Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Fighting was like vomiting. The prospect grew more dreadful with each year that passed without her doing it. Even when she finally fell ill and needed to throw up, and even though she rationally knew that it would bring relief, she struggled to hold the vomit in as long as possible. And fighting was even worse, because fighting didn’t bring relief. Fighting was more like death in that regard: just keep postponing.

“ Your house,” she said, trying to steady her voice. “Pip living in your house.”

“Our house. Didn’t you tell me you wished you could take her in?”

“Actually, what I said was that I wished I had a place that I could offer her. I don’t think of your house as a place I can offer.”

“I think of it as our house.”

“I know you do. And you know I don’t. Which is a long discussion I don’t feel like having right now.”

“I didn’t promise her anything.”

“Well, I’m not loving the position that puts me in. Of being the one who nixed it, and her knowing it was me.”

“I can tell her I had second thoughts myself, so you’re not in that position. But help me understand why you’re nixing it? I thought you wanted her to live with you.”

“You didn’t even like being in the same room with the girl until tonight. It seems like a pretty fast one-eighty on your part.”

“Leila. Come on. You’re the one who’s smitten with her. I’m not going to take her from you. And she couldn’t take me from you if she made it her entire life’s mission. She’s a child .”

Leila didn’t know who to be more jealous of, Tom or Pip. But together the two jealousies made her feel like simply bowing out.

“It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do whatever you want.”

“When you say it like that?”

“What do you want me to say? That there’s something wrong with my head? That I’m smitten with a girl I’ve only known two months? That I’m jealous ? I’m not going to fight about this. You just caught me by surprise.”

“She and I talked about you.”

“How nice.”

“She wants to be like you.”

“She must be out of her mind.”

“Well, there is one thing. Or rather, isn’t. She should probably tell you this herself, but she’s so in awe of you that she’s afraid to. There isn’t any boyfriend.”

“What?”

“She’s in a Lakewood share with two other girls. She made up the whole thing about a boyfriend. Or, to be precise, there is a guy, who is named Stephen. But he lives in California and has a wife.”

“She told you this?”

“I have some skill at eliciting things myself.”

Leila ought to have felt betrayed, but mostly she felt sorry for Pip. Happy people didn’t tell lies. “Why did she do that?”

“Didn’t want to seem overeager to be in Denver. Didn’t want you to know how alone she is. Didn’t want to seem pathetic to you. I gather the reason she wanted to get out of California was her situation with the married guy there. But this is part of why it occurred to me that she could live with us. She’s very talented but kind of a mess.”

“You’re not attracted to her.”

“I can’t even describe how far off the radar that is.”

The risk of a fight was waning. To talk about something else, Leila mentioned her meeting with Earl Walker and her idea of letting Pip write the story, since it was small.

“Why did Walker meet with you?” Tom said.

As soon as he said it, she saw it.

“Ah,” she said. “You’re good.”

“All I said was ‘Why did he meet with you?’”

“No, but that’s it. I was so fixated on Pip, on her being disappointed. It’s a good question.”

“Happy to help.”

“Because there was one thing Walker said. He said Albuquerque had sent over a car full of investigators. It just sailed right past me.”

“You were fixated on Pip.”

“OK, OK.”

“We’re the team, right? I’m not the enemy.”

“I said OK.”

“Reinterview.”

When she got off the phone, she saw that a text from Pip had come in: I have a confession to make. Good girl, Leila thought. Good for her.

She herself was off her game. She’d totally botched her meeting with Walker. He’d been rushed and flighty, but this didn’t excuse her not having asked the obvious question: Why did Kirtland AFB ship a dummy weapon to Amarillo in the first place? This was the question that Walker had met with her to be asked. The plant wouldn’t have paid a quarter-million dollars to shut him up about some harmless prank. But a weapon that had gone missing in Albuquerque? Swapped out for a training dummy?

Even more embarrassing was why she hadn’t thought to ask the question. She’d assumed that the reason that Walker was meeting with her was her self-presentation, her feminine wiles. She’d taken his allusion to her bed in Denver straight, when in fact it had been sarcastic. She was fifty-two. The hair she’d made a show of toying with was graying.

Ugh. Ugh.

Ambien normally knocked her right out, but on the nights when it didn’t she had no recourse; she’d heard too many somnambulism stories to take another dose. She lay and tossed on the drought-dry bed, which somehow smelled more strongly of cigarettes than it had the previous night, and considered the fact that Pip had lied to her. That Pip had fallen for somebody’s husband; had done or tried to do to a marriage what Leila herself had once done. That she herself was now the older, drier, pouchier-faced woman who once had been, as Pip was now, a mobile destabilizing menace, a kind of rogue warhead …

How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner’s pickup. So easy. Incomparably easier than winning the war on drugs or eliminating poverty or curing cancer or solving Palestine. Tom’s theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday scenarios was Please make me the first person killed ; but she’d forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want the Amarillo story to be large. The world’s fear of nuclear weapons was unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and vomiting: the longer the world lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be. The Second World War was remembered more for the extermination of Jews, more even for the firebombing of Dresden or the siege of Leningrad, than for what had happened on two August mornings in Japan. Climate change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say nothing of the NFL passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver Bronco. Leila was afraid and felt like the only one who was.

Or almost the only one. Pip was afraid, too. The mother who’d named her Purity appeared to have taught her very little about how the world worked, and this meant that Pip looked at things with eyes unclouded by preconception. She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can’t be good .