Purity by Jonathan Franzen

housemate, and we’ll have Ramon three evenings a week—Marie and I worked it out yesterday. S.
    A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn’t crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who’d rejected you, than compassionate forbearance? Her anger momentarily chased away her remorse and shame. She wanted the “incident” to be remembered! She wanted his complete attention! She fired back:
    With all this forgetting, I guess you forgot my question too: when will you not be home?
    Despite having got up four hours early, she was now on the verge of being late to work, but while her blood was up and her remorse was at bay she went ahead and read Wolf’s message.
    Dear Pip Tyler,
    Your email is LOL—I could use many more like it. And of course you have questions, we would be disappointed if you didn’t. But, no, I am not a white-slaver, and our beverage of choice here is bottled beer. Also, we have more outstanding hackers and lawyers and theorists than I know what to do with. What we frankly (your funny word) never have enough of is laypeople of high intelligence and independent character who can help us to see the world as it is, and help the world to see us as we are. I have known and trusted Annagret for many years and never heard her more enthusiastic about an applicant. We would be delighted if you come and visit our operation. If you don’t like us, you can enjoy our beautiful surroundings as a vacation and then go home. But I think you’ll like us. Our dirty little secret is that we’re having lots of fun down here.
    Send me more questions, the more LOL the better.
    Yours,
    Andreas
    After everything she’d been reading about Wolf, she couldn’t believe she’d gotten such a long email from him, and so quickly. She reread it twice before getting on her bike and heading downhill, propelled by gravity and by the thrill of imagining that she really was an extraordinary person, and that this was the true reason her life was such a mess, and that Annagret had been the first to recognize it, and that even if Wolf turned out to be the world’s cleverest debaucher and Annagret his sexually traumatized procuress, and even if she, Pip, fell victim to Wolf herself, she would still be getting her revenge on Stephen; because, whatever else Wolf was, he wasn’t weak .
    She still had five minutes to kill when she reached the office. She stopped in the bike room and typed out the reply she’d been composing in her head.
    Dear Mr. Wolf, Thank you for the nice note and suspiciously speedy response. If I were trying to lure an innocent young person to Bolivia for purposes of sex slavery and/or cultish subservience, I would have written the exact same note. In fact … come to think of it … how do I know the note wasn’t written by a cultishly subservient sex-slave assistant of yours? Somebody of high intelligence and formerly independent character? We have a verification problem here! Yours, Pip T.
    Hoping 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 Olallie-berries.” 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