Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Leila ought to have been pleased with the arrangement. But she had reason to believe that, on the nights she worked late or had to be at Charles’s, Pip wasn’t staying in her room all evening. Twice already in a month, Leila had learned of important news — the unofficial approval of a $7.5 million grant to DI from the Pew Foundation, the selection of an unfriendly judge for a First Amendment case that DI was co-defending — not directly from Tom but from Tom by way of Pip. Having herself once been the beneficiary of an older man’s experience, Leila knew how nice it felt to be specially apprised of things, and how unaware the girl was of what a privilege it was, how unaware that people might resent her for it. Leila wondered if the guilt she’d come to feel about what she’d done to Charles’s first wife wasn’t guilt at all but anger; anger at the younger Leila who’d been granted entrée to the literary world because she was attractive to Charles; an older woman’s feminist anger at her younger self. She felt some of this anger as she watched Pip absorbing Tom’s wisdom and basking in the pleasure he took in her young company.

This wasn’t just theoretical. Twice already in a month, Tom had pounced on Leila in Charles-like ways. Once while she was standing at the bathroom mirror, removing her makeup, and he’d come up behind her with his cock already escaping from his pajamas, and again just a few nights later, when she’d turned out her reading light and felt his hand on her collarbone, which he liked, and on her neck, which he liked even more. This had been Tom’s way only in the beginning. Other understandings had long since superseded that one, and very minimal paranoia was required to connect the sudden change in Tom to the radiating presence, two doors down the hallway, of a full-chested, creamy-skinned, regularly menstruating twenty-four-year-old. If Leila had lived alone with Pip, she might have been happy to see the girl making herself at home, going braless under her sweatshirt after showering, digging her bare feet between sofa cushions while she lay and worked with the tablet device DI had issued her, the shampoo fragrance of her damp hair filling the room. But with Tom in the mix, the spillage of Pip around the house made Leila feel merely old.

The girl was doing nothing wrong, just being herself, but Leila could feel herself turning against her, envying her time alone with Tom, envying that she, not Leila, was getting to enjoy him. She believed that both he and Pip liked her too much to betray her, but it didn’t matter. Scarcely more than minimal paranoia was needed to imagine that Pip’s physical resemblance to Tom’s ex-wife had reawakened something in him, was curing him of his post-traumatic aversion to Anabel’s type, making it possible for him to again be attracted to it, and that this type was more truly his type, and that his preference for Leila’s type had been, all along, a reaction against the awfulness of his marriage: that Pip was the perfect avatar of young Anabel, his fundamental type without any Anabel baggage. When he’d asked Leila if she would mind his taking Pip to One Night in Miami , since Leila was going to be in Washington, she’d felt pinioned by her circumstances. How could she object to Tom going out with Pip when she herself spent so much time at Charles’s? Still gave the man hand jobs from time to time! She was stuck with an embittered wheelchair dude and could buy herself free time only at the cost of sleeping fewer hours, while Pip, who had no other friends, and Tom, who left the office promptly at seven every night, had plenty of free time and could hardly be faulted for spending it with each other.

Her resentment would have been more demonstrably irrational if she hadn’t persisted in feeling secondary in Tom’s inner life. Guilt wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed married to Charles. She’d never quite got over her suspicion that, however much Tom loved her for her own sake, it mattered to him that she hadn’t been young when he met her; that Anabel couldn’t fault him for being with her. Just as Anabel couldn’t fault him for operating an impeccably worthy news service with the money her father had left him. These moral considerations were still operative in him, and so her commitment to Charles continued to be strategic, a way of ensuring that she, too, like Tom, had someone else. But she was ruing it now.

The girl seemed largely unaware of her jealousy. Midway through her second Manhattan, the night before Leila had left for Washington, Pip had gone so far as to declare that Tom and Leila gave her hope for humanity.

“Say more,” Tom had said. “I think I can speak for Leila in saying we’d both like to offer hope to humanity.”

“Well, the work you do, obviously,” Pip said, “and the way you go about it. But all I’ve ever seen of couples is bad things. Either it’s lies and misunderstanding and abusiveness, or it’s this stifling, I don’t know, niceness .”

“Leila can be stiflingly nice.”

“I know. You’re making fun of me. But it’s like, with the really close couples I know, there’s no room for anybody else. It’s all about their wonderfulness as a couple. There’s kind of an old-sock smell to them, a this-morning’s-pancakes smell. I’m trying to say it’s nice for me to see it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“You’re making us very proud of ourselves.”

“Don’t tease her for giving us a compliment,” Leila said crossly.

“Anyway,” Pip said.

They were in Tom’s kitchen, and Leila, sensitive to Pip’s vegetarian inclinations, was making a zucchini frittata for dinner. Both she and Tom had noticed that whenever food was about to be sautéed, Pip went upstairs and shut the door of her bedroom. “You seem to be very sensitive to smells,” Tom said now. “Pancake smells, sock smells…”

“Smell is hell,” Pip said. She raised her Manhattan glass as if toasting the sentiment.

“I used to be married to someone who felt that way,” Tom said.

“But smell is also heaven,” Pip said. “I found that—” She stopped herself.

“What?” Leila said.

Pip shook her head. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

“Is she a super-smeller, too?” Tom said.

“She’s super anything to do with sensitivity. And she tends to be depressed, so smell is always hell for her.”

“You’re missing her,” Leila said.

Pip nodded.

“Maybe she’d like to come out here and visit you.”

“She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t drive, and she’s never set foot on an airplane.”

“She’s afraid of flying?”

“It’s more like she’s one of those mountain people who never leaves the mountains. She said she’d come to my college graduation, but I could tell how nervous the idea made her, riding the bus or asking somebody to take her, and I finally told her she didn’t have to. She was incredibly apologetic, but I could tell she was also incredibly relieved. And Berkeley’s not even two hours away.”

“Ha,” Tom said. “I would have loved not having my mother at my college graduation. She herself described it as the worst day of her life.”

“What happened?” Pip said.

“She had to meet the person I ended up marrying. It was a very bad scene.”

He said more about the scene, and Leila could hardly listen to it, not because she’d heard the story before but because she hadn’t . He’d had a decade-plus to tell her the story of his college graduation, and she was hearing it only as he recounted it to Pip. She wondered what other interesting things he’d told the girl while she was not around.

“You know, the wine’s not working for me,” she said from the stove. “Will you make me a Manhattan?”