Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“What?” she said.

He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that his whole face wrinkled. Then he blinked them open. “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”

“Whether we might talk about having a kid.”

“Not now.”

“OK. But do you mean ‘now’ as in ‘tonight,’ or ‘now’ as in ‘this decade’?”

He sighed dramatically. “What exactly is it about my profoundly non relationship with my existing children that makes you think I’m dad material? Did I not notice something?”

“But this is me. This isn’t her.”

“I’m aware of the distinction. Are you aware of the pressure I’m under?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“No, but can you conceive … can you imagine me, for one second, finishing the book with a baby in the house?”

“Obviously, it wouldn’t happen for at least nine months. Maybe a medium-term deadline would help you.”

“I’m already three years past one of those.”

“A real deadline. One you believed in. I’m saying this is something I want with you. I want you to finish the book and us to maybe have a kid. The two things don’t have to be opposed. Maybe they could be connected, in a good way.”

“ Leila .” He barked the name sternly but also ironically: to be funny.

“What.”

“I love you more than anything in this world. Please tell me you know that.”

“I know that,” she said in a slight voice.

“So hear me, please. Please hear this: every further minute this particular conversation lasts is going to be a day of lost work in the coming week. One minute, one day; I can feel it. When you suffer, I suffer — you know that. So can we please just put an end to it right here?”

She nodded, and then cried, and then had sex with him, and then cried some more. A few months later, when the Post offered her a five-year stint as its Washington correspondent, she accepted. She hadn’t entirely stopped loving Charles, but there was only so long that she could stand to be around him with an ache in her chest. She felt loyal to a baby in her that hadn’t even been conceived yet. To a possibility.

It came along to Washington with her, the possibility, and it flew home with her to Denver once a month, for staff meetings and conjugal obligations. She didn’t want to think about being divorced in her early forties, working sixty and seventy hours a week and wanting a kid, and yet her trajectory was like a thing she had no control over, a hurtling into deeper space, a feeling of nearly achieved escape velocity. She knew but didn’t want to know where it was taking her. When she spoke on the phone with Charles, late at night, she could tell that he was lonely, because he’d never been so attentive to her reporting work, so eager to be of help. But when he came east in the summer, and again the next summer, her little apartment on Capitol Hill became the sour-smelling cage of a big cat too depressed to groom itself. Charles spent his days in his boxer shorts and bitched about the weather. For the first time, she felt physically averse to him. She invented reasons to stay out late, but he was always waiting for her, anxious, obsessive, when she came home. He’d finally delivered the big book , but his editor wanted revisions and he couldn’t make up his mind about the smallest change. He asked her the same editorial questions over and over, and it did no good for her to answer them, because he had the very same questions again the next night. Both of them were relieved when he returned to Denver, where a fresh crop of students was waiting to hang on his words.

She met Tom Aberant in February 2004. Tom was a well-regarded journalist and editor who’d come to Washington to poach talent for a nonprofit investigative news service he was starting, and Leila, who by now had won a shared Pulitzer (anthrax, 2002), was on his wish list. He took her to lunch and told her he had $20 million in seed money. He currently lived in New York, but he was divorced and childless and thinking of situating his nonprofit in Denver, his hometown, where the overhead would be lower. Having done his homework, he knew that Leila had a husband in Denver. Might she be interested in going home and working at a nonprofit, insulated from the impending collapse of print-ad revenues, freed from space constraints and daily deadlines, and paid a competitive salary?

The offer ought to have appealed to her. But Charles’s big book had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers (“bloated and immensely disagreeable,” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times ), and Leila was in a state of medium-grade dread. She’d been calling Charles three and four times a day for pep talks, telling him how sorry she was that she couldn’t be with him. But it was clear, from the repugnance she felt toward Tom’s offer, that she wasn’t really sorry at all. She didn’t want to be the woman who abandoned her husband after his magnum opus tanked. But there was no hiding, from herself or from Tom, how unready she was to give up Washington.

“You’re pretty sure it has to be Denver,” she said.

Tom’s face was fleshy, his mouth somehow turtlish, his eyes narrow in a way that conveyed kindly amusement. The hair he still had farther back on his head was closely buzzed and mostly dark. The thing about men in their prime was that, within rather wide limits, it didn’t matter if they weren’t conventionally handsome. They could also get away with bellies and even with high-pitched voices, if they were scratchy high-pitched, as Tom’s was.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a sister and a niece there. I miss the West.”

“It sounds like an amazing project,” Leila said.

“Do you want to think it over? Or are you just going to say no right now.”

“I’m not saying no. I’m…”

She felt utterly exposed.

“Oh, this is terrible ,” she said. “I know what you must be thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to go home to Denver.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Leila. You’d be a keystone hire for me. I thought Denver would be a selling point.”

“No, it’s great, and I think you’re absolutely right about the industry. We had a monopoly on classifieds for a hundred years. Roll the presses, print the money. And now we don’t. But…”

“But.”

“Well, this is coming at a bad moment for me.”

“Trouble at home.”

“Yeah.”

Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back, straining the buttons of his dress shirt. “So tell me if this sounds familiar,” he said. “You love the person but you can’t live with him, the person is struggling, you think a separation will make it better, let the two of you recover. And then it finally comes time to get back together, because the separation was only supposed to be temporary, and you discover that, no, in fact, you were lying to yourself the whole time.”

“Actually,” Leila said, “I’ve suspected for quite a while that I’ve been lying to myself.”

“So women are smarter than men. Or you’re just smarter than I was. But to spin out the hypothetical scenario a little further—”

“I think we both know who we’re talking about.”

“I’m a fan of his,” Tom said. “ Mad Sad Dad —great book. Hilarious. Gorgeous.”

“Super funny, definitely.”

“And yet now here you are in Washington. And his new book’s getting kicked in the head.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck the reviewers. I’m still going to buy it. But, speaking hypothetically, is there someone else in town here I should know about? If he’s good and does investigative, I’d be happy to look at his CV. I have nothing in principle against couple hires.”