Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“That’s what sleepless nights are for. I’d almost rather get scooped than see her in the state she’s in. You need to help me try to keep her halfway sane.”

Pip was starting to feel bad about having lashed out at Leila; to wonder if she was simply overstressed by work.

“But listen,” Tom said, leaning forward. “Before you go, I want to ask you a personal question.”

“I actually had something to—”

“We were talking about your dad the other night. And I’ve been thinking — you’re a great researcher. Have you ever tried to find him?”

She frowned. Why did people keep asking her about her father? In her guilty frame of mind, she had the curious thought that Andreas was secretly her father. That this was why her mother was so hostile to him. That Tom and Leila had discovered the spyware and knew more about her than she herself did. Andreas as her dad: the thought was crazy but had a certain logic, the logic of ick, the logic of guilt.

“Yeah, I’ve tried,” she said. “But my mom covered her tracks really well. The only thing I’ve got is her made-up name and my approximate date of birth. I always seemed to be the right size for the grade I was in. But I know my birth certificate is fake.”

The look Tom was giving her was worrisomely loving. She lowered her eyes.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not a very good person.”

“What are you talking about? What’s not good about you?”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t always tell the truth.”

“About what? About your father?”

“No, that part is true.”

“Then what?”

Just say it , she thought. Say: I was in Bolivia, not California …

There was a tap on the door.

Tom jumped to his feet. “Come in, come in.”

It was Leila. She looked at Pip and spoke to Tom. “I was on the phone with Janelle Flayner. I was thinking last night about something she’d said to me. Something like ‘It’s about time someone listened.’”

“Leila,” Tom said gently.

“Hear me out. This is not paranoia. She said that, and I called her, and it turns out that, yes, she did communicate with someone else. Before me. While Cody’s pictures were still up on Facebook, she sent a message to the famous leaker . ‘The Sunshine Boys?’ That’s what she said. The Sunshine Boys. The place that everybody sends their tips to.”

Pip had one of those double blushes, a mild one followed by a burning whole-body wave.

“So what?” Tom said, less gently.

“Well, Mrs. Flayner didn’t hear back. Nothing ever happened.”

“Good. Happy ending. He couldn’t do shit from Bolivia. To cover a story like this, you need boots on the ground.”

“Well, but Wolf never put the pictures up. He puts up twenty things a day — there’s no filter. But for some reason he didn’t put this one up.”

“I’m serenely unworried.”

“I’m radically worried.”

“Leila. He’s had the information for almost a year. Why would he suddenly decide to float it in the next five days?”

“Because these stories have a boiling point. Suddenly everyone starts talking overnight. If he gets one more leak, he can spit in the soup. It’s bad enough if the Post does it to me. But if that guy gets there first—”

“The world looks very scary when you haven’t slept. You’re the one who’s sitting on the elephant. You’re the only one who can connect the dots from Amarillo to Albuquerque.”

“People steal elephants. It happens all the time.”

“If you want to worry about something, worry about the Post .”

Leila laughed raggedly. “I’m all over that, too. They’ve got to be days ahead of me on the Kirtland drug scandal. Probably weeks. There’s no way I can cover it when I’m also confirming the nuke story.”

“You’ll pick up enough of it collaterally. It’s fine if the Post has more detail on it, so long as we’re first. Let them add the salt to our soup. Worst case, they’re out in front with a drug story, and we follow with an Armageddon story.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to do a co-op with them?”

“With a Jeff Bezos joint? I can’t believe you’re even asking.”

“Then prepare for me to be a wreck.”

Leila left, and Tom gazed after her. “I hate to see her like this,” he said. “It feels like the end of the world to her when she gets beaten.”

Pip wondered if she’d been mistaken. He wasn’t seeming like a man in love with anyone but Leila.

“Do you have your phone?” he said.

“My phone?”

“I want to make some calls to the Post . Dial some numbers and see who’s there on a Saturday. If the people I have in mind aren’t there, she can worry a little less.”

Even though Pip had come here to confess, she was tempted to say she didn’t have her device with her; it was radioactive with incriminating texts. But to claim not to have it was dumb and implausible. When she handed it over to Tom, it felt like a small bomb, and when she left his office she stationed herself outside the door, hoping her proximity would inhibit him from reading her texts.

She saw that she’d lost her nerve and wouldn’t be confessing anything today. If, as she now suspected, she’d been mistaken about Tom’s interest in her, there might be nothing so terrible about her situation that uninstalling Andreas’s spyware couldn’t fix it. When Tom emerged from his office, smiling, she took her phone to the ladies’ room and locked herself in a stall.

She sent the text and went to Leila’s work space, where Leila was on the phone again. Pip stood in the corridor with her head bowed, trying to look penitent.

“I’m sorry if I make you self-conscious,” she said when Leila was off the phone. “Are you too upset with me to let me help you?”

Leila seemed about to say something angry that she reconsidered. “We’re not going to talk about that,” she said. “You need to be a journalist this week. Not a researcher, not a houseguest. Do you think you can work with me?”

“I love working with you.”

The first task Pip was given was to gather basic facts about the execution-style killing of two women in Tennessee. The facts turned out to be consistent with the appalling story Leila told her. The women, sisters with the maiden name Keneally, had been abducted within minutes of each other in different cities; neither body showed signs of sexual trauma, and officially the police had no leads. As Pip proceeded to learn what she could about the hospitalization and disappearance of the sisters’ brother, Richard, she began to think she’d been petulant and childish in threatening to quit her job. Although living with Tom and Leila was clearly a mistake, the job wasn’t.

She kept retreating to the ladies’ room to check messages, but it wasn’t until she and Tom had gone home for a late dinner and she was in bed, at the usual texting hour, that Andreas’s reply came in.

She turned off the device without replying. She’d forced him to break his vow not to text her again, and she felt good about it. Less like a child, more like an adult who had some power. Not like a rigorously moral person, certainly; but moral absolutism was childish. Downtown, at her desk, Leila was gutting out some private misery, sitting alone at the office after midnight, drafting her story, because Leila was an adult. Her toughness made Pip see Andreas in a new light, as a kind of child-man, obsessed with spilling secrets. She squirmed with displeasure at the recollection of his hand in her pants. She could see — she thought she could see — that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a gray-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price. Pip imagined herself continuing to work at DI, knowing what she knew, having done what she’d done, and not confessing it, just as Leila had said: We’re not going to talk about that .