Purity

  Leila was writing as fast as she could. “Good God,” she said.

  “It’s terrible. But to me it’s as much a story about the utter failure of the war on drugs, about trusting in technology instead of taking care of people, as it is about our nuclear arsenal.”

  “I see that,” Leila said, still writing.

  “It was all going to come out even if you hadn’t come here with your questions. The WaPo’s already on the demotion and reassignment of the officers Keneally sold to. They know about the drug dealing. Only a matter of time before someone leaks the rest.”

  “You’ve talked to the Post?”

  The senator shook his head. “Still being punished by this office for something unrelated.”

  “Why did Keneally do it?”

  “The speculation is partly money, partly fear for his life.”

  “Are you saying he’s not in custody?”

  “You’ll have to ask someone else.”

  “That sounds like a no.”

  “Draw your own conclusions. And let me reiterate that none of this goes on your site until you have independent confirmation.”

  “We don’t like single-source stories. We’re old-fashioned that way.”

  “This is known to us. It’s one reason you and I are sitting here. Or have been.” The senator stood up. “I actually do have a plane to catch.”

  “How was Keneally going to get the weapon off the base?”

  “That’s it, Leila. You already have more than you need to get the rest of it.”

  He was right about that. One of the best stories of her career was in the bag. The rest would be routine triangulate-and-bluff—“I’m just confirming that I have my facts right”—while she endured the sick-making anxiety that the Post or someone else, someone less scrupulous about multiple-sourcing, would scoop her.

  Leaving the Dirksen, she thought about canceling her trip home to Denver, but the work she had to do now, to confirm the senator’s story, could only be done with in-person meetings, and on a mild and sunny spring weekend nobody she needed to see would be staying in D.C. Better to spend the weekend in Denver, writing and lining up interviews, and fly back on Sunday night.

  Or so she rationalized it. The unfortunate, unflattering fact was that she didn’t want to leave Tom and Pip alone together for a weekend. She’d already been feeling resentfully beleaguered by how much she had to do—too many stories, a caregiver crisis at Charles’s house, the usual email and social-media onslaught (the former Mrs. Cody Flayner was writing to her daily, sending recipes and pictures of her kids)—and the new urgency of the Albuquerque story only added to her workload. The story was demanding and she its single parent. Even going home, she wouldn’t have much time for Tom or Pip. Their unscheduled freedom on the weekend seemed sybaritic in comparison. She knew it was important to resist jealousy and resentment and self-pity, but she was having a hard time of it.

  On the Metro, her hand shook so much that it was hard to fill out the scribbles in her notebook, hard to tap out texts to Tom and Pip. By the time she boarded her Denver flight, her anxiety about being scooped was nearly disabling. There wasn’t enough room between seats for her to work without being observed by the businessman next to her, and her mind was too jumpy to concentrate on tech-industry taxes, and so she bought a split of wine and stared uselessly at the crawl of the jet icon across the route map on the seat-back screen. She bought a second split and applied it to her anxiety.

  She had no rational case against Pip as a houseguest. The girl had yet to leave an unwashed dish or spoon in the sink, a light burning in an empty room. She’d even offered to do Tom and Leila’s laundry for them. They’d recoiled at the thought of her handling their underwear, but she explained that she’d never lived in a house with a functioning washer and dryer (“Total luxury”) and so they let her do the sheets and towels. She had little of the unearned entitlement for which kids of her generation were laughed at, but she didn’t apologize for being in the house or thank them too profusely for letting her be there. During the week, at least on the nights when Leila was home, she prepared her own separate dinner, retreated to her room, and didn’t show herself again. Come Friday night, though, she plunked herself down on a stool in the kitchen, let Tom shake her one of his perfect Manhattans, chopped garlic for Leila, and opened up with funny tales of squatter life in Oakland.

  Leila ought to have been pleased with the arrangement. But she had reason to believe that, on the nights she worked late or had to be at Charles’s, Pip wasn’t staying in her room all evening. Twice already in a month, Leila had learned of important news—the unofficial approval of a $7.5 million grant to DI from the Pew Foundation, the selection of an unfriendly judge for a First Amendment case that DI was co-defending—not directly from Tom but from Tom by way of Pip. Having herself once been the beneficiary of an older man’s experience, Leila knew how nice it felt to be specially apprised of things, and how unaware the girl was of what a privilege it was, how unaware that people might resent her for it. Leila wondered if the guilt she’d come to feel about what she’d done to Charles’s first wife wasn’t guilt at all but anger; anger at the younger Leila who’d been granted entrée to the literary world because she was attractive to Charles; an older woman’s feminist anger at her younger self. She felt some of this anger as she watched Pip absorbing Tom’s wisdom and basking in the pleasure he took in her young company.

  This wasn’t just theoretical. Twice already in a month, Tom had pounced on Leila in Charles-like ways. Once while she was standing at the bathroom mirror, removing her makeup, and he’d come up behind her with his cock already escaping from his pajamas, and again just a few nights later, when she’d turned out her reading light and felt his hand on her collarbone, which he liked, and on her neck, which he liked even more. This had been Tom’s way only in the beginning. Other understandings had long since superseded that one, and very minimal paranoia was required to connect the sudden change in Tom to the radiating presence, two doors down the hallway, of a full-chested, creamy-skinned, regularly menstruating twenty-four-year-old. If Leila had lived alone with Pip, she might have been happy to see the girl making herself at home, going braless under her sweatshirt after showering, digging her bare feet between sofa cushions while she lay and worked with the tablet device DI had issued her, the shampoo fragrance of her damp hair filling the room. But with Tom in the mix, the spillage of Pip around the house made Leila feel merely old.

  The girl was doing nothing wrong, just being herself, but Leila could feel herself turning against her, envying her time alone with Tom, envying that she, not Leila, was getting to enjoy him. She believed that both he and Pip liked her too much to betray her, but it didn’t matter. Scarcely more than minimal paranoia was needed to imagine that Pip’s physical resemblance to Tom’s ex-wife had reawakened something in him, was curing him of his post-traumatic aversion to Anabel’s type, making it possible for him to again be attracted to it, and that this type was more truly his type, and that his preference for Leila’s type had been, all along, a reaction against the awfulness of his marriage: that Pip was the perfect avatar of young Anabel, his fundamental type without any Anabel baggage. When he’d asked Leila if she would mind his taking Pip to One Night in Miami, since Leila was going to be in Washington, she’d felt pinioned by her circumstances. How could she object to Tom going out with Pip when she herself spent so much time at Charles’s? Still gave the man hand jobs from time to time! She was stuck with an embittered wheelchair dude and could buy herself free time only at the cost of sleeping fewer hours, while Pip, who had no other friends, and Tom, who left the office promptly at seven every night, had plenty of free time and could hardly be faulted for spending it with each other.

  Her resentment would have been more demonstrably irrational if she hadn’t persisted in feeling secondary in Tom’s inner life. Guilt wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed married to Charles. She’d never quite got over her suspicion that, however much Tom loved
her for her own sake, it mattered to him that she hadn’t been young when he met her; that Anabel couldn’t fault him for being with her. Just as Anabel couldn’t fault him for operating an impeccably worthy news service with the money her father had left him. These moral considerations were still operative in him, and so her commitment to Charles continued to be strategic, a way of ensuring that she, too, like Tom, had someone else. But she was ruing it now.

  The girl seemed largely unaware of her jealousy. Midway through her second Manhattan, the night before Leila had left for Washington, Pip had gone so far as to declare that Tom and Leila gave her hope for humanity.

  “Say more,” Tom had said. “I think I can speak for Leila in saying we’d both like to offer hope to humanity.”

  “Well, the work you do, obviously,” Pip said, “and the way you go about it. But all I’ve ever seen of couples is bad things. Either it’s lies and misunderstanding and abusiveness, or it’s this stifling, I don’t know, niceness.”

  “Leila can be stiflingly nice.”

  “I know. You’re making fun of me. But it’s like, with the really close couples I know, there’s no room for anybody else. It’s all about their wonderfulness as a couple. There’s kind of an old-sock smell to them, a this-morning’s-pancakes smell. I’m trying to say it’s nice for me to see it doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “You’re making us very proud of ourselves.”

  “Don’t tease her for giving us a compliment,” Leila said crossly.

  “Anyway,” Pip said.

  They were in Tom’s kitchen, and Leila, sensitive to Pip’s vegetarian inclinations, was making a zucchini frittata for dinner. Both she and Tom had noticed that whenever food was about to be sautéed, Pip went upstairs and shut the door of her bedroom. “You seem to be very sensitive to smells,” Tom said now. “Pancake smells, sock smells…”

  “Smell is hell,” Pip said. She raised her Manhattan glass as if toasting the sentiment.

  “I used to be married to someone who felt that way,” Tom said.

  “But smell is also heaven,” Pip said. “I found that—” She stopped herself.

  “What?” Leila said.

  Pip shook her head. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

  “Is she a super-smeller, too?” Tom said.

  “She’s super anything to do with sensitivity. And she tends to be depressed, so smell is always hell for her.”

  “You’re missing her,” Leila said.

  Pip nodded.

  “Maybe she’d like to come out here and visit you.”

  “She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t drive, and she’s never set foot on an airplane.”

  “She’s afraid of flying?”

  “It’s more like she’s one of those mountain people who never leaves the mountains. She said she’d come to my college graduation, but I could tell how nervous the idea made her, riding the bus or asking somebody to take her, and I finally told her she didn’t have to. She was incredibly apologetic, but I could tell she was also incredibly relieved. And Berkeley’s not even two hours away.”

  “Ha,” Tom said. “I would have loved not having my mother at my college graduation. She herself described it as the worst day of her life.”

  “What happened?” Pip said.

  “She had to meet the person I ended up marrying. It was a very bad scene.”

  He said more about the scene, and Leila could hardly listen to it, not because she’d heard the story before but because she hadn’t. He’d had a decade-plus to tell her the story of his college graduation, and she was hearing it only as he recounted it to Pip. She wondered what other interesting things he’d told the girl while she was not around.

  “You know, the wine’s not working for me,” she said from the stove. “Will you make me a Manhattan?”

  “I’ll do it,” Pip said eagerly.

  Leila had been drinking more since she’d met Pip. At the dinner table that night, she found herself ranting about the false promise of the Internet and social media as substitutes for journalism—the idea that you didn’t need Washington journalists when you could read the tweets of congressmen, didn’t need news photographers when everyone carried a phone with a camera, didn’t need to pay professionals when you could crowdsource, didn’t need investigative reporting when giants like Assange and Wolf and Snowden walked the earth …

  She could feel herself targeting Pip with her rant, losing her cool by way of attacking Pip’s noncommittal coolness, but there was an undercurrent of grievance with Tom as well. He’d told her, a long time ago, that he’d met Andreas Wolf in Berlin, back when he was still married. All he would say was that Wolf was a magnetic but troubled person, with secrets of his own. But the way he said it gave Leila the impression that Wolf had meant a great deal to Tom. Like Anabel, Wolf belonged to the dark core of Tom’s inner life, the pre-Leila history against which she contended. Because she appreciated that he didn’t poke and probe her, she didn’t poke or probe him. But she couldn’t help noticing how closely Tom guarded his memories of Wolf, and she felt some of the same competitive jealousy she did toward Anabel.

  This had already come to the surface a year ago, when she’d been honored with an interview by the Columbia Journalism Review. In response to a question about leakers, she’d laid into the Sunlight Project rather viciously. Tom was unhappy with her when he read the interview. Why antagonize the true believers who had nothing better to do with their days than to mischaracterize the “Luddites” who disagreed with them? Wasn’t Denver Independent just as wedded to the Internet as the Sunlight Project was? Why expose herself to cheap criticism? Leila had thought but hadn’t said: Because you don’t tell me anything.

  As she continued her Manhattan-fueled rant at the dinner table, extending it to male-dominated Silicon Valley and the way it exploited not only female freelancers but women more generally, seducing them with new technologies for chitchat, giving them the illusion of power and advancement while maintaining control of the means of production—phony liberation, phony feminism, phony Andreas Wolf—Pip stopped eating and stared unhappily at her plate. Finally Tom, himself quite drunk, interrupted.

  “Leila,” he said. “You seem to think we don’t agree with you.”

  “Do you agree with me? Does Pip agree with me?” She turned to Pip. “Do you have an actual opinion to offer on this?”

  Pip’s eyes widened and stayed fixed on her plate. “I understand where you’re coming from,” she said. “But I guess I don’t see why there can’t be room for both journalists and leakers.”

  “Exactly,” Tom said.

  “You don’t think Wolf is competing with you?” Leila said to him. “Competing and winning?” She turned to Pip again. “Tom and Wolf have a history.”

  “You do?” Pip asked.

  “We met in Berlin,” Tom said. “After the Wall came down. But that has nothing to do with this.”

  “Really?” Leila said. “You hate Assange, but somehow Wolf gets a free pass. Everyone gives him a free pass. He gets carried around on people’s shoulders and hailed as a hero and a savior and a mighty feminist. And I don’t buy it for one second. I especially don’t buy his feminism.”

  “No other leaker in the last decade has broken a bigger and better variety of stories. You’re just annoyed because he has as good a record as we do.”

  “Uploading some dentist’s selfies of his thingy in the face of a female patient on Propofol? I guess you could call that a feminist act. But maybe feminist isn’t the best word to describe an upload like that?”

  “He does better things than that. The Blackwater and Halliburton leaks were game changers.”

  “But always with the same flimflam. Shining his pure light on a world of corruption. Lecturing other men on their sexism. It’s like he wants there to be a world full of women and only one man who understands them. I know that kind of guy. They give me the creeps.”

  “What happened in Berlin?” Pip said.

  “Tom doesn?
??t talk about it.”

  “That’s true,” Tom said. “I don’t talk about it. Do you want me to talk about it now?”

  Leila could see that the only reason he was offering was that the girl was there.

  “With you here,” she said to Pip with a wretched little laugh, “I’m learning all sorts of things I didn’t know about Tom.”

  Pip, no dummy, sensed the danger. “I don’t need to hear about Berlin,” she said. She reached for her wineglass and managed to knock it over. “Shit! I’m so sorry!”

  Tom was the one to jump up and get paper towels. Charles, even before his accident, would have let Leila mop up the wine—Charles who almost never taught books by women, while Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. “I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,” he’d said to her once. “What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.” And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them. She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.

  Another thing not spoken of, in a life of things unspoken, a life that Leila had enjoyed until the girl became a part of it. Pip seemed very happy to be with them and had stopped making noises about returning to California; it wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of her. But Leila, to her sorrow, had started wishing that they could.

  When the plane touched down in Denver, she checked her work email and then her texts. There was one from Charles: Does Cesar exist?