Purity. Джонатан Франзен

this would make him LOL again, she went upstairs to her cubicle. Beside her computer was a sticky note from one of her outreach colleagues (Found this—

Janet) and a printout of a recipe: “White Whole Wheat Cake with Vegan Cream Cheese Frosting and Olallieberries.” She dropped into her chair with a heavy sigh. As if she didn’t have enough to feel bad about already, she had to regret thinking ill of her colleagues.

      On the plus side, she seemed to have begun a flirtatious correspondence with somebody world-famous. She’d always considered herself immune to celebrity—had even, to some extent, resented it, for reasons hazily akin to her resentment of people with siblings. Her feeling was: what makes you so much worthier of attention than me? When a college friend of hers had landed a Hollywood job and started bragging about the famous actors he was meeting, she’d quietly severed communications with him. But now she saw that what mattered about celebrity was that other people were not immune to it: that they might be impressed with her connection to it, and that this might give her somewhat more than the zero power she currently felt she had. In a pleasantly seduced frame of mind, she waded back into her Rancho Ancho call sheet and deliberately refrained from checking her device, so as to prolong the anticipation.

      At her dinner break she found Wolf’s reply.

      I am seeing why Annagret likes you. My note would have reached you even faster if it hadn’t had to travel through four times the usual number of servers. Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don’t fall behind with email. Unfortunately, for security reasons, I can’t offer to video chat with you. More important, our Project needs risktakers with good judgement. You will have to judge for yourself the risk of trusting my emails. You may of course use every available internet tool to help you judge, and I can assure you, if you jump, we are here to catch you with open arms. But it is finally yours to decide whether to believe me. A.

      She noted with pleasure that he’d already dispensed with a salutation, and she did the same intimate thing in her reply.

      But trust goes both ways, right? Shouldn’t you also have to trust me? Maybe we should each tell the other some little thing we’re ashamed of. I’ll even go first. My real name is Purity. I’m so ashamed of it I always hold on tight to my wallet when I take it out with friends, because sometimes people grab wallets to make fun of people’s driver’s license pictures, and my name is on the license.

      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,