Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Leila still spent half her weekends at Charles’s, but she didn’t sleep with him. She had her own — slight — room at the front of the hallway leading to the big cat’s bedroom. She would have liked to slip Pip into the house unobserved, but it was only ten o’clock and the living-room lights were on when they pulled into the driveway.

“Well,” she said. “It looks like you’ll meet my husband. Are you sure you’re up for that?”

“I’m curious, actually.”

“That’s the journalistic spirit.”

Leila knocked on the front door, unlocked it, and stuck her head in to warn Charles that he had two visitors. They found him lying on the sofa with a pile of student writing on his chest and a red pencil in his hand. He still had his looks and his long hair, which he wore in a nearly white ponytail. Near at hand was a whiskey bottle, stoppered. Books were shelved floor to ceiling and standing in stacks on the floor.

“This is one of our research interns, Pip Tyler,” Leila said.

“Pip,” Charles boomed, looking the girl up and down in open sexual appraisal. “I like your name. I have great expectations of you. Aieee — you must get that a lot.”

“Seldom so neatly put,” Pip said.

“Pip needs a place to sleep tonight,” Leila said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Are you not my wife? Is this not our house?” Charles laughed less than nicely.

“Anyway, so,” Leila said, edging toward the front hall.

“Are you a reader , Pip? Do you read books ? Is the sight of so many books in one room at all frightening to you?”

“I like books,” Pip said.

“Good. Good. And are you a big fan of Jonathan Savoir Faire ? So many of my students are.”

“You mean the book about animal welfare?”

“The very one. He’s a novelist, too, I’m told.”

“I read the animal book.”

“So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans . If you read only the New York Times Book Review , you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.” He arched an eyebrow at Pip. “And what about Zadie Smith ? Great stuff, right?”

“Charles,” Leila said.

“Sit with me. Have a drink.”

“A drink is more or less exactly what we don’t need. And you’ve got stories to read.”

“Before my long and restful night’s sleep.” He picked up a student story. “‘We were doing lines as long and fat as milk-shake straws.’ The flaw in this simile: can we spot it? Pip? Can you tell me what’s less than airtight about this simile?”

Pip seemed to be enjoying the show that Charles was putting on for her. “Is there a difference between milk-shake straws and other straws?”

“Good point, good point. The hobgoblin of spurious specificity. And the tubularity of a drinking straw, the dull sheen of its plastic — the suspicion creeps in that the author is personally unacquainted with the physical properties of powder cocaine. Or that he’s confused the substance with the tool for nasally delivering the substance.”

“Or he’s just trying too hard,” Pip said.

“Or trying too hard. Yes. I’m going to write those very words in the margin. Would you believe that I have colleagues who won’t make marginal notations? I actually care about this student. I think he could do better, if he could only see what he’s doing wrong. Tell me, do you believe in the soul? ”

“I don’t like to think about it,” Pip said.

“Charles.”

He gave Leila a look of comically sorrowful reproach. Must she deny him, the wheelchair dude, his iota of pleasure? “The soul,” he said to Pip, “is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified enzyme . Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it’s designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy ? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That’s what I’ve become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme , floating in my cell here.” He nodded at Leila. “And she worries that I’m not happy.”

Pip’s eyes widened with swallowed comment.

“She’s still looking for her molecule,” Charles continued. “I already know mine. Do you know yours?”

“I’m going to set Pip up in the basement room,” Leila said.

“Safe, but not completely safe,” he said. “I’ve conquered those stairs more than once.”

In the basement, Leila put Pip to bed and then sat near her, under an afghan, drinking from a bottle of wine that she’d opened out of nervous agitation and shared with Pip against her better judgment. The wine and the bed and the girl’s proximity brought out something predatory in her, something ardent and greedy, the same inherited Helou thing that had once landed her Charles and, later, Tom. She told Pip how she’d ended up with two men, the husband whose care she managed and the boyfriend she loved. She didn’t mention having wanted children, because the story of her disappointment felt too personal and too relevant to what she was doing at this moment: sitting at the bedside of a daughter-aged girl. But she kept drinking and told Pip a lot. She told her that if she ever had to choose between men she’d probably choose Charles, because she’d made a vow to him and had arguably ruined his life, and that Charles was OK with this. That he still needed her and was still sometimes capable of sex. That he’d sussed out a lot about Tom and enjoyed baiting her about him, and that, although she did acknowledge that Tom existed, she never referred to him by name. That in more than a decade the two men had never met. That the molecule for which she was evidently the matching enzyme was the care of disabled older men. That, contrary to Charles’s theory, interacting with this molecule didn’t make her happy. That happy would have been a life entirely with Tom.

“The job is mine, though,” she said. “His children never forgave him for leaving their mother, and they’re pretty screwed up anyway. I’m all he’s got.”

Hearing this, Pip began to cry again. Leila took her wineglass away from her, obviously too late, and held her hand. “Won’t you tell me what’s upsetting you tonight?”

“I’ve just been feeling really alone.”

“It’s hard when the only person you know in a town is your boyfriend.”

Pip didn’t respond to this.

“Are things OK with you two?”

“I’m thinking I might have to go back to California soon.”

“Because things aren’t working out with your boyfriend?”

Pip shook her head and reluctantly divulged. Her student debt, she said, was so large that most of her small intern salary was going to payments on it; she couldn’t afford to be in Denver unless she lived rent-free. Her debt was from both college and the private high school she’d attended in Santa Cruz — her mother had kept telling her not to worry about the money. And her mother, though not technically disabled, was emotionally handicapped and had no support network. There was no one but Pip to look after her, and all Pip could see in her own future was nursing her. “It makes me feel like I’m already an old person myself,” she said.

“You’re the opposite of old.”

“But I feel so guilty being this far away from her. Like, what am I even doing here? It’s some kind of unsustainable fantasy.”

How Leila wished that she could offer to let Pip live with her. But even though she seemed to have two homes, she had none that was actually hers. Not the finest of feminist role-modeling. “It’s only been two months,” she said. “Surely you can be away from California for longer than two months.”