Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“You think you’re smart.”

“No, in fact, I’m fairly female-brained about this stuff. I could really use your help to understand it.”

“Smart lady from the big city.”

“Just tell me a time and a landmark. Somewhere I can meet you. Somewhere anonymous.”

Anonymous was a preferred word of hers with male sources. It had all the right connotations. Anonymous was the opposite of the wife in Walker’s house. Who, at that very moment, opened the front door and called out, “Earl, who is that?”

Leila bit her lip.

“Reporter lady,” Walker shouted back. “She needs directions out of town.”

“You tell her you got nothing to say to her?”

“What I just said to you.”

After the door had closed again, Walker spoke without looking at Leila. “Behind the Centergas depot on Cliffside. Be there at three. You don’t see me by four, you may as well head on home to that bed of yours in Denver.”

As Leila drove away from his house, on the rush of his yes, the kind of rush she lived for as a journalist, she had to tell herself not to speed. Who could have guessed that, of the ten tricks she’d tried, dropping the word bed would be the one that got to him?

Back in her hotel room, she speed-dialed with the letter P.

“This is Pip Tyler,” Pip said in Denver.

“Hello, hello. I just landed a date with Earl Walker.”

“Hey!”

“I also got Phyllisha Babcock’s story.”

“ Nice .”

“The most hilarious thing you ever heard. Flayner borrowed the weapon as a sex aid.”

“She told you that?”

“It would have been TMI if there were such a thing in this business. But she did also confirm the weapon was a dummy.”

“Oh.”

“It’s still a good story, Pip. If a worker can take a dummy out, he could take a real one, too. It’s still a story.”

“I guess it’s good to know the world is safer than I thought.”

As Leila filled her in on the details, she was glad, as a person, if not as a boss, that Pip seemed in no hurry to get back to the research she was doing for another reporter on the credentialing of coroners.

“I should let you read your autopsy reports,” Leila said finally. “How’s that going?”

“Borink.”

“Well. You have to pay your dues.”

“I’m describing, not complaining.”

Leila resisted a surge of emotion. Then she surrendered to it. “I miss you.”

“Oh — thank you.”

She waited, hoping for more.

“I miss you, too,” Pip said.

“I wish I’d brought you with me.”

“It’s OK. I’m not going anywhere.”

Leila felt keenly, after the call, that she liked the girl too much. “I miss you” was already more than she had a right to elicit from a subordinate and still not as much as she wanted to hear. She felt dissatisfied and exposed and somewhat nuts. The tenderness she felt with children had always had a physical component, situated close in her body to the part that wanted intimacy and sex. But the reason she felt such tenderness was that, no matter how she warmed to a child in her arms, she knew she would never betray and exploit its innocence. This was why nothing could replace having kids — this structural insatiability, both painful and delicious, of parental love.

Uncannily enough, Pip’s actual name was Purity. (She called herself Pip Tyler on her résumé, but Leila had looked at her college transcript.) The name seemed apt to Leila without her being able to say exactly why. Certainly Pip was no innocent sexually. She was shacked up in Denver with a boyfriend about whom she’d been resolutely tight-lipped, saying only that he was a musician named Stephen. She’d also been living in serious squalor in Oakland, surrounded by dirty anarchists, and her pictures of Cody Flayner’s barbecue had been obtained by lawless hacking. Leila wondered if the innocence she sensed in Pip was actually her own innocence at the age of twenty-four. Back then, she’d had no concept of how little she knew, but she could see it clearly now in Pip.

She wanted to be a good feminist role model and give Pip the direction she herself had lacked at that age. “The irony of the Internet,” she’d said to her at lunch one day, “is that it’s made the journalist’s job so much easier. You can research in five minutes what used to take five days. But the Internet is also killing journalism. There’s no substitute for the reporter who’s worked a beat for twenty years, who’s cultivated sources, who can see the difference between a story and a non-story. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you’re out in the field. Your source makes some offhand remark, and suddenly you see the real story. That’s when I feel most alive. When I’m sitting at the computer, I’m only half alive.”

Pip listened to Leila attentively but noncommittally. She had the modern college grad’s reluctance to express a strong opinion, for fear of being uncool or disrespectful. It did occur to Leila that Pip wasn’t actually innocent at all — that, to the contrary, she was wiser than Leila, that she and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting, and that Leila herself was the innocent one. But she persisted in thinking that Pip’s coolness was merely a generational style, and looking for ways to break through it.

Pip seemed to drink either not at all or way too much. Leila had been treating her to dinners out, to make sure she got some good meals, and had drunk alone at them. But the previous week, on Thursday night, Pip had ordered a glass of wine and dispatched it in two minutes. After she’d done the same to a second glass, she asked if she could order a bottle; she offered, ridiculously, to pay for it. An hour later, the bottle empty, her dinner barely touched, she was crying. Leila reached across the table and put her hand on her flushed face. She said, “Oh, honey.”

Pip pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom. When she returned, she asked if she might, this once, come home with Leila and sleep on her sofa or something.

“Oh, honey,” Leila said again. “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Pip said. “I just feel so alone here. I miss my mom.”

Leila preferred not to think about the girl’s mother. “It’s fine if you want to come home with me,” she said. “There are just some things you need to know about my situation.”

Pip quickly nodded.

“Or maybe you’ve already heard about it.”

“Some of it.”

“Well, ordinarily I’d be at Tom’s tonight — I’m presuming that’s part of what you know. But I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“It’s OK. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No! It’s lovely that you asked. But I’m sort of a guest at the other house. If you could live with a little bit of sneaking…”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“I wouldn’t offer if it weren’t all right with me.”

Charles’s house was three blocks from the creative-writing offices. He could have wheeled himself to and from work — could also have retired — but he preferred to conduct his workshops and office hours from home. The house was a lair that he did his best never to leave; he said he’d rather be the absolute ruler of a 2,000-square-foot kingdom than be that wheelchair dude in the outside world. He had fair control of his bowels, remarkable abdominal and shoulder strength, and great dexterity with his chair. He still drank too much, but he’d cut back because he intended to live a long time. His paraplegia had objectified his grievance with the literary world, which, he believed, wanted more than ever for him to simply go away, and he wasn’t going to give it that satisfaction.