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Dreyfuss was serving pizza when she went back inside, and the talk had turned to Andreas Wolf, the famous bringer of sunlight. She poured herself a large glass of beer.
“Was it a leak, or did they hack in?” Erik said.
“They never say,” Garth said. “It could be that somebody just leaked them the passwords or the keys. That’s part of Wolf’s M.O.—protect the source.”
“He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.”
“At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.”
“But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole brand now: purity.”
The word purity made Pip shudder.
“This definitely helps us,” Stephen said. “There’s a bunch of East Bay properties in the document dump. This is exactly the kind of shit we’ve been trying to document from the outside. We need to reach out to all the East Bay homeowners in the leak and get them on our side, do a rally with them or something.”
Pip turned to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He ate with such pleasureless speed that food just disappeared from his plate without his seeming to touch it. “The Sunlight Project,” he said, “released thirty thousand internal emails from its undisclosed tropical location on Saturday night. Most of the emails are from the Bank of Relentless Pursuit, which is, interestingly, as you know, my own bank. Although my own case is nowhere mentioned in the emails, I believe it falls short of pathological to imagine that the German spies might have tried to do us a favor, having nosed out the identity of my bank. In any event, the emails are highly damning. Relentless Pursuit is still engaged in a pattern of misrepresentation, deceit, bullying, stonewalling, and the attempted theft of equity from homeowners in temporary distress. In toto, it casts a devastatingly unflattering light on the federal government’s settlement with the banks.”
“The Germans weren’t spying, Dreyfuss,” Stephen said. “I told Annagret about your bank.”
“What?” Pip said sharply. “When?”
“When what?”
“When did you tell Annagret? Are you guys still in touch?”
“Of course we are.”
She searched Stephen’s beer-flushed face for evidence of guilt. She didn’t see any, but her jealousy discounted this and moved right on to imagining that, with Marie out of the picture, Annagret would dump her boyfriend and move to Oakland and take Stephen and drive Pip out of the house.
“It’s an amazing leak,” Stephen said to her. “It’s all there—how to work out a re-fi with the homeowner and then go nonresponsive, and then ‘lose’ the paperwork, and initiate foreclosure proceedings. They even name the numbers. Anybody with more than two consecutive missed or partial payments and seventy-five thousand in net equity gets the treatment. And quite a bit of it is right here in the East Bay. It’s an incredible gift to us. I’m pretty sure Annagret made it happen.”
Too agitated to eat, Pip drank down her beer and poured more. In the past four months, she’d received at least twenty emails from Annagret, all of which she’d marked as Read without reading. She wasn’t much of a Facebook user, in part because she felt bludgeoned by happier people’s photographs and in part because personal socialmedia use was frowned upon at work, but in order to keep using it at all she’d had to reject Annagret’s overture of friendship, so as not to be bombarded with messages there as well. Her memory of Annagret was tangled up with the memory of Jason, and it made her feel strangely dirty, as if she’d been not robed but fully naked when she did the questionnaire and had then inflicted her dirtiness on Jason; as if she’d had some very wrong sort of personal intercourse with Annagret, the sort a person had bad dreams about. And now it was connected with the word purity, which to her was the most shameful word in the language, because it was her given name. It made her ashamed of her own driver’s license, the PURITY TYLER beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture. The name had accomplished the opposite of what her mother had intended by giving it to her. As if to escape the weight of it, she’d made herself a dirty girl in high school, and she was still a dirty girl, desiring someone’s husband … She kept drinking beer until she felt dulled enough to excuse herself and take some pizza to Ramón.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his face to the wall.
“Sweetie, you have to eat something.”
“I’m not hungry. Where’s Stephen?”
“He has friends over. He’ll be up soon.”
“I wanna stay here with you an’ Stephen an’ Drayfuss.”
Pip bit her lip and went back down to the kitchen.
“You guys need to go now,” she said to Garth and Erik. “Stephen needs to talk to Ramón.”
“I’ll go up soon,” he said.
The plain fear in his face made her angry. “He’s your son,” she said. “He’s not going to eat until you talk to him.”
“All right,” he said with a little-boy irritation that he normally directed at Marie.
Pip watched him go and wondered if she and he were going to skip right over the bliss part to the bitchy-relationship part. Having broken up the party, she sat and finished off the beer. She could feel an outburst coming on, and she knew she ought to go to bed, but her heart was beating too hard. Eventually her desire and anger and jealousy and distrust coalesced into a single beery grievance: Stephen had forgotten that he’d promised to have a private talk with her tonight. He stayed in touch with Annagret but he abandoned Pip. She heard his bedroom door close upstairs, and while she waited to hear it open again she silently repeated her grievance, rewording and rewording it, trying to strengthen it to bear the weight of her feeling of abandonment; but it couldn’t bear the weight. She went upstairs anyway and knocked on Stephen’s door.
He was sitting on the marital bed reading a book with a red title, something political.
“You’re reading a book?” she said.
“It’s better than thinking about things I have no control over.”
She shut the door and sat down on a corner of the bed. “A person wouldn’t have guessed anything unusual had even happened today, the way you were talking with Garth and Erik.”
“What are they going to do about it? I still have my work. I still have my friends.”
“And me. You still have me.”
Stephen looked aside nervously. “Yeah.”
“Did you forget you’d said you’d talk to me?”
“Yeah, I did. I’m sorry.”
She tried to deepen and slow her breathing.
“What?” he said.
“You know what.”
“No, I don’t know what.”
“You promised you were going to talk to me.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
Her grievance was as puny and useless as she’d feared. There was no point in airing it a third time.
“What’s going to happen to us?” she said.
“You and me?” He closed his book. “Nothing. We’ll find a couple of new housemates, preferably female, so you don’t have to be the only one.”
“So nothing changes. Everything the same.”
“Why would anything change?”
She paused, listening to her heart. “You know, a year ago, when we were having those coffees, I had the impression that you liked me.”
“I do like you. A lot.”
“But you made it sound like you were hardly even married.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well, it turns out I was right about that.”
“No, but back then,” she said. “Back then you made it sound that way. Why did you do that to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to you. We were having coffee.”
She looked at him beseechingly, searching his eyes, asking them if he really was so clueless or was just pretending to be clueless for some cruel reason. It killed her that she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Her breaths came harder, followed by tears. Not sad tears—upset tears, accusing tears.
“What is it?” he said.
She kept looking into his eyes, and finally he seemed to get it.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”
“Why not.”
“Pip, come on. No.”
“How could you not see,” she said with a gasp, “how much I want you?”
“No, no, no.”
“I thought we were just waiting. And now it’s happened. It finally happened.”
“God, Pip, no.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you. But not like that. Truly, I’m sorry, not like that. I’m old enough to be your father.”
“Oh, come on! It’s fifteen years! It’s nothing!”
Stephen looked at the window and then at the door, as if weighing escape options.
“Are you telling me you never felt anything?” she said. “It was all in my head?”
“You must have misinterpreted.”
“What?”
“I never wanted to have kids,” he said. “That’s the whole issue with Marie and me, I didn’t want babies. I kept telling her, ‘What do we need babies for? We have Ramón, we have Pip. We can still be good parents.’ And that’s what you are to me. Like a daughter.”
She stared at him. “That’s my role? To be like Ramón for you? Would you be even happier if I stank? I have a parent! I don’t need another parent!”
“Well, actually, it kind of seemed like you did,” Stephen said. “Like a father was exactly what you needed. And I can still do it. You can still stay here.”
“Are you out of your mind? Stay here? Like this?”
She stood up and looked around wildly. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she’d been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.
In a kind of anarchy of involition, she found herself pulling off her sweater, and then taking off her bra, and then dropping to her knees on the bed and pushing herself at Stephen, abusing him with her nakedness. “Do I look like a daughter? Is that what I look like to you?”
He cowered with his hands over his face. “Stop it.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m not going to look at you. You’re the one who’s out of your mind.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Are you too fucking weak to even look at me?” Where were these words coming from? What hidden place? Already a riptide of remorse was swirling around her knees, and already she knew it would be worse than all of her previous remorses combined, and yet there was nothing to be done but see it through, and do what her body wanted, which was to collapse on Stephen. She rubbed her bare chest against his seersucker shirt, pulled his hands from his face and let her hair fall around it; and she could see that she’d really done it this time. He looked terrified.
“Just be sure, OK?” she said. “Be sure that’s all I am to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Four hours after she left the house.”
“Oh, so four days would make a difference? Or four months? Four years?” She lowered her face toward his. “Touch me!”
She tried to guide his hands, but he was very strong and pushed her off him easily. He scrambled away from the bed and retreated to the door.
“You know,” he said, breathing hard, “I don’t really believe in therapy, but I’m thinking you could use it.”
“As if I could afford it.”
“Seriously, Pip. This is totally fucked up. Are you even thinking about what I’m feeling?”
“Last I checked, you were reading—” She picked up his book. “Gramsci.”
“If you’re pulling shit like this with other people, people who aren’t looking out for you, you’re not doing yourself any favors. I don’t like what it says about your impulse control.”
“I know. I’m abnormal. It’s like the refrain of my life.”
“No, you’re great. You’re wonderful, I mean it. But still—seriously.”
“Are you in love with her?” Pip said.
He turned back from the door. “What?”
“Annagret. Is that what this is about? You’re in love with her?”
“Oh, Pip.” His look of pity and concern was so pure that it almost overcame her distrust; she almost believed she had no reason to be jealous. “She’s in Düsseldorf,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”
“Riiiiight. But you’re in touch with her.”
“Try to listen to yourself. Try to see what you’re doing.”
“I’m not hearing a no.”
“For God’s sake.”
