Purity (5 page)

On the second-floor landing, she paused to seethe. Stephen was weak? She thought about men too much?
That is so nice
.
That really makes me feel good about myself
.

Behind Stephen's door, the marital fighting had stopped. Pip very quietly moved closer to it, away from the sound of basketball downstairs, and listened. Before long, there came a creak of a bedspring, and then an unmistakable whimpering sigh, and she understood that Annagret was right, that Stephen
was
weak, he
was
weak; and yet there was nothing wrong with a husband and a wife having sex. Hearing it and picturing it and being excluded from it filled Pip with a desolation that she had only one means of assuaging.

She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, as if shaving five seconds off her ascent could make up for half an hour's absence. Outside her door, she composed her face into an expression of sheepish apology. It was a face she'd used a thousand times on her mother, to reliably good effect. She opened the door and peeked in, wearing the look.

The lights were on and Jason was in his clothes again, sitting on the edge of the bed, texting intently.

“Psst,” Pip said. “Are you horribly mad at me?”

He shook his head. “It's just I told my sister I'd be home by eleven.”

The word
sister
dispelled much of the apology from Pip's face, but Jason wasn't looking at her anyway. She went in and sat down by him and touched him. “It's not eleven yet, is it?”

“It's eleven twenty.”

She put her head on his shoulder and her hands around his arm. She could feel his muscles working as he texted. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I can't explain what happened. I mean, I can, but I don't want to.”

“You don't have to explain. I kind of knew it anyway.”

“Knew what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“No, what, though? What did you know?”

He stopped texting and stared at the floor. “It's not like I'm so normal myself. But relatively speaking—”

“I want to make normal love with you. Can't we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you'll be home a little late.”

“Listen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”

“It's what I call myself.”

“Somehow it doesn't seem like I'm talking to
you
when I use it. I don't know … ‘Pip.' ‘Pip.' It doesn't sound … I don't know…”

The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn't resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.

“OK,” she said. “So you don't like my name. What else don't you like about me?”

“Oh, come on. You're the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”

“Right. While your sister was waiting for you.”

Speaking the word
sister
again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of
whoosh
inside her head.

“Seriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don't like about me, since we're obviously never going to fuck, since I'm not normal enough, although what's so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”

“Hey, come on,” Jason said. “I could have just left.”

The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the
anisotropy
of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while girls played the boys' game of sex at their own risk, dupes if they objectified and victims if they didn't.

“You didn't seem to mind me when your dick was in my mouth,” she said.

“I didn't put it there,” he said. “And it wasn't there long.”

“No, because I had to go downstairs and get a condom so you could stick it inside me.”

“Wow. So this is all me now?”

Through a haze of flame, or hot blood, Pip's eyes fell on Jason's handheld device.

“Hey!” he cried.

She jumped up and ran to the far side of the room with his device.

“Hey, you can't do that,” he shouted, pursuing her.

“Yes I can!”

“No, you can't, it's not fair. Hey—hey—you can't do that!”

She wedged herself underneath the child's writing desk that was her only piece of furniture and faced the wall, bracing her leg on a desk leg. Jason tried to pull her out by the belt of her robe, but he couldn't dislodge her and was apparently unwilling to get more violent than this. “What kind of freak are you?” he said. “What are you doing?”

Pip touched the device's screen with shaking fingers.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jason said, pacing behind her. “What are you doing?”

She pawed the screen and found the next thread.

She slumped to one side, put the device on the floor, and gave it a push in Jason's direction. Her anger had burned off as quickly as it had ignited, leaving ashen grief behind.

“It's only the way some of my friends talk,” Jason said. “It doesn't mean anything.”

“Please go away,” she said in a small voice.

“Let's start over. Can we just, like, reboot? I'm really sorry.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, and she recoiled. He took the hand away.

“OK, look, let's talk tomorrow, though, OK?” he said. “This was obviously the wrong night for both of us.”

“Just go away now, please.”

*   *   *

Renewable Solutions didn't make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not
climate
but
weather
, for it changed seasonally and sometimes seemingly hourly), it “bundled,” it “brokered,” it “captured,” it “surveyed,” it “client-provided.” In theory, this was all very worthy. America put too much carbon into the atmosphere, renewable energy could help with that, federal and state governments were forever devising new tax inducements, the utilities were indifferent-to-moderately-enthusiastic about greening their image, a gratifyingly non-negligible percentage of California households and businesses were willing to pay a premium for cleaner electricity, and this premium, multiplied by many thousands and added to the money flowing from Washington and Sacramento, minus the money that went to the companies that actually made or installed stuff, was enough to pay fifteen salaries at Renewable Solutions and placate its venture-capitalist backers. The buzzwords at the company were also good:
collective
,
community
,
cooperative
. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions. From her mother she'd learned the importance of leading a morally purposeful life, and from college she'd learned to feel worried and guilty about the country's unsustainable consumption patterns. Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

At first, and in hindsight least confusingly, she'd sold power-purchase agreements to small and midsize businesses, until a new state regulation put an end to the outrageous little cut that Renewable Solutions took of those. Then it was signing up households in
potential
renewable energy districts; each household earned Renewable Solutions a bounty paid by some shadowy third party or parties that had created an allegedly lucrative futures market. Then it was giving residents of progressive municipalities a “survey” to measure their level of interest in having their taxes raised or their municipal budgets rejiggered to switch over to renewables; when Pip pointed out to Igor that ordinary citizens had no realistic basis for answering the “survey” questions, Igor said that she must not, under any circumstances, admit this to the respondents, because positive responses had cash value not only for the companies that made stuff but also for the shadowy third parties with their futures market. Pip was on the verge of quitting her job when the cash value of the responses went down and she was shifted to solar renewable energy certificates. This had lasted six relatively pleasant weeks before a flaw in the business model was detected. Since April, she'd been attempting to sign up South Bay subdivisions for waste-energy micro-collectives.

Her associates in consumer outreach were flogging the same crap, of course. The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn't vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn't make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. Only when she was allowed to work on direct-mail and social-media outreach did her talents seem less wasted; having grown up with no television, she had good language skills.

Today being a Monday, she was telephonically harassing the many 65
+
s who didn't use social media and hadn't responded to the company's direct-mail bombardment of a Santa Clara County development called Rancho Ancho. Micro-collectives only worked if you got near-total community buy-in, and a community organizer couldn't be dispatched before a fifty percent response rate was achieved; nor could Pip earn any “outreach points,” no matter how much work she'd done.

She put on her headset and forced herself to look at her call sheet again and cursed the self she'd been an hour earlier, before lunch, because this earlier self had cherry-picked the sheet, leaving the names
GUTTENSCHWERDER, ALOYSIUS
and
BUTCAVAGE, DENNIS
for after lunch. Pip hated the hard names, because mispronouncing them immediately alienated the consumer, but she gamely clicked Dial. A man at the Butcavage residence answered with a gruff hello.

“Hiiiiii,” she said in a sultry drawl into which she'd learned to inject a note of apology, of shared social discomfort. “This is Pip Tyler, with Renewable Solutions, and I'm following up on a mailing we sent you a few weeks ago. Is this Mr. Butcavage?”

“Boocavazh,” the man corrected gruffly.

“So sorry, Mr. Boocavazh.”

“What's this about?”

“It's about lowering your electric bill, helping the planet, and getting your fair share of state and federal energy tax credits,” Pip said, although in truth the electric-bill savings were hypothetical, waste energy was environmentally controversial, and she wouldn't have been making this call if Renewable Solutions and its partners had any intention of giving consumers a large share of the tax benefits.

“Not interested,” Mr. Butcavage said.

“Well, you know,” Pip said, “quite a few of your neighbors have expressed strong interest in forming a collective. You might do a little asking around and see what they're thinking.”

“I don't talk to my neighbors.”

“Well, no, of course, I'm not saying you have to if you don't want to. But the reason they're interested is that your community has a chance to work together for cleaner, cheaper energy and real tax savings.”