Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Cody then assured her that he wasn’t going to do it. He just wanted her to know that he could do it. He, Cody Flayner. He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal. He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up in the air for him. Didn’t the bomb’s terrible, dangerous power make her want that?

It did, actually, when he put it like that. She went ahead and did what he’d said, and they hadn’t had such a good time since before he’d surprised her by moving out on his wife. To be that close to so much potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when she orgasmed. It was pretty great, she had to say.

At the same time, it was obviously a one-night-only thing. Either Cody would be hauled off to jail or he’d have to take the B61 back to where it belonged, and that would be the end of them having orgasmic sex with her face mashed up against the casing of a 300-kiloton death-bomb. To enjoy it while it lasted, they went at it a second time. Cody got her all wound up but afterward she felt sad for him. He wasn’t very bright, and she’d already made up her mind to go with Kyle.

Baby, she said, they’re going to put you in jail.

“No they ain’t,” Cody said. “Not for borrowing a fake.”

A fake?

“Yeah, for training purposes. It’s a perfect replica, except for the fissile core.”

She got upset then. Was he trying to make her feel stupid now, or what? He’d told her it was a fully armed death-bomb!

“Nobody takes out a real bomb on their pickup, sweetheart.”

So the bomb was just a fake? Well, that was just like him.

“Yeah, and what difference did it make?” he said. “You sure didn’t seem like you were fakin’ it. Talk about Fourth of July fireworks — whoo hee!”

Leila was writing furiously in her notebook. “And how long did he keep the replica? We have pictures of it from the Fourth of July.”

“He took it back the next night,” Phyllisha said. “The plant’s real quiet on the Fourth, and he knew the people at the gate. But first he had to show the thing off to his friends, at the barbecue. Kyle says Cody’s always been like a little dog that follows you around, doing stuff on dares to try to make people respect him.”

“And were his friends impressed?”

“Kyle wasn’t. He had a notion of what Cody and me had done the night before, because Cody was all but bragging about it. Calling it the afrodizziac bomb.”

“Lovely. But, just so we’re clear, in one of the pictures, you seem to be…”

Phyllisha blushed. “I know the picture. I was doing that on Kyle’s account. Looking him right in the eye.”

“Cody couldn’t have been happy about that.”

“I can’t say I’m proud of my behavior. But I was scared Kyle might think Cody and I were A-OK again. I did what I had to do.”

“And that’s why Cody broke up with you?”

“Who the heck told you that? Kyle helped me pack up while Cody was taking the bomb back. That very same night. I’ve been in Pampa ever since. I still feel bad about it, but at least Cody’s last memories of me are good ones. Neither of us will ever forget the night with the death-bomb. It’s like a memory we can always treasure.”

“Do you have any idea how the plant found out about it?”

“Well, you can’t pull a stunt like that without word getting around. Plus it was on Facebook. Can you imagine?”

Taking leave of Phyllisha, her short-term memory aching like an unmilked cow, Leila moved her car out of the Sonic lot and parked it farther down the street. Using a red ballpoint, she filled out and clarified the scribbles in her notebook. The work couldn’t wait until she returned to Amarillo; her precise recall of interviews lasted less than an hour. Before she was finished, a vintage pickup rumbled into the Sonic lot and then out again. As it passed by Leila, she saw Phyllisha, not on the passenger side of the bench but scooched toward the middle, with her arm around the driver’s neck.

* * *

Leila was just old enough to have lived through the Watergate hearings at an age where she could understand them. Of her mother she could remember little more than a jumble of fear and sadness, hospital rooms, her father’s sobbing, a funeral that seemed to last for days. Only in the summer of Sam Ervin and John Dean and Bob Haldeman did she become a fully remembering person. She’d begun watching the hearings as a way to escape interaction with her father’s crone cousin Marie. Her father, who had a busy practice and was also on the research faculty at the dental school, had brought Marie over from the old country to keep house for him and care for Leila. Marie frightened Leila’s friends, licked her knife at the dinner table, wore clicking dentures that she refused to exchange for better ones, complained incessantly about the air-conditioning, and was unacquainted with the concept of letting a child win at games. Summers with her were long, and Leila never forgot the thrill of realizing that everything the adults in Washington were saying on TV made sense to her; that she could follow the conspiracy. A few years later, when her father took her to see All the President’s Men , she made him leave her at the theater so she could sneak back in to watch the next screening.

Her father had approved of her sneaking. He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with; he stole hotel towels and bought a radar detector for his Cadillac and was merely annoyed, not embarrassed, when the IRS caught him cheating on his taxes. But he could also seem New World. When Leila, under the spell of All the President’s Men , declared her ambition to be an investigative reporter, her father replied that journalism was a male business and that she should therefore go into it, to show what a Helou woman was capable of. He said that America was a butter the hot knife of her mind was made to cut through, America the place where a woman didn’t have to live like Marie, on a cousin’s charity.

His message was feminist, and yet he wasn’t a feminist. As Leila proceeded through college and into newspaper work, she couldn’t shake the sense that she was proving something for him , not for herself. When she landed a real reporting job, at the Miami Herald , and her father was disabled by a stroke, she knew it was his wish and expectation that she quit the job and return to San Antonio. Marie was dead by then, but her father had two sons from his first marriage, in Houston and Memphis. They could have taken him in, if they hadn’t been men.

To fill her evenings in San Antonio, while her father languished, she began to write short stories. She later felt so mortified to have imagined herself as a fiction writer that she recalled these stories with revulsion, as scabs that she couldn’t stop picking but was too ashamed to make bleed. She couldn’t reconstruct her reasons for writing them, apart from a wish to rebel against her father’s ambitions for her and to punish him for getting in their way. But after he died, of a second stroke, she decided to spend a good chunk of her inheritance — from an estate heftily diminished by delinquent taxes and shared with her half brothers and two women she’d scarcely known, one of them a dental hygienist her father had long employed — to pursue a degree in creative writing at a program in Denver.

She was already older than most of the other students in Denver and not only had more real-world experience but was sitting on more family unhappiness and immigrant lore. She also considered herself more attractive than the quality of her past boyfriends would suggest. When one of her first-semester teachers, Charles Blenheim, singled out and praised the work of a younger “experimental” female writer in the workshop, it activated a hereditary competitive streak in Leila. Among the Helous, the main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat. Leila worked hard on her fiction and even harder on her comments on her younger rival’s work. She learned exactly where to stick the needle, and soon she had Charles’s attention.