Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Well, that’s a happy ending.”

  “Safe to say there’s been some guilt along the way.”

  “You know, you seem OK to me. I never met a reporter before. You’re not what I expected.”

  That’s because I’m freaking good at getting people to open up, Leila thought.

  Phyllisha interrupted herself to serve a carload of teenagers and then to scold her co-workers. “Hey fellas, no quiero la musica. Menos loud-o, por favor?”

  That Cody was the best thing that ever happened to Phyllisha was a conviction of his that she did not reciprocate. The more he tried to impress her, the less impressed she got. He picked a bar fight in her presence to show her how well he could take getting the crap beaten out of him. His wife, the baboon face, hadn’t managed to get his wages garnished for child support—count on Big Government to screw things up—and he bought Phyllisha piles of bling and other stuff, including a brand-new iPad, to impress her. The whole idea behind his July Fourth surprise was to impress her. She knew that he worked at the bomb plant and had the most boring of all the jobs there. He could jaw for hours about variable yields and bunker busters and kilotonnage, making himself out to be personally responsible for keeping the nation safe. She finally got fed up and told him the truth, namely, that he was a nobody and she wasn’t impressed with these bombs that he didn’t actually have anything to do with. She hurt his feelings, but she didn’t care. She’d already exchanged meaningful eye contact with his friend Kyle, who lived over in Pampa.

  On the night of July 3, coming home late from drinking with her girlfriends, she found Cody waiting for her on the front steps. He said he had another present for her. He took her around to the back yard, where something big and cylindrical was lying on a blanket. Cody said it was a fully armed B61 thermonuclear warhead, and what did she think of that?

  Well, she was afraid, was what.

  Cody said, “I want you to touch it. I want you to get buck-naked and lay on it, and then I’m gonna do you like you never been done in your whole life.”

  She hedged by saying she didn’t want to get radiation poisoning or whatnot.

  Cody said the warhead was totally safe to handle and be around. He made her touch it with her hand and explained to her about one-point safety and permission action links. It was the usual all-hat routine, talking about stuff he didn’t really understand and had nothing to do with, except that this time there was an actual thermonuclear warhead on a blanket in his yard.

  “And I know how to set it off,” he said.

  You do not, Phyllisha said.

  “There’s a way if you got the codes, and I got the codes. I can wipe old Amarillo right off the map. Right now.”

  Why would you do that, Phyllisha wanted to know. She half believed him and two-thirds didn’t.

  “To make you see how much I love you,” Cody said.

  Phyllisha said she didn’t see the connection between loving her and blowing up Amarillo. She thought that, conceivably, by saying this, by buying time, she was saving tens of thousands of innocent Amarillo lives, her own not least among them. She was listening out of one ear for police sirens.

  Cody then assured her that he wasn’t going to do it. He just wanted her to know that he could do it. He, Cody Flayner. He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal. He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up in the air for him. Didn’t the bomb’s terrible, dangerous power make her want that?

  It did, actually, when he put it like that. She went ahead and did what he’d said, and they hadn’t had such a good time since before he’d surprised her by moving out on his wife. To be that close to so much potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when she orgasmed. It was pretty great, she had to say.

  At the same time, it was obviously a one-night-only thing. Either Cody would be hauled off to jail or he’d have to take the B61 back to where it belonged, and that would be the end of them having orgasmic sex with her face mashed up against the casing of a 300-kiloton death-bomb. To enjoy it while it lasted, they went at it a second time. Cody got her all wound up but afterward she felt sad for him. He wasn’t very bright, and she’d already made up her mind to go with Kyle.

  Baby, she said, they’re going to put you in jail.

  “No they ain’t,” Cody said. “Not for borrowing a fake.”

  A fake?

  “Yeah, for training purposes. It’s a perfect replica, except for the fissile core.”

  She got upset then. Was he trying to make her feel stupid now, or what? He’d told her it was a fully armed death-bomb!

  “Nobody takes out a real bomb on their pickup, sweetheart.”

  So the bomb was just a fake? Well, that was just like him.

  “Yeah, and what difference did it make?” he said. “You sure didn’t seem like you were fakin’ it. Talk about Fourth of July fireworks—whoo hee!”

  Leila was writing furiously in her notebook. “And how long did he keep the replica? We have pictures of it from the Fourth of July.”

  “He took it back the next night,” Phyllisha said. “The plant’s real quiet on the Fourth, and he knew the people at the gate. But first he had to show the thing off to his friends, at the barbecue. Kyle says Cody’s always been like a little dog that follows you around, doing stuff on dares to try to make people respect him.”

  “And were his friends impressed?”

  “Kyle wasn’t. He had a notion of what Cody and me had done the night before, because Cody was all but bragging about it. Calling it the afrodizziac bomb.”

  “Lovely. But, just so we’re clear, in one of the pictures, you seem to be…”

  Phyllisha blushed. “I know the picture. I was doing that on Kyle’s account. Looking him right in the eye.”

  “Cody couldn’t have been happy about that.”

  “I can’t say I’m proud of my behavior. But I was scared Kyle might think Cody and I were A-OK again. I did what I had to do.”

  “And that’s why Cody broke up with you?”

  “Who the heck told you that? Kyle helped me pack up while Cody was taking the bomb back. That very same night. I’ve been in Pampa ever since. I still feel bad about it, but at least Cody’s last memories of me are good ones. Neither of us will ever forget the night with the death-bomb. It’s like a memory we can always treasure.”

  “Do you have any idea how the plant found out about it?”

  “Well, you can’t pull a stunt like that without word getting around. Plus it was on Facebook. Can you imagine?”

  Taking leave of Phyllisha, her short-term memory aching like an unmilked cow, Leila moved her car out of the Sonic lot and parked it farther down the street. Using a red ballpoint, she filled out and clarified the scribbles in her notebook. The work couldn’t wait until she returned to Amarillo; her precise recall of interviews lasted less than an hour. Before she was finished, a vintage pickup rumbled into the Sonic lot and then out again. As it passed by Leila, she saw Phyllisha, not on the passenger side of the bench but scooched toward the middle, with her arm around the driver’s neck.

  * * *

  Leila was just old enough to have lived through the Watergate hearings at an age where she could understand them. Of her mother she could remember little more than a jumble of fear and sadness, hospital rooms, her father’s sobbing, a funeral that seemed to last for days. Only in the summer of Sam Ervin and John Dean and Bob Haldeman did she become a fully remembering person. She’d begun watching the hearings as a way to escape interaction with her father’s crone cousin Marie. Her father, who had a busy practice and was also on the research faculty at the dental school, had brought Marie over from the old country to keep house for him and care for Leila. Marie frightened Leila’s friends, licked her knife at the dinner table, wore clicking dentures that she refused to exchange for better ones, complained incessantly ab
out the air-conditioning, and was unacquainted with the concept of letting a child win at games. Summers with her were long, and Leila never forgot the thrill of realizing that everything the adults in Washington were saying on TV made sense to her; that she could follow the conspiracy. A few years later, when her father took her to see All the President’s Men, she made him leave her at the theater so she could sneak back in to watch the next screening.

  Her father had approved of her sneaking. He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with; he stole hotel towels and bought a radar detector for his Cadillac and was merely annoyed, not embarrassed, when the IRS caught him cheating on his taxes. But he could also seem New World. When Leila, under the spell of All the President’s Men, declared her ambition to be an investigative reporter, her father replied that journalism was a male business and that she should therefore go into it, to show what a Helou woman was capable of. He said that America was a butter the hot knife of her mind was made to cut through, America the place where a woman didn’t have to live like Marie, on a cousin’s charity.

  His message was feminist, and yet he wasn’t a feminist. As Leila proceeded through college and into newspaper work, she couldn’t shake the sense that she was proving something for him, not for herself. When she landed a real reporting job, at the Miami Herald, and her father was disabled by a stroke, she knew it was his wish and expectation that she quit the job and return to San Antonio. Marie was dead by then, but her father had two sons from his first marriage, in Houston and Memphis. They could have taken him in, if they hadn’t been men.

  To fill her evenings in San Antonio, while her father languished, she began to write short stories. She later felt so mortified to have imagined herself as a fiction writer that she recalled these stories with revulsion, as scabs that she couldn’t stop picking but was too ashamed to make bleed. She couldn’t reconstruct her reasons for writing them, apart from a wish to rebel against her father’s ambitions for her and to punish him for getting in their way. But after he died, of a second stroke, she decided to spend a good chunk of her inheritance—from an estate heftily diminished by delinquent taxes and shared with her half brothers and two women she’d scarcely known, one of them a dental hygienist her father had long employed—to pursue a degree in creative writing at a program in Denver.

  She was already older than most of the other students in Denver and not only had more real-world experience but was sitting on more family unhappiness and immigrant lore. She also considered herself more attractive than the quality of her past boyfriends would suggest. When one of her first-semester teachers, Charles Blenheim, singled out and praised the work of a younger “experimental” female writer in the workshop, it activated a hereditary competitive streak in Leila. Among the Helous, the main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat. Leila worked hard on her fiction and even harder on her comments on her younger rival’s work. She learned exactly where to stick the needle, and soon she had Charles’s attention.

  Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn’t know it was the apex. In the bright light of his prospects, his marriage of fifteen years was seeming lackluster and unbecoming to him, a contract entered into when Blenheim stock was undervalued. Leila had come along at just the right time to put an end to it. While she was at it, she permanently turned his two daughters against him. She understood how she must have looked to them, and to his wife, and she was sorry about it—she hated being hated—but she didn’t feel especially guilty. It simply wasn’t her fault that Charles was happier with her. Not to choose his happiness and her own happiness over his family’s would have required very strict principles. At the crucial moment, when she’d looked into herself for a clear understanding of right and wrong, she’d instead found the mess her father had bequeathed her.

  She was wild about Charles, for a while. Among all his female students, he’d chosen her. His older man’s bulk made her own slightness agreeable to her; made her feel amazingly sexy. He rode a Harley-Davidson to class, he wore his corn-silk hair down to the shoulders of his leather jacket, he referred to literary giants by their first names. To spare him from institutional embarrassment, she quit the writing program. A week after his divorce went through, she rode on the back of his Harley to New Mexico and married him in Taos. She went to conferences with him and performed what she was slow to realize was her function at them: to be younger and fresh and somewhat exotic, to excite the envy of male writers who hadn’t traded in their wives yet or hadn’t done so recently. She’d published enough of her scratchings, in small journals where a word from Charles carried weight, to introduce herself as a fiction writer.

  When Charles’s several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. A day of frustration was mourned with three large bourbons. A day of conceptual breakthrough and euphoria was celebrated with four large bourbons. To dilate his mind to the requisite bigness, Charles needed to spend weeks on end doing nothing. Although the university asked very little of him, it asked for more than nothing, and the tiniest unperformed tasks became torments to him. Leila took over every task she could and many that she shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t, for example, teach his workshops. For hours, their three-story Craftsman echoed with his groans at the prospect of teaching. The groans came from every floor of it and were at once heartfelt and intended as humor.

  It was Charles’s saving grace, and the heart of Leila’s weakness for him, to be funny. On a rare good day, he might produce a long paragraph—disconnected, like all its fellows, from any other paragraph—that made her hoot with laughter. Much more often, there was no paragraph. Instead, during the small scrap of time when she was free to toil on her scratchings, at the child-size desk of his older daughter, in what had been the daughter’s bedroom, and to self-hatingly contrast her flat reportorial style with the “twinned muscularity and febrility” (New York Times Book Review, front page) of her husband’s paragraphs, even though he’d failed to string together two of them since before she’d married him, she heard the door of his book-lined third-floor study open, followed by the Trudge. He retarded this Trudge, knowing she could hear it, to make the very sound of it funny. Finally he stopped outside her closed door and—as if it could be imagined that she hadn’t heard the Trudge approaching—hesitated for some minute or minutes before knocking. Even after he’d opened the door, he didn’t enter the room immediately but stood and slowly turned his gaze on every corner of it, as if wondering whether he might write bigger in a child’s bedroom, or as if to refamiliarize himself with the strange little world of being Leila. Then suddenly—his timing always comic—he looked at her and said, “You busy?” She never said she was. He entered the room and fell onto the dust-ruffled single bed and groaned cartoonishly. He was good about apologizing for disturbing her, but she detected, in his apologies, an undercurrent of resentment at her ability to perform household tasks while managing, in her flat reportorial way, to string a few paragraphs together. Sometimes they discussed the etiology of his blockage, his obstacle du jour, but only as a prelude to what he’d come downstairs for, which was to fuck her on the dust-ruffled bed, or on the Douglas-fir flooring, or on the child-size desk. She liked doing it with him. Liked it a lot.

  After a year of big book ignition failure, she’d had enough of fiction writing. As a feminist, she couldn’t imagine merely being Charles’s wife, so she went to work at the Denver Post and quickly thrived there, doing j
ournalism for herself now, not for her father. Without her in the house, pages of the big book began to coalesce, albeit slowly and at the cost of stepped-up bourbon intake. After she won a prize for her reporting (Colorado State Fair mismanagement), she dared to excuse herself from the dinners that Charles was obliged to host for visiting writers. Oh, the drinking at those ghastly dinners, the inevitable slighting of Charles, the addition of yet another name to his hate list. Practically the only living American writers Charles didn’t hate now were his students and former students, and if any of the latter had some success it was only a matter of time before they slighted him, betrayed him, and he added them to his list.

  Given his sinking confidence and rising self-pity levels, she might have worried that he’d do to her, with some fresh female student, what he’d done to his first wife. But he remained almost maniacally arousable by her. It was as if he were a big cat and she, with her slightness, her littleness, the mouse on which he compulsively pounced. Maybe it was a novelist thing or maybe just Charles, but he couldn’t leave her alone. Even when they weren’t having sex, he was forever poking and probing her, getting his fingers in her spirit, leaving nothing unsaid.

  As if in self-defense, she reached the point of wanting him to make her pregnant. She had friends at the Post with babies, toddlers, six-year-olds. She’d held them in her arms and inwardly melted at the trust and innocence with which they put their hands on her face, their faces on her breast, their feet between her legs. Nothing, she came to think, was sweeter than a child, nothing more precious and worth having. But when—on a night carefully selected for having followed a day of thousand-word progress on his book—she took a deep breath and raised the subject of children with Charles, he became especially dramatic. He turned his head with comical slowness and gave her his glowering Look. The Look was supposed to be funny but it also scared her. The Look meant Think about what you just said. Or You must be joking. Or, more sinisterly, Do you realize you’re speaking to a major American novelist? The frequency with which she’d received the Look of late was making her wonder what she was to him. She’d thought he was attracted to her talent and toughness and maturity, but she worried that it was principally her slightness.