Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“You don’t understand,” Pip said. “What makes me feel so guilty is that I don’t want to go back there. I love working with you and learning from you. But when I think about not going back, it just breaks my heart to think of her alone in our cabin, missing me.”

“I do understand,” Leila said. “You’re describing my daily life.”

“But at least you’re in the same town . You had bad luck, but you found the right way to deal with it. Sometimes I wish…”

“What do you wish?”

Pip shook her head. “I’ve already kept you up way too late.”

“Not the other way around?”

“Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to have a parent more like you.”

The little basement room seemed to spin, and not just from the wine in Leila’s head.

“Well,” she said briskly, patting Pip’s hand and standing up, “I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter like you, either, so.”

“Thank you for the dinner and the wine.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“We’ll both be sorry tomorrow.”

“Just hungover. Not sorry, I hope.”

Leila gave a false little laugh for which she punished herself, as she climbed the basement stairs, by striking her forehead with the heel of her hand. Upstairs, Charles was snoring on the sofa, the student stories on the floor, the whiskey bottle damaged. She woke him with a kiss on his forehead. “Ready to go to bed?”

“Ready to piss .”

He didn’t require her help in getting into his chair, but he appreciated it. There was a narrow but deep way in which she was closer to him than she would ever be to anyone else. The two of them had no secrets. Over the years, being a novelist, Charles had guessed and gleefully trumpeted pretty much every feeling she’d ever had about Tom. If she still declined to speak Tom’s name, it was to protect his privacy, not hers. It was a little game that Charles was fine with playing.

The master-bedroom end of the house had a faint but inexpungible scent of skin lotions and fart. In the bathroom, she stood by the railinged toilet and watched Charles’s urine issue from his penis in a healthy stream. It did both of them good for her to witness his bodily functions. It was a way of doing something for each other. Even when she handled the penis to ejaculation, it wasn’t just for him. He was the baby she’d got.

“When I heard your car,” he said, “I thought, ‘Thursday! What a nice surprise.’”

“I appreciate your letting her stay here.”

“Then I thought, ‘Trouble on the Other Home Front?’”

“You weren’t kidding about needing to pee.”

“My continence speaks to the existence of a Deity for which evidence is otherwise scant.”

“I’m a little nuts about that girl.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You thinking of jumping the fence?”

“God, no. She’s more like a lost puppy that found its way to me.”

“You can keep her in the basement, but you’d have to do the house-training.”

“Where did Rosie put the clean pajamas?”

“They’re right in front of you.”

“Ah, yes. They’re right in front of me.”

The next morning, somewhat hungover, she went to Tom and told him he had to hire Pip as a full-fledged researcher, with a salary she could live on. Tom pointed out that Pip hadn’t finished her internship. Leila said, “She’s good, she’s worth it, and she needs the money right now.” And Tom, with a shrug, assented. Before he could change his mind, she went and found Pip and told her the good news.

“That’s great,” Pip said in a small voice.

For a moment, Leila wondered whether she was doing something selfish, something disturbed even, by trying to keep Pip in Denver. But the girl herself had said she didn’t want to leave.

“Now let’s find you a place to live,” Leila said cheerfully. “We can start by asking around the office.”

Pip nodded, seeming underjoyed.

* * *

The meeting with Earl Walker, behind the propane depot on Amarillo’s outskirts, lasted less than fifteen minutes. Walker stayed in his truck, speaking through the open window, and left the engine running. He admitted to having accepted a $250,000 severance payment after he’d remarked to plant management that everyone would be happier if he was happy. He further admitted to having been fired for cause, the cause being that he’d done some drinking, once , while on the job. One time , Cody Flayner had had to cover for him, and Flayner, having a taste for blackmail and being a generally nasty little shit, had made him pay for it by doing the egress paperwork on the mock B61, so that Flayner could play a prank on his girlfriend. Walker wasn’t proud of himself, but he insisted that he’d done nothing dangerous. The mock B61 had been shipped in error from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and a carload of Air Force investigators had come by to examine it, but Kirtland hadn’t yet dispatched a truck to repossess it. If Flayner hadn’t been so stupid as to show the thing off to his buddies, and post pictures of it, there would have been no harm, no foul.

“You did not hear any of this from me,” Walker said, shifting his truck into drive.

“Absolutely not,” Leila said. “Your wife can attest to the fact that you refused to talk to me.”

Her mind was already moving on to a story she was developing on mining-industry ties to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. She still needed to interview plant management about the mock B61, but the smallness of the Flayner story was becoming apparent. It would disappoint Pip, the smallness, and Leila decided to let the girl write it and share the byline.

Back in her hotel room, she tried calling Pip and Tom and then texted them. That both texts went unanswered for some hours, while she plowed through the tax filings and COI disclosure statements that Pip had dug up for her, became noteworthy only when Tom returned her call, around ten thirty Denver time.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Out to dinner,” he said. “I took your girl to dinner.”

Leila immediately had a bad feeling, as if she’d felt a tooth crack.

“I always take new hires to dinner,” Tom said.

“Right. Of course. And where’d you go?”

“Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro.”

The Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro was her and Tom’s place. They liked to reward it for its name.

“I have no imagination for restaurants,” he said. “My mind becomes a perfect blank.”

“It’s kind of funny to think of you there without me.” There was a tremor in Leila’s voice.

“I had the same thought. I don’t think I’ve ever been there without you.”

But he’d taken other new hires to dinner, and in each case he’d had enough imagination to think of restaurants other than the one where he and Leila went. Although the two of them never fought — hadn’t fought in so many years that she’d thought they never would again — she was remembering the foretaste now, the constriction of her chest.

“Maybe I was wrong,” she said, “but I had the sense you weren’t even comfortable around Pip.”

“Not wrong. You’re never wrong.”

“She reminds you of Anabel.”

“Of Anabel? No.”

“She’s the same type. If I can see it, you can definitely see it.”

“Completely different personality. And you were right — I’m glad we hired her.”

“Always Listen to Leila.”

“The words I live by. But I ran something by her. Tell me what you think of this. I said I’d run it by you, too.”

“Move her out of research and into reporting?”

“Ah, no. That’s worth discussing, but no. I asked her if she might want to live with you and me for a while. I gather she’s beyond broke.”