Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“We’re a little shorthanded tonight. One sec … Oh, I see what happened. César had to fill in for another aide who got sick. He should be getting to Mr. Blenheim’s pretty soon.”

The agency couldn’t foresee a staff shortage? Thought it was OK to send someone three hours late and not notify them? Made a practice of pulling aides off scheduled visits and sending them to other clients? Didn’t even train its desk personnel to apologize?

Leila knew better than to ask these questions. She was halfway into the city when Emma called back. “OK, so, unfortunately it looks like César won’t be able to get away. But we do have someone else we can send out. She can’t do lifting, but she can help Mr. Blenheim with other things and keep him company.”

“Mr. Blenheim doesn’t need company. Mr. Blenheim only needs lifting.”

“OK, no problem. Let me reach out to César again.”

“Just forget the whole thing. Send a male aide out at nine tomorrow morning, and never mention the name César to me again. Can you do that for me? Is it no problem?”

Charles was perfectly capable of feeding himself and getting himself into bed, and Leila could feel that she was spiting herself by letting Tom and Pip enjoy an extra hour or two at home without her. But she did it anyway. She found Charles sitting in his chair in the hallway off his kitchen, where he’d randomly stopped. A smell of canned beef stew was in the air.

“God, you look depressing,” she said. “Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

“I’ve become kind of obsessed with this nonexistent César. There’s that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you’ve only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is. I have yet to experience the disappointing reality of César.”

“You must have been on your way somewhere when you stopped here. Maybe you want to go there?”

“It’s been nice getting better acquainted with the hallway.”

“What do you need?”

“A real bath, but that’s not going to happen. I suppose I could have a drink. Haven’t played the drink card yet.”

He wheeled himself into the living room, and she brought him his bottle and a glass.

“You should run along to your guy and your gamine,” he said.

“First tell me what else I can do for you.”

“You didn’t have to come here at all. In fact, it’s interesting that you did. Is everything OK on the other home front?”

“Things are fine.”

“You’ve got that parenthetical frown between your eyebrows.”

“I’m just really tired.”

“I don’t know your guy — haven’t had the pleasure. But the gamine has a daddy thing. Even the wheelchair dude was getting somewhere, in the few short minutes you gave me with her. I’ve always had a knack for bringing out daddy issues.”

“Huh. Thanks for that.”

“I didn’t mean you.” He frowned. “Was that what I was for you? Daddy?”

“No. But I probably did have issues.”

“None that I could smell the way I could with this girl. I’d advise keeping close watch.”

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?”

“I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

“It just seems like it must get very tiring.”

When she finally arrived at Tom’s, the only light she could see was from the kitchen. She loved his house and had made herself at home in it, but its very niceness was eternally a reminder that Anabel’s father’s money had paid for part of it. This may have been why she felt reluctant to so much as hang a picture of her own choosing in it, and why, for years, she’d tried to get Tom to accept rent checks from her. Since he refused them, she instead paid for Charles’s caregivers and sent large sums to EMILY’s List, to NARAL and NOW and Barbara Boxer, to ease her feminist conscience.

At the back door, before she went inside, she massaged the skin between her eyebrows, feeling grateful, not sore, that Charles had told her she was frowning. It occurred to her that she’d stayed married to him less for reasons of guilt or strategic balance than because she simply couldn’t bear to part with a person who still loved her.

The kitchen was empty. Water simmering in the pasta pot, an untossed salad on the island countertop. “Hell-o-oh,” she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals.

“Hello,” Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.

She wheeled her suitcase out to the front hall. It took her a moment, in the semidarkness, to see Tom stretched out on the sofa.

“Where’s Pip?” she said.

“Pip is out with the interns tonight. I drank too much, waiting for you, and had to lie down.”

“I’m sorry I’m so late. We can eat right away.”

“No rush. There’s a drink for you in the freezer.”

“I won’t pretend I don’t want it.”

She took her suitcase upstairs and changed into jeans and a sweater. Maybe it was only because she’d expected to find Pip here, but the house seemed ominously sound-swallowing, the banalities of homecoming unreverberating. When she went back downstairs and claimed her drink, Tom was still on the sofa.

“You got my text,” she said.

“I did.”

“Two women are dead. The guy in the middle of it is probably dead, too. It’s a drug story as well as a nukes story. Really scary stuff.”

“That’s great, Leila.”

He sounded far away, but she drank her drink and gave him the details. He said the right things in response, but not in the right voice, and then a silence fell. The house was so quiet that she could hear the faint rattle of the pasta-pot lid.

“So what’s happening,” she said.

It was a while before Tom answered. “You must be very tired.”

“Not so bad. The drink is waking me up.”

A longer silence fell, a bad one. She felt as if she’d walked into someone else’s life, someone else’s house. She didn’t recognize it. Pip had done something to it. Suddenly the distant rattle of the pot lid was unbearable.

“I’m going to go turn the stove off,” she said.

When she came back, Tom was upright on the sofa, rubbing his eyes with one hand and holding his glasses in the other.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” she said.

“Always Listen to Leila.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you were right. Having her here was a bad idea.”

“How so?”

“It’s making you unhappy.”

“A lot of things do. If that’s all it is, let’s move on.”

Silence.

“So, she’s uncannily like Anabel,” Tom said. “Not the personality but the voice, the gestures. When she yawns, it could be Anabel yawning. Same thing when she sneezes.”

“Not knowing Anabel, I’ll have to take your word for that. Do you want to have sex with her?”

He shook his head.

“You sure?”

To her dismay, he seemed to need to think about it.

“Oh, fuck,” Leila said. “ Fuck .”

“It’s not what you think.”

It was as if, all of a sudden, with no warning, she were vomiting. The wave of rage, the old fighting feeling.

“Leila, there’s—”

“Do you have any idea how sick of this life I am? Do you have the foggiest fucking clue? What it’s like to live with a man still haunted by a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty-five years? To feel like the sum of what I mean to you is that I’m not her?”

He didn’t have to rise to this. He knew how to stay cool and to defuse. But he must have drunk quite a lot before she came home.

“Yeah, I do, a little bit,” he said unsteadily. “A little bit, yeah. I know what it’s like to sit around here waiting all evening while you stop and see your husband for no reason.”