Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“So what are you saying?” she said. “I’ve got ten months before you show me the door?”

“You’re already in a committed relationship,” he said.

“Right. Funny. Is this rule of yours something you led with on first dates?”

“It’s a tacit rule in New York dating. I’m not the author of it. It’s a way to avoid chewing up five years of a woman’s life and then showing her the door.”

“As opposed to, say, getting over your commitment phobia.”

“I tried. More than once. But apparently I’m textbook PTSD. I had actual panic attacks.”

“Textbook toxic bachelor is what it sounds more like.”

“Leila, they were younger. I knew things they didn’t know, I knew what can happen. Even if you weren’t married, it wouldn’t be the same with you.”

“No, that’s right. Because I’m forty-one. I’m already past the sell-by date. You won’t have to feel so guilty when you dump me.”

“The difference is that you’ve been through a marriage.”

A light went on in Leila. “No, here’s what it is,” she said. “What’s different is that I’m older than your wife when you divorced her. You didn’t trade up to some twenty-eight-year-old. With me you’re trading down. You don’t have to feel so guilty.”

Tom said nothing.

“And you know how I know that? Because I make the same kind of calculations myself. Whatever it takes to get away from my guilt, even for five minutes, my mind will do it. There was a review of Charles’s book in The Adirondack Review , online. Glowing. He sent the link in an email blast to everyone in his address book, and I didn’t see it until I was on my way up here to sleep with you. He needed somebody to tell him not to send that email blast. He needed me, his wife, to tell him, ‘Better not to do that.’ But I was otherwise engaged, on the phone, talking to you. And where’s my little rule to help me out of that one? I don’t have a little rule.”

She was putting on clothes, repacking her overnight bag.

“I’m done with the rule,” Tom said. “I only mentioned it because I trusted you to understand it. But you’re right, it does help that you’re forty-one. I’m not going to deny it.”

His honesty seemed directed at the ghost of his ex-wife, not at Leila.

“I think I’m just going to leave before you make me cry,” she said.

What drove her away from his apartment that night was an instinct about Tom. If his reserve had simply been his fundamental nature, she could have relaxed and appreciated it. But he hadn’t always been reserved. He’d been open to intensity in his marriage, so open that he now felt traumatized by it, and Anabel clearly still had a grip on his conscience. He’d had something with Anabel that he didn’t intend to have with anyone else, and an instinct told Leila that she would always feel secondary — that here was a competition she could never win.

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.