Джонатан Франзен – Purity (страница 16)
How about that, Mr. Purity? Now it’s your turn.
Too giddy with temerity to eat, she marched down the hall to Igor’s office. He was packing his briefcase, his day already done. He frowned when he saw her.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I haven’t washed my hair in three days.”
“Your stomach’s better? You’re not contagious?”
She plopped herself down in a guest chair. “So listen. Igor. Your twenty questions.”
“Let’s forget that,” he said quickly.
“The thing you wanted from me, that I was supposed to guess. What was it?”
“Pip, I’m sorry. I’m taking my sons to the A’s game. This is not a good time.”
“I was just kidding about the lawsuit.”
“Are you really feeling all right? You don’t seem like yourself.”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
Igor’s look of fear was reminiscent of Stephen’s two nights earlier. “If you need more time off, you can take it. Take the rest of the week if you want.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of taking the rest of my life off.”
“It was a stupid joke, the twenty questions. I apologize. But my sons are waiting for me.”
Sons: even worse than siblings!
“Your sons can wait five minutes,” she said.
“We’ll talk first thing in the morning.”
“You said you liked me, although you don’t know why. You said you wanted to see me succeed.”
“Both things completely true.”
“But you can’t take five minutes to tell me why I shouldn’t quit?”
“I can take the whole morning, tomorrow. But right now—”
“Right now you don’t have time to flirt.”
Igor sighed, looked at his watch, and sat down in the other guest chair. “Don’t quit tonight,” he said.
“I think I’m going to quit tonight.”
“Is it the flirting? I don’t have to do that. I thought you enjoyed it.”
Pip frowned. “So there wasn’t actually anything you wanted from me.”
“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 longrunning 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.
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
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.