Purity (81 page)

Three customers were waiting in the fog when she unlocked the front door. After she'd served them, a lull came, and into this lull walked a person she recognized. It was Jason, the boy she'd tried and failed to sleep with a year and a half ago, the boy whose texts she'd read. Jason Whitaker with his Sunday
Times
. She'd thought of him, their Sunday mornings, when she'd applied for the Peet's job. But she'd figured that by now he'd found some other coffee place to be enthusiastic about.

She waited, with the particular exposure of a barista, while he claimed his preferred table with his paper and came over to the pastry case. To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person. When he stepped up to the cash register, he saw this person and blushed.

She gave him an ironic little wave. “Hello.”

“Wow. You work here.”

“It's my first real day.”

“It took me a second to recognize you. Your hair is short.”

“Yes.”

“It looks nice. You look great.”

“Thank you.”

“Wow, so.” He looked over his shoulder. No one was behind him. His own hair was shorter, his body still skinny but less skinny than before. She remembered why she'd wanted him.

“What can I get you?” she said.

“You probably remember. Bear claw and a three-shot cappuccino, tall.”

She was relieved to turn away from him and work on his drink. Navi was occupied at the back with a large plastic drum.

“So are you part-time here?” Jason said. “Do you still work for the alt-energy place?”

“No.” She tonged a bear claw from the case. “I've been away. I just came back.”

“Where were you?”

“Bolivia and then Denver.”

“Bolivia? For real? What were you doing down there?”

She got the milk steamer squealing so she didn't have to answer.

“This is on me,” she said when she was finished. “You don't have to pay.”

“No, come on.”

He pushed a ten-dollar bill at her. She pushed it back. It lay there on the counter. Keeping her eyes on it, she said, “I never apologized to you. I should have apologized.”

“God, no, it's OK. I'm the one who should have apologized.”

“You did. I got your texts. I was so ashamed of myself I couldn't write back to you.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am, I suspect.”

“It was like a perfect storm of wrongness, that night.”

“Yah.”

“That guy I was texting? I'm not even friends with him anymore.”

“Seriously, Jason, you are not the one to apologize.”

He left the money on the counter when he went back to his table. She rang up his purchase and put the change in the tip jar. A year and a half ago she might have resented him for being cavalier about the money, but she was no longer that person. Somewhere she'd lost her capacity for resentment, and for hostility as well, and thus, to some extent, for being amusing. This was a real loss, but there was nothing she could do about it except be sad. She was pretty sure the loss predated the knowledge that her mother was a billionaire.

For a while the stream of customers was steady. Navi had to pull her out of the weeds more than once; accidental coffee and dairy wastages were running high. During another lull, Jason returned to the counter. “I'm taking off,” he said.

“It was nice to see you again. I mean, discounting my excruciating embarrassment.”

“I still come here every Sunday. But now you can think, ‘Oh, that's just Jason.' I can think, ‘Oh, that's just Pip.'”

“Is that something I said?”

“It's something you said. Will I see you next Sunday?”

“Probably. It's not a popular shift.”

He started to leave and then turned back to her. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That sounded like something I didn't mean. Asking if you'd be here next week.”

“It just sounded friendly.”

“Good. I mean—I'm kind of with someone else. I didn't want to send the wrong message.”

She felt a small pang but no surprise. “Message of friendliness received.”

He was walking away when she found herself laughing. He turned back. “What?”

“Nothing. Sorry. Unrelated.”

When he was gone, more laughter escaped her. A stupid condom! Was anything funnier than a condom? If she hadn't left Jason and gone downstairs to get one, a year and a half ago, she might never have taken Annagret's questionnaire, and everything that had happened to her since then wouldn't have happened. If she'd had a boyfriend, she wouldn't have wanted to leave town. She would never have learned about the
other
condoms, the comedy of
that
. The comedy of her even existing. Navi was giving her a chiding look, but she couldn't stop laughing.

In the afternoon, when her shift ended, she walked back down the hill. The sky was as clear as if there'd never been such a thing as fog. In theory, she was now supposed to work on a piece the
Express
had commissioned, a firsthand account of life as a Sunlight Project intern. But no matter how long or good the piece was, she wouldn't get more than a couple of hundred dollars for it, and she still had her loan payments to make; hence the full-time job at Peet's. She also didn't know how to write about Andreas. It might be a year, or a decade, before she could sort out how she felt about his death, and she already had so much else to sort out, such a mountain of unsorted material, that all she'd been good for, after putting in her hours at Peet's, was whacking dead tennis balls against the door of Dreyfuss's garage.

Dreyfuss was supine on his living-room sofa, watching an A's game. He was recovering from treatment of an intestinal parasite for which the freeganism of his housemates Garth and Erik was probably responsible. Garth and Erik themselves were temporarily in the Alameda County jail. Three days ago, they'd “assaulted” a real-estate agent attempting to show Dreyfuss's house to prospective buyers, and crowdfunding by their anarchist friends had yet to raise enough bail for both of them.

“Someone smells like coffee,” Dreyfuss said.

“I brought you scones,” Pip said, unzipping her knapsack. “Do you want milk with them? I brought some milk home, too.”

“The challenge of stale scone and a perpetually dry mouth may be insurmountable without it.”

Dreyfuss put the bag of scones on his diminished but still convex belly and reached into it. Pip set the plastic bottle on the coffee table. “Yesterday was the use-by date, just so you know. Have you heard anything more from the bank?”

“Even Relentless Pursuit rests on the Sabbath.”

“It's going to be fine. They can't do anything until you've had your hearing.”

“Nothing I've learned about Judge Costa inclines me toward optimism. He appears to have an eighth-grade education and slavish respect for the rights of corporations. I've edited my presentation to the bone, but there are still a hundred twenty-two discrete narrative elements. I suspect that the judge's attention will wander after three or four of them.”

Pip wasn't so afraid of Dreyfuss anymore, and unfortunately his bank wasn't either. She patted one of his heavy and nearly hairless hands. She didn't expect him to respond in any way, and he didn't.

Upstairs, in her old room, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Half the room was piled with Stephen's belongings and scavenged crap, which she'd rearranged in more vertical form to make room for her mattress and suitcase. Two weeks ago, from her friend Samantha's apartment, after emerging from the haze into which she'd put herself with Samantha's Ativan, she'd called Dreyfuss to say hi and tell him he'd been right about those Germans. Dreyfuss told her that Stephen was adventuring in Central America with a twenty-year-old girl who had parental money. Currently Garth and Erik were Dreyfuss's only housemates; she was welcome to her old room if she wanted it. The male filth of the house was even more disgusting than she'd imagined, but cleaning it had given her some direction for a while.

In Stephen's pile of junk she'd found an old Pro Kennex tennis racquet. Dreyfuss's garage door was loose in its frame and weakened by dry rot. Even the hardest-hit balls hopped back from it with a puppyish lack of aggression. Behind the garage was a wall of broadleaf evergreens that served as a backstop. Balls she bombed over it were easily replaced by searching the bushes in Mosswood Park. The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done.

From some weeks of tennis in her high-school gym class, she knew she needed to keep her eye on the ball and address it sideways. Her backhand was still a flail, but the forehand—oh, the forehand. Her natural stroke was topspin, a ripping upswing. She could pound forehands for fifteen minutes, scurrying around the return caroms, repositioning herself like a cat with her mouseball, before she had to catch her breath. Each
whack
was another small bite taken out of a too-long late afternoon.

She'd still been in Denver, having crashed for some nights with her former share-mates in Lakewood, when the email headed
le1o9n8a0rd
came in. She'd sensed right away that the document attached to it was from Tom's computer, which she'd promised never to violate. But later the same day, after a punishing bus ride to the Denver airport, there had followed two short emails from Tom himself.

Andreas dead. Suicide. I'm in physical shock but thought you should know.

PS: I'm in Bolivia, I saw him go. If he sent you something, please shred it without reading it. He was mentally ill.

More than shock, or dread, or pain, what punched her in the stomach and sickened her was
guilt
. And this was strange: why guilt? But she knew what she knew. The sick feeling was definitely guilt. Mechanically, because her group number had been called, she went ahead and boarded her cheap Frontier Airlines flight to San Francisco. There were soldiers on the plane. They'd been invited to board early, and her seat was next to one of them.

He was mentally ill.
She'd both known this and not known it. Had seen it but also had done what he'd asked her not to do: had projected. Projected her own sanity onto him. If he really was dead now, she must have had it in her power to save him. This idea was obviously a form of self-flattery, but when she examined her memories of their times alone, it seemed to her that he'd been asking her to save him. She'd thought she was doing the morally right thing by rejecting him, but what if it had been morally the wrong thing? A failure of compassion? She scrunched herself down in her narrow airline seat and cried as inconspicuously as she could, keeping her eyes shut, as if this could make her invisible to the soldier in fatigues beside her.

By the time she got to Samantha's, she was aware of a conflict of loyalties. On one side was her promise to respect Tom's privacy, along with the pointedness of his warning that Andreas had been mentally ill; Tom seemed to have been implying that there was sickness in her very possession of a document. And yet: emailing her had been one of Andreas's last acts on earth. Only a few hours had elapsed between his email and Tom's. However sick he'd been, he'd been thinking of
her
. To imagine that this mattered was obviously another form of self-flattery—a failure of compassion for a suicidally tormented person, a failure to respect how little anything mattered to him but the pain he was in. And yet: it had to mean something that he'd sent her the email. She was afraid that it meant she was part of why he'd killed himself. If she was somehow responsible for his death, the least she could do to accept her guilt was to read the message he'd taken the trouble to send her. She reasoned that she could look at the document and still honor her promise to Tom by never telling him. It seemed like a thing she owed Andreas.

But the document was like a box she couldn't put the lid back on; like the secret of nuclear fission, the so-called Pandora's box. When she came to Tom's description of his ex-wife's forehead scar and reconstructed front teeth, the most terrible chill came over her. The chill had to do with Andreas and consisted of strange gratitude and redoubled guilt: in his last hour of life, he'd given her the thing she'd most wanted, the answer to her question. But now that she had it, she didn't want it. She saw that she'd done a very bad thing to both her mother and Tom by getting it. Both of them had known, and neither of them had wanted her to know.

Without reading farther, she lay down on Samantha's foldout bed. She wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all. She wondered if Tom might conceivably be mistaken about his death. She couldn't stand his being dead; she missed him unbearably. She pawed at her phone and saw that Denver Independent, not normally known for spot reporting, had already broken the story.

jumped from a height of at least five hundred feet

She turned off the phone and sobbed until upwelling anxiety overwhelmed her grief and she had to go and wake Samantha and beg for Ativan. She told Samantha that Andreas had killed himself. Samantha, who had difficulty making sense of anything that didn't refer to herself in some way, replied that she'd had a friend in high school who'd hanged himself, and that she hadn't gotten over it until she'd understood that suicide was the greatest of mysteries.

“It's not a mystery,” Pip said.

“Yes it is,” Samantha said. “I kept struggling to get over it. I kept thinking I could have prevented it, I could have saved him—”