Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  She sent the text and went to Leila’s work space, where Leila was on the phone again. Pip stood in the corridor with her head bowed, trying to look penitent.

  “I’m sorry if I make you self-conscious,” she said when Leila was off the phone. “Are you too upset with me to let me help you?”

  Leila seemed about to say something angry that she reconsidered. “We’re not going to talk about that,” she said. “You need to be a journalist this week. Not a researcher, not a houseguest. Do you think you can work with me?”

  “I love working with you.”

  The first task Pip was given was to gather basic facts about the execution-style killing of two women in Tennessee. The facts turned out to be consistent with the appalling story Leila told her. The women, sisters with the maiden name Keneally, had been abducted within minutes of each other in different cities; neither body showed signs of sexual trauma, and officially the police had no leads. As Pip proceeded to learn what she could about the hospitalization and disappearance of the sisters’ brother, Richard, she began to think she’d been petulant and childish in threatening to quit her job. Although living with Tom and Leila was clearly a mistake, the job wasn’t.

  She kept retreating to the ladies’ room to check messages, but it wasn’t until she and Tom had gone home for a late dinner and she was in bed, at the usual texting hour, that Andreas’s reply came in.

  She turned off the device without replying. She’d forced him to break his vow not to text her again, and she felt good about it. Less like a child, more like an adult who had some power. Not like a rigorously moral person, certainly; but moral absolutism was childish. Downtown, at her desk, Leila was gutting out some private misery, sitting alone at the office after midnight, drafting her story, because Leila was an adult. Her toughness made Pip see Andreas in a new light, as a kind of child-man, obsessed with spilling secrets. She squirmed with displeasure at the recollection of his hand in her pants. She could see—she thought she could see—that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a gray-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price. Pip imagined herself continuing to work at DI, knowing what she knew, having done what she’d done, and not confessing it, just as Leila had said: We’re not going to talk about that.

  Her new feeling of adultness persisted through the days that followed, as Leila went back to Washington to confirm her story, returned home triumphant but even more anxious (one of her sources had uttered the words “You might not be alone”), and pulled yet another all-nighter to finish her draft. By Thursday morning the lawyer was on it. Pip had slept very little herself and was going to be rewarded with an additional-reporting byline. She hadn’t had an unexhausted moment to think about Andreas or whether the spyware was still installed; she was fact-checking like a madwoman. The suspense in the office seemed both silly and exciting. Silly because the whole thing was just a game that had nothing to do with social utility (what did it matter if they beat the WaPo by an hour or a day?) but exciting in the way the Manhattan Project must have been exciting: they’d been building their information bomb for months, and now they were waiting to explode it.

  She was still checking less essential facts when the story went up on Friday morning.

  THEFT OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON IN NEW MEXICO THWARTED BY ACCIDENT

  MISSING PERPETRATOR TIED TO MEXICAN CARTEL AND DRUG ABUSE AT KIRTLAND AFB; ALARM FIRST RAISED AT WEAPONS PLANT IN TEXAS

  Leila had gone home with a fever that she hoped to sleep off in time for interviews with NPR and cable news. The social-media team was manning its battle station, and more phones than usual seemed to be ringing, but the office was otherwise unshaken by the detonation of the information bomb. Other reporters still had their own stories, and Tom had been closeted in his office for more than an hour. The blast wave and radiation pulse were occurring in cyberspace.

  Pip was on the phone with a Sonic Drive-In manager, trying to reach Phyllisha Babcock, whose tale of death-bomb sex had squeaked into the article in one-graf form, when the office IT manager, Ken Warmbold, came by her desk. He waited while she wrote down the hours of Phyllisha’s shift, and then he told her that Tom wanted to see her. She left her desk reluctantly. Fact-checking had tapped into her compulsion for cleanliness. It was making her crazy to have the article up with even tiny facts unchecked.

  Tom was sitting at his desk with his fingers knit together and pressed to his mouth. His interlocked knuckles were white with the force he was applying to them. “Shut the door,” he said.

  She obeyed him and sat down.

  “Who sent you here?” he said.

  “Just now?”

  “No. To Denver. I know the answer, so you might as well tell me.”

  She opened her mouth and closed it. She’d been so deep in fact-checking, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why Tom was closeted with the IT manager.

  “Obviously I’m upset,” he said, not looking at her. “But I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re not entirely to blame. So just say what you have to say.”

  She tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again. “I wanted to say it. On Saturday. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  “So say it now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’ll hate me. Leila will hate me.”

  He tossed some stapled pages across his desk. “This is Ken’s report on the office network. We have extremely good security here. We’re protected against every form of spyware known to man. But apparently there’s one not known to man. It has a completely alien signature. It took some finding, but Ken found it.”

  Pip’s eyes weren’t working right. The words of the report were just a blur.

  “Did you know about this?” Tom said.

  “Not for positive. But I did worry. I opened an attachment I shouldn’t have.”

  He tossed another document at her. “What about this? This is the report on my home computer. Did you open any suspicious attachments at home?”

  “There was one…”

  He slammed his hand down on his desk. “Say the name!”

  “I don’t want to,” she whimpered.

  “My home hard drive’s been scraped for two weeks. My business network’s been an open book since three days after we hired you. And who brought me the story I just broke? Who was the intern who brought me the Facebook pictures? What is the name of the leaker who we now know had those pictures last summer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Say it!”

  She burst into tears. “I’m sorry! I’m so ashamed!”

  Tom pushed a box of tissues toward her and waited, with crossed arms, for her tears to abate.

  “I lied,” she said, sniffling. “I was in Bolivia for six months. The Sunlight Project. That’s where I got the Facebook pictures. From him. I lied to you about that. I lied about everything, and I’m so sorry. I know it’s a disaster.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes! All our confidential sources, all our databases, everything. I know. I get it. I’m so sorry.”

  Tom’s eyes were fixed on some unseen presence, not her.

  “I met this German woman in Oakland,” she said. “She wanted me to go to Bolivia. She said the Project could help me find my father. And so I went there, and he was—”

  “Say the name.”

  “I can’t. But he took this special interest in me, and he told me something. I think you may know it.”

  “Say it.”

  “That he killed someone. That there was one other person he’d told, and it was you. And then I gave up on finding my father and I wanted to leave, and he told me to come here. He was afraid you wanted to expose him. He sent me an email attachment. I knew what it was, and I opened it anyway. But I swear to you that’s all I did.”

  Tom pressed his fingertips to his forehead. “And why would you do this for him?”


  “I don’t know! I felt bad for him—he came on really strong with me. I thought I had to respond. I did respond, I was bad. I mean, he’s really famous, I couldn’t help it. But then I didn’t like him, and he was hurt, and, I don’t know, I guess I felt I owed him something. And then I was so happy here—the whole thing started seeming like this horrible dirty dream.”

  “Dirty.”

  “I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t.”

  “Why would I care who you sleep with?”

  The phone rang. Tom looked at it, unplugged it, and continued to look at it.

  “Well, anyway,” she said. “I was a willing accomplice. You can call the police if you want.”

  “What would that serve?”

  “To punish me.”

  “I admit that I have no patience with liars. I think it’s best if you hand in your resignation and go home to your mother. But I’m not interested in punishing you.”

  Pip had never been arrested, never sent to a principal’s office, never yelled at by a father. She’d done some bad things in her life but nothing so bad that she hadn’t been able to get away with it by being cute, or pitiable, or obviously well-meaning. She’d always managed to avoid scenes of harsh discipline; and now she was getting what she deserved. But still it seemed cruel and unusual that Tom was the man she was in trouble with. She couldn’t think of anyone whose standards she would have wanted less to run afoul of. His maturity and manliness, his fleshy shaved cheeks, his bald head, his crookedly knotted tie, his fashion-defying glasses all seemed to brook no nonsense. She felt wretchedly sad that this had to be the man, of all men, whom she’d betrayed and disappointed.

  He was flipping through one of the IT reports. “The office breach doesn’t worry me too much,” he said. “The guy’s whole business depends on protecting his sources. I think he’ll protect mine. At worst, he’ll try to poach them. What concerns me is the home computer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pip said. “That was so dumb of me. One of the Project girls sent me an email attachment. I never should have opened it.”

  “Have you had access to my home computer since then?”

  “Me? No! I mean, how could I? Don’t you have passwords?”

  “The software records keystrokes.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know there was spyware. I mean, I was worried, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “He didn’t send you any passwords?”

  “No.”

  “So you haven’t seen anything on my hard drive. He hasn’t sent you any documents from it.”

  “No! We broke off contact!”

  “Why should I believe you? You’ve done nothing but lie to us.”

  “You and Leila are my heroes. I would never spy on you. I would never read anything I wasn’t supposed to. I adore you guys.”

  “And what if he sent you a document now? What would you do?”

  “If I knew it was yours,” she said, “I wouldn’t read it.”

  Tom released a long sigh, his shoulders caving inward around the loss of the air that he’d been holding in. Again he was staring at some invisible presence. Pip wondered what document of his could be so explosive that he had to worry about her reading it. She couldn’t imagine that he, of all men, had anything to hide.

  [le1o9n8a0rd]

  My affair with Anabel had begun as soon as our divorce decree came through. In exchange for stipulating that I’d abandoned her—“abandonment” being one of the few grounds for divorce that New York state law recognized, and the one that Anabel felt best captured the wrong she’d suffered—I’d been permitted to reclaim our valuable rent-controlled tenement in East Harlem while Anabel went off to live by herself in the woods of New Jersey. Since there could be no talk of inflicting Manhattan on her, I had to take the bus across 125th Street and the subway up to 168th, followed by a much longer and invariably nauseating bus ride over the Hudson and out through increasingly raw developments to the hills northwest of Netcong.

  I’d made this trip twice in February, twice in March, and once in April. On the last Saturday in May, my phone rang around seven in the morning, not long after I’d gone to bed drunk. I answered it only to stop the ringing.

  “Oh,” Anabel said. “I thought I was going to get your machine.”

  “I’ll hang up and you can leave a message,” I said.

  “No, this is only going to be thirty seconds. I swear I will not get drawn in again.”

  “Anabel.”

  “I just wanted to say that I reject your version of us. I utterly reject it. That’s my message.”

  “Couldn’t you have rejected my version by just never calling me again?”

  “I’m not getting drawn in,” she said, “but I know the way you operate. You interpret silence as capitulation.”

  “You don’t remember me promising I’d never interpret your silence that way. The very last time we spoke.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” she said, “but at least be honest, Tom, and admit that your promise was a low trick. A way of having the last word.”

  I laid the phone on my mattress, next to my ear and mouth. “Are we at the point yet where I get blamed for this conversation lasting more than thirty seconds? Or do I still have that to look forward to?”

  “No, I’m hanging up,” she said. “I wanted to say for the record that you’re completely wrong about us. But that’s all. So. I’m going to hang up.”

  “OK, then. Good-bye.”

  But she could never hang up, and I could never bear to do it for her.

  “I’m not blaming you,” she said. “You did consume my youth and then abandon me, but I know you’re not responsible for my happiness out here, although in fact I’m having a good time and things are going pretty well, unbelievable as it may sound to a person who considers me, quote, ‘unequipped’ to deal with the, quote, ‘real world.’”

  “‘Consumed my youth and then abandoned me,’” I quoted back. “But this is not a provocation. You just wanted to leave a thirty-second message.”

  “Which I would have done! But you reacted—”

  “I reacted, Anabel—do I need to point this out? I reacted to your picking up a telephone and dialing my number.”

  “Right, I know, because I’m so needy. Right? I’m so pathetically needy.”

  I couldn’t have named one instant of happiness or ease from our previous togetherness binge, four weeks earlier. I emerged from these binges feeling bruised and harrowed, with worrisome bomb craters in my memory but also a vague, sick craving for a do-over.

  “Look,” I said. “Do you want to get together? Do you want me to come out? Is that why you called?”

  “No! I do not want to get together! I want to hang up the phone if you would please just let me!”

  “Usually, in the past, though, when you’ve called,” I said, “you’ve started out saying you didn’t want to get together, and then, after a couple of hours on the phone, it’s come out that you did actually, all along, underneath, want to get together.”

  “If you want to come out and see me,” she said, “you should have the decency to say so in so many words—”

  “And by then, of course—”

  “Like any polite man who wants to spend time with a woman he respects, instead of making your invitation some sort of icky accusation—”

  “By then, of course,” I said, “it’s gotten to be pretty late in the day, which means that by the time we actually do get together, which is what you’ve secretly wanted all along, it’s very late, and when we then, inevitably, go ahead and sleep together—”

  “Instead of insidiously twisting things around,” she said. “So that it looks like my neediness rather than yours, my lousy life rather than your own lousy life—”

  “Inevitably go ahead and sleep together—”

  “I don’t want to sleep with you! I don’t want to see you! That’s not why I called! I called to say a simple thing which—”

  “It’s
three or four in the morning before we actually get around to the sleeping part of sleeping together, which, with three hours of travel and a workday ahead of me, has tended, in the past, to become kind of a bad scene. Is all I’m trying to remind you.”

  “If you want to come out and go for a hike with me,” she said, “that would be very nice. I would like that. But you have to say it’s what you want.”

  “But I didn’t call you,” I said.

  “But you were the one who brought up getting together. So just be honest with me now.”

  “Is this something you want?”

  “Not unless you want it and you say so like a human being.”

  “But that perfectly mirrors my own sentiments. So.”

  “Look, I called,” she said. “You could at least—”

  “What could I do?”

  “Do you think I’m going to harm you if you let your defenses down for one tiny half second? I mean, what do you think I’m going to do? Make you my slave? Force you to be married to me again? It’s a hike, for God’s sake, it’s just a hike!”

  Simply to avoid the two-hour version of this conversation—wherein Party A tried to prove that Party B had made the fatal statement that prolonged the conversation in the first place, and Party B challenged Party A’s version of events, and this, in turn, there being no actual transcript, compelled Party A to reconstruct from memory the conversation’s overture and Party B to offer a reconstruction that differed from Party A’s in certain crucial respects, which then necessitated a time-devouring joint effort to collate and reconcile the two reconstructions—I agreed to go out to New Jersey and take a hike.

  Anabel was cleansing her spirit on land that belonged to the parents of her younger friend and only fan, Suzanne. One of my first actions after requesting a divorce was to sleep with Suzanne. She’d asked me out to dinner as a kind of ambassador for Anabel, intending to talk me into reconsidering the divorce, but she was so worn out from listening to Anabel’s complaints about me and about the New York art world, in nightly two-hour phone calls, that I ended up talking her into betraying Anabel. I must have been trying to make Anabel want a divorce as much as I did, but things hadn’t worked out that way. She’d terminated her friendship with Suzanne and accused me of refusing to rest until I’d stolen or polluted every last thing she had. But the upshot, according to her curious moral calculus, was that both Suzanne and I owed her. I continued to take Anabel’s calls and get together with her, and Suzanne allowed her to keep living on the New Jersey property, which Suzanne’s parents, who’d relocated to New Mexico, were trying to sell at an unrealistic price.