you like so much,” her mother said, hovering near the door. “I forgot to ask if you were still eating meat, so I didn’t get you a pork chop.”

“It’s hard to live in a communal house and not eat meat,” Pip said. “Although I’m no longer living in a communal house.”

While she opened the bottle of wine she’d bought for her exclusive use, and while her mother spread out the bounty of her New Leaf employee discount, Pip gave a mostly fictitious account of her reasons for leaving the Thirty-Third Street house. Her mother seemed to believe every word of it. Pip proceeded to attack the bottle while her mother reported on her eyelid (not spasming but still feeling as if it might spasm again at any moment), the latest workplace incursions on her privacy, the latest abrasions of her sensitivities by New Leaf shoppers, and the moral dilemma posed by the 3 a.m. crowing of her next-door neighbor’s rooster. Pip had imagined that she might hide out at the cabin for a week, to recover and to plan her next move, but despite her supposed centrality to her mother’s life she was feeling as if her mother’s miniature universe of obsession and grievance was sufficient unto itself. As if there was, actually, no place in her life for Pip now.

“So, I also quit my job,” she said when they’d eaten dinner and the wine was nearly gone.

“Good for you,” her mother said. “That job never sounded worthy of your talents.”

“Mom, I have no talents. I have useless intelligence. And no money. And now no place to live.”

“You can always live with me.”

“Let’s try to be realistic.”

“You can have the sleeping porch back. You love the sleeping porch.”

Pip poured the last of the wine into her glass. Moral hazard allowed her to simply ignore her mother when she felt like it. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she said. “Two possibilities. One, you help me find my other parent, so I can try to get some money out of him. The other is I’m thinking of going to South America for a while. If you want me to stay around here, you have to help me find the missing parent.”

Her mother’s posture, fortified by her Endeavor, was as beautifully vertical as Pip’s was crappy and slouched. A faraway look was coming over her, almost a different kind of face altogether, a younger face. It could only be, Pip thought, the face of the person she’d once been, before she was a mother.

Looking into the now-dark window by the table, her mother said: “Not even for you will I do that.”

“OK, so I guess I’m going to South America.”

“South America …”

“Mom, I don’t want to go. I want to stay closer to you. But you have to help me out here.”

“You see!” her mother cried, still with her faraway look, as if she were seeing more than just her own reflection in the window. “He’s doing it to me even now! He’s trying to take you from me! And I will not let that happen!”

“This is fairly crazy talk, Mom. I’m twenty-three years old. If you saw where I’ve been living, you’d know I know how to take care of myself.”

Finally her mother turned to her. “What’s in South America?”

“This thing,” Pip said with some reluctance, as if confessing to an impure thought or action. “This kind of interesting thing. It’s called the Sunlight Project. They give paid internships and teach you all these skills.”

Her mother frowned. “The illegal leak thing?”

“What do you know about it.”

“I do read the newspaper, pussycat. This is the group that the sex criminal started.”

“No, you see?” Pip said. “You see? You’re thinking of WikiLeaks. You don’t know anything about the Project. You live in the mountains and you don’t know anything.”

For a moment her mother seemed to doubt herself. But then, emphatically: “Not Assange. Somebody else. Andreas.”

“OK, I’m sorry. You do know something.”

“But he’s the same as the other one, or worse.”

“No, Mom, actually not. They’re completely different.”

At this, her mother closed her eyes, sat up even straighter, and began to do her breathing. It always happened when she got too upset, and it put Pip in a bind, because she didn’t like to disturb her but also didn’t want to spend an hour waiting for her to resurface.

“I’m sure that’s very calming for you,” she said. “But I’m still sitting here, and you’re not dealing with me.”

Her mother just breathed.

“Do you want to at least tell me what really happened with my dad?”

“I told you,” her mother murmured, her eyes still shut.

“No, you lied. And you want to know something else? Andreas Wolf can help me find him.”

Her mother’s eyes sprang open.

“So you can either tell me,” Pip said, “or I can go to South America and find out for myself.”

“Purity, listen to me. I know I’m a difficult person, but you have to believe me: if you go to South America and do that, it will kill me.”

“Why? Lots of people my age travel. Why can’t you trust that I’ll come back? Can’t you see how much I love you?”

Her mother shook her head. “This is my worst nightmare. And now Andreas Wolf. This is a nightmare, a nightmare.”

“What do you know about Andreas?”

“I know that he is not a good person.”

“How? How do you know that? I just spent half a day researching him, and he’s the opposite of a bad person. I have emails from him! I can show you.”

“Oh my God,” her mother said, shaking her head.

“What? Oh my God what?”

“Has it occurred to you why a person like that is emailing you?”

“They have a paid internship program. You have to take a test, and I passed it. They do amazing work, and they actually want me. He’s been sending me all these personal emails even though he’s incredibly busy and famous.”

“It could be some assistant who’s writing to you. Isn’t that the thing about emails? You never know who’s writing them.”

“No, this is definitely him.”

“But think about it, Purity. Why do they want you?”

“You’re the one who’s been telling me I’m so special for twenty-three years.”

“Why does a man with bad morals pay a beautiful young woman to come to South America?”

“Mother, I’m not beautiful. I’m also not stupid. That’s why I researched him and wrote to him.”

“But pussycat, the Bay Area is full of people who could want you. Appropriate people. Kind people.”

“Well, it’s safe to say I haven’t been meeting them.”

Her mother took hold of Pip’s hands and searched her face. “Did something happen to you? Tell me what happened to you.”

The maternal hands suddenly seemed like grasping claws to Pip, and her mother like a stranger. She pulled her own hands away. “Nothing happened to me!”

“Dearheart, you can tell me.”

“I wouldn’t tell you if you were the last person on earth. You don’t tell me anything.”

“I tell you everything.”

“Nothing that matters.”

Her mother fell back in her seat and looked at the empty window again. “No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t. I have my reasons, but I don’t.”

“Well, so then leave me alone. You don’t have any rights with me.”

“I have the right to love you more than anything in this world.”

“No you don’t!” Pip cried. “No you don’t! No you don’t! No you don’t!”