Purity (85 page)

The dog presented Pip with a drooly, dirty tennis ball and pushed his head between her bare knees. End to end, there was a whole lot of Choco.

“I wasn't sure I could handle having a dog,” Jason said, “but he's got this thing for chewing lemons. He walks around with them in his mouth, sort of half bitten, lots of slobber. He looks like he's wearing this big idiotic yellow smile. My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.”

“The acid can't be good for his teeth.”

“My sister had a lemon tree behind her apartment. I'm putting him on a reduced-citrus diet. As you can see, he still has his teeth.”

“Excellent dog.”

“And a champ at finding tennis balls.”

“Next best thing to lemons.”

“Right?”

Four nights earlier, Jason had sent Pip a one-line message on Facebook:
check out my relationship status
. This she had duly done and mostly been dismayed by. The last thing she wanted was to be in any way responsible for a breakup. Among other things, it seemed to oblige her to be worth breaking up for: to be available. And yet, of course, she'd literally asked for it. Of all the ways she could have said no to hitting a tennis ball, she'd chosen to make an issue of Jason's girlfriend. Not only could no one else be trusted—she herself couldn't be trusted! She'd wrapped herself in relationship ethics when her real motive was to take Jason away from Sandrine. And sleep with him herself? She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with
him
. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable. She'd written back:

Obviously saying this WAY too late, but … I'm going through a lot of stuff of my own right now and I can't really promise you anything but returning balls hit to my forehand. Should have been MUCH clearer about this on Sunday. I apologize (again, again, again). Please don't feel you have to follow through and hit with me.

To which Jason had replied, very quickly,
just hitting works for me
.

As soon as they were on a court, she discovered that he was bad at tennis, even worse than she was. He tried to crush every shot, sometimes missing the ball altogether, more often sending it into the net or over her head, and his good shots were unreturnable bullets. After ten minutes, she called a time-out. Choco, leashed to the outside of the fence, stood up hopefully.

“I'm no tennis pro,” she said, “but I think you're swinging too hard.”

“It feels
fantastic
when I connect.”

“I know. But we're trying to hit together.”

His face clouded. “I suck at this, don't I.”

“That's why we're practicing.”

He swung less hard after that, and the hitting was somewhat more satisfactory, but their longest rally in an hour was six hits. “I blame the brick wall,” Jason said as they walked off the court. “I'm realizing I should have drawn a line representing the top of the net. And maybe a higher line to represent the baseline.”

“I sort of do that mentally,” Pip said.

“I don't suppose you'd like to hear how to calculate the probability of a six-hit rally, given an arbitrary error rate of fifty percent? Or, slightly more interesting, how to calculate our actual combined error rate, given the empirical frequency of four-hit rallies?”

“Sometime I would,” Pip said. “But I should probably get home.”

“Do I suck too much to do this again?”

“No. We had some fun rallies.”

“I should have told you how much I suck.”

“Whatever you didn't tell me is dwarfed by how much I haven't told you.”

Jason bent down to unknot Choco's leash. There was something humble and patient about the dog's very low-slungness, the drooping of his heavy head. His grin was silly, possibly in a sly way, suggesting awareness of his more general silliness as a dog.

“I'm sorry if I freaked you out,” Jason said. “By breaking up, I mean. It was already in the works. I just didn't want you to think I'm the kind of guy who, you know. Sees two people at once.”

“I understand,” Pip said. “Loyalty is good.”

“I also don't want you to think you were the only reason.”

“OK. I won't think that.”

“Although you were definitely
a
reason.”

“Got that, too.”

They didn't speak of it again, not the next time they hit, three days later, nor any of the many times they hit in August and September. Jason was every bit as compulsive about whacking the ball as Pip was, and for a long time the intensity of their mutual concentration, on the court, was an adequate substitute for the kinds of off-court intensity from which she was still shying and for which Jason, his eager personality notwithstanding, was sensitive enough not to pressure her. But she liked him a lot and loved Choco. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. In hindsight, now that she'd read Tom's memoir and knew the historical depth of her mother's concern for animals, she was surprised that her mother had never had a pet. She guessed that she herself had been that pet. There was also her mother's strange cosmology of animals, a simplified trinity consisting of birds (whose beady eyes frightened her), cats (which represented the Feminine but to which she was totally allergic), and dogs (which embodied the Masculine and therefore, whatever their charms, could not be allowed to disturb her cabin with their pushy male-principle energies). Pip was in any case so dog-starved that she would have fallen for one far less excellent than Choco. Choco was
weird
, very unneedy as dogs went, a kind of Zen dog, all about his lemons and sly acknowledgment of his ridiculousness.

Hitting two or three times a week, she and Jason got better—enough better to be depressed or enraged when they were suddenly worse again. They never played games, only rallied, working together to keep the ball in play. Week by week, the light began to change, their shadows at the baseline stretching, the autumn-scented dusk arriving earlier. It was the driest and least foggy season of the year in Oakland, but she minded it less now that it meant consistently ideal tennis conditions. All over the state, reservoirs and wells were going dry, the taste and clarity of tap water worsening, farmers suffering, Northern Californians conserving while Orange County set new records for monthly consumption, but none of this mattered for the hour and a half that she was on the court with Jason.

Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o'clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth,
whack
and
whack
, rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball's inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful
pock
of a tennis ball. It was enough.

In near-darkness afterward, outside the fence, she put her arms around Jason and her face to his chest. Choco stood by patiently, his mouth open, smiling.

“OK,” she said, “OK.”

“It's about time,” he said.

“I've got some things I have to tell you.”

*   *   *

The rain came three weeks later. Nothing made Pip more homesick for the San Lorenzo Valley than what passed for rain in the East Bay. Rain in Oakland was ordinary, seldom very heavy, always liable to yield to clear sky between the chaotic tentacles of Pacific storm cloud. Only up in the cloud-trapping Santa Cruz Mountains could the rain continue for days without a break, never less than moderately heavy and often coming down an inch per hour, all night, all day, the river rising to lap at the undersides of bridges, Highway 9 covered with sheets of muddy runoff and fallen boughs, power lines down everywhere, PG&E trucks flashing their lights in the torrential midday twilight. That was real rain. Back in the pre-drought years, six feet of it had fallen every winter.

“I might need to go home to Felton for a while,” Pip said to Jason one evening while they were walking, under umbrellas, down the hill from the St. Agnes Home. She'd been visiting Ramón at the home every month or so, even though things had changed between them. He was wholly Marie's adoptee now, not Stephen's at all. He had new friends, including a “girlfriend,” and he took very seriously the janitorial duties he'd learned to perform. Pip had wanted Jason to meet him before she drifted out of his life altogether.

“How long is a while?” Jason said.

“I don't know. Weeks maybe. Longer than I have days off for. I have a feeling my mom's going to be difficult. I may have to quit my job.”

“Can I come down and see you?”

“No, I'll come up. It's a five-hundred-square-foot cabin. Plus I'm worried you'll run for your life when you meet my mom. You'll think I've been concealing the fact that I'm like her.”

“Everybody's embarrassed by their parents.”

“But I have actual reason to be.”

Pip was Jason's newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. If she wanted something more, like visiting Ramón with her, he agreed to it enthusiastically. He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do. She'd watched him rapidly eat four generic vanilla-cream cookies and then stop and marvel at a fifth, holding it in front of his eyes and saying, “These are
fantastic.
”

If she became a rich person—and she could already feel herself becoming one; was sensing the mentally deformative weight of the word
heir
—Jason would be the last boy who'd liked her when she was still nobody. He did admit that her interning with Andreas Wolf had “confirmed” his assessment of her intelligence, but he swore it hadn't had anything to do with his breakup. “It was just you,” he said. “You behind the counter at Peet's.” She trusted Jason in a way that might well prove to be unique, but she didn't want him to know this. She was aware of how easily she could blow things with him, and she was even more aware, thanks to Tom's memoir, of the hazards of love. She felt herself wanting to bury herself in Jason, to pour her trust into him, even though she had evidence that self-burial and crazy trust levels could result in toxicity. She was therefore allowing herself to be heedless in sex only. This was probably hazardous, too, but she couldn't help it.

They had more sex as soon as they got back to Jason's apartment. Starting to fall in love with a person made it bigger, almost metaphysical; a John Donne poem she'd studied in college and failed to appreciate, a poem about the Extasie and how it doth unperplex, was making sense to her now. But in the wake of the Extasie she became anxious again.

“I think I'd better call my mom,” she said. “I can't postpone it any longer.”

“Do it.”

“Can you just keep lying there like that while I do? With your arm there? I need you to hold me in case I feel like I'm getting sucked in.”

“I'm picturing somebody getting sucked out of a blown-open airplane,” Jason said. “They say it's surprisingly hard to hold on to a person when that happens. Or maybe not so surprising when you consider the air-pressure differentials that keep a hundred-ton plane aloft.”

“Do your best,” she said, reaching for her phone.

She loved having a body now that Jason loved her having it. She was clutching his arm when her mother answered.

“Hi, Mom.” She braced herself for a
Pussycat!

“Yes,” her mother said.

“So, I'm sorry I haven't called in so long, but I'm thinking I might come down and see you.”

“All right.”

“Mom?”

“You come and go as you please. If you want to come, come. Obviously I can't stop you. Obviously I'll be here.”

“Mom, I'm really sorry.”

There was a click, a cessation.

“Holy shit,” Pip said. “She hung up on me.”

“Uh oh.”

It hadn't occurred to her that her mother might be angry at her; that even their extreme case of moral hazard might have limits. But now that she thought about it, her mother's entire story, in Tom's memoir, was one of serial abandonment and betrayal, followed by scorching moral judgment. Pip had always been safe from this judgment, but she could tell, from the fact that Tom still seemed afraid of it, even after twenty-five years, that it was awful to experience. She felt afraid of it herself now, and closer to Tom.

The next day, she gave notice at Peet's and called Mr. Navarre to tell him she was going to have the conversation with her mother, and to ask him for five thousand dollars. Mr. Navarre could have been judgmental or teasing about the money, but apparently he was impressed that she'd waited four and a half months to ask for any. She enjoyed the feeling that she'd passed some test, exceeded some norm.