Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“What I want?” He looked up at the sky. “I want you to like me. I want you never to leave me. I want to get old with you.”

“Oh!”

“I’m sorry. I had to say that once before you left.”

She wished she could believe him. He seemed to believe himself. But her inability to trust him was in her marrow; in her nerves.

“Anyway,” she said.

“Anyway, I’m not asking for much. If you get the job in Denver, which I think you will, I want you to open an attachment I’ll send you when you have an office email account. The editor and publisher is a man named Tom Aberant. All you really have to do is open the attachment. But if you want to keep your ears open, and get a sense of whether Denver Independent is coming after me, I’d be grateful for that, too.”

“He’s the other person who knows what you did. He’s the journalist.”

“Yes.”

“You want me to be your spy.”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with. If it’s nothing, so be it. The only thing I ask, besides opening the attachment, is that you not tell anyone that you were down here. You never left California. Telling Aberant you were here is the one thing that could actually harm me. Harm you, too, needless to say.”

A dark thought occurred to her.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m liking being a journalist. But is this person in Denver the real reason you suggested it?”

“The real reason? No. But part of the reason? Of course. It’s good for you and good for me. Do you have a problem with that?”

In the moment, it didn’t seem like much for him to ask. She’d withheld her heart and her body from him, and she remembered, from her experience with Stephen, the ache and desolation of being denied the heart and body you desired. She may not have trusted Andreas, but she had compassion for him, including his paranoia, and if a click of a mouse would suffice to make her less indebted to him, less guilty for hurting him, she was willing to click. She thought it might help close the books on her and him. And so she went to Denver.

* * *

When she returned to Tom and Leila’s house, very late, after a night of drinking with the Denver Independent interns, she was surprised to find Leila on the steps outside the kitchen, bundled in a thick fleece jacket, with cigarette smoke in the vicinity.

“Aha, you caught me,” Leila said.

“You smoke ?”

“About five a year.” In a white cereal bowl next to Leila were four stubbed butts. She covered the bowl with her hand.

“What is it like to be so moderate?” Pip said.

“Oh, it’s just another thing to feel insecure about.” Leila gave a self-disliking laugh. “The interesting people are always immoderate.”

“Can I sit here with you?”

“It’s freezing. I was about to go inside.”

Following Leila into the house, Pip worried that she herself was the cause of Leila’s smoking. She’d sort of fallen in love with Leila, in the same way she had with Colleen in Bolivia, but ever since she’d moved in with her and Tom she’d had the sense that she was causing trouble between them. She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn’t physically attracted to him — he was both older and safe —and Leila, of late, had been all too visibly jealous of one or both of them. Pip knew she should just move somewhere else. But it was hard to let go of the family she’d fallen into.

In the kitchen, Leila poured the butts and ashes onto a sheet of foil and balled it up. Aided by the four margaritas in her, Pip asked her if she could ask her something.

“Of course,” Leila said, taking coffee from the refrigerator.

“Would you rather I find my own place to live? Would that help?”

For a moment, Leila froze. She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty; lovely in a way to be aspired to. She looked at the coffee can in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had got there. “Of course not,” she said. “Does it seem like I want you to?”

“Um. Well. Yeah. A little bit.”

“I’m sorry.” Leila moved briskly to the coffee maker. “You’re probably just picking up on insecurities that have nothing to do with you.”

“Why are you insecure? I admire you so much.”

The coffee can fell to the floor.

“This is what I get for smoking,” Leila said, bending down.

“Why are you smoking? Why are you making coffee at one thirty in the morning?”

“Because I know I’m not going to sleep anyway. I might as well work.”

“Leila,” Pip said plaintively.

Leila gave her a look worse than annoyed; a fierce look. “ What? ”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Nothing.” Leila composed herself. “Did you get my text from Washington?”

“Yeah! It sounds like this is bigger than we thought.”

“Well, that’s all it is. I’m half out of my mind with fear that somebody’s ahead of us on the story.”

“Is there something I can do to help?”

“ No! Go to bed. It’s late.”

In the upstairs hallway, Pip could hear Tom snoring off whatever he’d drunk. She sat on the edge of her bed and typed out an email to Colleen, the latest of many, all of them unanswered.

Yes, me again. I thought of you because I just caught Leila smoking behind the house and it made me miss you. I keep missing you. I know all I do is betray people. But I can’t stop wishing you’d give me another chance. Much love, PT

Emailing drunk was never a good idea, but she went ahead and hit Send.

Her problem was that it was true: all she did was betray people. Almost as soon as her email account at Denver Independent had been activated and she’d clicked on the attachment from Andreas, she’d regretted it. The symphony she’d failed to hear in Bolivia had commenced immediately in Denver. Her fellow interns were ordinary young people, not goddesses or prodigies. The reporters and editors were lumpy and sarcastic, the division of labor gender-neutral, the office atmosphere serious and professional but not remotely cool. Though Andreas liked to tell his interns that every hand was raised against the leaker , to stake his claim to the sympathy accorded underdogs, the Project was too cool and famous to be an underdog. The real underdogs were the journalists. Though much was made of Andreas’s personal penury, the purity of his service, it was the ordinary financial stresses of the journalists, their child-support and mortgage payments, the four-dollar sandwiches they ate for lunch, that reminded Pip of her mother and her struggling neighbors in Felton. After six hours she felt more at home at DI than she had in six months at TSP.

And Leila: lovely in body and soul, motherly in a way that felt sisterly, not suffocating, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose personal life was even stranger than Pip’s. And Tom: earnest about his work but silly in private, indifferent to anyone’s opinion of what he said or how he looked, his manner as reserved and ironic as Andreas’s was invasive and self-important, his commitment to Leila the more obvious for being unspoken. Pip loved them both, and when they asked her to move in with them she felt as if, after a life of constraints and poor decisions and general ineffectiveness, she’d finally caught a major break.

Which made it all the more disastrously unfortunate that she’d planted spyware on DI’s computer system, pretended to be responsible for finding the warhead pictures that Andreas had given her, and told Tom and Leila a dozen other lies. She’d succeeded in walking back the smaller lies without undue damage or embarrassment, but the biggest lies — and presumably the spyware — remained in place. And now Leila was turning against her, and now Tom, too, was suddenly uncomfortable around her; the two things, taken together, made her afraid that, although she respected Tom too much to have flirted with him or laid her authority-questioning shtick on him, he might have developed a romantic interest in her. Two nights ago, he’d taken her to the theater, and as if it weren’t unsettling enough to be there as his date , he’d lowered his guard on the drive home and asked her personal questions, had seemed distinctly pale when she said good night to him, and had been avoiding her ever since.