Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  As soon as she was off the plane, she called him. “Is César there yet?”

  “Still not,” Charles said. “It’s a matter of indifference to me, but I know how you like to bite them people’s heads off. And nibble on they tiny feet.”

  “Fuck these people. What is so hard about getting someone to show up?”

  “Rowrr!”

  César, the new aide, was supposed to have been at Charles’s at six to give him a bath, PT, and a hot dinner. It was now eight thirty. The trouble with Charles was that he didn’t like having aides but didn’t dislike it so much that he forbade Leila to employ them and oversee them. As a result, she did a lot of work for little thanks.

  Striding down the concourse, she called Tom’s home number and was shunted straight to voice mail. Next she called the agency.

  “People Who Need People, this is Emma,” said a girl who sounded about twelve.

  “This is Leila Helou and I want to know why César isn’t at Charles Blenheim’s.”

  “Oh hi, Mrs. Blenheim,” Emma said cheerfully. “César should have been there at six.”

  “I’m aware of that. But he was not there at six. He’s still not there.”

  “OK, no problem. I’ll see if we can find out where he is.”

  “‘No problem’? It is a problem! And this is not the first time.”

  “I’ll find out where he is. It’s really no problem.”

  “Please stop saying ‘no problem’ when we have a problem.”

  “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.”

  “His caregiver didn’t show up.”

  “That’s funny. Who could have foreseen such a thing? When has a thing like that ever happened before?”

  “It’s unfortunate that it happened tonight.”

  “Nothing I’m not used to.”

  “Well, good, because it’s never going to change. Why would I change it now? Why did I even come home? Why didn’t I stay over with a person who’s never going to hurt me? Who never hurts me. A person I’m number one with.”

  “Why not indeed?”

  “Because I’m not in love with him! And you know it. This has nothing to do with Charles.”

  “No, it does, a little bit, I think.”

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing. I take care of Charles because he needs me. You hold on to Anabel because you never stopped loving her.”

  “That is preposterous.”

  “It’s preposterous to deny it. I could see it the first second I saw you and Pip in the same room. No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.”

  “I’m not the one still giving my husband hand jobs.”

  “God!”

  “If indeed that’s all you give him.”

  “God damn it! I knew I never should have told you!”

  “Never mind the telling. I’m talking about the doing. You don’t think there’s a bit of a double standard here?”

  “I told you because it didn’t matter. You yourself said it didn’t matter. You said it was no different than feeding him mashed peas with a spoon. Those were your exact words.”

  “I’m just saying, Leila. Don’t talk to me about being haunted. You practically have to invent reasons to be over there with him.”

  “He needs care.”

  “He doesn’t even want half the things you do for him.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you had your chance. You had your chance to give me someone more appropriate to take care of. And the only reason you didn’t—”

  “Ah. Here we go.”

  “The only reason you didn’t—”

  “There were a lot of good reasons, and you know it.”

  “The only reason you didn’t is Anabel. Anabel, Anabel, Anabel. What is so wonderful and amazing about Anabel? Please answer me. I’d like to know.”

  He sighed heavily. “After the first couple of years, I was almost never happy with her. I’m almost always happy with you. You make me happy every time you walk into the room.”

  “Like when I walked in just now? That made you happy?”

  “Right now we seem to be having a fight.”

  “Because Anabel’s in the house—you said it yourself. Same voice, same gestures. You can be happy with me as long as we’re alone, but put her in the same house with us—”

  “I already said it was a mistake to bring Pip here.”

  “So in other words: Yes. Yes, I’m only good enough as long as you’re not reminded of her.”

  “Not true. Wholly wrong.”

  “You know what I feel like doing? I feel like letting the two of you live here alone and work it out. I can live with my husband, she can have the daddy she never had, and you can have a nice fresh incarnation of the woman you never got over. You can listen to her yawns and imagine you’re with Anabel.”

  “Leila.”

  “I’m actually not kidding. I’m thinking that’s what I might do. It’s kind of refreshing to think of not having to be the boss’s mistress for a change. To not have that be the very first thing that every new intern learns about me. Maybe I can make some new female friends while I’m at it, so I don’t have to walk around feeling like such an embarrassing betrayal of the sisterhood. There are a whole lot of things I could do with five more nights and one less man in my week.”

  “Leila.”

  “In fact, I’ve already got my bag packed. You can wait up for Pip. I’ll go home—home.” She drained her drink and stood up. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not so into her anymore.”

  “I’ve noticed. She’s noticed, too.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  “She went out tonight so you and I could be alone. Hence the irony and irritation of your important business at your husband’s. But she’s not stupid. She’s not insensitive.”

  “No, she’s lovely in every way. Why not go ahead and fuck her brains out?”

  “The last thing she wants is to come between us. She looks up to you—”

  “Have a baby with her, now that you’ve expended all your guilt on me—”

  “She looks up to you, and she can sense that you don’t want her here. It’s making her miserable.”

  “You know, that’s very nice. But I don’t like hearing that you talk about me, and I like even less that you’re doing it. Maybe you can do me a favor and talk about Anabel instead.”

  “You’re upset,” he said. “I’m upset. I got pissed off and jealous waiting for you. I’m sorry about that. You come home with huge news, you’re understandably exhausted, and what do we do? We fight.”

  “Oh, I’ll be back. You know I will. It’s just, every once in a while, I come up against how much I hate this life, even though it’s a good life. Do you feel that, too?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m worn out,” she said. “And I have to work all weekend. Right now, the only thing I can think is that there’s a little room that’s all mine, one hundred percent mine, and it’s not here. I’m sorry.”

  He sighed again. “Before you go?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try not to get angry when I say this.”

  “Just hearing that, I start to get angry.”

  He set his glasses on a cushion and covered his face with his hands, rubbing his eyes.

  “You’re going to think I buried the lede,” he said. “You’re going to think I’m insane. But I think she might be my daughter.”

  “Who might be your daughter?”

  He put his glasses back on and stared straight ahead. A ghost was in the room with them. “It’s not possible,” he said. “I don’t have a daughter, and even if I somehow did, what are the chances of her living under my roof?”

  “Zero.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And so?”

  “She’s Anabel’s daughter,” he said. “Her mother is definitely Anabel. And I’m the father. I’m pretty sure of that, too.”

  Leila had to sit down to steady the room. “That can’t be.”

  “Now you see why I was so impatient for you to
get home.”

  Even sitting down, she could feel the floor tilting beneath her, as if it were trying to tumble her out of the house. Was it possible that everything was over? That she would go home to Charles and never come back? It seemed possible.

  “It started with ‘Smell is hell,’” Tom said. “And the fact that her mother is nutty and living underground. And so, on Wednesday, after the theater, I asked her why her mother changed her identity. She said her mother’s afraid that her father will ‘take her away from her.’ Sound like Anabel? More than a little, right? And so I asked her if she had a picture of her mother—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Leila said.

  “And she did, on her phone.”

  “I really don’t need to hear this.” She was already thinking that if Tom had known that Anabel had a kid, he wouldn’t have been so averse to having one himself. Already thinking that this was the end of her and him.

  “So who’s the father?” Tom said. “I’ll spare you the details, but there’s no way it could be me. And yet I’m pretty sure it’s me.”

  “Why is that.”

  “Because Pip is the right age, and because I know Anabel. The way she vanished makes more sense now, knowing she was pregnant—”

  “I’ll say this one more time. It is a torture for me to hear about Anabel.”

  Tom sighed. “I can’t tell you how strange it was to see her picture on Pip’s phone. I only looked for one second, but one second was enough. I don’t know what I said, but Pip was completely casual about it. She wasn’t trying to hide anything. I asked to see the picture, she showed it to me. Which makes me think—”

  “She has no idea.”

  “Exactly. Either that, or she’s a really good liar. Because I started to think about the boyfriend thing, the fact that she lied to us. It made me wonder if she does know who I am.”

  “You didn’t ask her?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  Leila thought of the emergency cigarettes that she kept in the freezer. The drink had stunned her. Tom’s news had stunned her.

  “This has nothing to do with me,” she said dully. “This is your life, your real life, the life that matters to you. I was always just a sideshow. Even if you didn’t want your real life back, it’s coming to get you. And you don’t have to worry about me—I know how to exit quietly.”