Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  But Tom kept calling her that winter, updating her on the progress of his nonprofit, and she couldn’t pretend that she would rather have been talking to anyone else. In early May, three and a half months after they’d first met, he came down to Washington again. When she went to Union Station and saw him ambling up the platform, in wrinkled khakis and an old fifties sport shirt specifically chosen for its ugliness, as a private joke at the expense of good taste, a little chime sounded in her head, a single pure note, and she knew she was in love with him.

  He’d booked a room at the George, so as not to presume that he could stay with her, but he never checked in. He spent a week in her apartment, using her Internet connection and reading on her sofa, his glasses perched upon his bald dome, his fingers curled over the spine of his book, holding it close to his bad eyes. She felt as if he’d always been there on the sofa; as if, when she came home and saw him sprawled on it, she was finally truly coming home, for the first time in her life. She agreed to leave the Post and go to work for his nonprofit. If there had been other things to agree to, she would have agreed to them. She wanted (but didn’t yet say she wanted) to try to have a baby with him. She loved him and wanted him to never leave. Now there was only the matter, much discussed but still not acted on, of having the conversation with Charles. And maybe, if she’d managed to have that conversation in time, she could have married Tom. But she was cowardly—as cowardly as Tom said he’d been in not ending his own marriage. She delayed having the conversation, delayed giving notice at the Post, and on a warm Colorado night in late June, on a foothill road behind Golden, Charles went over the front of the XLCR 1000 he’d bought with the last third of his U.K. advance and was paralyzed below the hips. He’d been drinking.

  The fault was his but also undeniably hers. While falling in love with someone else, she’d allowed her husband’s life to spin out of control. She immediately had herself reassigned to Denver, and as long as Charles was in the hospital, and then in rehab, she couldn’t tell him about Tom; she needed to keep his spirits up. But suppressing the fact of Tom made the prospect of divulging it ever scarier. She performed the role of loving wife perfectly—she saw Charles briefly every morning and for hours every evening, she sold their three-story house and bought a more suitable one, she infused morale and sneaked him whiskey, she befriended his doctors and caregivers, she ran herself ragged—and meanwhile, at the pretty house that Tom had bought in Hilltop, in part with money from his former father-in-law, she had sex with someone else.

  Charles’s accident ended up costing her a year of fertility. It was unthinkable, as long as he was recovering, to bring him the news that she was carrying someone else’s child. Unthinkable to add a baby to an already overstressed life. And then unthinkable not to live with Charles after she brought him home to his new house. But she still wanted a baby, and when, by and by, Tom asked her how long she intended to keep living with Charles, she found herself replying with a question of her own.

  “No,” Tom said.

  “That’s it?” she said. “No?”

  He gave her many sensible reasons—their dedication to their work, their already overfull lives, the danger of birth defects for older couples, the global cataclysms that climate change and overpopulation would likely unleash in a child’s lifetime—but the reason that actually made him angry was that she was still living with Charles and hadn’t told him about their affair. How could he think of having a kid with a woman who couldn’t even leave her husband?

  “The minute I got pregnant, I’d tell him everything,” she said.

  “Why not tell him now?”

  “He’s suffering. Would you have abandoned Anabel if she’d landed in a wheelchair? Charles needs me.”

  “But can you not see how this looks to me? I’m ready to go, right now. I’m ready to marry you tomorrow. And you don’t even have a timeline for getting out of your marriage.”

  “Well, and I’m telling you how you could help me with that.”

  “And I’m telling you there’s something wrong if that’s what you need to help you.”

  She was in a weak position, wanting a baby and running out of time. If it didn’t happen with Tom, it wouldn’t happen at all. She felt grief at the death of the possibility, pain at Tom’s refusal, and anger at him for not wanting what she wanted. He didn’t seem to understand the bind she was in. She was convinced that his avowed reasons for not wanting a kid were bogus—that his actual reason was to avoid the guilt of having the child he’d denied his ex-wife—but he refused to credit her own guilt about Charles.

  And so they started fighting. Hotly on her side, coldly on his. Again and again the same impasse: she wouldn’t leave Charles, he wouldn’t try to have a baby. Tom never lost control, never even raised his voice, and his explanation for this—that he’d already done five lifetimes’ worth of fighting with Anabel and refused to do it anymore—made Leila lose control for both of them. Charles had never driven her to shriek with rage; nobody had; but competing with Anabel did. She detested the sound of her shrieking so much that she broke up with Tom. A week later, they reconciled. A week after that, they broke up again. She was right for him, he was right for her, but they couldn’t find a way to be together.

  For nearly two months, they didn’t communicate in any way. Then one night, after she’d put Charles to bed and cleaned his errant shit off the toilet and found herself weeping, she yielded to an impulse to call Tom. She picked up the phone, but there was something wrong with it—no dial tone.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello?”

  “Tom?”

  “Leila?”

  Two months of no contact, and they’d picked up the phone at the same moment. She didn’t believe in signs, but this had to be a sign. She blurted out that she couldn’t divorce Charles but couldn’t live without Tom. He in turn said he didn’t care if she ever divorced Charles, he couldn’t live without her, either. It felt like coming home again.

  The next morning, she told Charles that she was getting a place of her own and leaving the Post to work for a new nonprofit service. She didn’t say why, but Charles poked and probed and made her confession for her. She continued to spend every second weekend with him, but from then on she lived mainly at Tom’s, not as the co-keeper of his house, not as a person who made decorating decisions, but as a kind of permanent special guest. The two of them buried the fundamental conflict that their fighting had exposed; buried it deep. She never quite forgave him for not wanting a child with her, but in time it stopped mattering. They were both busy building DI into a nationally respected news service, and she was additionally busy taking care of Charles; sometimes she even found herself feeling grateful to be unburdened with children.

  Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true love, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she’d learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom’s a matter of fearing Anabel’s wrath and judgment. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

  * * *

  Early in the morning after her visit with Phyllisha, she drove to the house that Earl Walker had bought, for a price publicly recorded at $372,000, after losing his job at the weapons plant. The house had a triple garage and a sprinkler system whose early-morning overshoot had left the street wet where she parked. Apparently, in Amarillo, when lawns dried out in a drought, the obvious thing to do was water them. On Walker’s driveway was a newspaper with a rubber band around it. After Leila had sat for a few minutes, a very heavy woman in her fifties came out and picked it up, gave Leila a hard look, and went back inside.

  Walker had been Cody Flayner’s boss in Inventory Control. This information Leila had from Pip, who had also learned that Walker had sold his previous home for $230,000. People who’d lost their job didn’t typically turn ar
ound and buy a larger house, nor were they good candidates for a larger mortgage, and no probated will from the previous three years could account for the additional $142,000 Walker had paid. This amounted to a fact nearly as interesting as the Facebook pictures. Another fact, unearthed by Pip in an inspector general’s report from January, was that “a minor irregularity in Inventory Control” had occurred at the plant the previous summer; according to the report, the irregularity had been “satisfactorily addressed” and was “no longer an issue.” At Leila’s suggestion, Pip had shown the Facebook pictures to an auto mechanic and learned that, unless Flayner’s pickup had a custom suspension, the load on its bed had probably been less than the nine hundred pounds of a real B61. “It aint a real one, sugar” was still the only statement that Leila or Pip had gotten from Flayner directly. Leila’s one phone call to him had quickly ended with threats and curses.

  Walker, too, had said no to her, but merely “no,” and merely “no” meant “maybe.” She sat in her car, drinking green tea and replying to emails about other stories, until Walker himself came out of his house and strode straight toward her, across his sodden lawn. He was Jack Sprat lean and wearing a sweat suit with the purple and white of Texas Christian University. The Horned Frogs. She powered down her window.

  “Who are you?” Walker said. He had a whiskey drinker’s complexion not unlike her husband’s.

  “Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

  “That’s what I thought, and I already told you I got nothing to say to you.”

  With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

  “I have just a couple of very quick and straightforward questions,” Leila said. “Nothing that’s going to cause you any trouble.”

  “You’re already trouble. I don’t want you on my street.”

  “But if we could meet for a cup of coffee somewhere? Any time today is good for me.”

  “You think I’m going to sit in public with you? I’m asking you politely to please go away. I couldn’t talk to you even if I wanted to.”

  Not on my street. Not in public. Not allowed to talk.

  “You’ve got a beautiful house,” she said. “I’ve been admiring it.”

  She gave him a pleasant smile and touched the hair at her temple for no other reason than to let him see her fingers in her hair.

  “Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice lady, so I’m going to spare you a deal of trouble here. There’s no story. You think there’s something but there’s not. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Easy, then,” she said. “Let’s clear it up. I’ll tell you why I think there’s something, you can explain to me why there’s not, and I can be home tonight in Denver, sleeping in my own bed.”

  “I’d prefer you just start up your car and move it off this street.”

  “Or not explain, if you don’t want to. You can just nod or shake your head. There’s no law against shaking your head, is there?”

  She smiled again and demonstrated how to shake a head. Walker sighed as if unsure what to do.

  “Here, I’m starting my car,” she said, starting it. “See? I’m going to leave your street.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But maybe there’s someplace you need to be? I can give you a lift.”

  “I don’t need a lift.”

  She turned off the engine, and Walker sighed more heavily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be a responsible journalist if I didn’t hear your side of the story.”

  “There is no story.”

  “Well, see, but that’s a side itself. Because other sides are saying there is a story. And some of those sides are telling me that you were paid off not to talk about it. And I’m wondering why the money, if there’s no story. You see what I’m saying?”

  Walker bent down closer to her. His face was like a stained map of somewhere densely populated. “Who you been talking to?”

  “I don’t betray sources. That’s the first thing you need to know about me. When you talk to me, you’re safe.”

  “You think you’re smart.”

  “No, in fact, I’m fairly female-brained about this stuff. I could really use your help to understand it.”

  “Smart lady from the big city.”

  “Just tell me a time and a landmark. Somewhere I can meet you. Somewhere anonymous.”

  Anonymous was a preferred word of hers with male sources. It had all the right connotations. Anonymous was the opposite of the wife in Walker’s house. Who, at that very moment, opened the front door and called out, “Earl, who is that?”

  Leila bit her lip.

  “Reporter lady,” Walker shouted back. “She needs directions out of town.”

  “You tell her you got nothing to say to her?”

  “What I just said to you.”

  After the door had closed again, Walker spoke without looking at Leila. “Behind the Centergas depot on Cliffside. Be there at three. You don’t see me by four, you may as well head on home to that bed of yours in Denver.”

  As Leila drove away from his house, on the rush of his yes, the kind of rush she lived for as a journalist, she had to tell herself not to speed. Who could have guessed that, of the ten tricks she’d tried, dropping the word bed would be the one that got to him?

  Back in her hotel room, she speed-dialed with the letter P.

  “This is Pip Tyler,” Pip said in Denver.

  “Hello, hello. I just landed a date with Earl Walker.”

  “Hey!”

  “I also got Phyllisha Babcock’s story.”

  “Nice.”

  “The most hilarious thing you ever heard. Flayner borrowed the weapon as a sex aid.”

  “She told you that?”

  “It would have been TMI if there were such a thing in this business. But she did also confirm the weapon was a dummy.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s still a good story, Pip. If a worker can take a dummy out, he could take a real one, too. It’s still a story.”

  “I guess it’s good to know the world is safer than I thought.”

  As Leila filled her in on the details, she was glad, as a person, if not as a boss, that Pip seemed in no hurry to get back to the research she was doing for another reporter on the credentialing of coroners.

  “I should let you read your autopsy reports,” Leila said finally. “How’s that going?”

  “Borink.”

  “Well. You have to pay your dues.”

  “I’m describing, not complaining.”

  Leila resisted a surge of emotion. Then she surrendered to it. “I miss you.”

  “Oh—thank you.”

  She waited, hoping for more.

  “I miss you, too,” Pip said.

  “I wish I’d brought you with me.”

  “It’s OK. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Leila felt keenly, after the call, that she liked the girl too much. “I miss you” was already more than she had a right to elicit from a subordinate and still not as much as she wanted to hear. She felt dissatisfied and exposed and somewhat nuts. The tenderness she felt with children had always had a physical component, situated close in her body to the part that wanted intimacy and sex. But the reason she felt such tenderness was that, no matter how she warmed to a child in her arms, she knew she would never betray and exploit its innocence. This was why nothing could replace having kids—this structural insatiability, both painful and delicious, of parental love.

  Uncannily enough, Pip’s actual name was Purity. (She called herself Pip Tyler on her résumé, but Leila had looked at her college transcript.) The name seemed apt to Leila without her being able to say exactly why. Certainly Pip was no innocent sexually. She was shacked up in Denver with a boyfriend about whom she’d been resolutely tight-lipped, saying only that he was a musician named Stephen. She’d also been living in serious squalor in Oaklan
d, surrounded by dirty anarchists, and her pictures of Cody Flayner’s barbecue had been obtained by lawless hacking. Leila wondered if the innocence she sensed in Pip was actually her own innocence at the age of twenty-four. Back then, she’d had no concept of how little she knew, but she could see it clearly now in Pip.

  She wanted to be a good feminist role model and give Pip the direction she herself had lacked at that age. “The irony of the Internet,” she’d said to her at lunch one day, “is that it’s made the journalist’s job so much easier. You can research in five minutes what used to take five days. But the Internet is also killing journalism. There’s no substitute for the reporter who’s worked a beat for twenty years, who’s cultivated sources, who can see the difference between a story and a non-story. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you’re out in the field. Your source makes some offhand remark, and suddenly you see the real story. That’s when I feel most alive. When I’m sitting at the computer, I’m only half alive.”

  Pip listened to Leila attentively but noncommittally. She had the modern college grad’s reluctance to express a strong opinion, for fear of being uncool or disrespectful. It did occur to Leila that Pip wasn’t actually innocent at all—that, to the contrary, she was wiser than Leila, that she and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting, and that Leila herself was the innocent one. But she persisted in thinking that Pip’s coolness was merely a generational style, and looking for ways to break through it.

  Pip seemed to drink either not at all or way too much. Leila had been treating her to dinners out, to make sure she got some good meals, and had drunk alone at them. But the previous week, on Thursday night, Pip had ordered a glass of wine and dispatched it in two minutes. After she’d done the same to a second glass, she asked if she could order a bottle; she offered, ridiculously, to pay for it. An hour later, the bottle empty, her dinner barely touched, she was crying. Leila reached across the table and put her hand on her flushed face. She said, “Oh, honey.”