Джонатан Франзен – Purity (страница 11)

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.

“Where’s Ramón?” Pip said.

“In his room.”

“I guess I don’t even have to ask you if you know what’s going on.”

“I don’t meddle in family affairs,” Dreyfuss said coolly. Like a six-legged spider, he rotated his bulk in Pip’s direction. “I have, however, been checking facts. The St. Agnes Home is a fully state-accredited and well-reviewed thirty-six-bed facility, opened in 1984. The director, Vincent Olivieri, is a forty-seven-year-old widower with three sons in their late teens and early twenties; he holds an MSW from San Francisco State. Archbishop Evans has visited the home on at least two occasions. Would you care to see a picture of Evans and Olivieri on the front steps of the home?”

“Dreyfuss, do you feel anything about this?”

He looked at Pip steadily. “I feel that Ramón will be getting more than adequate care. I will miss his friendly presence but not his video games or his very limited conversational range. It may take some time, but Marie will likely be able to get her marriage annulled—I’ve identified several precedents in the archdiocese. I confess to some concern about house finances in the absence of her paychecks. Stephen tells me we need a new roof. As much as you seem to enjoy helping him with house maintenance, I have trouble imagining the two of you in a roofing capacity.”

By Dreyfuss standards this was a very feeling speech. Pip went up to Ramón’s room and found him lying on his tangled bedsheets, his face to a wall covered with Bay Area sports posters. The combination of his strong smell and the smiling star athletes was so poignant that her eyes filled.

“Ramón, sweetie?”

“Hi Pip,” he said, not moving at all.

She sat down on his bed and touched his fat arm. “Stephen said you wanted to see me. Do you want to turn around and see me?”

“I want us to be famlee,” he said, not moving.

“We’re still family,” she said. “None of us is going anywhere.”

“I’m going somewhere. Marie said. I’m going to the home where she works. It’s a different famlee but I like our famlee. Don’ you like our famlee, Pip?”

“I do like it, very much.”

“Marie can go but I wanna stay with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss, just like before.”

“But we’ll all still see you, and now you can make some new friends, too.”

“I don’ wan’ new frens. I wan’ my old frens, just like before.”

“You like Marie, though. And she’ll be there every day, you’ll never be alone. It’ll be sort of the same and sort of new—it’ll be nice.”

She sounded to herself just like she did when she was lying on the phone at work.

“Marie don’ do things with me like you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss do,” Ramón said. “She’s too busy. I don’ see why I have to go with her an’ not stay here.”

“Well, she takes care of you in a different way. She earns money, and we all benefit from that. She loves you just as much as Stephen does, and anyway she’s your mother now. A person has to stay with their mother.”

“But I like it here, like famlee. Wha’s gonna happen to us, Pip?”

She was already imagining what would happen to them: how much more time she’d have alone with Stephen. The best part of living here, even more than discovering her capacity for charity, had been that she got to be around him every day. Having grown up with a mother so unworldly that she couldn’t even hang a picture on a wall, because it would have entailed buying a hammer to drive the nail, Pip had arrived on Thirty-Third Street with a hunger to learn practical skills. And Stephen had taught her these skills. He’d shown her how to spackle, how to caulk, how to operate a power saw, how to glaze a window, how to rewire a scavenged lamp, how to take apart her bicycle, and he’d been so patient with her, so generous, that she (or at least her body) had had a feeling of being groomed to be a worthier mate for him than Marie, whose domestic skills were strictly of the kitchen. He took her dumpsterdiving, demonstrating how to jump right in and toss things around, digging for the good stuff, and sometimes she even did this by herself now, when she saw a promising dumpster, and exulted with him when she brought home something usable. It was a thing they had together. She could be more like him than Marie was, and thus, in time, more liked. This promise made the ache of her desire more bearable.

By the time she and Ramón had had a good cry together, and he’d refused to go downstairs with her, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, two of Stephen’s young friends from Occupy had arrived with quarts of low-end beer. She found the three of them sitting at the kitchen table, talking not about Marie but about wage/price feedback loops. She preheated the oven for the frozen pizzas that were Dreyfuss’s contribution to communal cooking, and it occurred to her that she would probably get stuck with more cooking now that Marie was gone. She considered the problem of communal labor while Stephen and his friends, Garth and Erik, imagined a labor utopia. Their theory was that the technologydriven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.