Jonathan Franzen - Purity

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 around 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.”